by Chad Millman
Thomas was back and better than ever on the field. But he still refused to speak. Beat writers started calling him “The Sphinx.” As his resistance to the organization grew, so did his influence on his fellow Cowboys. Calvin Hill recalled, “I suppose that in the deepest part of me was admiration. He was like the silent slave. He said nothing, but maybe he took the gear out of the machinery. Once Dr. Marvin Knight, our team doctor, came into the trainer’s room, looking for Duane. ‘Where’s Duane?’ he said. Oh, there’s the son of a bitch. How ya doing?’ Duane said, ‘When you learn how to address me, I’ll tell you how I’m doing,’ and he got in the whirlpool and turned his back. I felt like pounding on the table. ‘Yeah! Yeah!’”
With Thomas, the Cowboys cruised through the season and compiled an 11-3 record. His play was so outstanding that even Landry reached out to shake his hand after one remarkable touchdown run. Thomas stared Landry down, refused to shake, and then bypassed the outstretched hands of teammates Rayfield Wright and Jethro Pugh. When player-coach Dan Reeves was tasked to take roll call at every meeting, Thomas refused to answer. Reeves was so incensed that he went to Landry for justice. But Landry ignored him. “I still have nightmares about that roll call. Duane made Landry bend to him and do something I thought was unfair, and I’ve never forgotten it,” Reeves recalled.
The Cowboys beat the Vikings in the first round and the 49ers again in the NFC Championship to reach their second Super Bowl in a row. Thomas scored touchdowns in each of those games. Media day for Super Bowl VI spooked every journalist who walked past a corner of Tulane Stadium in New Orleans. There Duane Thomas sat, as he was ordered to do by his boss, for picture and interview day. He remained silent for his allotted twenty minutes, refusing to add more verbiage and hype to an already overblown American ritual. Pete Rozelle didn’t dine out on this performance.
The Cowboys dominated the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl VI. Thomas ran for a seemingly effortless ninety-five yards and one touchdown on nineteen carries. As the writers cast their ballots in the press box for the Most Valuable Player of the game, some Thomas backers thought the outcome would be unanimous. But when Sport magazine’s editor Larry Klein announced that Roger Staubach (12 of 19 for 119 yards passing) was the MVP, they realized what had happened: The winner was expected to fly to New York and give a speech at a banquet. That was something that Duane Thomas would not do.
“Duane represented what was in the hearts of most players, but we didn’t have the courage to stand up like he did. Duane did what he did for a reason, but we didn’t give him the support. We just went along with the system,” Rayfield Wright said.
Thomas faded from the game as quickly as he arrived. The Cowboys traded him to San Diego in 1972 and the Chargers traded him to the Washington Redskins in 1973. By the end of the 1974-75 season, Thomas was out of football for good.
The Cowboys, meanwhile, would not win another Super Bowl until they found someone as talented and uncontrollable as he was.
22
AS HE HAD IN HIS FIRST TWO SEASONS, NOLL MADE WISE draft choices in 1971, picking up Jack Ham—the All-American Penn State linebacker—in the second round, Dwight White—the East Texas State defensive end—in the fourth round, and defensive tackle Ernie Holmes from Texas Southern in the eighth round. But he made another move, much less noticed, that helped transform his defensive line from Joe Greene and the Greenettes into something cohesive and brilliant. He hired Dan Radakovich as the defensive-line coach.
Noll had a theory about assistant coaches, one that wasn’t all that different from his feelings about veteran players from other teams: If they’ve been somewhere else in the pros, he didn’t want them. They’d have too many bad habits to break, and Noll wanted guys who were clean slates. It would be too easy for them to say, “Well, this is how we did it in . . .”
But Noll wasn’t a dictator. He encouraged and appreciated discourse on day-to-day ideas and game plans. In a sport that relied on regiment and experience, he wanted fertile football minds. That’s what made Radakovich the ideal candidate for his staff. Radakovich had been a center and linebacker at Penn State in the mid-1950s. He earned the nickname “Bad Rad” for the way he constantly attacked and cajoled not just the opposition, but also his teammates and even his coaches. He was Pennsylvania-steel tough with an in-your-face disposition, although he never planned on being a football coach. “I was going to go to law school,” he says. But after getting into an argument with his Penn State coaches late in his senior year about how to play linebacker, they told him, “If you’re so good, you coach it.” And that spring he did, getting $100 to teach his former teammates. After an NFL tryout ended with an injury, he was back in State College, working as a grad assistant.
