The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  But the Cowboys defense couldn’t hold the lead. With sixteen seconds left, Packers quarterback Bart Starr snuck across the goal line for the winning score. On the trip back to Dallas, Rentzel later said, “not one word was spoken the entire flight.”

  The Cowboys continued to dominate in the regular season, winning their division each year while posting a combined 23-4-1 record in 1968 and 1969. But again, in the playoffs, they stumbled, losing twice to the Cleveland Browns in the first round. Schramm, Brandt, and especially Landry obsessed. A former employee of NFL films recalled, “Landry came in for something or other, and all of a sudden he just started talking about those two losses. He really wasn’t talking to me—anyone would have done—it was just something he had to say. He said, ‘It’s a lack of character, in the team and in myself. We just don’t have what it takes. Maybe we never will. Maybe I never will.’”

  16

  FOR ALL HIS EXPERIENCE COMING UP AS A RABBLE ROUSER in the mills; for all the hand-to-hand combat he did negotiating with steel company bosses and union leaders, I. W. Abel had the countenance of your favorite grandfather. He preferred dark suits and gold-rimmed glasses. USWA members lovingly referred to him as Abe. He was stocky, white-haired and, in public at least, remarkably shy.

  His greatest gift was his patience, developed over years of hardscrabble negotiations. From his burning-shoe-leather years in the mills, he learned as much about people as he knew about metal. Together, those two traits taught him how to find common ground. “Collective bargaining is pretty much of a crisis business,” he once said. “You have to have patience and you have to be tolerant. You have to be a fair fisherman. You have to sit back and wait for a bite.”

  In 1968 Abel negotiated the biggest wage and benefit increase in USWA history—a 16.3 percent increase over three years. Abel was also proud of growing the USWA into a colossal 3,700 locals with 1.2 million paying members in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It was a part of the AFL-CIO and one of the most powerful unions, along with the United Auto Workers and Teamsters, in the United States. Abel was instrumental in diversifying the membership, so much so that actual steelworkers made up less than 50 percent of the rank and file. Since the 1959 strike, the USWA had drafted iron miners, copper smelters and refiners, aluminum workers, can-factory and metal-fabricating-plant employees, and even some police and Chock full o’Nuts coffee-shop waitresses. Having a broader base of dues-paying members buttressed the union when one or the other of its labor divisions had to go on strike. There were individual collective-bargaining agreements for each industry, so having several groups under one roof meant stability for the greater union. Even if every steelworker walked off the job, there would be 700,000 others paying dues monthly.

  But this was a union, after all. The radical fringe was always alive. And as soon as a union leader begins to look comfortable, he becomes a target. That’s what happened to Abel. In 1969, after just one term, he was challenged for reelection by a young union lawyer named Emil Narick.

  A former star running back for the Pitt Panthers, Narick accused Abel of the same tuxedo unionism that Abel had said his predecessor suffered from. He said Abel was a dictator, a patsy for the Washington politicians, a guy who went to lavish parties hosted by the big steel manufacturers and sold the workers out for scraps. Narick charged that a real union leader would never break bread with management or hobnob with Washington elites. And there was no way the big steel manufacturers would give the workers a 16.3 percent increase unless it was a pittance compared to what they made in profit. According to Narick, the Abel administration was “old fashioned and unresponsive to the will of its members.”

  Abel’s response: “You’ve got the younger element. They think we’ve always had good wages because employers believed in paying good wages. They think they get benefits like we have and holidays, vacations, medical insurance, and all that because employers want to give that.”

  But Narick, who Abel predicted wouldn’t get more than 20 percent of the vote, was relentless. Fueled by his popularity as a local football hero, his candidacy gained momentum. He stood outside western Pennsylvania mill gates, asking for “a buck for Emil,” and workers responded with grease-stained singles and five-dollar bills. In the closing weeks leading up to the February 1969 election, Narick compared his campaign to the fresh New York Jets up against Abel’s tired Colts. Narick predicted an upset win.

