The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  When Art Jr. heard his father and brother were interviewing Noll at the Roosevelt Hotel one afternoon—he’d been left out of the loop and heard about it from his assistant—he burst into the Chief’s conference room. He introduced himself, and then sat quietly while his brother and father chatted with their potential new coach. But after a few minutes, he couldn’t contain himself.

  “Coach,” he blurted out, “how do you feel about building a team and maintaining a team through the draft?”

  He could feel his father glaring at him through his inch-thick glasses. Dan frowned in disgust.

  “Well,” Noll said, “when I was with Sid Gillman we developed a lot of good players who came to us in the draft. I don’t see a problem with doing that in Pittsburgh. You only have to be patient.”

  This was what Art Jr. had wanted to hear. He knew his father and brother would never let him run the scouting department independent of the coach. But he at least wanted to know that the coach believed in scouting. When Noll was hired soon after that, Art Jr. was determined to prove his worth, all over again.

  The night before the draft, on the eighth floor of the Roosevelt Hotel, where the Steelers had their draft war room, Art Jr. was working through draft lists with his staff. Every prospect’s name was written on a big board, with vital information beneath it. As their rankings changed, the names had to be rewritten in their new spot. It was mind-numbing work, easy to make mistakes. And it put Art Jr. on edge with his staff. If someone’s name was spelled incorrectly or put in the wrong spot, he grew more irate. “The first thing Noll will see when he walks into this room are those charts,” he yelled that night. “If he sees a lot of mistakes, our credibility will be shot.”

  Very late the night before the draft, Art Jr., Noll, and Dan sat in Art Jr.’s office, going over a list of prospects. Greene was at the top of Noll’s. And, despite protests from his staff, Art Jr. had him there, too. They briefly talked about Hanratty, the local kid turned Notre Dame superstar, and the Steelers’ need for a quarterback. “But I don’t think we can afford to take one,” Noll said. “We need too much help in other areas.” They all agreed that building the defensive line was the best way to rebuild this team.

  Still, Art Jr. wanted to impress. On January 28, the morning of the draft, he was in the war room by 6:00 A.M., two hours before everyone else was set to arrive. He ordered coffee, tea, doughnuts, and rolls, items that every scout needed to survive the day. He checked the phone lines to New York, where the draft was being held and his brother Tim was located. He wiped his brow and checked his board and made sure names were spelled right.

  When Noll arrived he said nothing, and changed nothing. He and Art Jr. talked about the press that was lurking inside the room and the ground rules they followed to maintain access. Then, at exactly 8:00 A.M., NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle announced the first pick of the 1968 draft: “Buffalo . . . First choice in the first round . . . O. J. Simpson, running back from USC.”

  With the second pick Atlanta chose Notre Dame tackle George Kunz. And picking third the Eagles took Purdue running back Leroy Keyes. In the Steelers war room there was a hush. Art Jr. looked across the table at Noll and asked him, “Greene?” Noll said, “Let’s go for him.” Dan then picked up the phone, called Tim standing by in New York, and said one word, “Greene.” The next sound they heard was Rozelle, at the podium: “Pittsburgh . . . Fourth choice in the first round . . . Joe Greene, defensive tackle from North Texas.”

  The press in the room grumbled. Reporters wanted a name brand to sell some papers. They wanted to build excitement around the moribund franchise that had, in their eyes, yet again, botched the one way to get better: making good draft picks. They would, in fact, get their local-kid-made-good story when the Steelers picked Hanratty in the second round. “In doing so we deviated from our plans,” wrote Art Jr. in his book. “He was not the best athlete available. We took him for one reason: pressure from our fans.”

  But that wasn’t good enough to please the reporters who were trying to please those fans. They chose not to focus on the fact that every other team in the NFL had passed on Hanratty in the first round as well. Instead one reporter took to the streets and randomly asked local fans if they had ever heard of Joe Greene. No one said yes. The headline the next day read simply: JOE WHO?

