by Chad Millman
11
ON MARCH 16, 1963, A GROUP LED BY A FORMER AGENT AT THE Music Corporation of America completed the purchase of New York’s AFL franchise, the New York Titans. The Gotham Football Club paid $1,000,000 for the bankrupt franchise, far above its market value, but the club’s leader, David Abraham “Sonny” Werblin, knew the draw and potential for professional football.
Werblin had been a brilliant talent agent who served as president of television for Lew Wasserman’s MCA. He made his fortune selling MCAPRODUCED shows to networks. In fact, NBC ceded their entire prime-time schedule to Werblin and MCA in 1957. NBC’s president Robert Kintner famously declared at the programming meeting, “Sonny, look at the schedule for the next season; here are the empty slots—you fill them.”
Sonny sold television shows by selling stars—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jackie Gleason, Andy Williams, Eddie Fisher, Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, Abbott and Costello, Ozzie Nelson, and a movie actor named Ronald Reagan. If you had the stars, the deals and audiences would follow.
The 1958 NFL championship ratings did not go unnoticed by Werblin. While the scoreboard said Colts versus Giants, Werblin saw it as the steely-eyed, blue-collar Johnny Unitas versus the metropolitan heartthrob Frank Gifford. There was a reason why viewers in Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, and every other state tuned in. It wasn’t because they cared about the cities represented or even the teams. It was the men on the field.
The forty-five million people who watched the game comprised 25 percent of the U.S. population in 1960. Madison Avenue now had the opportunity to speak directly to the demographic they coveted most, and the one that was the hardest to reach: the male aged 18 to 45. These men were or soon would be heads of households who bought cars, beer, cigarettes, razors, and aftershave. John DeLorean, then general manager of the Chevrolet Division of General Motors, said it best: “You know you’re not reaching Maudie Frickert; you’re reaching men, the guys who are making the decision to buy a car.”
Werblin followed the startup AFL closely. With Bert Bell’s announcement of the new league at the congressional hearings, founder Lamar Hunt negotiated a $2 million deal with ABC in June 1960 to carry the brand-new league. By 1962, the AFL hit critical mass. Fifty-six million viewers watched the double-overtime AFL championship between Hunt’s Dallas Texans and Bud Adams’s Houston Oilers.
The NFL followed up with its own $4.65 million TV deal with CBS in 1962. Meanwhile Werblin’s life at MCA hit a crossroads. The Justice Department forced MCA to make a choice between its core agency business or television production. Production won and Werblin lost his stars. Football beckoned.
The NFL’s old-school football-as-civic-enterprise setup was ridiculous to Werblin. Football wasn’t about rivalries, or about keeping the hometown fans happy; it was entertainment. “A million dollar set [the Titans] is worthless if you put a $2,000 actor in the main role,” he once said. “To me building a football team is like building a show. You can’t go at it little by little. You have to go all out all the way. And professional football has become one of the great entertainment mediums in the United States.”
With his purchase of the Titans, Werblin now had the stage. He just had to put on the right show. His first order of business was to change the name of the team, to get it far away from Wismer’s “Titans” name, which was just a lame copycat of the Mara family’s “Giants.” Werblin’s franchise wouldn’t be an homage to the NFL. The “Jets” would be fresh, modern, and cool—just like the jet-set owners of the league.
Armed with more television money—in 1964, Werblin worked behind the scenes to secure an unprecedented $36 million deal for the AFL on NBC—the AFL franchises went to war with the NFL, outspending them to get the best college players. Werblin was not just on the lookout for talented athletes. He wanted a star.
Joe Namath was everything he could ask for. Werblin gave him a game-changing contract worth more than $400,000 in 1965 (as much as many teams’ entire payroll) and got tens of millions of dollars of publicity for the Jets in the bargain. (Namath actually had a four-year deal worth $25,000 per season, plus $200,000 worth of annuities that did not pay out for years, and salaries for his family.)
