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IT’S A RECENT Friday night in downtown Pittsburgh, and JuJu Smith-Schuster sits in a midsized hotel conference room, having just completed his promotional duties for a “Call of Duty” livestream. In one corner is a table of picked-over and forgotten food and drinks on ice. When Smith-Schuster walks in, wearing a black tee and black joggers and black Yeezy Boost 350s, he asks for a Shirley Temple, “extra cherry.” After playing for more than an hour and then conducting an interview, Smith-Schuster and a few streamers invited for the event are back on the sticks, their eyes darting back and forth across the screen.
The event’s lighting leaves the room a deep saffron. On one wall is the elaborate streaming setup, a row of chairs facing several TV screens, behind which are a couple of laptops — the whole apparatus linked by a sinuous tangle of wires. The room is decorated with dining table-sized CoD posters, logo-bearing black couch pillows and the large upright orange shield, which looks a bit like an absurd headboard.
affair punctuated with gaming chatter like, “I haven’t gotten the ray gun yet, it’s a bucket list thing of mine” — I lean over to Smith-Schuster’s current roommate and former USC teammate, Delvon Simmons, and ask how much Smith-Schuster plays. Simmons puffs air out of his mouth, shakes his head and smiles. “Oh man,” he says. “He can play all night. Sometimes I’m like, ‘When did you go to sleep?'”
Smith-Schuster says, to no one in particular, “When this game drops my coaches are gonna be like, ‘JuJu, you gotta focus.'” When I ask him later that night if Steelers coaches give him any grief about his gaming habits, he says no. “They know I play video games all night. It’s what I do.”
The CoD PR people are starting to pack up the room around us. The saffron lighting is unplugged, extension cords are spun back into coils, the posters come down, and someone mentions that Smith-Schuster has practice the next day. Smith-Schuster looks around him and says, “Hey, can I get that shield?”