There’s Something Beautiful Behind Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft City

4 min readMike Tomlin was my football coach for nineteen years. I loved him and I hated him. I screamed when his notoriously stingy defense pummeled the Browns and the Bengals, and also screamed when his offense of choice was running the ball into the opposing team’s nose tackle for three straight downs. But we won a Super Bowl together and we lost a Super Bowl together. When he left my hometown Pittsburgh Steelers this past offseason, it hurt, but it was a mutual breakup kind of pain. It was time.That said, as is so often the case when your significant other goes to greener pastures, you see each other grow and change in ways you could never imagine. I now watch the Steelers with a pathetic sort of detachment, listening to audiobooks with the game on mute.Tomlin? He’s a broadcaster on NBC now, which is all fine and well, but he’s . . . also on YouTube showing off his Minecraft city. But it’s great, actually. We could all learn something from it.If you missed the backstory here, Tomlin—who was notoriously tight-lipped in his Pittsburgh days—is proving himself to be a revelation off the gridiron. He’s a damn good football analyst, sure, but he let slip to the Today Show early last month that he has a secret passion project: a sprawling city in the uber-popular sandbox video game, Minecraft.Of course, sports fans promptly demanded that Tomlin show off his creation. Last night, he finally obliged. In a nineteen-minute video, which you can watch in its entirety above, Tomlin shows off—wait for it—twelve years of work in the game, where he made what feels like an endless urban utopia of high-rises, sports stadiums, and even a boutique hotel. (Coach, I’ll put in a word with my editor for inclusion in Esquire’s best new hotels list next year.)Over the course of the video, which Tomlin says is the first of several, he reveals himself as a sort of architecture nerd, obsessed with “lighting-conscious” design, aquariums, and Jack and Jill bedroom concepts. Hilariously, Tomlin City actually looks like a much better Pittsburgh, with (and this is something the city desperately needs) quality housing in the downtown area. Can someone from the Burgh’s urban planning division give this man a call?So why, with his infinitesimal free time, did a high-salaried football coach choose to play in Gen Z’s paradise of choice? If you listen to what Tomlin is really saying in the video, it’s actually something beautiful.It was for his kids. Tomlin has three children, who are all now in their twenties, and he started playing Minecraft to see what pulled their attention so dramatically. “Over the course of time, they got just disinterested in the game,” Tomlin says, adding that his kids created several buildings in his city. “They go on to high school and so forth and off to college. Their participation became less and less over the years. My participation probably at times increased. At different times over the course of a twelve-month calendar, I would have different levels of fixation on this.”“More than anything, it was therapeutic from me. Some mindless entertainment,” he adds. “I'm not a big TV watcher. It allowed me to detach from the realities and the pressures of life.”This is how you show up as a father to your kids, unplug from work, and keep up with a wholesome hobby, all at once. I knew Mike Tomlin was a good man—his charity work in Pittsburgh is the stuff of legend—but there’s something about watching him with his son, sitting in their living room, talking about Minecraft that felt different. He was my team’s coach since I was thirteen, playing video games to connect with my dad. We watched Tomlin and the Steelers every Sunday, win or lose, and stuck with him through the Super Bowl we won, and the one we lost. We always knew he was the right guy.Is this the most bizarre thing in the world to me, as someone who watched Tomlin avoid so much as a press question about his favorite color of Gatorade over the years? Yes. Do I worry, like former Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell, that Coach T was building a football stadium when he should’ve been drawing schemes? Maybe a little bit. Do I love seeing that he’s found work-life balance, is a great father, and seems pretty much at peace? Absolutely.Coach Tomlin? I’m happy that you’re happy. I still think of you on Sundays. Maybe, when all of this is over, we can build a high-rise together.