As soon as he joined the team, Namath did exactly what Werblin expected. And what he wanted. The star QB missed curfews. He wore white shoes when everyone else wore black. But he was a warrior, too. He played hurt and at times brilliantly. Football’s core audience didn’t like Joe as a person, but respected him as a player. Meanwhile, a brand-new audience looked at Joe as the rebel against the system, an individual stuck in a crew-cut collective. Joe made a fortune, lived a life out of Play-boy magazine, and rubbed it in the establishment’s face.
Namath sold out Shea Stadium and every stadium on the road, too. He became bigger than the game he played, and every other professional football player wanted what Joe had—the money and the power to behave any way he wanted to. With Joe Willie Namath, the professional football hierarchy was on the precipice of revolution. As New York Jets defensive lineman Gerry Philbin explained it, “There was one set of rules for the team and another for Joe.”
12
BY THE SPRING OF 1969, NOLL STILL HAD YET TO MEET WITH his team. And those he had met, like Pro Bowl linebacker Andy Russell, didn’t exactly get a warm embrace from the coach. “I met him at his office and we sat down to watch film and the first thing he said to me was, ‘I don’t like the way you play,’” says Russell. “He thought I had bad form, was undisciplined and took too many chances. And I was one of our better players. I had just made the Pro Bowl.”
Dick Hoak had made the Pro Bowl in 1968, too. “Not long after he was hired I went in to meet him. He didn’t even have his whole staff hired yet,” Hoak says. “He tried to explain what we were going to do offensively. He talked about running this and that. He had a plan, you could tell he did. We were going to build through the draft and quit trading these choices. You could tell it was going to be hard.”
Hoak was a Pittsburgh kid who had starred as a two-way player for Penn State in the late 1950s. He had learned to play football from his two brothers, who were more than a decade older than he was, by watching them play in the park across the street from his house. When his oldest brother broke his arm, the Hoak boys’ mom forbade him from playing football. But the slightly built Dick was too nifty, too fleet-footed, and too smart on the field to ever take a clean hit. He had an uncanny sense for how a play would develop. His mom never had to worry about him.
The Hoaks were a mill family. Charles and Donald, the oldest brothers, both spent time working in a rubber factory making tires. Hoak’s father worked in mills, too, making grenades and shells during the war and then picking up work wherever he could when it was over. After Dick’s senior year in high school, his father never found steady work again—the family got by with help from Dick’s brothers. Dick didn’t intend on doing hard labor; he wanted to teach and coach. He had the perfect temperament for it—never too impressed with his accomplishments; never too disappointed with failure. Even when he was drafted by the Steelers in 1961, it wasn’t cause for celebration. After talking it over with his parents he called the Pittsburgh scout and said, “Okay, I might as well try it.” All Hoak asked was that the team help him finish school at Penn State, where he was six credits shy of graduating. The team Hoak joined was, by the barest definition, a pro team. It played in the NFL. He got paid. They had uniforms. But in so many ways, this was a minor-league outfit. Those uniforms? Well, sometimes the helmets were different colors. The team was essentially homeless, playing its home games at the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt Stadium, and at Forbes Field, where the Pirates roamed. And while fans loved the fact that the Steelers practiced in the public spaces at South Park—there were times that Frisbee-throwing fans and players had to watch out for each other—the players deplored it. When it rained, water drained to the middle of the field, making it impossible to practice. On those days, they moved indoors, to a barn where they kept poli
ce horses and manure piled high on the ground.
When it wasn’t raining, the players had to walk the field themselves to remove rocks and debris. When coaches sent the team on endurance runs for training, the players had to run a course that traveled in a circle through the nearby woods. Veterans would stop just inside the shade and make the rookies finish the circuit. They’d smoke some cigarettes, rest on the rocks, and then pick up with the crowd of newbies as they circled back.
