The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  P.S. Franco’s from Hoboken.

  Of course, Harris wasn’t from Hoboken. But Sinatra hustled up front to Cope’s table, and being the bettor he was, asked how Bradshaw’s dislocated finger was doing. Then he agreed to show up at practice the next day, share some wine with Franco, and accept induction into the Italian Army.

  Cope called Stagno and Vento, who booked first-class flights to Palm Springs. It was the first time Stagno had ever been on a plane. They had an Italian Army helmet made that read “Sinatra” on the back. On the sidelines at practice they had a table set up with wine and cheese and Italian flags waving in the soft California breeze. Film crews were ready to shoot. The only thing missing was Sinatra. Ten minutes went by. Thirty minutes went by. Finally, after an hour, Cope said out loud, “I guess he’s not gonna show.”

  Then, everything got quiet. Cope turned around and found himself face-to-face with Frank. “When Sinatra says he’ll show,” Sinatra said, “he shows.”

  Stagno and Vento handed him the helmet. They shook his hand and kissed him on both cheeks. They all shared wine and cheese and called each other “compad.” Then Cope realized that Harris was missing out, since it was all happening in the middle of practice. So he ran onto the field and yelled, “Franco, the man is here.” Practice stopped. All eyes turned to Noll. And then to Cope, who was frozen, realizing what he had just done. And then they turned back to Noll who said simply, “Franco, get over there.” On the sideline, in the middle of practice, Harris and Sinatra each raised a glass of red wine and toasted to Franco’s Italian Army.

  On his way back to the airport Stagno called his wife. When she asked him how it all went with Sinatra he told her, “It was like kissing God.”

  The next week, back at Three Rivers, the Steelers prepared to host the Raiders in the opening round of the playoffs, Pittsburgh’s first-ever postseason game. The Italian Army joked they were going to kidnap John Madden, the Raiders animated coach. And, in fact, a pep rally a few blocks away at the Hilton became so frenzied that fans marched down to the Raiders hotel, where they saw Madden relaxing in the lobby. Several hundred fans started pounding on the hotel’s plate-glass window, someone threw a bottle that crashed into a second-floor window and then a Pittsburgh police officer, called in for crowd control, fell and was stepped on. Before the night was over, paddy wagons had been called in and people were being hauled off to jail, including two Raiders reserves who had been caught in the melee on their way back to the hotel from the movies.

  Watching it all through the lobby window was Madden, thirty-five, and still built like the burly offensive tackle he had been in college. He had been hired three years earlier by Raiders owner Al Davis, and he’d led Oakland to a 12-1-1 record that first year and had been named the AFL’s best coach.

  Earlier that season, in the first game of the year, the Steelers and Raiders played at Three Rivers. It was a game the Raiders, who had finished 8-4 the year before, expected to win handily, but instead they were beaten 34-28. It was an especially bitter loss for Davis, who had coached with Noll on Sid Gillman’s Chargers’ staff. No one in the league had a reputation for being as angry and competitive and belligerent as Davis. He took traffic personally. And he especially hated old-guard NFL families like the Rooneys.

  Davis was an original AFL guy. After working for Gillman, he became the head coach and GM of the Raiders. And he was at the heart of the upstart league’s attempts to break the NFL by pushing his colleagues to bid up salaries for the biggest college stars. Of course, Davis had always been full of ideas. Once, as an assistant coach at the Citadel, he was recruiting a linebacker from Brooklyn. Davis took the kid to one of the nicest restaurants in the borough, where the tables were set with fine silverware and real tablecloths. In the middle of dinner he got so excited describing a defensive scheme that he started drawing on the tablecloth. Then he jumped out of his seat and got into a three-point stance, right in the middle of the restaurant.

  He was just as committed to the AFL’s success as to the NFL’s failure. In 1966 the league’s owners, who were negotiating with the NFL to merge, knew how passionate Davis was, how he didn’t compromise, how he didn’t just want to win, but to humiliate opponents. So, in a Machiavellian move, his fellow AFL owners named him league commissioner, which forced him to give up his job with the Raiders. He was at the pinnacle of football, leading a league that had stolen Joe Namath from the NFL, had high-flying offenses, and money to burn. “He wanted nothing to do with the NFL,” Dan Rooney wrote in his autobiography.

