by Chad Millman
The first four Dorsett sons—Melvin, Ernie, Tyrone, and Keith—became street legends. Wild, fast, and fearless, the Dorsett boys held their own in Aliquippa’s pool halls and back alleys. One neighborhood kid from Plan Eleven’s Linmar Terrace had gone from a skinny, chicken-legged crybaby to a terror on Aliquippa’s high school field. With his brush cut, cuffed jeans, and white T-shirt, Mike Ditka Jr., the son of a union leader for the A&S Railroad, was carving a fresh path out of town. As a senior starting end for the Fighting Quips in 1957, Ditka had offers from twenty colleges to come play football for them. Recruited by an assistant coach, Joe Paterno, Ditka agreed to go to Penn State, until the University of Pittsburgh relentlessly lobbied him to switch. Agreeing to automatically admit Ditka to dental school after he graduated sealed the deal. He ended up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame instead.
The Dorsetts played football, too, but not at Ditka’s level. They masked their frustration with trash talk and left a legacy for their youngest brother that demanded a brio the young boy just didn’t have. Wes Dorsett spent his rare off-hours chasing his first sons with a switch, meting out traditional mill-town punishment. But like most Aliquippa sons, they took their licks and wrote them off as a fair price to pay for their ganging, drinking, and hustling ways.
Anthony cowered in fear of his father’s belt. He was a mama’s boy comfortable in the kitchen at the hem of his mother’s skirt and by her side at the Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church. His big eyes continually scanning his environment for dangers, his father coined him “Hawk.”
The Dorsetts weren’t easy to catch. They could flat-out run faster than any other boy or man in Aliquippa, Pittsburgh, or western Pennsylvania. Hopewell High School football coach Richard “Butch” Ross, an Aliquippa-born son of a steelworker who parlayed football into a college education and a teacher’s certificate, noticed. “The name Dorsett was synonymous with speed, with being a good athlete. There was a line of progression from Melvin, who was a track star, to Ernie, to Tyrone, to Keith. We kept our eyes on the line because we knew when we had a Dorsett, we had someone who could really run.” A small number of Plan Eleven kids were bused into coach Ross’s Hopewell School District (fifteen out of fifteen hundred students). Every Dorsett child made the short list.
Vince Lombardi once said, “Football is blocking and tackling. Everything else is mythology.” While it’s true that without the proper technique for blocking and tackling a team has little chance to succeed, the part of the game that decides an outcome can’t be taught. The difference between two teams is often speed. It is the most important attribute an athlete can have, and it’s as rare a quality as charisma. At every level of the game, the boys and men who carry the football have to be able to outrun the opposition.
For a while, the Dorsetts outran everyone and everything—their mother, their father, the street, school, the mill, and themselves. Ernie, ten years older than Anthony, used to pull him away from his mother’s hearth and get in his face before he hit elementary school. “Hey, man, you ain’t gonna be anything. Your brothers have got speed, why don’t you be like us?” Then Melvin would join in and push the boy around the living room, forcing him to fight back. The kids on the block had no use for Anthony, either—they’d call out for his younger sister Sheree to play pickup football, ignoring him.
While he grew ever more fearful on the street and at home, Anthony understood the necessity of playing football. He went out for the Midget Football League Termites and made the team based on his last name alone. But he played little, and to compensate, he would drag his pants in the mud to make it look like he’d played four quarters. His brothers drilled him for the play-by-play of the game as soon as he got home. During street touch football games he struggled. “You can’t even play the game. You’re going to be the sorriest Dorsett of them all,” his brother Ernie would say. Anthony steeled himself and committed to proving his worth in the only arena that mattered in Aliquippa, high school football. “I remember the first time I touched the football,” Dorsett recalled. “It was on a kickoff return. I was so afraid of getting hit that I just took off like a rabbit. I ended up running seventy-five yards for a touchdown. After that, it was a snowball effect. Things began falling into place for me.”
Anthony channeled his fear and found that his hawk eyes were invaluable as a running back. Later on he’d rely on this ability to see “flashes of color—sometimes it’s just this feeling for everything that’s happening around you, almost like an outside force.”