By the spring of 1971, he had worked his way through the college ranks—a dozen years at Penn State, a stint as the defensive coordinator at the University of Cincinnati—while trying to fit in law school classes at night, along with helping his wife raise their four kids. “I was going broke, and the Steelers had had a coach die a few weeks earlier, so I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if they’ve hired anyone to replace that guy,’” says Radakovich. “So I called, and lo and behold they hadn’t hired anyone or interviewed anyone because Mr. Rooney had put a freeze on interviewing until six weeks after the coach had died, out of respect. That’s right when I happened to call. Noll didn’t know me, but he said if I could get there the next day he’d talk to me.”
Radakovich showed up at 8:15 the next morning, driving from Cincy. No one was there. Noll and his staff rarely showed up before nine. At nine on the dot, a secretary unlocked the door, and “within 15 minutes, the whole organization showed up,” Radakovich remembers. “By 9:30, Noll sat me down in front of a blackboard and asked me about the defensive line. I had never coached it before. So I talked for two minutes and that was it. He said, ‘That was it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but if you want to know about coverage, I can do that.’ He said, ‘Show me.’ So I was at the board for 20 minutes. Finally he told me that was enough. Then he turned to Charlie Summers, the secondary coach and said, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have a D-line coach that knows coverage?’ Charlie looked goofy because that didn’t make sense.”
At least not to Summers, but to Noll it was revolutionary. He was a contrarian. The trend in the NFL at the time was to build lines—on both offense and defense—that were as big and bulky as possible. But Noll wanted speed. The faster his defensive line was, the easier it would be to get around those lumbering blockers. The more disruptive it would be to the timing of the offense. And the less time his linebackers and defensive backs would have to spend in coverage. Finding Radakovich, who could emphasize the importance of coverage to his linemen and teach them how to move like linebackers, was a happy accident.
It helped that he had drafted the right talent. Greenwood had played sparingly his first two seasons, but Noll saw him consistently improving—the young lineman was learning to combine power off the edge and superior hand-to-hand combat skills with his 4.7 speed. When Joe Gordon, the Steelers PR man, was tinkering with the team’s media guide after the season, Noll told him to give a little extra room to Greenwood because he thought he’d be ready to make bigger contributions.
White, meanwhile, impressed from his first day in camp. Rookies always reported before veterans and were timed in the 40. White, running a 4.9, was just a step slower than Greenwood. And he played angrily and recklessly. Not desperate, like Green, but aggrieved, as though he’d been slighted. He’d grown up around junkies and drunks in Dallas. He was bright, but his teachers in school ignored him. “Some tried,” he once said. “But most just wanted to get away at four o’clock.” At home, as the oldest of three boys, his parents handed down the brunt of punishment and responsibility to him. He had gone to East Texas State and was, admittedly, bitter while he was there, constantly thinking how he could have ended up somewhere better if anyone had pushed him as a student. He was so frenetic when he played that coaches nicknamed him “Mad
Dog.” Years later, Joe Greene would say that the hardest hits he ever took during games were from White.
Through those first few days of camp, Radakovich couldn’t stop thinking about how dominant White was. But he was a rookie coach, evaluating a rookie player who was competing against other rookies. He didn’t trust his assessment. Until the veterans came in, that is. When he first studied his new team on film, Radakovich kept telling Noll how slow he thought the Steelers defensive ends were. “My teams at Penn State were faster,” he says. Once he saw them live, and saw White blowing past them, he became convinced his original assessment was right: The kid had to get on the field right away.