  Joe Greene felt as bad about going to Pittsburgh as fans did about him coming there. He was a small-town Texas kid who had grown up a Cowboys fan. After he got the call from Noll, he looked through the sports books lining his shelves and the magazines in his room trying to find one positive thing written about Pittsburgh or the Steelers. He found nothing. “I was sad,” he says. “I wished I hadn’t been drafted at all. I didn’t know anything other than they were in the Steel City and it was old and smoky from the mills.”

  And the headline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—“Joe Who?”—made things even worse. What Noll had liked most about Greene, more than his unmatched size and speed, was his pride. He was a nasty, ill-tempered competitor. Losing burned him from the inside out, like an ulcer. When he was embarrassed on the field and felt as though his pride had been damaged, he lashed out at whoever was causing the pain. Teammates suffered in practice with a club move to the head; opponents felt a swift punch to the stomach. Greene was, well, mean. So mean that the green-clad North Texas football team, historically called the Eagles, became known as the Mean Green during his tenure. The name stuck. For player and school.

  Greene had plenty of reasons to be angry growing up in Temple, Texas, a hundred miles south of Dallas. When he was ten, his father left his family (“Just went somewhere,” Greene said), leaving Joe to comfort his mom and three younger siblings. She worked as a maid while Joe was the after-school watchdog at home. But money was always tight, and the Greenes often found themselves forced to move from one run-down home to another.

  When he was older, to help out at home, he occasionally spent weekends working menial labor jobs, usually picking cotton beside grown men who were trying to support their families on a dollar or two an hour. He was already the biggest kid in his class, but these experiences aged him, stealing a part of his adolescence. He wouldn’t live his life like this, he thought to himself. He’d never let it get this bad for him, for his family. “When I was twelve I told myself I would never go back to the fields,” he said. “I had a burning desire to be a success at something.” Every slight he ever felt on the playing field—from a coach, from a teammate—was construed as his not being good enough. Every punch he threw because some offensive lineman was holding him came from a fear of being embarrassed, of not being able to do his job and being told it was time for him to go back and work with those men.

  Because he was so big, and because he so rarely smiled, kids his age were scared of him. He was a man among ten-year-olds, brooding, hulking, and moody to those around him. He was a bully by decree, not actions; someone who looked tough, and therefore was tough. Years later, after he was drafted, there were rumors that he was actually six years older than his official age. No one could be that big and that strong and that young.

  People’s perception of him made him feel isolated, like an outcast, and imbued him with a sensitivity, a shyness, that would last a lifetime. Not even football spared him. “I went out for football because I was one of the biggest kids and the head coach taught me math and the assistant was teaching me geography so they were all over me to play,” Greene says. “Most of the guys in school, if you weren’t in the band, you played sports, and even the kids in the band had to play. Guys marched in the band in their football uniform. In central Texas that happened a lot.

  “When I started playing in high school, I was scolded by an older player for not being aggressive and for getting blocked. He was a linebacker and I was getting knocked back into him and that was a big time no-no.”

  Greene weighed 203 pounds as a high school freshman. The next season, having grown to 235, he moved to middle linebacker, and was so ferocious that he was kic
ked out of every single game. His junior year, he was booted from nine more. By his senior year, he was a 250-pound linebacker with a rep as a wild man. Once, after losing a home game, Greene saw a bunch of the players from the other team at a local restaurant. The star quarterback was eating an ice cream cone, which Greene promptly shoved in his face. He then heard a bunch of players sitting on the bus who had seen what he’d done yelling his name. So he ran through the front door of the bus, ready to take on everyone, only to watch the entire team jump out the emergency door in the back.

  None of the fans in Pittsburgh knew these stories yet. They didn’t know that this big man burned hotter than molten steel. They didn’t know that he feared losing the way most people fear poverty. They didn’t know that he understood what every blue-collar mill worker felt every time he walked into the foundry, because he’d stood there, too, just a guy punching a clock looking for a paycheck. And losing meant doing it again. He had no intention of doing that.

  That’s who Joe was.

