Local fans work up a Super Bowl lather

Area football fans cheer their favorites as Pittsburgh downs Seattle on Super Bowl Sunday.Next week, Sandy Barr will move back to her hometown of Pittsburgh. The city may have recovered from the Super Bowl by then. Or , maybe not.

“In Pittsburgh the whole last week, there was no news,” the vodka saleswoman and Newport Beach resident said, sitting in Skosh Monahan’s in Costa Mesa during the second quarter on Sunday. “It was all Super Bowl coverage, all of it. The weather wasn’t even Pittsburgh weather. It was Detroit weather.”

As the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks faced off in Motown, fans of both teams packed bars and restaurants around Newport-Mesa to cheer their favorites. In Barr’s opinion, the local mania was nowhere close to that in her hometown -- where fans were buying Christmas trees and decking them in black and gold and bars were staying open into the wee hours.

“Did you know that every time the Steelers lose the Super Bowl, the rate of domestic violence goes up in Pittsburgh?” she shouted over the crowd after her team scored a touchdown to pull ahead, 6-3. “I don’t know the rate, but it does.”

In the end, Pittsburgh took home the Vince Lombardi Trophy, but it was hard to say which team had more support around Newport-Mesa. At public Super Bowl watching parties around both cities, patrons talked about their childhoods watching football and their decades-long allegiances to their favorite team.

At Skosh Monahan’s, Huntington Beach residents Jack Girard a security guard, and Jack Tieu a fitness trainer, had a bet going on the winner. Girard said he put his money on the Seahawks to be different.

“Everybody else wants Pittsburgh,” he said. “I want Seattle.”

Across town at Hooters, diners placed napkins at their tables with columns marked for Seattle and Pittsburgh, asking the waitress to mark their preferences as they passed by. Ty McSherry, a veterinarian from Costa Mesa, said he had been a Steelers fan since he was six.

“The first football game I ever went to was a Steelers game in 1974,” he said, referring to the first season that Pittsburgh won the Super Bowl when the Steelers downed the Vikings in January, 1975.

At Rudy’s Pub and Grill in Newport Beach, Aaron Junta, a cross country coach at East Los Angeles Community College, proudly wore his Seahawks jersey at the bar. A native of Portland, Oregon, Junta spent much of his youth trekking up to Seattle to watch the Seahawks play.

As the third quarter neared its end, things didn’t look good for Seattle, but Junta said the city rarely took losing as hard as Pittsburgh.

“You know, in Seattle, they have Starbucks,” he said. “People drink 10 coffees and they’re OK. In Pittsburgh, they just have steel, poor people and the Steelers. In Seattle, we’ve got coffee.”20060206iu8wlzncDOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN / DAILY PILOT(LA)Pittsburgh-native Ben Turin celebrates the Pittsburgh Steelers’ first touchdown against the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL. He was watching the game with a number of Pittsburgh Steelers fans at Skosh Monahan’s bar and restaurant in Costa Mesa.