This was the kind of proactive coaching that Noll wanted. Radakovich wasn’t beholden to the veterans, didn’t care about the status quo. More important, he wasn’t afraid of talent, no matter how young or the potential for mistakes. “Some of the assistants thought I was messing with the best part of the team,” says Radakovich. “But Noll was for it right away. Moving Dwight and L.C. to first string was a no-brainer. It improved the defensive pursuit by ten steps every play by having them both start. They were skinny, but they could fly.”
Radakovich expanded their minds while expanding their games. He explained the nuances of coverage for the back seven defenders, which helped his young D-line understand the importance of getting to the passer quickly. Greenwood weighed in at 245 pounds. And Dwight White, the other defensive end, was 255. Noll wanted that speed to overwhelm the edges of the offensive line, while Greene collapsed the middle of it. So Radakovich trained them like he would a linebacker, teaching them how to move laterally and how to change direction. Stopping them in the close spaces of the offensive line was like trying to stop a drop of mercury. Slow-footed linemen looked bewildered trying to keep up with them.
The results on the field were immediate, with the Steelers starting 2-1 and allowing a little more than two touchdowns per game. Through the first 10 games in the season, the Steelers were 5-5. And while they’d finish 6-8, it was their best record in nine seasons and good enough for second place in their division.
More importantly, the Steelers defensive line forged an identity. Greenwood was as calm and cool as he was fast. Greene was the reluctant, brooding star. And White was a man whose mouth worked as hard as his body. He had so much to get off his chest, so much to prove. Mostly, they bonded over the fact they were young black men from the South who had been transplanted to the industrial North. They supported each other, pushed each other, protected each other, and taught each other. Greene and White would eventually share an apartment. “We all came from basically the same background,” White once said. “Living in the ghetto, where you had to work, had to get up and get it for yourself. We all happened to meet in the utopia of pro football, but a lot of the ways we think now are influenced by the way we were then. That’s why we all seem to think the same way.”
That year, a Pittsburgh radio station looking to capitalize on the Steelers exciting young defense held a contest to give it a nickname. Playing off the dreaded Iron Curtain, seventeen fans submitted “The Steel Curtain.” It stuck.
23
SLOWLY, METHODICALLY, NOLL WAS BUILDING THE TEAM—from players to staff—that he had envisioned when he was first hired in 1969. He had the defensive tackle, the defensive ends, the quarterback. But his strategy during his first three seasons had been as much about not losing as it had been about winning. He wanted mistake-free football and, as talented as Bradshaw was, he was still prone to the hubris-induced, confusion-caused interception. Noll needed a dynamic running back, someone who matched the speed and power of his defensive line.
As the 1972 draft neared, Noll eyed a running back from Houston named Robert Newhouse. An All-American, Newhouse finished his senior season with the second-most rushing yards in a season in NCAA history. He wasn’t big, but he was squat and ran low to the ground. He used his forty-four-inch thighs to churn through tacklers, earning him the nickname “The Human Bowling Ball.” One arm wasn’t enough to bring him down, and neither were two. It took an entire team. Noll looked at Newhouse and thought he was the antidote to the Steelers’ offensive ills.
But Art Rooney Jr. and Radakovich loved a Penn State running back. It had become a habit for the Steelers to think of Penn State as their own farm team. That was true for players like Jack Ham, who displayed such smarts and instincts that he earned a starting linebacker job as a rookie, and coaches like Bad Rad. Part of it was the respect the Rooneys had for Joe Paterno. And the other was that because the school was so close, and the players always so good, it was easy to scout them.
Of course, everyone in the country was high on a Penn State running back in 1972. Lydell Mitchell was a powerful, 5’11”, 200-pound runner who scored twenty-nine touchdowns his senior season—twenty-six of them on the ground—and gained more than 1,500 yards. He was an All-American who finished fifth in the Heisman voting. But that wasn’t the guy Rooney and Radakovich wanted. They wanted Mitchell’s blocker, Franco Harris.
All Penn State players were required to spend a week or two practicing on the opposite side of the ball every year during spring drills. During Harris’s sophomore year, Radakovich tutored Harris as a linebacker and marveled at his speed, at how fluid someone that size—Harris was 6’2”, 220—could be when he moved. That sophomore season he went on to earn honorable mention All-American status. That put him on NFL radars. But he was injured the following year, and his senior year, while Harris was a threat, Mitchell was Paterno’s primary weapon.