  After all the ballots were tallied, Abel was shocked. He’d won, but Narick got double the anticipated votes. While his win was never in real jeopardy (257,000 to 180,000), Abel could not deny that there was growing unrest on the shop floor.

  Abel was still President of the USWA, but he didn’t have anywhere near the power he thought he had.

  17

  THE STEELERS HAD A NEW QUARTERBACK. AND FOR THE first time in their history, a new stadium to play in, too. Three Rivers, built where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio River, was a dull, concrete, multisport facility that the Steelers would share with the Pirates. But the players didn’t care. Compared to South Park, it made them feel like real-live professional athletes. “It had these sumptuous locker rooms, carpeting on the floors,” Noll once told NFL Films. “These guys are just sitting there glowing, they are thinking they are really something special.”

  Noll, however, made sure no one felt too special. While NFL teams around the league often gave—and still give—stars the biggest spaces in the locker room or grouped players according to positions, Noll arranged the Three Rivers dressing quarters as logically as the way he ran the team. The locker room was a big square, and locker assignments began with low numbers in the lower left-hand corner from the entrance and then wound around. It forced linebackers like Russell, who was number 34, to mingle with running backs and defensive tackles like Greene, who was number 75, to get dressed next to offensive linemen. It was hard to form cliques. Not that any of the players cared where they got dressed at first, as long as it was Three Rivers.

  “It was,” says Russell, “phenomenal.”

  So was the enthusiasm they felt for Bradshaw. Mansfield, the center who’d be snapping the rookie the ball, told Time magazine, “This guy is going to be Moses, he is going to lead us out of the desert.” No pressure.

  The weekend of Bradshaw’s first rookie minicamp in Pittsburgh, Russell arranged to have a barbecue at his house. But when he called the Steelers facility to find the rookie, he wasn’t there. Bradshaw, Russell was told, had gone to pray at a local church.

  The Steelers were a tight group, but they were not the most pious of teams. They drank as hard as they played. Nights were spent at a club called The Attic, listening to jazz. During training camp, nearly every night was spent breaking curfew at a motel bar the players called the 19th Hole. “As soon as the assistant coaches were pulling out of the parking lot, we were pulling in,” remembers offensive lineman Gerry Mullins. Russell and Mansfield, holdovers from the early 1960s, believed that drinking away from the stadium brought the team together. It’s how they were taught, and it’s the lesson they were trying to pass down. The new realities of the big-money NFL, like rookies holding out for bigger contracts, were foreign to them. They always had jobs during the off-season and had never made enough for the game to be anything but fun. Just like for the fans, football was an escape from reality. And, really, they liked to party, and they liked the rookies to party with them.

  That night, Russell went to the church to find Bradshaw. When he arrived he found his future quarterback on the pulpit, speaking passionately about his faith, to people he had never met. Russell was uncomfortable, wondering if he shouldn’t be “more devout,” he wrote in his book A Steeler Odyssey. He sat in a darkened area of the church and waited. Bradshaw, he thought, was so genuine and confident.

  Bradshaw made his way out to Russell’s house a couple days later for the barbecue. He was the only rookie invited, and the veterans were “as nice to a rookie as we had ever been,” Russell wrote. But
they also didn’t spare Bradshaw any tales of woe. All the misery they had been feeling, all the ugly losses they had endured, were shared. They were desperate, and they wanted Bradshaw to know what he meant to the franchise, how they thought he could save them. This wasn’t bonding, this was pleading. Bradshaw left the party early. “And some of the veterans wondered out loud if he would be the man our offense needed,” Russell wrote.

  His teammates were looking for a connection. As dominating as Joe Greene could be, and as much as he affected his teammates’ attitude, a defensive tackle is not the quarterback. Only the quarterback controls tempo, makes play calls in the huddle, touches the ball on every offensive down. The pulse of the team runs through his hands. Receivers run better routes when they know a quarterback can get them the ball. Linemen explode out of their stances faster to protect if they believe in him. The quarterback can make every other player on offense look good. You never hear baseball players say “My pitcher” but you always hear receivers praising “My quarterback.” Bradshaw had to create that relationship.