  But the rest of the AFL owners felt differently. While letting Davis take a hard-line stance publicly as the league commissioner, Hunt and Schramm were having their back-room talks to finalize a merger deal. Davis had been a patsy, someone to help them look strong. Three months after Davis took over, in June 1966, the two leagues announced the merger. “No doubt Davis felt betrayed,” wrote Rooney in his autobiography. “Not only by the merger itself but by the way he had been deliberately cut out of the negotiations.”

  When the Raiders landed in Pittsburgh for that opening-round playoff game, not only was Davis, who returned to the Raiders as part owner in 1966, still fuming from that season-opening loss, he carried the baggage of the merger with him as well. “Davis still played by the old rules,” Rooney wrote. “Treating NFL teams like the enemy.”

  This game played out like a front-line battle—a few yards on either side of the line constituted victory. At the end of the first half, the score was tied at zero. In the third quarter, the only points scored had come from a Roy Gerela field goal. Gerela added another in the fourth, giving Pittsburgh a 6-0 lead late in the game. Desperate, Madden pulled his starting QB, Daryle Lamonica, replacing him with a rookie southpaw, Kenny Stabler.

  In the stands, the raucous crowd tried to rattle Stabler. Vento and Stagno and the rest of Franco’s Italian Army waved hollowed-out red peppers at the Raiders and put the malocchio curse—the evil eye—on Oakland. It didn’t work. Three times on the drive, Stabler and the Raiders faced third down. All three times they converted. Finally, with less than two minutes left, Stabler, nicknamed “The Snake,” slithered his way for a thirty-yard touchdown run. After trailing the entire game, the Raiders had gone ahead with 1:13 remaining. “Yeah,” Noll said after the game. “It wasn’t a fun time.”

  He wasn’t the only one thinking it was over. Art Rooney had already left his seats in the owner’s box to make his way down to the locker room, where he’d be waiting to shake every Steelers hand and thank them. At this point in the game, Bradshaw had completed just 10 of 24 passes for 115 yards. “I wouldn’t have wagered my momma’s tooth on our chances,” Bradshaw wrote in It’s Only a Game. Noll sent in a play, 66 Circle Option, which was a pass over the middle to a rookie receiver named Barry Pearson. “Oh no,” Harris muttered in the huddle. “Not that play.” It was a rare moment of exasperation from the rookie, whose assignment was to stay in and block. The plan was to get enough yardage for a Gerela field goal attempt. “I was next to our safety, Glen Edwards, and I was thinking it was over,” Russell says. “Right before the play Glen was giving our offense a hard time. We had played pretty well that game and we were about to lose and I said to him, ‘Hey, be positive, something good can happen.’ It was just standard thinking. I didn’t believe it.”

  Vento and Stagno did. Just as they waved peppers at the Raiders, they pointed a tiny man carved from ivory, a good luck charm, at the Steelers goal line. “The crazy thing,” Stagno once told NFL Films, “is that it really worked.”

  The Raiders read the play and jammed Pearson at the line. With his primary receiver nowhere to be found, Bradshaw scrambled in the pocket. He ducked a Raider and sprinted right. As Bradshaw broke from the line, Harris’s blocking assignments roamed away from him, so he released from the backfield and put himself in position to be a safety valve for his quarterback. But Bradshaw, pursued by five Raiders who were diving for his ankles, never saw him.

  Meanwhile, Stagno dropped his
good luck charm. As Vento scrambled on the cement between the steps to find it, Bradshaw rifled a pass downfield to the Raiders 35 in the direction of running back John “Frenchy” Fuqua, who, for an instant, had come free on the broken play. At that moment, the ball, Fuqua, and Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum all collided.

  Just then, Vento jumped up, holding his tiny ivory man to the sky.

  Bradshaw’s pass ricocheted off Tatum and Fuqua and hurtled toward midfield. “I saw it deflected and I dropped my head,” says Russell. “I thought we lost.”

