The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  At the end of the decade, Rosenbloom’s Colts would win the 1958 NFL Championship against the New York Giants. Considered the “Greatest Game Ever Played”—more for the impact made by NBC’s live coverage of the sudden-death overtime victory than the level of play—the Colts’ championship proved to be spectacular entertainment for homebound husbands on Sunday afternoon. Even with a New York metropolitan area blackout (Yankee Stadium had not sold out), forty-five million people watched with racing hearts as Johnny Unitas moved the Colts seventy-three yards to set up a tying field goal with seven seconds left in the game. Then he matched that drive with an eighty-yard march, capped by the winning touchdown on the Colts’ first series of overtime, cementing his legacy. The Pittsburgh kid who wasn’t good enough for the Steelers—no matter how much the Chief’s youngest boys tried to tell their father otherwise—was the greatest clutch quarterback of a generation.

  The coaches on the field that day, Weeb Ewbank (head coach of the Colts), Vince Lombardi (offensive coordinator of the Giants), and a mild-mannered former defensive back named Tom Landry (defensive coordinator of the Giants) weren’t too bad, either. They’d go on to assemble the winners of four of the first five Super Bowls (Lombardi’s Packers, Ewbank’s Jets, Landry’s Cowboys) and coach players who defined football as physical (Green Bay’s power sweep), emotional (Broadway Joe’s guarantee), and precise (the Cowboys Flex defense).

  A twenty-six-year-old Texan named Lamar Hunt watched the 1958 NFL championship game in a Houston hotel room. The beneficiary of an extraordinary fortune from his father, billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt, he was just two years out of SMU with a geology degree and zero interest in joining the family business. A young entrepreneur with deep pockets whose previous venture (a miniature golf franchising idea) didn’t quite pan out, he was looking to be part of what the people his age called “show business.”

  An avid sports fan, Hunt was in Houston to attend the Southwest Conference Holiday Basketball Tournament at Rice Gymnasium, but he decided to skip the second round of games to watch the NFL championship. Seeing Unitas’s surgical aerial assault on the tired Giants defense convinced Hunt that not only was professional football the future of American sports, it was the future of American entertainment. He later recalled thinking, “Well, that’s it. This sport really has everything. And it televises well.”

  Hunt quickly applied for a Dallas expansion franchise with the NFL. But with the failure of the first version of the Texans still heavy in the minds of the owners, along with the concern that adding franchises could weaken the core structure of the twelve-team league—and their pocketbooks—Hunt was denied.

  He then tried to buy an existing franchise—the Chicago Cardinals—with the intent of moving the team south. Hunt got on a jet and flew to Miami to work out a deal with the Cardinals owner Walter Wolfner, who had married widow Violet Bidwell and got her deceased husband’s team in the deal. Wolfner got right to the point. There was another oilman in Houston named Bud Adams who wanted to buy. There were people in Denver (Robert Howsman) and in Minneapolis (Max Winter) who wanted the Cardinals, too. He even heard about another guy in Dallas who had been trying to get a franchise for years. Get in line.

  Young Hunt wasn’t interested in waiting his turn. He knew what he wanted and he had the money to buy it. On the American Airlines flight home, he asked a stewardess for some stationery. If there were other up-and-coming businessmen like him who were refused professional football franchises from the NFL, there must be enough of a demand to create another league. When he got off the flight in Dallas, he had a rough outline for a new American Football League that included the number of teams for the first year, how the new league’s draft would be handled, how revenues would be split, and a list of men to approach to invest. Over the next several months, he continued to flesh out his plans and wait out the Cardinals’ decision. By the end of spring, it became clear the Cardinals had no intention of selling—instead, the team moved to St. Louis, Wolfner’s hometown, in 1960. No matter. Hunt called Bud Adams and had an oilman-to-oilman conversation. Hunt flew south, ate a steak with him, and shook hands. When he left Houston, he had Adams’s commitment to join the new league.

  While Hunt approached all of the other jilted wannabe NFL owners around the country, starting with those who had been interested in the Cardinals, NFL commissioner Bert Bell was dealing with the fallout from threats by U.S. Senate reformer Estes Kefauver. Kefauver, famous for his investigations into organized crime, wanted legislation to ensure that the major sports leagues were treated under the same antitrust laws as the oil and steel industries. NFL violations were numerous, its draft of college players being the most obvious transgression. The draft gave the rights to college players to one and only one franchise, effectively eliminating any competitive bidding for their skills.

  Bell, aware of Hunt’s plans for the AFL, asked for the upstart’s help. Could he announce Hunt’s new league while testifying in the Senate in July? If Bell could prove that another league was soon to start up, then he could argue that college players would have more than one employment opportunity and could therefore leverage one league against another in order to get their fair market price. Hunt did not fail to see the irony in Bell’s request. The NFL had barred him from joining their business and now they wanted to use him to defend their unregulated monopoly.

  But Hunt, who could appreciate the power of the media to prime public demand, gave Bell the go-ahead. The New York Times headline read, “Bell tells Congressional Hearing new Pro Football League Is Being Formed.” And the story went on to report that “Bell said the new teams would definitely constitute a new major league and not a minor one . . . [He] did not identify the promoters of the new league except as ‘people from Texas.’ He told reporters later he was not at liberty to divulge their names but hinted that they were ‘oil men.’”