  But Bradshaw wasn’t Greene. He couldn’t whip someone with one arm and command respect just by standing there, glowering. He didn’t like to lose, but he didn’t exude the same kind of hatred for it that Greene did. He’d grown up comfortable and loved by a big family. To him football was a game he was passionate to play, more than anything, sure, but he wasn’t desperate to win. The game was just fun and because of that, the wins followed. It had always been that way. In high school he cocked his arm, threw the ball, his team won. In college he did the same. There was no pressure—from fans who identified with the team, from teammates who needed to keep their jobs. His transition from fun-loving gun-slinger to professional quarterback, playing with grown men he was supposed to lead, was hard. “Nobody at Tech thought the world was going to end if we lost to Delta State,” Bradshaw wrote in It’s Only a Game. “I figured the Steelers had finished last without me; they’d won one game. How much worse could I make the situation?”

  Much, much worse. It wasn’t just that Bradshaw liked going to church while his teammates liked going to bars. It was the game. College football was Terry Bradshaw’s domain; pro football was Chuck Noll’s. It was the difference between checkers and chess. Bradshaw had never studied film before. In high school and college, if his first receiver wasn’t open, he tucked the ball and ran. He didn’t know how to read defensive coverages at the line of scrimmage. He underestimated the speed of the game, the intensity, how hard opponents were going to hit and how high a standard his coaches were going to hold him to. He was, in every way, overmatched. And no one had any sympathy.

  In his very first game, against the Oilers, Bradshaw completed just four of sixteen passes with an interception and was pulled from the game to a chorus of 75,000 boos. This is where a new Chuck Noll emerged. The calm teacher who preached technique, the master manipulator who looked the other way when Joe Greene attacked opponents with scissors, handled Bradshaw like he was an abusive father. He grabbed his quarterback’s face mask, his jersey and unloaded obscenities that would make the bluest of comics cringe. The anger shot from his knuckles through Bradshaw’s pads. “I couldn’t believe how cruel Chuck was,” Bradshaw once said. “You would think someone as smart as Chuck was would be a better psychologist, but he beat me down. I totally lost my confidence. I was the kind of guy who needed a pat on the back—shouting at me only made things worse.”

  So did the fact that, on his first play from scrimmage in place of Bradshaw, local hero Terry Hanratty threw a touchdown. After the game, Bradshaw sat in his car in the Three Rivers parking lot and cried.

  The Steelers lost their first three games that season, with Noll shuffling his quarterbacks practically every quarter. It got so bad for Bradshaw that his mom came to stay with him. One night he took her to a hockey game and fans in the stands started booing the both of them. Another time, before a game, he was standing outside the doorway of the locker room talking to Art Rooney Sr., within the eyesight of Noll. The owner was telling his young quarterback to keep his confidence, that everything would be all right, with Bradshaw’s blond locks bobbing up and down in agreement. When the conversation ended and Bradshaw walked into the locker room five minutes late, Noll, who had seen the conversation between rookie and owner taking place, fined him.

  It didn’t help with fans that he was burly for a quarterback. His blond hair was thinning and unruly and his face lacked the kind of angles Madison Avenue likes in its football idols. He had a funny Louisiana accent that, to those in the North, made him sound simple. He preferred spending time on his farm with his parents to drinking at the Jamestown Inn in Pittsburgh’s South Hills with his teammates. He wore buckskin coats with fringe hanging from the sleeves. “I was an outsider who didn’t mingle well,” Bradshaw once told Sports Illustrated. “No one liked to fish or do the things I liked to do. The other players looked upon me as a bible-toting Li’l Abner.”

  The criticism of Bradshaw, for his play and for his intelligence, was fierce as he threw four interceptions for every one touchdown that rookie season. But he wasn’t the only one suffering. Noll’s first season was about installing a program and teaching his players. Every frustration was met with encouraging signs of progress. Even at 1-13, players saw improvement. Not true that second season. The rookie quarterback was lost. The coach couldn’t decide who should lead the team. While the team won four of five games in the middle of the year, it was 5-8 and on a two-game losing streak as it headed into the last game of the season in Philadelphia.