  9

  LAMAR HUNT WASN’T THE ONLY SON OF A MULTIMILLIONAIRE oilman in Dallas who wanted a new toy. Clint Murchison Jr. (pronounced Murk-a-son) had been after an NFL franchise for close to a decade. Like Hunt, who was a third-string end at SMU, Murchison, a scrawny halfback in prep school, had a love of the game but played it with little distinction. And like Hunt, he was convinced that Dallas would support a professional football team. After trying to buy the original Texans before their insolvency in 1952, the San Francisco 49ers in 1955, and George Preston Marshall’s Washington Redskins in 1958, Clint Jr. was not about to be denied an expansion franchise.

  When Hunt and Adams refused to abort the AFL, Murchison pursued Halas until he agreed to recommend that he be given the honor of paying $600,000 for the rights to the Dallas team. Halas assured him that formal approval would not be a problem at the annual owners meeting in January 1960.

  Halas had also secured an ownership group from Houston, but this time Bud Adams outflanked him. The hometown son locked up Jeppesen Stadium for his Oilers. The only other pro football-worthy Houston stadium was at Rice University. And, in October, Rice made a surprising announcement that it would not lease the stadium for professional football use. The AFL won round two. The NFL would not play in Houston.

  October 1959 dealt a serious blow to the NFL, when Bell, the former Eagles owners and current league commissioner, was felled by a heart attack while watching the Steelers-Eagles game. Red Smith wrote, “It was like Caruso dying in the third act of Pagliacci.” At the most crucial time in its history, when the NFL needed its steady and respected consigliere to broker a truce with the young turks of the AFL, he was gone. It had been Bell who calmed the waters by saying there was easily enough talent to go around for both leagues. The owners stuck NFL treasurer Austin Gunsel in the chair until they could sort out the best choice at their meeting in January 1960.

  With Bell gone and no one left to hold him back, Halas went for the jugular. The AFL had just secured its eighth and final franchise when Billy Sullivan in Boston locked down financing for his Patriots. And the AFL had scheduled its first player draft. The owners planned to meet at the Cedric Adams Hotel in Minneapolis at the end of November. As the group came together for dinner the night before the draft, Harry Wismer (the New York Titans owner) arrived with news. “This is the last supper! And he’s Judas!” He pointed a newspaper at Max Winter, the owner of the AFL’s Minnesota franchise. Winter confessed that he had accepted an offer from George Halas to join the NFL.

  With the exception of the hyperbolic and underfinanced Wismer, the AFL’s owners were the next generation of American businessmen. Among its members were the sons of many of the country’s most successful industrialists and forward-thinking entrepreneurs—jet-setters unburdened by provincial loyalties. They looked at the game as a national enterprise rather than a local responsibility. They were in it for the business.

  Barron Hilton, the son of hotelier Conrad Hilton, started up the Los Angeles franchise. He named them the Chargers, after a new business that he and his father were in, the Carte Blanche charge card. Within a year, he found a better market and picked up and moved the team to San Diego. Ralph C. Wilson Jr., the son of a successful insurance broker who diversified and scaled his father’s business to great success, owned the Buffalo Bills. When the Oakland franchise was in financial trouble, Wilson lent the team $400,000 to keep it and the AFL viable.

  Even with the loss of the Minnesota franchise, Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams were not about to panic. With Hilton intent on finding a West Coast rival for his Chargers, Hunt encouraged him to reach out to Oakland real estate magnate Chet Soda to replace Minnesota with Oakland. And Bud Adams did his part by drafting the Heisman Trophy winner for 1959, Billy Cannon of LSU.

  The NFL’s Los Angeles Rams held the number-one draft pick and were intent on signing Cannon before the AFL. The general manager of the Rams, Pete Rozelle, quietly worked out a deal with Cannon that called for a $10,000 signing bonus and a salary of $15,000 per year for three years. Because Cannon had been rebuffing his overtures, Adams suspected that the Rams had gotten to him before he could. When he finally reached Cannon, he learned that not only had the Rams and Cannon negotiated, he had in fact signed a contract. So Adams doubled the NFL offer.

  LSU was the defending national champion in 1959 and was poised to play Mississippi in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day 1960. As soon as the last second ticked off the clock, Cannon met an Oiler representative under the goalposts and signed a contract worth $110,000. When Rozelle and the Rams challenged the signing, it became clear that they had broken a cardinal rule—college players were forbidden to sign pro contracts while still playing in the NCAA. The dispute went to court and the judge ruled in Houston’s favor. The war between the AFL and the NFL was in full swing before the new league got one play off from scrimmage.

