The Pottsville Maroons’ 1925 NFL Championship Trophy, carved from anthracite coal, on display in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. PHOTO FROM WIKIPEDIA
Originally published on February 13, 2022 in the Pottsville Republican-Herald.
As you read this, the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals are preparing to face off in Super Bowl LVI. The Arizona Cardinals are notably absent, a fact that may bring you great satisfaction.
When the Cardinals reached the playoffs for the first time since 2015, it looked like the infamous “Curse of the Pottsville Maroons” could finally be lifted. Cardinals Coach Kliff Kingsbury even acknowledged the curse in the media, giving it national attention.
“I’m sure they’re very lovely people in Pottsville,” Kingsbury said. “I hope that they will rescind the curse.”
No such luck. The Cardinals lost to the Los Angeles Rams on January 17, prolonging the longest championship drought (75 years) of any North American professional sports team. Were you “very lovely people” to blame for their loss? That depends on how superstitious - and prideful - you are.
The “Curse of the Maroons” is one of the most famous coal nuggets of Schuylkill County lore. The Pottsville Maroons’ legendary 1925 season needs no introduction, nor does their championship-winning victory over the Cardinals, then known as the Chicago Cardinals. In those days, there were no playoffs. The NFL Championship went to the team with the best win-loss record, and the Maroons’ 21-7 victory over the Cardinals gave Pottsville a record of 10 wins and 2 losses.
Six days later, the Maroons played an exhibition game in Philadelphia against all-stars from Notre Dame - some of the most famous and feared players of the era. The Maroons scored an incredible victory of 9-7, in a time when the NFL was still in its infancy and college football was the only form of the game taken seriously. The Maroons did not have the NFL’s permission to play that game, so they were suspended from the league. The Cardinals subsequently won two easy games, and the Championship title.
As punishment for “stealing” the Championship from Pottsville, the Cardinals were “cursed” to never win ever again - so the story goes. The fact that the Cardinals won the 1947 Championship against the Philadelphia Eagles blows a hole in the “curse” mythology, but superstitions are known for their imperviousness to facts.
I know next to nothing about football, but when Schuylkill County gets national media attention, my interest is piqued. The portrayal of Pottsville in sports media fits an old and tired narrative about the region - and narrative, with its veneer of respectability, is even more invincible to facts than superstition is.
According to azcentral.com, Pottsville is “an old Pennsylvania mining town.” The New York Times places us “deep in the heart of Pennsylvania coal country.” Both of those statements are true, but they don’t tell the whole story. Media reports on the “curse” love to point out how small Pottsville is, both in 1925 and today. We may not be a megalopolis, but the constant references to our size frames us as a pitiable little town that desperately clings to a 90-something year old championship for some sense of identity.
When the national media writes about Schuylkill County, it is with condescension at best, and disgust at worst. The mantra is “accentuate the negative.” Anything that goes against one-dimensional stereotypes is avoided.
In his biography of John O’Hara, the narcissistic bard of the anthracite coal fields, Geoffrey Wolff calls O’Hara’s hometown of Pottsville “scuffed” and “eroded.” Wolff takes great pains to describe Pottsville as an awful place with no redeeming qualities. He quotes the 1996 “Almanac of American Politics,” which describes the people of historic Pottsville as “tough-talking miners and factory workers who stayed menacingly in the background, unless a character stumbled into the wrong roadhouse at night or the wrong diner at dawn.”
This image seems to have endured. Wolff portrays the people of current-day Pottsville, including the Schuylkill County Historical Society, as rude and unhelpful.
“It’s hard to imagine how such a place could have inspired anything,” he writes.
Pottsville, and Schuylkill County, have provided me with an endless fountain of inspiration. Ever since I joined the Republican-Herald as a correspondent in 2019, some of my best memories have been spent here. It would take more space than this paper allows to list the interesting people, rich history and fascinating scenarios that I have encountered while on the job. Like any place on Earth, Schuylkill County has its problems, but a place is more than just its problems. Below the surface, there is a rich tapestry of colorful characters and events dating back centuries, and a wide variety of stories to tell - if anyone is interested in telling.
And by the way, the folks at the Historical Society are lovely people.
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