After the run, or lack thereof, they retired to the locker room in the basement of an old building on the grounds. Each player got a nail for his clothes. Hot water for showers after practice wasn’t an option. Two of the showers didn’t work at all, which meant the entire team shared only four. The toilets didn’t have any seats. “You go from college, playing in a huge stadium and perfect practice fields,” says Russell, who starred at Missouri. “And all of a sudden you’re in Pittsburgh, practicing in South Park and playing in a tiny stadium. Well, it’s hard.”
Noll didn’t care. Playing for him would be harder. Hoak knew it the first time they met. And Noll confirmed it when the team finally got together on the field at South Park for a spring practice. “Chuck came in and said, ‘Some of you aren’t good enough to play,’” remembers Hoak. “It was nothing personal, he was going to be honest, you either produced or you weren’t going to be there. He was not a rah-rah guy, not a guy that gave a lot of speeches. He felt you were in the pros and you had to produce. He basically said, ‘You are a man now and I will not lie or treat you like kids—if you have a problem you can see me, my door is open.’
“But I don’t know how many of us walked in.”
That included the cornerstone of his franchise, Joe Greene. Before training camp started Greene decided to hold out. Simpson held out in Buffalo. Leroy Keyes, drafted third overall by the Eagles, held out. So Greene did, too. Something no Steeler had ever done before. At one point Greene became so frustrated with the negotiations that he told a Pittsburgh reporter, “I’d rather play for ten dollars a game in the minor leagues than back down any further in the money I’m asking.”
It was pride. With Greene it always was. But once he signed—reportedly a three-year deal worth $200,000—he learned how quickly the Rooneys separated their business from their feelings. The guy who gave Greene a ride to camp was Dan Rooney.
That made Greene feel welcome, but when he got to camp his teammates saw him as the big-money rook driven to camp by the owner. Plus he was overweight. Fat and late and loaded. The veteran Steelers, struggling through their first few days with a new coach, were just aggravated enough to give Greene a lesson.
Noll, and most coaches, started training camp with the Oklahoma drill. There is no more physical—or violent—exercise in all of football. From a three point-stance a defensive player goes face-to-face with an offensive lineman. At the snap, the defender must engage the lineman, shed the block and then tackle a running back, who gets a seven-yard head start. “To make that play you have to be strong enough to lose the blocker so you can get a good lock on that running back,” says Russell. “And you are at a disadvantage because the blocker knows the count.”
Noll and his coaches loved the Oklahoma drill. Right away, from the first minute of camp, they knew who was full of tenacity at the point of attack, and who would rather be fishing. The players loved it, too, because it told them who was a target and who was legit. They were about to find out with Greene. “Ray Mansfield was first,” Russell remembers. Mansfield was the Steelers longtime starting center. He was the son of a man who laid concrete for a living and had the ears of his teammates. If a player asked a teammate to go out drinking for the night, it was Mansfield. If there was someone who needed to say something when teammates were slacking, it was Mansfield. If there was someone who needed to get chippy and a little dirty with opponents, it was Mansfield. He loved the physical nature of football, embracing the violence in a way that was different, more comfortable, than other players, who accepted it as a job hazard.
He was one of the players most looking forward to hazing Greene. “So Ray was first. And Joe just threw him like a rag doll. Pushed him away with his left arm. Then he used his right arm to crush the back,” says Russell. “I was standing there with some other guys and we just looked at each other.”
“He beat the crap out of every one of the offensive linemen,” remembers Hoak. “We had two defensive tackles, Kenny Kortas and Frank Parker, and they were watching Joe and they just looked at each other and said, ‘Well, we might as well pack our bags.’ They had never seen anything like that.”
Years later, Russell would tell Rooney that was the day everything changed for the Steelers. That one drill. It established Greene as the meanest, maddest, baddest player on the team. After that, he’d rip into teammates he felt were giving less than full effort in practice. His disgust with losing, his fear of going back to Texas with nothing, didn’t infiltrate the Steelers. It swallowed them whole. “He was the single most important player in the history of our success,” Russell says.
