The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  That Monday, represented by a lawyer paid for by the Rooneys, Holmes was released on $45,000 bail, also paid by the Rooneys, and admitted to a psych hospital in western Pennsylvania, again paid for by the Rooneys. He was supposed to be there for a month. He stayed for two. Art Rooney visited nearly every day. L. C. Greenwood took him on supervised trips around town. This was a kid who had quit on the team once, had to be coaxed to come back, and was a part-timer who showed only flashes of the kind of mental strength necessary to be a consistent starter. Yet he was treated as if he were Joe Greene. “We all thought,” says Art Rooney Jr., “he needed mercy.”

  That summer, after his stay in the hospital, Holmes went back to Ohio and pled guilty to assault with a deadly weapon. At sentencing, a psychiatrist testified that he suffered from acute paranoid psychosis. Holmes was given five years’ probation. That July he was back in training camp. And that September he was the Steelers starting defensive tackle.

  The success of 1972 turned Three Rivers into Pittsburgh’s biggest block party every Sunday. The first home game of 1973—against the Lions—was sold out, a streak that continues to this day. And with Holmes firmly entrenched alongside Greene, the Steelers played as well as they ever had. In the second game of the year, against the Browns, they won 33-6 in what Noll described after the season as his team’s most perfect game of the year. Holmes had three sacks, and after one of them, he just sat on Browns QB Mike Phipps, as if he had found the most perfect spot to lounge all afternoon.

  Even before the game, they showed the confidence and swagger of a team that knew how good it could be. That year, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle had issued rules forcing all NFL players to wear the same uniforms as their teammates, from the tape on their shoes to the stripes on their helmets. A lot of the players had come of age on college campuses in the late 1960s. They had been raised on rebellion and freedom of expression. Rozelle’s rules, while harmless, were stifling. At least L. C. Greenwood thought so. For that Browns game he protested by debuting a pair of gold cleats. “We all live to be different or our own selves,” he said. The Steelers were fined by the league, but Noll’s response when asked about the shoes by reporters after the game was typical of his it-doesn’t-bother-me-if-it-doesn’t-bother-the-team approach:

  “What shoes?” he asked.

  “The gold shoes,” he was told.

  “I don’t watch shoes,” he answered. “That’s Peter’s province. I’d feel bad if L.C. went out there barefoot.”

  They started that season 4-0, giving up just eleven points per game. After a loss in the fifth game of the season to the Bengals, the Steelers won four straight again, including a win at Oakland. They were 8-1 and had a three-game lead over Cincinnati in the AFC Central, with only five games to play.

  And it wasn’t just the front line that was dominating games. Noll had hired another longtime college coach, Bud Carson, to be his defensive coordinator in 1972. He installed a complicated zone defense called the Cover Two, which essentially forced the quarterback to solve a moving puzzle whenever he stepped to the line.

  The Steelers were the first NFL team to use the Cover Two, and it was a radical shift from the coverage schemes that most pro teams were using. Around the league, the preference was for man coverage, with cornerbacks tracking receivers down the sidelines or across the field. But the Cover Two was a zone, with corners funneling receivers toward the safeties, then protecting the short to middle portion of the field. That was their zone, while safeties covered the deeper area of the field. The system not only confused quarterbacks who could never be sure who would be covering receivers, it also created very small seams in which to throw passes between the two levels of defensive backs. “We first installed this with Bud in 1972, but by 1973, it was our base defense,” says safety Mike Wagner. “As a safety, you have to read as the QB drops back. The first thing you look for is a pass read, and if it’s a pass you look to the outside receiver and see which way he is releasing. Our corners would push for an inside release, but if it’s an outside release he would follow for a few steps and I would have to widen my base and get outside and sprint to a spot. But it worked because of our corners. They had to be able to jam the receiver, read the play, and then funnel the receivers all within seconds. And if it was a run, they had to support, because they were bigger than the safeties.”