  The announcement was picked up by wire services across the country along with the possible cities being discussed as franchise awardees—Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Buffalo. By announcing the league Bell gave it immediate legitimacy. Hunt now had not only the leverage to get his American Football League off the ground at the local stadium box office level, but even more critically he would have it later on with Madison Avenue. The buzz began to reach NFL players. Cleveland head coach Paul Brown tried to cut off any curiosity. At his 1959 training camp he told his players, “There’s a new league starting. Don’t pay any attention to it. It’s not going to succeed. It’s a bunch of sons of rich guys who don’t know anything about football.”

  But having dodged Congress in July, the NFL owners, who had struggled for decades to get pro football profitable, knew that a bunch of sons of rich guys could become a real problem. The NFL owners did not have the deep pockets that the younger AFL generation had. So they took their message to the public to undercut the AFL at the box office. Bell spoke for the self-appointed guardians of the game: “I told Hunt that money is not the most important thing in starting a football team, it’s the operation of the sport.” The subtext was anything but subtle. Beware of spoiled rich kids tampering with the blue-collar game.

  Then “Papa Bear” George Halas took matters into his own hands. Halas—the league’s sole remaining founding owner—back-channeled a proposition to Hunt and Houston’s Bud Adams in August. Abandon your new league, and we’ll give you NFL franchises. Halas was as old as Hunt’s and Adam’s fathers, and he expected them to get in line and apprentice. Their money, Halas hinted, would not buy them immediate equality in the NFL. But if they hired the right football people they could one day field respectable teams and move into the old boys’ club of owners.

  Hunt and Adams, however, didn’t want to play by those rules, and declined Halas’s offer. Days later, on August 29, Halas and Art Rooney held a press conference in Houston to announce they were recommending that NFL franchises be awarded to Dallas and Houston. Bids from sources with “virtually unlimited financial resourc
es” were forthcoming.

  8

  NOLL HAD BUILT HIS REPUTATION AS A DEFENSIVE COACH. When the Chargers won the AFL title in 1963, Noll’s unit allowed the fewest points in the league. In 1968, Noll’s last year with the Colts, Baltimore allowed just 144 points the entire fourteen-game season, then an NFL record. For all his exposure to Brown and Gillman and their offensive innovations, the defensive aspects of the game came more naturally to him. A good defense was steadfast and strong and straightforward, dominating in a physical and merciless way. Offense could be messy and tricky, full of mistakes that made the ball tumble to and fro, taking the coach’s stomach for a ride along with it. For Noll, like Brown before him, football’s greatness appeared in the finest details, the inches won in the trenches, not the bundles of yards gained by the fleetest feet or the strongest arms. But mostly, to play great defense was practical, and there is logic and beauty in pragmatism. Logic was Noll’s muse.

  “I knew what you had to do to win. Number one, you had to not lose,” Noll said. “That means you have to play good defense. And you wanted an offense that didn’t get your defense in trouble. We have to play good defense and not make mistakes on offense—even if we have to run the ball on every down and punt.”

  Noll liked to see the whole board when he coached, not just the pieces in front of him. That meant it wasn’t enough just to scout future prospects, grade his own players, or study opponents’ tendencies. Talent alone couldn’t dictate what his game plan looked like or what kind of players he wanted. The NFL rules were just as important, and he scrutinized them like the lawyer he was, looking for the smallest advantages that could help him build the most efficient team. And in the late 1960s and early 1970s, pro football favored brute strength, especially at the point of attack along the line of scrimmage. “At the time the edge went to defensive linemen,” Noll said. “Rushing the passer a lineman could come in and slap you up the side of your head, grab your jersey, grab your shoulder pads and go right past you. Offensive linemen had their hands in front of them, and that was what they called protecting.”

  It made sense then that, with his own team, Noll decided his first move would be to draft a defensive player, one who could dominate the line of scrimmage. And he had a guy in mind. A defensive tackle who played for tiny North Texas in Denton, a school thirty minutes northwest of Dallas, named Joe Greene.

  Each assistant on Don Shula’s staff was responsible for making trips to see prospects during the off-season. They divided the country into territories, like salesmen peddling palm oil, and Noll’s included Texas. For three springs he made sure to stop in Denton, where he watched the 6’4”, 275-pound Greene destroy his teammates in practices. Greene crackled with intensity, barely able to hide his competitiveness. Pride seemed to be his sole motivation. Noll spent time with Greene after practice, listening as the player told him how badly he wanted to make it in the pros. The energy was still there while he spoke, but he was softer standing still. Whatever anger he played with disappeared after the whistle.

  When Greene went off to classes, Noll sat with North Texas coaches and watched film of Greene from the previous season. These sessions were always when Noll decided a player’s worth. Spinning the reels back and forth, checking how their shoulders lined up when making a tackle or if their feet ever stopped moving or how they absorbed and then shed blocks. More importantly, he could slow the film down and see what the player was looking at, track the cues he was following. It told Noll everything he needed to know about instincts and vision.