  But Harris, with no one to block, had been trailing on the play. As the ball sailed toward the ground at the forty-two-yard line, he scooped it up by the nose as it passed his shins. He seemed to be the only one moving. The Steelers watching on the sidelines believed the game had been lost. The Raiders on the field saw the deflection and were sure they had won. Only Harris kept the play alive, galloping down the sidelines, as if he were running out a play in practice.

  There were five seconds left in the game. The Steelers were ahead 13-7, and about to win their first postseason game in thirty-nine years of existence. And the man who started it all, Art Rooney, was alone in the locker room. He’d missed what would one day be voted by NFL Films as the greatest play in league history.

  Forty-five minutes after the game, as the team celebrated in the locker room, Harris got a note from one of the locker-room attendants. It was a telegram that read: “THE FOLLOWING IS AN ORDER: ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK. COLONEL FRANCIS SINATRA (OF FRANCO HARRIS’ ITALIAN ARMY).”

  Later that night, a local reporter called Harris’s mom, who had been watching the game. She wasn’t a football fan, and barely understood the game. But she knew how important this day was to her son. “She told me and everyone who would listen that something special was going to happen,” Harris says. Before the game, she lit candles with pictures of the Virgin Mary on the holders and placed them around her living room. When the reporter called, she told him divine intervention saved that ball from touching the ground.

  She wasn’t the only one who believed.

  That night on TV, while doing the local sports broadcast, Cope said he got a call from a fan who told him a friend had named the play. Then Cope said the words on the air. “It was,” he said, “the Immaculate Reception.”

  THIRD QUARTER

  1973-1974

  27

  TWO DAYS BEFORE ST. PATRICK’S DAY IN MARCH 1973, DAN Rooney was sitting in his office. It was after five. Most of the people on the Steelers’ staff had gone home. For the past few months the entire franchise had been reveling in the glory of the Immaculate Reception. The fact that the Steelers lost to the Dolphins in the AFC title game the next week—everyone lost to the Dolphins in their undefeated 1972 season—hadn’t taken away the hope that everyone had for the future.

  Then Rooney’s phone rang. It was his private line. When he picked it up he heard his wife. She sounded anxious, concerned. “Ernie Holmes just called me,” she told him. “He’s in trouble. You better call him right away.”

  Holmes, a defensive tackle, was the final piece in the Steel Curtain defensive line. While he had been drafted out of Texas Southern in 1971, the same year as White, he wasn’t as polished a player. His playing weight in college was close to three hundred pounds. He worked furiously to get down to 265 before his first training camp, as the Steelers had asked, but when he did, he lacked the strength that had made him so dominant. The Steelers cut him and offered him a job on the taxi squad for $1,000 a month, where he could wait and hope someone got hurt. Holmes refused. “I could make more back home on the docks,” he said, insulted.

  Holmes was country strong—his nickname had been “Fats” from the time he was a boy—and built like a powder keg. He had the same temperament. When he first arrived at a reception for Steelers rookies in 1971, he kept eyeing White from across the room, staring at him but never talking to him. When they eventually came face-to-face, White stuck out his hand, but the stockier, broader Holmes just looked at him and said, “Yeah, fat boy, you know you’re going to have to leave here. There’s not room for more than one of us here.”

  Holmes needed to make the Steelers. He had grown up on his family’s forty-five-acre farm in Jamestown, Texas, halfway between Dallas and the Louisiana border. But while at Texas Southern, in Houston, he had married his girlfriend. And they had two kids before he graduated. While he struggled in Pittsburgh, his family was waiting in Houston for his checks. The distance, and the stress he felt financially, was straining his relationship with his wife.

  When Holmes refused the taxi-squad assignment and moved back home to Texas, Holmes’s father sat his son down and asked him, “What the hell are you doing?” But Holmes couldn’t be moved. He was despondent and disappointed, convinced that conspiracies had kept him off the team, and frustrated that he wasn’t being recognized right away. Finally his dad called Art Rooney Jr. and asked him to talk to his son. “He was kind of a poor soul,” remembers Art. “He and Bradshaw were the same way. They could be cheerful, but there was always something sad about them. You felt sorry for them.”