  In much the same way Noll counteracted league trends by preferring smaller, quicker offensive linemen, he went after bigger physical corners, like Mel Blount, whom he drafted in the third round out of Southern University in 1970. He was just playing the rules in the book. And they allowed for cornerbacks to manhandle receivers, hitting and chucking them from the moment the ball was snapped, all the way across the field. Noll’s theory was, if a receiver can’t get loose from a corner, he can’t catch a ball. And the 6’3”, 205-pound Blount was the perfect corner for such a theory. He eliminated half the field for every offense.

  But no matter how great his defense was, no matter how many games in a row the team won, this season felt different than the previous one. The euphoria that came with winning that first division title had ceded to expectations—from fans and from players. And despite the wins, Noll saw constant mistakes, especially at quarterback. In a way he never did with Greene or the defense, Noll refused to cut his quarterback any slack. Every mistake by Bradshaw, every missed read or wrong call, resulted in an eruption. “Noll was more focused on what the offense was doing during games,” says Russell. “He wanted Terry to make the checks the way they had talked about during the week. If Terry didn’t audible what he told him to audible to, which was almost always a running play, he was angry. You got to follow the boss’s instructions.”

  “Joe Gordon had the best line: One of them wanted love; the other couldn’t love,” says Vito Stellino, who covered the Steelers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the 1970s. “Noll’s idea is that the game was the final exam—he spent all week teaching them, and the game is their job.”

  That 1973 season, despite all the wins, Noll played yo-yo with his quarterbacks. No one was good enough. Bradshaw had the skill but not the confidence or the discipline, and he was often injured. Hanratty had the confidence and the understanding of defenses, but not the skill. They were the same way off the field. Bradshaw was self-conscious and rarely hung out with his teammates. The more he was ridiculed and manipulated by Noll, the more he kept to himself. It got to the point where, if he told a joke in front of his teammates, he’d look Greene’s way to see if it had gone over. “After a game, Bradshaw would say exactly what you wanted him to say,” says Stellino. “And then another wave of reporters would come up and he’d tell them something entirely different if that’s what they wanted to hear. He had tremendous insecurity.”

  Hanratty, meanwhile, was the guy sitting at his locker every morning when his teammates came in, smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee, reading the paper, and making wisecracks. Mansfield used to call him Yosemite Sam because of his hook nose and mustache. He’d walk into the huddle during a game and be ready to wing it. He had nothing to lose. He was the local kid backing up the mercurial superstar. “I’d say, ‘I have no clue what to call. Check with me on two,’” Hanratty says. “I had thirty seconds to check out the defense and then I would see what was happening and I would call it.”

  Hanratty took over from Bradshaw in the middle of the Steelers’ second four-game win streak, a 20-13 win over the Bengals. He won his next two starts, but then he struggled—the Steelers lost to the Broncos in the tenth game of the season, and Hanratty was replaced for a game by Joe Gilliam, the third-string, second-year quarterback. When Gilliam lost his first start, the Steelers second straight loss, Noll had no choice but to go back to Bradshaw, who lost as well. The Steelers, who had been 8-1 with a three-game lead in the division and five games to play, were now 8-4 and tied with the Bengals.

  The next week, during a win over Houston, Joe Greene became so disgusted with his team’s lack of effort and intensity that he p
ulled himself from the game. While the Steelers made the playoffs that season as a Wild Card, finishing second in the division to the Bengals, they ended the year pitifully, with a 33-14 loss to the Raiders in the opening round. When asked to summarize his team, Greene told a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter, “We are a team in danger. We are in danger of living on potential, and no one can do that. You are powerless with potential.”

  28

  THE FIRST TIME THE UNITED STEEL WORKERS OF AMERICA’S new District 31 director, Edward Sadlowski, walked into the union’s glittering new headquarters, he found himself surrounded by suits. He later told a group of followers, “You go in there, and after a while you start relating to the mahogany more than you do to the guy out in the mill.”

  The union bought the brand-new, thirteen-story high rise on Pittsburgh’s Boulevard of the Allies in 1973, while thousands of western Pennsylvania steelworkers remained laid off. Five Gateway Center had diamond-shaped windows formed by crisscrossed beams, reminiscent of the U.S. Steel logo—the hypocycloid. With manicured walkways and a neat plaza funneling into a viaduct that took pedestrians into Pittsburgh’s Signature Point Park, the message that USWA President I. W. Abel wanted to send was clear: Steelworkers had arrived.

