Tim Butler was disappointed he had missed the brief window to meet up with his childhood friend while he was back in town.
Turns out, their families will have plenty more opportunities to break bread.
Mike McCarthy is coming back to the ’Burgh — and the Greenfield native is doing so as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“My whole family couldn’t be happier,” Butler said Saturday after the Steelers announced a verbal agreement with McCarthy, three days after he interviewed to replace Mike Tomlin.
“I thought (McCarthy) was still in town,” said Butler, whose father, Jack, had a Hall of Fame playing career with the Steelers. “I invited him to go to dinner with all my siblings last night because our families are close, but he was back in Green Bay. But, yeah, we’re all pretty much beside ourselves with joy.”
The Butlers aren’t the only ones — especially in the Pittsburgh neighborhood where McCarthy grew up that sits just a 5-minute drive across the Monongahela River from Steelers headquarters.
“Greenfield,” said Jimmy Gregg, who for six decades coached youth baseball in the neighborhood, “is really excited about it.”
“It’s like a holiday here.”
Gregg, like Butler and his family, goes back decades with the McCarthy family. They all have followed Mike McCarthy’s journey from St. Rosalia grade school to Bishop Boyle High School through his days as a graduate assistant at Pitt and low-level NFL assistant all the way up to his head-coaching jobs at three of the highest-profile, blueblood gigs in pro football: the Green Bay Packers, the Dallas Cowboys and, now, the Steelers.
“He’s built a heck of a reputation,” Gregg said. “As good of a coach as he is, that’s how good of a guy he is. He’s been a great role model for our community, to show what a kid who came from Greenfield can do.”
McCarthy has one of the NFL’s premier coaching resumes since the turn of this century. Over 18 seasons (13 with Green Bay, five with Dallas) he won 174 regular-season games and 11 more in the playoffs, making three NFC championship games and claiming the 2010 season’s Super Bowl title — with a win against the Steelers, no less.
McCarthy has over the years made no secret about his fandom of the Steelers and Pittsburgh’s other pro sports teams.
“Being born in ’63, to go through the ’70s back in Pittsburgh as a child and just (seeing) the way the city was booming with the steel industry, it just had a tremendous vibe to it,” McCarthy said during the lead-up to a Steelers-Cowboys game last season. “But ’71 was really it, with the Pirates winning in the World Series, being a big fan of the Pirates, and Roberto Clemente was my favorite player. Obviously, a great team. They won it again in ’79. But the Steelers, I do remember the Immaculate Reception, and where I was (when it happened). That kind of changed everything (for the Steelers).”
Few could have imagined that when Franco Harris caught that deflected pass on Dec. 23, 1972, not only that the Steelers were on the cusp of one of football’s greatest dynasties but that the Steelers would make only two coaching hires over the next half-century.
Or that the coach after that would be a kid who grew up in Greenfield, the son of a Pittsburgh police officer and firefighter who also happened to be the proprietor of Joe McCarthy’s Bar and Grill.
“What’s made Michael so successful was he always had a strong worth ethic,” said Dee Rizzo, a prominent agent representing Sidney Crosby and other NHL players.
Rizzo, who works for the powerful Creative Artists Agency, was a family friend of the McCarthys. Rizzo recalled how, when McCarthy was a grad assistant at Pitt from 1989-91, he moonlighted at his dad’s bar.
“He wasn’t just pouring drinks,” Rizzo recalled, “he was cleaning bathrooms and hauling cases of beer.”
That wasn’t McCarthy’s only side hustle, either. A former Division II tight end, McCarthy got a gig as a bouncer at legendary former Pittsburgh nightclub Chauncey’s.
“He had to wear a tuxedo like the all the security working the doors had to wear tuxedos,” said Mike “Archie” Manning, who played on sports teams with McCarthy at Bishop Boyle and was a manager at the time at Chauncey’s in Station Square.
“I’m just happy for him,” said Manning, who owns Archie’s bar on the South Side, “for being a great guy — a Pittsburgh guy — who worked hard his whole life.”
After parting ways with the Cowboys at the end of the 2024 NFL season, McCarthy did some TV work and moved back to Green Bay. That’s where his wife, Jessica, is from and where they met.
But Butler — McCarthy’s five-decade-long friend — said McCarthy “absolutely” wanted to be a head coach again in 2026.
“We’ve talked about it,” Butler said, “but, I mean, Pittsburgh? I’m sure it wasn’t even on Mike’s radar, because nobody expected Tomlin to take that exit the way he did. I’m sure when Tomlin left, obviously, I guarantee Mike was extremely excited about the opportunity to interview for the job.
“Who wouldn’t want to coach for their hometown team? The Steelers were his favorite team his whole life, growing up.”
An NFL head coach for most of the past two decades, McCarthy was by far the oldest and most experienced of the nine men the Steelers had in-person or virtual interviews with during their search for their next coach. McCarthy, though, had been cast as an underdog to get the gig.
Turns out, he is coming home to the place he tended bar as part of a large Irish Catholic family.
“He’s paid his dues,” Rizzo said. “He’s always had that with him. He’s got old-school morals. He’s a Pittsburgh guy. He gets it.”