  The Steelers brought Holmes back and hid him on their practice squad, which was already full, asking him not to dress for the team picture so they didn’t get fined for carrying too many players. And that off-season he rededicated himself to training. He knew he’d never be svelte, but he wanted to at least have the stamina to match his strength. He ate one meal a day, drank water, took vitamins, and ran for his life, sometimes as many as ten miles a day in three separate sessions around Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill section. By the time he reported to camp in the summer of 1972, he weighed 260 pounds but was as strong as ever. Holmes had decided that the only time he’d leave Pittsburgh again was if “they dragged me off the field.”

  He went all out on every play, in practice and in games, blindly attacking—every snap he didn’t win was a threat to his livelihood. But the ferocity with which he played came from a deeper well than where most players find personal motivation. Something seethed inside him. “I don’t know what my life is,” he once told Time magazine, “except there’s something pounding in the back of my head.” Occasionally he’d stop by Dan Rooney’s office to talk, worried that people were out to get him. During practices veteran Steelers offensive linemen had to ask him to slow down so they didn’t get hurt. Holmes played low, and used his helmet like a ram’s horns, butting opponents under the chin to knock them off balance and, literally, make their head spin. “He had a look that was really scary,” says former Steelers safety Mike Wagner. “I think he wanted to beat people to death—within the rules of the game.”

  But this is how he lived, all the time, at the extreme edges. “He and I were pretty tight,” says Terry Hanratty. “We used to play poker on the road, and it was up to the guy hosting the party to look up in the yellow pages the barbecue rib joint and bring it in. You would have thought you had walked into a shoe store because there were so many boxes of ribs: 20 rows, six boxes high, cards covered in sauce. Ernie would eat ten boxes, go to the bathroom, throw up, and then repeat that three or four times.”

  Once, at a party in a restaurant hosted by defensive line coach George Perles, the Steelers entered a back room to find a gluttonous spread: A full roasted pig, piles of pasta, roast beef. They attacked the food at first, pouring it down their throats, before they finally slowed down, everyone settling into chairs with full bellies and heavy breaths. Hanratty walked in at that moment. “And there is Ernie Holmes almost contented,” Hanratty says. “Then he looks at the pig’s head, throws it down, cracks it, and starts eating the brains.”

  Holmes had split time at defensive tackle in 1972 with Ben McGee. But McGee retired after that season, and Holmes got the job. He had the stability and recognition he craved, which he fought for on every play. Players and coaches hoped it would help mellow him off the field.

  But in March 1973 Holmes was in Texas when he and his wife separated. He worried he’d never s
ee his kids again. He was overextended financially—“I was the successful one in my family and helped people out,” he told a reporter back then—and knew he was facing an expensive divorce. He needed money, and he’d asked Rooney to help him. Without promising anything, Rooney told him to come see him in Pittsburgh, that he’d help him work it out.

  That night, Holmes jumped into his car and raced through the night and the next day to Pittsburgh, without sleeping. He arrived after the Steelers offices had closed, so he kept driving, onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike until it became the Ohio Turnpike. He was distraught and tired and battling demons in his head, real and imagined. At the scene of an accident he stopped and told a police officer that trucks were trying to cut him off. But the cop ignored him. Back in his car, Holmes grew more paranoid as traffic built up around him, blocking his car. He pressed on the brake, he pressed on the gas, lurching forward ever so slightly.

  The trucks were after him. He pulled a shotgun from the floor, blew out his window, and started shooting at the tires of passing trucks. The state police were on his tail now, chasing him at ninety miles an hour. He veered off the main road, blew out a tire, and jumped out of his car, running into a nearby forest. He carried his shotgun with him.

  A police helicopter swirled overhead and Holmes, surrounded by state police, began shooting at it, hitting an officer in the ankle. Moments later, surrounded and exhausted, he was finally in cuffs. Said one officer afterward: “We could have killed him a dozen times.”

  That night in jail, Holmes called Dan Rooney. “We’ll do everything we can for you,” Rooney told him. “Try not to worry.” It was a Saturday. Holmes would be in jail for the weekend, until a judge could hear his case and consider bail.