The terror of the steel mill did not escape the boy either. Wes Dorsett, like many uneducated fathers who went back and forth through the tunnel, warned his youngest son about life in the mill. “Do something better, son. At the mill you go in, but you never know if you’ll come out.” Anthony got a look at the place firsthand. “Once I was sent down to the mill to get the keys to Dad’s car. I was waiting at the gate when I saw this guy come walking toward me. He was filthy, covered with dust and a mask of grime, and it wasn’t until he was right before me that I recognized him—it was my own father.” Anthony would never step foot in the mill, refusing summer jobs throughout high school.
In January 1965, ten-year-old Anthony Dorsett, like every other kid in western Pennsylvania, heard about someone like him hitting the jack-pot. The pride of Beaver Falls (one of Aliquippa’s rival towns across the Ohio River) signed the biggest contract in the history of professional sports. Joe Namath, son of Babcock and Wilcox steelworker John Namath, agreed to a $400,000 deal with the American Football League’s New York Jets. In just five years, a kid who quarterbacked the WPIAL (Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League) Champion Beaver Falls Tigers and played on a national championship team at the University of Alabama had made it big. The game could not only keep you out of the mill, it could make you rich.
31
THE FRUSTRATION DUANE THOMAS FELT ABOUT HIS CONTRACT wasn’t an isolated incident. Throughout the league, as the NFL’s influence increased, as TV revenue grew and owners got richer, players vented. They wanted better pensions. They wanted to get paid a decent wage for a preseason game. “When I was a rookie in 1969 I made $54 after taxes for a preseason game,” says Hanratty. “I remember when Joe Greene got his check for a game he tore it up and threw it in the business manager’s face.”
But, mostly, they wanted unfettered free agency. And in the summer of 1974, they decided to strike. On the picket lines, they yelled, “No freedom, no football!”
But striking, in Pittsburgh, while playing football for the Steelers, was complicated. It was a union town, but one whose steelworkers were losing jobs every day. And those people, largely fans of the Steelers, didn’t empathize with the striking players. “They wanted to know why we weren’t being loyal and going to play a game,” says Rocky Bleier. “It wasn’t like we were working eight hours a day and spending forty years in the mill. That’s how fans felt—they didn’t equate sports with work.”
Bleier was a particularly favorite target of venting fans. After star-ring as a captain at Notre Dame, he was drafted by the Steelers in 1968. But compared to pro talent he was a slow, small running back who, from all appearances, had no reason to be in the NFL. Some people thought he had only made the team because he was charming and eloquent, or because the Chief had a soft spot for Catholic kids. But those feelings changed when Bleier was drafted to fight in Vietnam after the 1968 season and it was assumed his career was over. No one knew when, or if, he’d come back. “I liked pro football,” says Bleier. “I liked the status it gave me. I didn’t want to give that up.”
While on patrol with his unit in Vietnam he was caught in an ambush and shot in his left thigh. As he struggled to crawl away from the gunfight a grenade in his path went off. Shrapnel ripped through his right leg and foot. With both legs badly wounded and losing blood, and his unit pinned down, Bleier waited seven hours for the firefight to end and support to arrive. He says that his first thought while lying in his hospital bed was, “I want to
play pro football.”
Over the next several months Bleier struggled through several surgeries to repair his foot. But he was encouraged by constant postcards from the Chief, who would write, “We need you, Rock.” But when he rejoined the team for training camp in 1970, he was slower than he had ever been. Hanratty, his buddy from Notre Dame, encouraged him to try law school. Instead, Bleier went through every two-a-day, limping off the field at the end of every practice, keeping the pain to himself. His comeback try was valiant, but he had no business playing professional football, and Noll cut him at the end of training camp.
The next day, Dan Rooney called Bleier and gave him a gift: They were going to put him on injured reserve, pay him a salary and let him continue rehabbing so he could try again next year. “I had an internal drive mechanism,” says Bleier. “Everyone likes to be a hero and have someone look up to you. And I just didn’t want to be like everyone else who was working a regular job.”
Bleier had another operation to remove scar tissue from his foot and regain some flexibility. “Still, I tried to talk him into retiring,” says former Steelers trainer Ralph Berlin. “If you saw the back of his leg, it looked like someone had been working on it with an axe. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer. I used to go in at night and take his foot and massage and manipulate it to try to get more movement to it, and he wouldn’t quit. Some nights we would be doing it and it would bring tears to his eyes.”