  The truth was as dusty and black as a Pittsburgh sunrise. The USWA was steeped in problems piled as high as its new tower.

  There were four major unions in the 1970s—the USWA, the Teamsters, the United Mine Workers, and the United Auto Workers. The latter three gave their members—the rank and file—the right to vote on national contracts. When the president of those unions banged out a deal with the trucking, mine, and auto-manufacturing companies, the deal wasn’t done until the members agreed to the terms of the contract. In exchange for the right to approve new agreements, the rank and file gave up the right to vote for their local reps. Those men—always men—were appointed by the union’s national leaders, who were elected by all the union members. Basically, the rank and file were citizens who had the right to vote for president of the United States, but who also allowed the president to appoint their congressmen. The leadership of the Teamsters, UMW, and UAW held on to their power by putting strong-arms in charge of the locals. Their primary role was to get the membership to rubber-stamp contracts and to make sure that the president was reelected for national office at massive convention gatherings. With that kind of power, these union bosses could walk into a negotiation with a sledgehammer in hand—a strike threat that would completely shut down an industry.

  That wasn’t the case for the United Steelworkers of America. The steelworkers did not have rank-and-file ratification power. Contracts were approved in an executive committee, made up of district leaders—who repped hundreds of locals in specific areas of the country—and a select number of USWA presidential appointments called staff reps. It was actually easier to consolidate power in this system. The USWA president only had to find allies in a handful of district presidents to push his agenda.

  With his weathered leather coat, blue khakis, and work shirt, thirty-five-year-old Ed Sadlowski came from Chicago to Pittsburgh in the spring of 1974 to turn over the desks and start a revolution. He was attending his first meeting as District 31 president, a position he earned the hard way. Only a year earlier, Sadlowski lost his district election to I. W. Abel’s man in Chicago, Sam Evett. But after Evett was exposed for giving kickbacks and payoffs to union members counting the ballots, the U.S. Justice Department forced the USWA to hold another election. In November 1973, with government agents at each union hall observing the counts, Sadlowski won by a 2-1 margin.

  Sadlowski thought I. W. Abel and his bureaucrats dressed in their Saks Fifth Avenue best were shafting the rank and file. To Sadlowski and his followers, Abel had gotten into bed with big steel and was complicit in men losing their jobs. The insurgents’ case got stronger after Abel worked with the steel companies on a film in 1973 called Where’s Joe? It was shown at every major steelworks. George Bogdanovich in The Nation magazine described the film best:“Where’s Joe? tries to frighten the American steelworker into thinking that ‘Joe’ lost his job because of competition from ‘Hans’ or ‘Oda,’ who, by outworking Joe, enabled German and Japanese companies to undersell their American competitors. ‘They got to be kidding,’ is the typical reaction of steelworkers, especially younger ones . . . It is hardly surprising that many young workers view the union bureaucrats as an extension of [steel company] management.”

  Like his Polish immigrant grandfather and father before him, Ed Sadlowski went straight into the mill when he came of age. An autodidact troubled by the working conditions at his South Chicago mill and with a family history of activism, Sadlowski became a force in his local union. He read up on the history of the American labor movement between shifts, and by twenty-one, he was elected shop steward. In 1964, at twenty-five, he was elected president of Local 65’s 10,000 membership. He ran for the job on a tried-and-true platform—the differences between the guys in the blast furnace and the guys with their feet up on the desk at the union hall. Put a guy from the shop floor in power and watch things change. Physically, he was imposing. At a linebacker-solid 240-plus pounds, with wavy black hair and a granite chin, he had a faraway look in his eyes that seemed to see a better landscape than the one in front of him. He wore the same clothes and drank in the same bars as the men he represented. Sadlowski looked like the kind of guy who could take a punch and keep on coming. He was Dick Butkus in work boots.

  In Which Side Are You On?, his memoir of organized labor, Thomas Geoghegan described Sadlowski’s appeal: “[He] could say the word ‘Boss’ with fifty-five different nuances of contempt, and use just the right one for each occasion. . . . Sadlowski was the younger son who reminded them [the older workers] of their own fathers. . . . Yet he wasn’t from the Stone Age. He was in Rolling Stone. He was sixties, and hip.”

