The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  But the Rooney boys would stay after practice with Unitas and run routes for him. They were amazed by the strength of his arm and the precision of his passes. They couldn’t believe he wasn’t getting more of an opportunity from the Steelers coach, Walt Kiesling. Tim wrote the Chief a twenty-two-page letter, begging him to tell Kiesling that Unitas deserved a chance, that he was better than any other quarterback the Steelers had on the roster. The Chief shook his head—his boys were often given less than the full complement of his kindness—crumpled up the letter and tossed it into the trash. “I like John, too,” he said. “But Kies is the coach, let him do his job.” And so the great Johnny Unitas would be cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers.

  By the end of the 1968 season, the team that had lost so often for so many years had hit rock bottom. Bill Austin, a disciple of legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi hired solely because the great coach gave Austin a sterling recommendation, led the Steelers to eleven wins in three seasons, including just two in 1968, and was let go. And Dan Rooney, Art’s oldest son, who had been taking on more of the team’s management responsibilities, was charged with filling the job.

  While the Chief was big and broad and lived for late nights around the poker table, Dan cut a lither figure and operated cautiously. “The Rooneys were gregarious,” wrote Art Jr. in his autobiography. “Except Dan.” The Chief was a horseplayer who made his choices on instinct. Dan was a college-educated accounting major who was preternaturally mature. In high school he had traveled with the team on East Coast trips, getting help from the players with his homework. During summer vacations from Duquesne University he worked training camps and negotiated Steelers player contracts. By the time he was thirty-seven, he and his wife had nine kids and The Chief had ceded day-to-day operations of the Steelers to him. He didn’t have time for whimsy. While his father sometimes treated owning the Steelers as an amusing hobby, Dan considered the team to be nothing less than his life’s work. And he wouldn’t leave any decision to chance, especially when given the opportunity to find the team’s next head coach in 1969.

  Dan Rooney’s first choice for the job was Penn State head coach Joe Paterno, whose team had just gone undefeated and won the Orange Bowl. But Paterno wasn’t swayed by the NFL. Truth was, his Nittany Lions team was probably better than anything the Steelers could put on the field. That year. Or most years prior.

  So Rooney continued to survey the league. He spoke to owners and head coaches about assistants on their staffs. He read team media guide coaching bios, searching for an overlooked genius. One name kept coming up in conversation, one bio looked better than all the rest: Chuck Noll’s.

  Noll had been a player in the NFL for seven years and an assistant for eight more. His pedigree was unmatched: He played for Cleveland and Paul Brown, the coach who wrote the NFL’s first playbook; he was hired as an assistant in San Diego by Sid Gillman, father of the NFL’s modern offense; he went on to be the top defensive assistant in Baltimore to Don Shula, a wunderkind coach who led the Colts to the NFL title game when he was just thirty-four. As a player Noll had been an undersized guard and linebacker who made up for his lack of size by focusing on the nuances of the game’s fundamentals. He insisted that those who played for him did the same. For the thirty-seven-year-old Noll, the beauty of the game was in its precision and detail. He didn’t play it to get famous, but to study it. And he didn’t coach it for the glory of winning, but for the mental challenge of perfecting it. Sunday was for the players, their final exam. Monday through Friday was for him.

  But outside of coaching circles few people knew of Noll. He was studious and dry-witted, not the most alluring traits to owners with bad teams who needed a fresh face to sell tickets. And, in January 1969, Noll was perhaps best known as the architect of the defense that had somehow just lost Super Bowl III to Namath and the Jets.

  The day after that game, at the urging of Shula, Dan Rooney and Noll sat together for the first time. “We met for two hours,” Rooney wrote in his autobiography. “Noll’s general knowledge of football and his specific knowledge of the Steelers strengths, weaknesses, and potential struck me as extraordinary. I mean, it’s the day after the Super Bowl, with all the attendant hype, hoopla, and pressure, and he’s telling me things about our offense and defense I thought only our coaches would know.”