  The Steelers opened the game strong, taking a 7-6 lead. But by halftime they were down 20-14. While they tied it at 20 in the second half, it was clear they were getting beaten up by the Eagles. It was so bad that even the Steelers punter got hurt. And Noll’s solution was to have Bradshaw take over the punting duties. Late in the game, Bradshaw, who used to kick in his Louisiana backyard until the ball split in two, stood at the back of his end zone, waiting to punt. “The only thing Chuck told me,” Bradshaw wrote in It’s Only a Game, “was to keep my head down.”

  The Eagles were on him so fast it was as though the Steelers offensive line had lain down. The punt was blocked, Philadelphia recovered it for a touchdown and Bradshaw was injured when an Eagle player’s spike opened a gash in his leg.

  That would have been bad enough, an injury-to-insult moment fitting for the end of a horrible season. Luckily for Bradshaw, he had Joe Greene to steal the spotlight. The only defense against Greene was to hold him.

  There was no other way for a single NFL offensive lineman to stop him. He was bigger than most, faster than most, and angrier than all of them. He did all the things on the field—hitting, stomping, helmet twisting—that other players were afraid to try for fear of retaliation on the field or punishment from coaches. But no player was crazy enough to stand up to Greene, and Noll had no interest in disciplining him. He saved his blisterings for Bradshaw.

  That day in Philadelphia, Greene had four sacks despite being held all day long. Between this kind of personal affront and the humiliating loss to end a losing season, Greene had reached his breaking point. Late in the game, Russell remembers Greene saying to an Eagles offensive guard, in a voice that sounded like rumbling thunder, “If you hold me one more time, I’m going to have to hurt you.”

  The player held, and Greene hurt, with an uppercut to the guard’s unprotected belly. His fist went into his stomach, and the air went out. So did the player, who was carted off to the sidelines. Greene made the same warning to the replacement, who, at the snap, held just like his predecessor—and suffered the same fate. Off to the sidelines he went. Finally, the Eagles brought in the third-stringer, who happened to have been a college teammate of Greene’s. And he held Greene, too. But now Greene was stuck. He didn’t want to hurt his old buddy, but he needed to make his point. As the official placed the ball at the line of scrimmage and the Eagles broke their huddle, Greene picked it up, walked toward his sideline, flicked it toward
his bench, and said to the ref, “If you can’t see these guys grabbing me, this game is over.”

  The officials put another ball down, and Greene glowered in their direction. Then he walked to middle of the field, picked up the new ball, and casually started walking toward his sideline again. Only this time he didn’t toss it toward the bench. He threw a perfect, high, arcing spiral into the second deck of Franklin Field. Then he walked off the field. “It seemed like the ball took forever,” Russell remembered in About Three Bricks Shy of a Load. “The crowd was dead silent. And the players—there we were, we didn’t have a ball, we didn’t have a tackle. It was like he was saying, ‘Okay, if you won’t play right, we won’t play at all.’ Nobody else would do such a thing.”

  “No one ever said anything to me about it after the game,” Greene says. “The only day that moment ever came up again was the day I told Mr. Rooney I was going to retire. He said, ‘You remember that day back in Philly when you threw ball in the stands?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I do.’ He said, ‘Well, I felt that same way.’”

  18

  CLINT MURCHISON KNEW WHAT THE COWBOYS NEEDED. JUST after the 1967 loss to the Packers at the Cotton Bowl, a number of disappointed fans fell victim to crime in the parking lot. A man was shot and his wife was seriously beaten during a robbery. Another was repeatedly stabbed and a dozen or so other fans mugged.

  Murchison had been hoping to build a new downtown stadium in a better neighborhood for his Cowboys for years, but had always been blocked by Erik Jonsson, the city’s mayor. Jonsson was a Brooklyn-born Yankee who cofounded the computer-chip manufacturer Texas Instruments. His creation of an entirely new economic engine for the city turned him into a favorite of Dallas society, a group that drafted him to run for mayor.