  Rozelle’s audacity throughout the Cannon controversy—even with the ultimate failure of the scheme—proved compelling to the NFL owners. They needed a bold leader, capable of beating the AFL youth movement. When he attended the NFL owners meeting in Miami just three weeks later, in January 1960, the thirty-three-year-old Rams general manager got an offer he never expected: He was elected commissioner of the NFL.

  10

  MEN LIKE I. W. ABEL GREW UP WATCHING THEIR FATHERS come home mornings and evenings dirty, hoarse, and bleary-eyed. Their bodies deteriorated from the inside out with each passing year as their lungs filled with coal dust and ash. Many were so severely burned in accidents that instant incineration would have been a mercy. There was no such thing as workman’s compensation or disability pay or company-sponsored life insurance. If you got hurt, too bad. There was no shortage of men who would take your place.

  Abel was born in Ohio in 1908, and by the time he was seventeen, he was firing kilns, often working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for just sixteen cents an hour. A yeoman laborer who went from mill to mill in search of the highest wages, Abel got a good look at the toll that working in an inferno took on the men on the floor. He’d see the older workers and pray he didn’t end up like them. One day he stopped praying and did something about it.

  At the Timken Roller Bearing mill in Canton, Ohio, Abel led wildcat strikes (those not approved by the Amalgamated leadership) to get better working conditions. Abel’s militancy attracted the attention of Phillip Murray, the leader of the new Steelworkers Organizing Committee. Murray took Abel under his wing and encouraged him to establish Canton’s Steel Workers Local 1123.

  When Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, limiting an employer’s ability to retaliate against workers who joined a union, engaged in collective bargaining, or went on strike, the Steelworkers Organizing Committee finally convinced U.S. Steel to sign a union contract. The smaller steel companies refused to follow suit. The SWOC called for a national strike to get all steelmakers to comply. This is when Abel came into his own, proving that he could galvanize his fellow union member
s. After he organized and led forty-two wildcat strikes, Murray pulled him into the national leadership. The strikes persisted for four years, amidst violence—the Memorial Day massacre in Chicago left ten dead and thirty wounded strikers—and resistance from steel companies. In 1941, the SWOC finally prevailed. “Little Steel” agreed to the same contract as “Big Steel.”

  The SWOC changed its name to the United Steelworkers of America in 1942 and Murray rented a shabby office in Pittsburgh’s Grant Building. As one of the leading figures in the movement, Abel climbed the union ranks and was elected secretary-treasurer of the USWA on the ballot with presidential candidate David J. McDonald in 1952. The USWA continued to face recalcitrant steel manufacturers, and was compelled to strike in 1952 and 1959 to raise wages and working standards. The strikes were brutal on steel-working families, and as secretary-treasurer, Abel got the brunt of the misery. The USWA did not have a strike fund in those days, and Abel’s hands were tied when the wives of steelworkers, their husbands too proud, pleaded for financial relief. He couldn’t authorize it even in the most extreme cases. If he had, there would have been a run on the building. He never forgot.

  By the mid-1960s, despite his long tenure, McDonald was losing his grip on the members. He drank often, joined the fanciest clubs in Pittsburgh—clubs that steelworkers built but could never afford. He bought high-end toys and had a reputation for being vain and self-centered. There wasn’t a press conference or broadcast that he didn’t seem to appear in.

  Abel, meanwhile, was constantly working the rank and file, traveling all over North America, meeting with local union officers and listening to their members’ gravest concerns. He also became skeptical of the deals that McDonald bragged about making. When McDonald came up for reelection in 1965, Abel ran against him. In a bitter campaign, Abel accused McDonald of “tuxedo unionism” and having “utter contempt” for the rank and file. McDonald, with his air of superiority, said Abel was nothing more than a bookkeeper. But with the help of thousands of disgruntled steelworkers his own age, Abel squeaked out a victory by a margin of 10,000 votes out of 600,000 cast.