  Still, Rooney wouldn’t settle for the first guy with a strong reference from a powerful coach. The Steelers had been down that road before. He did his own accounting of candidates, speaking with other assistants and scouring the college ranks for potential head coaching gems. He’d end up interviewing ten coaches. But he kept in contact with Noll on the phone. They were similar in so many ways: They were the same age, both had been overshadowed by dominating personalities, both were confident but self-effacing; it never occurred to them they had anything to prove to anyone. “Dan kept saying, ‘Chuck is one of us,’” says Art Rooney Jr. “But Chuck wasn’t like a Rooney at all. He was really one of Dan.”

  Several days after that first interview Rooney and Noll met again, this time at the Roosevelt Hotel. The Chief was there. So was Art Jr., then the Steelers head of scouting. They talked for several hours, discussing personnel philosophy, coaching strategy, expectations. Noll spoke as he always did, assured without being emphatic, respectful without being a yes-man. He answered questions as if he had been thinking about how he’d run a franchise for his entire life. He had the countenance of someone who’d been there, as he talked less about winning than about building.

  Soon after Noll left Pittsburgh that day, Dan Rooney decided to hire him. And he didn’t want to wait to spread the news. He hastily arranged a press conference at the Roosevelt and said, “When I first talked to Noll after the Super Bowl game, I thought he was young for the job. But when we brought him to Pittsburgh he sold himself to us . . . we have some good personnel and expect to draft a few more good prospects. We just need someone who can put it together.”

  It had all the grand expectations that come with a team’s rebirth. Only one thing was missing: the new coach.

  Noll was still in Baltimore, packing his boxes, making his plans.

  2

  VIOLENCE HAS BEEN A PART OF PITTSBURGH FROM THE VERY beginning.

  During the French and Indian War in the mid-1700s, a young general named George Washington recognized how valuable the location, at the intersection of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers, could be. A four-year battle of attrition ensued, with Washington winning and one of his officers burning the French compounds to the ground. Washington and his men built a new fortress and called it Fort Pitt, in honor of the British Secretary of State William Pitt. They named the land between the three rivers Pittsborough.

  But when the war ended, the real dirty work began. Just across from Fort Pitt was a thousand-foot peak the locals called “Coal Hill.” It proved to be an entry into a massive coal seam that ran from Maryland, through West Virginia, and into western Pennsylvania. With coal across the river, Fort Pitt and the borough’s early settlers had easy access to fuel. Laborers who mined the hills poured into the city by the thousands. By the early nineteenth century, as the American economy began its long ascent to prominence, Pittsburgh, with locally manufactured goods that could readily move north, south, east, and west, became the focal point for U.S. industry.

  It was a city that worked, more than anything else, and it attracted a certain breed of laborer. These men expected life to be a physical trial, and the mines at Karen, Maple Creek, Ellsworth, and Beck’s Run made their expectations pale to reality. Biographer James Parton once described Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid off.” But it was British novelist Anthony Trollope who captured the ambiguity of the industrial enclave best:Pittsburgh, without exception, is the blackest place I ever saw. . . . I was never more in love with smoke and dirt than when I stood there and watched the darkness of night close in upon the floating soot which hovered over the housetops of the city.

  Coal wasn’t Pittsburgh’s only
natural resource. Iron ore was also discovered in the area in the late 1700s. Local industrialists, constantly refining the way they mined and distributed their coal, quickly realized that with the ore, the abundance of coal, and the ever-present oxygen in the air, they had all three materials needed to make steel. Soon thereafter, a lucrative new production pipeline blossomed, with forges growing in number along the banks of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers.

  Making steel is, and always has been, an explosive process. It requires mixing large percentages of iron with small percentages of carbon derived from a specific type of coal, called coke, under extreme heat. The first stage requires the construction of the appropriately named “blast furnace.” At the top of an imposing cylinder (some as high as thirty stories) is the feeder hole where the iron ore and coke are dumped. The coke falls hundreds of feet and packs the teardrop-shaped bottom, where it is heated until it glows cherry red. The bottom of the teardrop furnace has two holes. One is filled by a straw-like hollow tube, and another larger “tapping” hole is closed with a heat-resistant ceramic. Iron ore is added from the top as the coke heats. Once the iron ore/coke mixture temperature has risen to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, a blast of hot air is pushed through the straw and into the boiling liquid.

