Bruce Arthur: Minecraft might not have been franchise-building for Mike Tomlin but it has been family-building - Toronto Star
The world is a lot at the moment, Bruce Arthur writes, and a good hobby is an antidote.
Mike Tomlin took the Pittsburgh Steelers to the NFL playoffs 13 times but won only one Super Bowl, presumably before he discovered Minecraft.
Bruce Arthur is a columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur.
We all need hobbies. The internet is eating us, as a species, driving people insane, spawning the scourge of AI, and often reducing us to screen-gawping dullards who sit too much. If you are reading this on a screen, of course, that’s good screen time. Good choice.
Former NFL coach Mike Tomlin offered the world a tour of his hobby this week: Minecraft. Tomlin coached the Pittsburgh Steelers for 19 years, during which he went 193-114-2, won a Super Bowl and lost another, ended his tenure 10th in all-time NFL regular season wins, and was also one of the sainted few who have been at the helm in Pittsburgh since 1969: Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Tomlin. He was, of course, the only Black man of the three.
But it wasn’t the pressure of NFL coaching that drove him to Minecraft, it was parenthood. As Tomlin said in his first of several YouTube videos, he watched his kids get lost in the world of Minecraft when they were younger, and joined in so he could spend time with them. And over the last 12 or 13 years, as his three children drifted into high school and university and away from the game, Tomlin stayed.
The result appears to be an epic city, and beyond the scale — it appears to have stadiums, a downtown, suburbs, and more — you can see how meticulous it is. When my children build things, they always have to be reminded to build an appropriate ceiling height; Tomlin nailed that. He put an adequate number of stalls in the lobby bathroom of his first building, a boutique hotel. He made a CVS Pharmacy and er, a Trump Tower. Look, we all have regrets.
“I appreciated over time, more, balconies,” Tomlin says, at one point.
“I got into Jack and Jill bedroom concepts,” he says, at another.
He likes water: Tomlin started the city around a small lake, wrapped it around a river, and built an apartment building with an aquarium on every floor, which is across the street from the town aquarium. Tomlin included a pool in a basement speakeasy, too.
He made a colour-coded apartment complex based on one son’s off-campus housing; he fixated on bedroom details and often used glass ceilings for light, because lighting in Minecraft — like working with water to make an aquarium — can be a pain in the butt. He spawned people, to see how they interacted with his city. And most impressively, Tomlin stayed focused on this one sprawling, focused creation for over 12 years.
“He cares more about Minecraft worlds than he does about the team,” my 11-year-old daughter said as I showed her the video and a Steelers game played on TV.
“If that burnt down,” she said, pointing to Minecraft, “he would explode. If that burnt down,” she said, pointing to the television, “he would minorly explode.”
NFL coaches are supposed to be mythically maniacal and, as former Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell wrote, “we were tryna win super bowls and coach T was on minecraft building cities.” It has been noted Tomlin won five playoff games and a Super Bowl before Minecraft, and three with no Super Bowls after Minecraft but, assuming a start in 2014, Tomlin’s Steelers reached the playoffs four times in seven years before Minecraft, and nine times in 12 years after. But, really, Pittsburgh’s run game declined, and then quarterback Ben Roethlisberger aged. It happens.
To those criticizing Tomlin’s hobby, well, Winston Churchill recommended every person should have two or three real hobbies, and he helped defeat the Nazis. A National Institutes of Health study on hobbies found they reduced depression, anxiety and stress, enhanced quality of life and well-being, and helped create a sense of community.
And, as video games go, Minecraft rules. As a father of four whose households have owned a Commodore 64, a Super Nintendo, a 1990s personal computer, an Xbox and a Nintendo Switch, I contend Minecraft is the greatest video game ever made. At its heart Minecraft is driven by the limitless engine of human creativity, and you can build more or less anything you can imagine. It’s almost literally the opposite of AI.
And Tomlin wanted to be close to his kids before they grew up and drifted into their own lives and their own worlds, and only later did it became a therapeutic place: a place to focus his mind away from the pressure and the strain of coaching guys like Roethlisberger, Joey Porter, James Harrison, Antonio Brown and Najeh Davenport, among others. Phew.
And then his sons got him to do the video, and helped with its production. Beautiful.
It’s understandable, and instructive. The world is a lot at the moment, and doing something you enjoy, something that occupies your whole brain, is an antidote. Ideally hobbies include the outdoors and other people and especially your kids, but what matters is you do it. Because in the end, in Minecraft or elsewhere, what you’re really building is you.
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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
Bruce Arthur is a columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur.
