SUPER BOWL: Tom Humphrieswill be reporting from Tampa throughout the week in the build-up to one of the biggest events in the American sports calendar

YOU WAKE up in Tampa, a soulless but sun-kissed collection of office buildings and carparks set upon a moseying river somewhere in Florida. Under almost every hotel room in the US, before light has broken, the same newspaper gets slipped silently under the door.

Travellers all over the continent awake to USA Today or McPaper as it was derisively known for years after it’s launch as a bright and breezy national paper 27 years ago.

Right now America is torn between the bright new sunshiney day feeling of the nascent Obama presidency and the convulsions of pessimism and pain radiating from the ailing economy. There’s a party on but there’s a wolf in the kitchen.

It’s Super Bowl week here in Tampa and the front page of USA Today captures all the confusion. The main headline and lead story deals in bold colours and tones of characteristic breeziness, with the issue of job cuts. A large illustrated scissors is depicted sensitively cutting through the logos of many top firms.

Above, though, is a teaser for an inside story on Michelle Obama’s inauguration outfit and the boost it gives to fashion designers. And below that is the teaser for the Super Bowl Countdown! A Pittsburgh Steelers special! Pittsburgh, one imagines, is a story which writes itself at a time like this. Just as the shrivelled automobile industry left Detroit an empty husk of a town, so surely did the steel industry destroy Pittsburgh.

The city won the fourth of its record five Super Bowl titles in 1979, completing a heady decade of triumph.

At that time one in 10 workers in Pittsburgh were employed directly by the steel industry.

The Steelers take their name from the local industry, their style from it’s muscular no-nonsense qualities and their helmet logo from the logo of a local steel giant. The city in the popular imagination would always be the grey hulking place from which Robert de Niro, Chris Walken and the lads left behind in the Deerhunter and came home to again, some of them.

You expect then that the story of Super Bowl week will be how the twin balms of Obama and Super Bowl success will bring hope and succour to a ravaged city, how men who haven’t worked in the 20 years since the steel mills closed will have their hearts gladdened by the news from sunny Tampa.

Afterall Tampa is precisely the sort of place where people flee to when they have enough of the bump and grind and cold of cities like Pittsburgh.

When Big Steel shrunk to nothing, the region around Pittsburgh lost a huge chunk of it’s work force to the sun belt, to places like Tampa and to places like Phoenix Arizona, home of the Cardinals whom the Steelers meet on Sunday.

The Pittsburgh area had 200,000 fewer people now then it did in the hey day of steel and most of those are driving around the sunny south

worrying about early bird menus in restaurants.

You think all this but you are wrong of course. Pittsburgh comes to the Super Bowl as a triumphant reversal of the grain of the American economy.

In Pittsburgh unemployment runs at 5.5 per cent, way below the national average. It is one of the rare spots in the US where house prices rose last year. Wages went up too.

The steel industry died a slow and painful death a generation ago in Pittsburgh and nearly took the entire city under with it. This week, though, when the Steeler’s come to town, the city which spawned them is one of the beacons of hope for the Obama presidency to point to.

When Big Steel went bust Pittsburgh adapted, cleverly pumping money into it’s universities and in particular into technology research and the city developed it’s own culture of indigenous entrepeneurship in areas like robotics, biotechnology and computer software and nuclear power.

And coming from a land overwhelmed by the stench of a tiger carcass, it is interesting to note that when America had it’s own little housing frenzy the banker types in Pittsburgh were singularly unimpressed and according to the New York Times remained “resolutely unadventurous”.

Pittsburgh never made itself a bubble to be popped. (Could Tony O’Reilly not have texted us all this as advice by the way?) The city came to realise that steel wasn’t coming back.

The great chimneys which once belched the black carbon emblem of Pittsburgh’s old prosperity are decorative features of the city and the great mills have been turned into shopping malls, condos and office blocks.

So when the Steelers rolled into yesterday’s media day in the Super Bowl stadium here in Tampa, they exuded a cool and a confidence which reflected a town which has insulated itself from failure.

So last April when the Steeler’s owner and president Dan Rooney (the Rooneys are founding owners of the franchise and a rare thing, popular owners who originated in Newry, Co Down) wrote a letter to local media outlets endorsing the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, it wasn’t a case of some sad sack sports spiv in a suit hitching a spin on the coat-tails of a rising political star. It was an endorsement from the leading family in a town which quietly and efficiently has been getting it’s business done.

Obama after months of scares and questioning whether the blue collar state was ready to vote for a black intellectual with an odd name, took Pennsylvania and America took another look at the state.

The Steelers are an old style football franchise still though, their name redolent of the games heyday on muddy snow-bitten fields with great hulks of men breathing out clouds of hot breath as they waged epic battles against other behemoths.

Their city has changed but they bring to this Super Bowl a touch of tradition and a sense of what is reassurance.

Too many sports franchise followed the money south to the sun belt (the Cardinals had half a century in Chicago and quarter of a century in St Louis before planting their cassocks in Arizona). And the Rooney family, whose great patriarch Art Rooney purchased the franchise having won €1,900 ($2,500) on a good day at the races, represent the sort of enlightened ownership which is the ethos of the city the team represents.

It was the Rooneys who were architects of the salary cap and the Rooney Rule which forces football franchise to interview at least one minority candidate for any head coaching or general management position which comes available.

USA Today is obsessive about graphs and about counting things. Americans are daily invited to count the job losses. To count through the first 100 days of the Obama presidency.

And this week to count down to the Super Bowl and to enjoy the unlikely lessons and inspirations from the grand old town of Pittsburgh.