  The oxygen in the air reacts with the fluid and an explosion results—similar to the pop you hear when a gas stove is lit, only a quantum-size louder. The 3,000 degrees of heat generated from the explosion causes the carbon from the coke to bind with iron from the iron ore. The resulting compound from the blast is the first stage in making steel. It’s called pig iron. Once the pig iron has formed, the ceramic in the tapping hole at the bottom of the blast furnace is knocked out, allowing the molten iron to flow into holding railroad cars. After the blast furnace has been drained, the tap hole is plugged and the process starts anew. A single batch is called a “heat.”

  But pig iron has too much carbon in the compound and must be heated again and manipulated to convert it into steel. The first technology used to get the excess carbon out of the pig iron was called puddling, and it required a certain breed of man to execute it. Puddlers tended large furnaces (seven feet high and six feet wide and deep) with two chambers. One chamber held fuel and was religiously tended by helpers. The second chamber held five to six hundred pounds of pig iron delivered from the blast furnace. The pig iron would melt and the puddler and his helpers would take turns stirring the boil. The heat was so overbearing and the work so heavy and intense that each man could only work the iron for ten or twelve minutes at a time. Once they finished their “spell” they went outside to sit on a bench and recover, sweat-soaked and exhausted. They were required to do six rounds of puddling (also called heats) in a ten-hour shift—stirring 2,500 pounds per man per day. What made the puddlers invaluable was their experience, knowing how much to work the pig iron and when just enough carbon had been burned out to become steel. Once a heat of steel was produced, it went on to be shaped into various products. This process is called “rolling.”

  The “rougher” guided the red-hot steel into the first set of rolling presses. At the end of the roller was a “catcher” who guided the billet back through the press, where it would be caught again by another catcher and fed into a second roller, until eventually the still-hot steel was turned into a rail, beam, wire, or nail. It would be cooled and stacked in cavernous warehouses where it awaited sale.

  For the men who toiled in Pittsburgh’s early mills—mostly made up of the first trickle of European immigrants (Germans, English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots)—social status was skill dependent. You either worked at the “back” or the “front” of the mill. While the puddlers were at the front and maintained a level of autonomy, the back workers were a dime a dozen. They did the work that mules or horses would have done, but no animals would get anywhere near a blast furnace. Top fillers shoveled loads of iron ore and coke into wheelbarrows. Then they pushed them up a steep incline to the feeder hole at the top of the furnace. With a wind shift, the exhaust from the molten furnace below blew noxious fumes (including odorless but deadly carbon monoxide) into their faces. One mill owner described the ultimate top loaders as “Gorilla Men.”

  Because it was necessary to maintain temperatures of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the blast furnace was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, three-hundred-sixty-five-day-a-year enterprise. It was just too cost prohibitive to turn it off for eight hours and then start it up the next morning. So the blast burned brightly from dawn to dusk and back again, with men working twelve-hour shifts. The night-shift switchover, called “the long turn,” was particularly brutal. The day shift would change to night by arriving on a Sunday at 6:00 A.M. They’d work twenty-four hours, rest twelve, and then start the night shift at 6:00 P.M. on Monday. Every other Sunday was a day off.

  The overbearing noise from the explosions, tappings, and train cars carrying raw materials and moving out pig iron made communication between the men extremely difficult. Injuries, maiming, and death were commonplace. With each explosive blast came a shower of sparks, soot, and slag shards-crust from impurities in the mix. Men who slipped on the incline would fall into the furnace and instantly incinerate.

  By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Gorilla Men were phased out by skip hoists that took large buckets of raw materials automatically to the feeder hole.