  Watching Greene in those dark rooms, all the energy Noll saw during their conversations was converted into kinetics. Greene uncoiled his body within fractions of a second after the ball was snapped and then blew the middle of the offensive line into three separate pieces. He was a human bomb.

  In three seasons at North Texas, Greene’s teams went 23-5-1 and held opponents to less than two yards per rush. After his senior year in 1968 he was named a consensus All-American. When Noll was coaching for the Colts, who were fresh off a Super Bowl appearance and drafting late in the first round, he knew there was no way a talent like Greene would last. But now that he was the boss of the Steelers, drafting Greene was a real possibility.

  There was only one problem: Defensive tackles from lesser-known colleges in Texas don’t exactly motivate the fan base in northeastern industrial towns, especially when the team has won just eleven games in the previous three seasons. And that’s especially true when the team is in desperate need of a quarterback. During the Bill Austin era, the Steelers used headliners such as Kent Nix and Bill Nelsen, who often had a hard time distinguishing between their teammates and opponents. Meanwhile, one of the most famous college players in the country at the time was a quarterback named Terry Hanratty. He played for Notre Dame. He was a two-time All-American. He had led the Irish to a national title and had been on the cover of Time and Sports Illustrated, in which he was called the “New Legend at Notre Dame.” But Hanratty, like the people of Pittsburgh, was unassuming and unimpressed with himself, no matter how well he played. When he broke some team records that were still held by George Gipp (of “win one for the Gipper” fame) his response in the press conference afterward was, “I feel like I’ve broken my mother’s most expensive set of china.” His attitude made sense: Hanratty happened to be from Butler, Pennsylvania, which is just outside Pittsburgh. If there was ever going to be an elixir that pleased Steelers fans, it was Hanratty. Remembered Rooney Jr.: “They wanted him, clamored for him.”

  No one would have blamed the Steelers for choosing Hanratty with their top pick. Especially since most of the team’s scouts were less convinced of Greene’s future greatness than their new boss. Their scouting reports on Greene read like this: “Puts on weight, tendency to loaf.” “Physically he has it all, mentally he is disappointing . . . will need a heavy hand but he can play.” “I would question taking him in the first round as he could turn out to be a big dog.”

  One guy, however, who didn’t worry about Greene was Rooney Jr. “He was a third-down guy all right,” he said. “But that was the only down he had to play. He was a guy who just completely dominated guys when he wanted to.”

  While Dan and Art Sr. were anxious about the hiring of Noll for all the reasons bosses are usually nervous about a new hire—Will he do well? Will he embarrass us? Will we look like fools for handing him the job?—Art Jr.’s anxiety came from an entirely different place. He was the complete opposite of older brother Dan. He was big and loud and disarmingly honest, even when it came to how people perceived him. He was the first to admit how much he benefited from being a namesake of Art Rooney. “I knew whenever I sat in a room folks looked at me like I was the rich kid who got a job with the team because of my dad,” he says.

  He was the Rooney son who looked most like his father, a little rounder in the middle, a little more skin hanging from his face, a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses resting on his nose, just like his dad. He idolized his father, who never swore, treated people fairly, and stayed honest in businesses—horse racing, pro football, real estate—where honest men were usually run out.

  But it was complicated being the son of Art Rooney, too. “No one ever called him Chief to his face,” says Art Jr. “We called him Dad or Mr. Rooney or Your Majesty or something.”

  The Chief was gone a lot when his boys were growing up. And he was harder on them than anyone in his orbit. Art Sr. provided all of his kids with jobs throughout his empire—but in exchange for this benefits package, they were his whipping boys. He called Art Jr. fatso and would ride him when he saw him chewing tobacco.

  When Art Jr. graduated from college, he first tried to create his own path. Kind of. Rather than work for the Steelers, he asked his father to pull strings and get him into Georgetown Law School. When Art decided law school wasn’t for him and he wanted to be an actor, Art Sr. set him up in New York while his son studied at the Actors Studio. And when Art decided to stop acting and join the Steelers, he got a
job in the scouting department. “It was perfect,” he says. “If the Chief yelled at me I went to scout for two weeks. I felt bad for Dan. He had to see the Chief every day. And when they argued he’d use numbers and the Chief would get perplexed.”

  He lived a life of constantly proving himself, being underestimated. During the season he was on the road practically seven days a week, scouting from the West Coast to the East Coast, flying in prop planes through freezing rain, convinced he was going to leave his wife a widow and his kids fatherless just so he could get to Ames or Tuscaloosa or Provo to see the next great offensive guard. The problem was, he had joined the Steelers during the reign of Buddy Parker, who had as much use for the kind of information Art Jr. dug up as a priest in the seminary. As soon as Art Jr. was convinced he’d found the next great prospect, it seemed Parker was trading away the draft choice. No matter how much he advocated building on young talent, picking the best available athlete in the draft, his advice was ignored. He had begged his dad and Dan to let him manage the scouting department without any interference from coaches, and they’d brushed him off. “Just get it through your head that we are going to do things my way,” his dad would tell him.