I've forgiven Ben Roethlisberger

“Good afternoon, Pittsburgh Steelers offices.”

Hi. Can I ask you some oddball questions?

“Sure! Go ahead.”

I’m trying to find out how many fans turned in their Ben Roethlisberger jerseys last summer when he had his personal trouble down in Georgia.

“I really don’t know.”

Well, was it dozens? Hundreds?

“I don’t know. That didn’t pertain to me.”

What happened to them?

“I don’t know. I believe they were donated. Why do you ask?”

Well, I turned mine in along with a letter to Art Rooney saying Roethlisberger had disgraced the team with his sexual assault in Georgia.

“Yes?”

And now I’d like to get the jersey back.

“You what?”

I’d like to have my Ben Roethlisberger jersey back in time for Saturday’s playoff game.

“You want it back?”

Exactly.

“Well, I’m sorry, but that’s impossible. They didn’t keep the jerseys. Thank you and goodbye.”

Will the Steelers replace the one I turned in?

“No. Goodbye.”

Of course, I knew the jersey I so sanctimoniously turned in to the Steeler headquarters last April was gone.

But I thought it would be fun to give the Steeler receptionist something to talk about when someone asked her how her day went.

Really, I’m surprised some lunatic fan hasn’t done that for real. There is no limit to excessive fan behavior and with the rival Baltimore Ravens in town things are at fever pitch here in the ‘burgh.

I don’t want his jersey back, but being a lunatic fan during playoff time I do have an announcement to make:

I forgive Ben. 

This is important because I consider myself a moral arbiter about all that’s right and good concerning the Steelers, Pittsburgh and, really, whatever else is going on in the universe.

It’s just what nosey guys like me do. It’s a pity the gig doesn’t pay squat.

But when a 20-year-old college student accused Ben of recreational rape in a club bathroom, I was outraged. Then came all the stories, ones we in Pittsburgh had heard for years, that he was just a total jerk.

He was never charged, everyone involved was drunk and no jury in the world would have convicted him, according to the country prosecutor who still gave him a good scolding.

I wrote that we needed to dump him, that Pittsburgh and the Rooney family needed to hold our players to a higher standard.

I still believe that.

And from everything I’ve heard, Ben is now living up to that standard so rarely applied in professional sports. Local reporters, many of whom are friends of mine, recently awarded him The Chief Award, named after beloved Steeler founder Art Rooney Sr.

The good-guy award goes to the player who is most cooperative with the press. For him, it’s a dramatic turnabout and an indication that his efforts to change are sincere.

I know a guy, too, who attends church with Roethlisberger. Of course, it’s difficult for anyone to seem like a jerk in a church pew, but my friend says he’s been a friendly and welcome addition to the congregation.

That’s all good.

For me, the tricky part is how would me and other forgiving fans feel if he was playing lousy.

Yes, he’s been great. We are a society that overlooks a lot of flaws if they come with a lot of wins.

I don’t think that’s entering into my thinking.

But I’m a big second chance guy. I was very happy to see Michael Vick emerge from a long prison sentence for dog fighting and to have a fantastic year.

I love to see guys like him turn their lives around. It’s why what happens to Ebenezer Scrooge will always resonate.

So Ben seems to have made the most of his second chance.

I won’t rush out and buy another Ben jersey and am relieved the receptionist at the Steeler HQ didn’t call my bluff and tell me to come on down and pick one up.

But as we’re nearing kickoff, I can feel comfortable about rooting for Ben.

I guess I’m like a lot of people in Pittsburgh.

We want our Steelers to kick ass, not prowl around in dingy bathrooms trying to snag pieces of it.

Make Daylight Savings Time weekly

I love this turn back the clock thing so much, I wish we could do it once a week. The cool thing about this is in 20 years, we’d only be about 18 years older.

Yes, Daylight Savings Time slows aging. But only by one hour.

If we did it once a week or maybe one minute per hour, we could live to be 175 years old.

I see many benefits. Gas prices would rise more slowly. Happy Hour would be Happy 61 Minutes (and generous bar owners would feel obliged to round up). And the timeless game of baseball would seem endless.

Well, that baseball part would remain unchanged to those who underappreciate its nuance.

We’ve never used “Time Out” as a disciplinary tactic. I guess it works for some, but it’s too early to discern the long-term effects.

For instance, when this generation of misbehaving children grows up and starts attending college and professional sports, will they depart the arenas and en masse head for a quiet corner whenever a referee whistles, “Time Out!”

Again with baseball, it used to be popular for teams to have “Turn Back the Clock Day,” when teams would dress in bygone uniforms and sell things like soda and popcorn for a buck and a quarter.

It was great fun and we thought it would be wonderful if the whole city complied. So if you had a “Turn Back the Clock Day” to say 1929, beer citywide would be a nickel and commuters would have to find horses to ride to work.

I guess I’d like to turn back the clock to the 1950s when it seemed like it must have been a really great time to be a white male who liked to drink. That would have worked for me better than say if I were a black male who liked to vote.

So I’m pretty comfortable with our times. Despite all our many upheavals and daily doom in the headlines, I’m optimistic about the future. I’m just not in that big of a hurry to have it come rushing up on us so quickly.

The exception, of course, being the year 2020 when my enduring insistence that 2020 will be a great year for visionaries is likely to finally gain marketing traction.

A friend of mine once said time is man’s worst invention. It’s very profound. As I’m becoming more conspiracy minded the older I get, I must conclude the concept of time was conceived by the guy who’d invented the first clock but couldn’t find a use for it.

So, voila, time! Now, if you have one fussbucket with a time piece then everyone needs one.