  And technology made the puddlers obsolete, too. The Bessemer process, an extremely compact furnace that did the puddlers’ work, came online at Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thompson Works in 1875. It burned out precise amounts of carbon from much larger batches of molten pig iron without “stirring” and did it in a fraction of the time it took a puddler to do a heat. Now the distinction between front and back workers was meaningless. As blast furnaces grew ever larger to service the Bessemers, bigger cranes were built to handle bigger loads of steel. Massive ladles were designed to collect and pour the steel from the Bessemers into ingot molds. Larger ingots went to ever more sophisticated rolling mills. Every one of these departments scaled to its limits—blast furnace, steel works, rolling mills. Tending the monstrous machine required ever more manpower to keep it online.

  By the mid-1800s, Pittsburgh, called the “Iron City” in national magazines, had 939 factories, which employed more than 10,000 workers and used 400 steam engines to haul an annual consumption of 880,000 tons of coal, 127,000 tons of iron ore, and $12 million (equivalent to $50 million today) worth of goods out of the city. In steam tonnage, Pittsburgh was the third-busiest port in the nation behind New York City and New Orleans, all with a population of just under 50,000.

  But even as money rolled in and steel mills modernized, the conditions were still life threatening. Accidental spills of molten iron and steel were commonplace. Navigating the blast furnace and Bessemer (and later open hearth and basic oxygen furnace) floors without incident required intense concentration. Men were burned day in and day out by the sparks created during an oxygen blow. The noise was overbearing, and communication usually required the use of hand signals. Most steelworkers suffered from acute hearing loss. Malfunctioning skip hoists showered iron ore and coke onto the blast furnace floor. Limbs were caught between swinging ingots and rail cars. The air was filled with soot, ash, and hazardous gases that often overwhelmed and asphyxiated workers on the floor. Hands were severed in rolling machines.

  Every shift that a steelworker worked increased his odds of dying at the mill.

  3

  WHEN CHUCK NOLL WAS A ROOKIE WITH THE CLEVELAND Browns, in 1953, a reporter looking to make conversation asked him if he had a girlfriend. Noll’s response: “First I’ve got to make good. Then maybe I can get serious about girls.”

  It was typical Noll. He always had a plan, an if-then strategy tucked in his back pocket for easy reference. His ideas were never fanciful, never full of dreamy prose; no one would ever make one great and glorious leap to the moon listening to him talk. But they’d know the first step they needed to take, and the next and the next, until, sudde
nly, they were floating amongst the stars. He could make the most complicated journey seem as simple as a walk to the store, if you followed his rules. And the first lesson was always the same: work hard, work right.

  He’d learned that playing high school football at Benedictine High in Cleveland, as part of a team that won the school its first city title. Noll was poor growing up, and he was small. But to be a boy living in Ohio in the 1940s and ’50s was to dream of playing football. And not just for anyone, but for Paul Brown. Noll wanted that for himself, and so did another Ohio kid his age, Don Shula.

  As the coach at Ohio State, Brown led the Buckeyes to the 1942 national championship. He joined the Browns after the war and, utilizing forward passing schemes and the skills of quarterback Otto Graham, Brown’s teams went to ten straight championship games, winning three of them. Because Brown’s teams were so good, and because he was so revered, the entire state seemed to become a breeding ground of acolyte coaches who followed the Paul Brown way.

  That meant studying the best technique and being smarter, not just better, than your opponent. In Brown’s football the angle at which someone was tackled was taken as seriously as how hard the tackle was. The cerebral, slightly built Noll understood that a running back planting his foot two inches inside a hash mark, rather than at the mark, was the difference between hitting a hole at full speed and being forced to stop and start again.

  Noll played offensive tackle in high school. But in college, at Dayton, he switched to linebacker, where he played well enough that Brown drafted him in the twenty-first round. The match between pupil and teacher was perfect. Noll played both ways, linebacker on defense and “messenger guard” on offense. Every other play, he and the other guard switched off, relaying plays in from the sideline. “After a while,” Brown once said, “Chuck could have called the plays himself without any help from the bench. He was that kind of student.”