  When Abel renegotiated the union’s last contract with the steel companies in 1971, he committed to pursuing a no-strike policy. He believed that hedge buying would end if steel consumers were confident that steelworkers wouldn’t strike. It would keep his men employed and, knowing there would be no strikes, would keep the companies that purchased steel from hedge buying in advance of a stoppage. No hedge buying meant more consistent production and, in theory, fewer layoffs.

  Having read everything about legendary union leaders, Sadlowski railed against the no-strike clause. If his heroes hadn’t had the power of the strike, there wouldn’t be a union. Now he had the backing of his more than 100,000-member-strong District 31. He thought that mattered.

  In Pittsburgh, though, Sadlowski’s Chicago connections meant nothing. His battle cry “Steelworkers Fight Back!” made no sense to the staff reps at Five Gateway Center, and he had no way to reach out to the men working along the Monongahela. “I went on the executive board in December of 1974. There’d be votes of 28 to 1. We’d break for lunch and there’d be seven or eight tables in the lunchroom. I’d sit alone. I was ostracized,” Sadlowski remembered.

  He needed an ally who could get his message to the men on the shop floor. Like La Cosa Nostra, steelworkers were insular and suspicious of outsiders. They wouldn’t give a guy the time of day without an introduction.

  Pittsburgh-based USWA staff rep Pat Coyne found a kindred spirit in Eddie Sadlowski. Disillusioned by the Abel administration’s deaf ear to the rank and file, he’d read the same labor history books as Sadlowski and thought the USWA was moving dramatically away from its roots. Born in 1929 and raised in Pittsburgh’s Brookline neighborhood—on the south side of the Monongahela—Coyne had the connections Sadlowski needed.

  At 6’3” and a hair under 300 pounds, Coyne could fill out a suit, but he wasn’t very good at keeping his hands in his pockets. He had side-stepped the mill himself as a football star at Pittsburgh’s Central Catholic High School and went to N.Y.U. on a scholarship. But when the university cancelled the football program, he was back in Pittsburgh for good.

  The first thi
ng he did was knock on a door twenty-eight steps above Oakland Avenue. The AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians) clubhouse was where Pittsburgh’s Irishmen went to make names for themselves. It was where favors and side deals were done. The only problem was getting through the door. The man who guarded it was Joey Diven, whom Sports Illustrated called “the greatest street fighter who ever lived.” To get into the AOH, you needed a card. If you didn’t have one, Diven wouldn’t let you in. Seas of Irishman walked the three flights to take Joey on. One night, the legend goes, a guy walked up and asked Joey to let him in because he’s Irish. Diven threw him down the stairs. The guy climbed back up again and said, “Really, I’m Irish.” Diven threw him down again. The third time the guy walked up, Diven looked at him again and said, “You’re right, you must be Irish.” He let him in.

  Pat Coyne and Joey Diven—who would one day bodyguard Art Rooney at Super Bowl IX in New Orleans—were cut from the same cloth. The Hibernians found work for Coyne at the Allegheny County Commissioners Office. He joined the Young Democrats of Pennsylvania and spent a lot of time with steelworkers at Joe Chiodo’s pub in Homestead and the hole in the wall bars along Carson Street. He knew a lot of them from the high school gridiron—Pittsburgh’s proving ground for future mill hunks. In 1962, when he was thirty-three, Coyne had never worked in a mill, but he still had the credibility and connections to walk into USWA President David McDonald’s office and say, “Hire me.”

  McDonald did. He made Coyne a staff rep, someone from the national office who worked with the rank and file at their local union halls. Coyne was just the kind of muscle McDonald used to keep the membership in line. But Coyne, the son of a cop and nephew of a Pittsburgh ward boss, was an empathetic brute. From his father and his uncle, he’d seen all sides of power, the kind that comes from strength, the kind that comes from influence, and he had ideas about how it should be used. Once inside the USWA’s “official family,” he knew enough not to like the way McDonald wielded his.