Harris had an open, inviting smile under a mustache he’d had since puberty, and the manner of a student who thought everything was trippy. Off the field he moved a beat slower. Surveying, appreciating, thinking. Words didn’t roll off his tongue, they gathered in his mouth and formed full sentences before passing his lips. He wondered why things were and contemplated the answers until he was satisfied, either with the answer or the fact there may not be one. He had the gait of a man who lived lightly and without judgment. During their senior years Penn State promoted Harris and Mitchell as Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, with the hook being that the bigger, brawnier Harris, who preferred running on the edges, was Mr. Outside.
It was the perfect campaign angle for a man so full of contradictions. He was half-black, half-Italian, the son of an Army vet who had married an Italian woman he met during World War II. Franco was so lax that he was considered lazy by his college coaches, but he was so determined that he spent much of his childhood working odd jobs around Fort Dix, New Jersey, where his father was stationed after the war. He rarely spoke, yet had bushels of friends who testified to his human decency. He grew up in a strict household where he feared punishments from his father. Yet had so much dignity that he refused to be belittled. During Harris’s senior year, Joe Paterno was screeching at players before a practice, trying to get them energized. Harris walked onto the field a few minutes late and Paterno lit into him in front of the entire team, telling him that the next time he jogged onto the field after practice started he’d be benched. The next day, as all his teammates emptied the locker room for practice, Harris just sat by his locker, in full uniform, and waited. And waited. Until he was sure practice had started. Then he casually walked out onto the field. Paterno benched him.
Because of that, NFL scouts didn’t know what to make of Harris. He was big, but didn’t play physical. He was fast, but spent a lot of time blocking for Mitchell. Around campus he had a reputation for being relaxed and welcoming, but to scouts, at least, he had a rep as a disciplinary problem because of his clashes with Paterno. As for Harris, he was only partially aware that he was even a prospect, let alone of his reputation. “No one worked me out and no one called me,” says Harris. “I never entered college thinking I was going to play pro football. It was not part of my plans. I wanted to get my education in hotel and food management and go to work and see the world.”
But Rooney and Radakovich were constantly in Noll’s ear. It was an interesting
time for Radakovich. After just one season with Noll, he had been offered the defensive coordinator job at the University of Colorado. He had decided to take it, but Noll insisted he stay at least through the draft, partly because he was one of the people pushing hardest for the Steelers to take Harris. Up until the minute it was time to make the choice, Noll was waffling. “He had so much pressure on him to take him, all the scouts and Art Rooney liked him so much,” says Radakovich. “When he finally did [take him], he picked up the phone and called Franco for the first time. They had a quick chat. Then he hung up the phone, looked at me and said, ‘Man, he sounds like a Dead Head.’ I answered back, ‘Yeah, he’s a nice shy kid, you’ll like him.’ Then I left town.”
Harris meanwhile, had singled out Pittsburgh as the one place in the NFL he was afraid to play. When he heard it was possible he might be drafted, by anyone, he considered writing the Steelers a letter asking them not to pick him because he didn’t want to play where fans threw snowballs at the players. His agent stopped him, afraid it would make his client with the rep for discipline problems seem like more of a head case. “I was probably the most surprised person there was when I went in the first round,” says Harris. “The first time I heard from any pro team was when I got that phone call from the Steelers.”
Maybe the only person more shocked was the man who picked him. Noll had no idea what he had.
24
WITH EMIL NARICK’S 1969 CHALLENGE BEHIND HIM, UNITED Steelworkers of America President I. W. Abel took on a new decade with a familiar stance, shoulder to shoulder with the big steel companies. Despite the substantial backing that Narick had received from Pittsburgh’s local union houses, and despite the continued grievances at individual mills—whether or not there was ample air circulation on the shop floor, getting better protective gear, making sure that a worker wasn’t passed over for a higher-paying job because of discrimination, or a grievance about overtime pay—Abel did not reach out to the rank and file. Their concerns were beneath him. He had his eye on the big picture. And there were serious problems ahead.
