Steven Steel

Stephen Steel (スティーブン・スティール Sutībun Sutīru) is an important character featured in Part VII: Steel Ball Run.

Personality
Stephen Steel is shown to be an anxious character despite bearing a bold facade as the organizer and host of the Steel Ball Run race. Stephen is unaware that the race is a carefully planned idea by Funny Valentine to find the Corpse Parts, though is aware of the president's malevolent intentions regarding the race and reluctantly gives in to his demands.

Synopsis
Stephen Steel was born in 1804, the fourth son of Irish immigrant. When he was 15 he fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a florist and the two vowed to be together, but she died in a carriage accident that year. At the Stephen fell into a deep state of despair and promised to never fall in love again. He joined the cavalry, but was never sent to wars nor expeditions. He spent two years in a deserted island hospital. The following years he changed jobs each year until he was 28. He disappeared for 13 years and then reappeared as a adventurer searching for dinosaurs in Costa Rica. Two years later, he dubbed himself a promoter and all the newspapers talked about him.

One day, a scandal about a monkey disguised as an alien caused him to be dubbed as a fraud, but he had nothing to do with the scandal. No one believed him and he had to sell his mansion. At his worst moment, an idea came to change his luck, "a long distance horse-ride", the one thing he wasn't able to do in the cavalry. He searched for sponsors without results. Not having eaten in days and severely drunk he sat by the edge of the street, interrupted by a young Lucy Pendleton who was listening to his mumbling.

Lucy came with the idea of a race across the entire American continent with a winning prize of 50 million dollars. He scolds her for that idea and returned to the bar, got in a fight, and fell sleep behind the urinals. The next day, a group of people surrounded him and asked about the cross-continental race, willing to sponsor it. It is, however, hinted by Funny Valentine's comments on the Steel Ball Run being a venue to claim the Corpse Parts that he was behind Stephen's sponsorship for the race.

Two years later, he remembered about the girl who gave him his chance. When he met her again, she was grown up and identical to his first love. Stephen told her father he wanted to pay his daughter back for the favor she gave him, but her father told him that he was forced to sell his daughter to a gang to be a prostitute. To protect her, Stephen told her father to lie about Lucy having lost her virginity to Stephen, to force the gang to give her up. After Lucy returned, she offered to marry him. Initially, Stephen objected to the idea, wishing for her to grow up, marry someone her age, and live a normal life, but eventually gave in and married her.

Trivia

 * It is possible that Steel's time searching for dinosaurs in Costa Rica is a reference to Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, which contains dinosaurs in Costa Rica.