As the coach of one of the NFL’s most successful franchises, the Pittsburgh Steelers, for nearly two decades, Mike Tomlin was charged with building championship-caliber teams.In his free time, Tomlin was building something different: an elaborate cityscape in the video game “Minecraft.”On his YouTube channel on Wednesday, Tomlin revealed part of that map, which he said he had been working on for more than 12 years.Within four hours, the episode had been viewed more than 334,000 times.
By the next morning, that total had doubled.“I’ve always had an interest in architecture and so forth,” Tomlin said in the video, which has amassed over 900,000 views.“And so I started building this creative city.” Tomlin may have been perfecting the map for more than a decade, but his hobby had only become public three weeks earlier.
The 54-year-old stepped down as the Steelers’ coach in January after 19 consecutive winning seasons, which included two Super Bowl victories.As his debut season as a broadcaster for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” began last month, Tomlin revealed in an interview with Craig Melvin that his passions, in fact, ranged beyond football.
Watching his then-young children spend hours playing “Minecraft” had inspired him to see what all the fuss was about.As they became teenagers and went off to college, their interest waned.Not Tomlin’s, though.“More than anything, it was therapeutic for me,” Tomlin said.
“So, mindless entertainment.I’m not a big TV watcher.
It allowed me to detach from the realities and the pressures of life.”With the Steelers, Tomlin was known for unique sayings referred to as “Tomlinisms.” In 2020, he famously wouldn’t allow Covid restrictions to be used as a hardship, saying, “We do not care.” So it stunned some football fans last month to hear that what Tomlin privately did care so much for was a video game that is immensely popular with elementary-age kids.Since its creation in 2009, “M...