I say to hell with time. Let’s all just show up whenever we feel like it. And bring a book.

I have three watches I adore: one from my late grandfather; an Elvis one from my good buddy Quinn: and a really snazzy one generously gifted to me from a Las Vegas resort for work that didn’t warrant the bauble. They gave one to Val, too.

It was the oddest thing. We were there on an assignment for a now-defunct magazine. The magazines I’ve worked for that can now be described as now-defunct are too numerous to name.

But we were on a fancy lake cruise outside of town and our host presented us with two boxes from an elegant jeweler. Inside were these fabulous watches.

I said, no, we couldn’t. It wouldn’t be ethical.

As I was saying this, I was admiring the watch was on my wrist and thinking, “It’s a tad too snug, but I saw a jeweler in the casino. I’ll bet he’ll size it for free.”

I was correct.

Ethical considerations be damned, there was no way I was leaving Las Vegas without that watch. It’s magnificent.

To this day, Val still thinks some husky guy is going to show up at our door and tell us we need to kill Vinny or he’s taking back the watches.

I know this much: Val will kill Vinny. She loves that watch. Me, too.

But one of these days I’m thinking of making all three timepieces obsolete.

I’m thinking of getting a $75 tattoo of an $18,000 Rolex for my left wrist.

It’ll be waterproof, impressive in refined company, and will make even the wafer thin models look clunky by comparison.

I’ll do it one of these days, I swear.

I just need to find the time.

The man Maz made a Communist

I’m friends with a man who became a Communist because of Bill Mazeroski.

It’s true. My buddy Paul and I were sitting in a Pittsburgh bar after a Pirate game about 15 years ago when we struck up a friendly conversation with another baseball fan.

And with the exception of some addle-brained Cub fans, friendly is about the only kind of conversation you can have with a fellow baseball fan.

Unlike professional football, a game played exclusively by and for mental meatheads, baseball has a charming civility about it. The lax rhythms of the game lend themselves to sunny chats.

His name is Tom Zanot. He was about 60 years old, but maintained an animated demeanor about baseball like a junior high spaz on a six Pepsi sugar high.

He talked about all the great games he’d seen, the players he’d cheered and the recollections of more than 50 years of great Pirate baseball.

That was until we asked the one question every Pirate fan asks every other Pirate fan who was conscious during the magical 1960 season.

“Where were you when Maz homered?”

ESPN voted it the most sensational home run in World Series history. His walk off dinger led the scrappy underdog Pirates to Game 7 victory over Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and the rest of the swaggering New York Yankees. 

Tom winced and said, “I don’t like to talk about that.”

But talk he did.

“You have to understand, I came of age in the 1950s,” he said. “I was raised to be respectful of the country. I was in ROTC at Penn State during the World Series. A friend of mine had tickets to Game 7. Great seats.”

His friend wanted Tom to skip marching drills and attend the game.

“‘Just blow it off,’ he said. ‘C’mon, it’s Game 7!’ But I felt it was my duty. So there I was on that beautiful Thursday afternoon.”

Right, left, right, left, right . . .

He told how he marched the whole afternoon while the rest of the baseball world fixated on what would become one of the greatest games ever played.

“Then right at 3:36 -- I remember looking at my watch -- I heard these cheers erupting from all over.”

As every Pirate fan knows, that’s the precise moment Maz homered. Pittsburgh fans everywhere went crazy.

Tom went right, left, right, left, right . . .

“To have missed it left me profoundly depressed. My life changed. I’d missed out on one of the greatest moments of my generation. Really, it broke my heart.”

Not thinking clearly, Tom decided to he needed to shake things up.

“I volunteered to serve in Vietnam. It was the biggest mistake of my life. I came to hate the war and my government for conducting it. That’s when I became a Communist.”

So, we asked, you became a Communist because of Bill Mazeroski?

“I never thought about it like that, but I guess so.”

The three of us ended up becoming great friends and he remains the only Communist who’s ever bought me beer, something that factors into my visceral disdain for Bolsheviks.

He moved to Florida and we haven’t seen him in years. I thought of our old comrade yesterday as I was attending what may be the world’s greatest pseudo sporting event.

It was begun by one man, Saul Finkelstein, on Oct. 13, 1985. All alone, he went to sit at the base of the lone remaining wall of old Forbes Field. It’s a 50-foot stretch of ivy covered brick in a small, shady park on the University of Pittsburgh campus. 

With a cassette recording of the original NBC broadcast he listened to the game, commercials and all, in real time so when broadcaster Chuck Thompson calls Maz’s home run ball leaving the old park it’s precisely 3:36 p.m.

What started with one man has grown to thousands, including Maz and every surviving Pirate from the 1960 championship team.

It’s Pittsburgh’s most magical gathering. Fans picnic, drink beer and sing off-key renditions of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch. They bring mitts as if they expect haunted foul balls to start dropping out of the sky.

It’s difficult to convey the eeriness of listening to a broadcast of a game from 50 years ago and still feeling tense about the outcome.

I took it all in standing in what used to be centerfield.

Had it been 1960, I could have whispered pep talks to Pirate centerfielder Bill Virdon, Heck, I could have pantsed Mantle.

And at 3:36 when Maz’s homer leaves the park, the crowd erupts as if it was happening right before our very eyes. It’s as if the lousy, stinking Pirates of the last 18 years never happened.

That one city, one people can from one man preserve and nurture a memory like that makes me proud to be a Pittsburgher.

Mazeroski, a rugged son of a West Virginia coal miner, made a moment immortal, something to be forever savored.

That one good man lost his soul to a corrupt belief system in the bargain seems a small sacrifice.