This training camp was about setting a foundation, and that’s what Noll preached, as much as he talked about winning a title. Immediately the veterans knew he was different than the Bill Austins and Buddy Parkers they had played for. He didn’t yell for the sake of yelling; didn’t punish just to punish. There was more method than madness.
If the veterans hadn’t gotten that message when Noll told them how bad they were in the spring, they got it their first day in training camp. Practice jerseys didn’t have numbers. They were black and they were gold. Last year’s starters were this year’s numberless, faceless bodies. Coaches wouldn’t have any preconceived notions about anyone. Talent would rule the day.
Joe Greene dazzled in this environment. So did another rookie, defensive end L. C. Greenwood, drafted in the tenth round from Arkansas AM&N. Greenwood was tall and lanky and weighed fifty pounds less than Greene. But, when he played alongside the mammoth number-one pick in practice, he exploded off the line. Every lesson learned seemed to make him faster.
That first training camp was more like Football 101 than a masters class. Noll taught blocking and tackling and three-point stances. He stood next to players like Russell, one of the few vets other teams would like to have, and showed him where to put his hands and how wide his stance should be. He emphasized the importance of knowing your opponent, and how proper technique, not brute strength, was the key to winning a game. “He was like, ‘I want your right foot two inches outside of your opponent’s foot, I want you to reach with your right hand,’” Russell said in Dan Rooney’s autobiography.
But Noll knew how far to push. He was there to make the Steelers better football players, not be their father. Gone were the petty rules players hated. No more dress codes. Being clean-shaven didn’t matter. Noll looked the other way when Mansfield snuck players out of the dorms for a late-night beer. He even let reporters stay in the dorms, partly so they’d talk to players instead of bothering him. Noll didn’t do these things to win hearts and minds; none of these rules helped improve performance. But to players they showed consistency, that Noll meant what he said when he’d treat them like men. It was his job to teach them and their job to act like professionals. Moves like this helped them believe in his process.
And then, by some miracle, in front of more than 50,000 expectant fans at Pitt Stadium on the first weekend of the 1969 season, the Steelers beat the Lions 16-13. It was exactly the kind of game Noll predicted his team would play: ugly, defensive, close. The first five scores through three quarters were field goals, with the Steelers ahead 9-6 in the fourth. Then a Lions go-ahead touchdown was answered by a Steelers game-winning drive that ended with just less than three minutes left. The Lions were a legit team—they would finish the season 9-4-1. The win buoyed the first-year coach and the franchise he was trying to make believe in him.
And that was as good as it got all season long.
The next week, playing the Eagles in Philly
at Franklin Field, the Steelers were euphoric when they went up 13-0 in the first quarter. But by halftime, they were down 17-13. And midway through the third, the score was 31-13. They ended up losing by two touchdowns. The next week they scored first again, against the Cardinals, only to give up twenty in the second quarter in another loss. The week after that? A three-point loss to the Giants. And two weeks later? A one-touchdown loss to the Redskins.
The Steelers were showing all the growing pains of a young team learning a new system. They’d execute early, then fall back on bad habits when challenged by opponents. The team wasn’t good enough yet to win on skill alone. And the players could see in the box scores that they were at their best, they were winning, when they played the way Noll taught them to play. But that was always early in a game, before fatigue set in and before opponents began to dictate how Pittsburgh’s game plan would have to change. It was frustrating, the way a toddler feels when he’s just learning how to walk. And there were times when it boiled over.
In November, playing in Chicago against the league’s only winless team, the Steelers were blown out 38-7. The game was over from the moment it started, with the Bears jumping out ahead 16-0 and going into the fourth quarter up 38-0. At the time, the acknowledged toughest player in the NFL was Bears middle linebacker Dick Butkus. He was surly and nasty and hit with the intensity of a man looking for a meal. Win or lose, Butkus had the respect, and fear, of the league. “And on this day, he was just destroying us,” remembers Russell.