Bleier tried everything to get back on the field. After visiting his family in Appleton, Wisconsin, he saw his father, who owned a bar, sitting in the lotus position in the living room. The yoga helped him relieve the pain in his hamstrings, which ached from the years he had spent standing on his feet and pouring pitchers. So Bleier started doing yoga. He progressed enough that, in 1971, Noll put him on the taxi squad. And in 1972 he made the roster, becoming a special-teams standout. “We had a stretching coach; they hired him in 1972,” Bleier says. “They had never had that before. I went to him and asked how to get faster. And we had a weight-lifting coach in the early seventies. I worked with him. I really worked out—in 1973 I came back and weighed 218 pounds and had eighteen-inch biceps.”
Occasionally, he used steroids. “I used it to get bigger, to make my muscles stronger so I could come back and play football,” Bleier says. “It helped me get my weight back and overcome my injury. From a professional standpoint it made sense. I was asked to perform at a high level and it helped me do it longer. Why wouldn’t I? If I can recuperate faster, that’s what you’re paying me to do.”
He wasn’t the only player on the team—or in pro football—who was using the performance-enhancing drugs. They had become popular in the early 1960s with the AFL’s Chargers, after Sid Gillman hired a strength coach named Alvin Roy. Roy had worked with the U.S. Olympic team and first learned about the steroid Dianabol from the Russians. He introduced them to the Chargers—“it showed up on our training table in cereal bowls,” one former player once told espn.com—and from there, word of the little pink pills spread throughout the game.
Jim Clack, a Steeler lineman during the early 1970s, admitted in About Three Bricks Shy of a Load that he used steroids to gain thirty pounds. “You knew guys were doing it. You heard them joking about it in the locker room,” says Hanratty. “But it was so new, no one knew what the hell they were doing or putting in their bodies. I wish we did. I’ve seen too many guys die from steroids. Jim Clack died of a heart condition. But the obit doesn’t say it was caused by steroids.”
Even if the players knew what kind of damage steroids caused, they were athletes, in their prime, trying to be the best in the world. The future wasn’t a consideration. “No one on our team ever asked me if I wanted any,” says Russell. “And I’m glad. Because I can’t say I wouldn’t have tried if they did.”
By 1973, Bleier, recovered and a full-fledged member of the team, had become a national hero, someone whose life story Hollywood producers wanted to—and eventually did—make movies out of.
But in the summer of 1974, as far as the fans were concerned, he was just an ingrate. As one of the Steelers player reps, he was the face of the strike. And Steelers backers took their frustration out on him. As much as any other player, it was his name they muttered when they vented about how disloyal the players were being. It left him conflicted, and concerned for his job. “I remember I came back from the picket line one night and there was a message that Mr. Rooney called,” says Bleier. “It said he was going to call me back. I’m nervous, convinced I’m going to get cut. So he calls back, at eleven that night, and he said, ‘Rocky, I called earlier because I was driving around and listening to a radio show and people were complaining about players and their loyalty and especially that Bleier kid and it bothered me. I called to let you know that what I did for you I would have done for any of my boys. If you believe in the strike, you be back in that picket line and we’ll get this thing cleared up. I didn’t want you to worry about what people are saying.’
“How can you not like that guy? It just made me want to play for him even more.”
The Rooneys did their best to straddle the line between being the owners of an increasingly valuable NFL franchise and the proprietors of a family-run business. Dan negotiated with Bleier and the other player rep, Preston Pearson, to let Ernie Holmes cross the picket line so he could keep his routine and avoid any trouble. One afternoon, while Jack Ham and Gerry Mullins were picketing on a dusty road near training camp, across from a local cemetery, the Chief rode up to say hello. “Don’t you boys worry about this,” he told them. “We’ll get it settled.” Then he left them a six-pack of beer. Remembers Mullins, “The next day’s story in the paper read ‘The players striked until the beer was gone, then they got into their Porsches and drove home’.”
Against the advice of his fellow owners, Dan Rooney stood before the picketers that August, with Bleier by his side, and told them there would be no hard feelings once all this had been worked out. Their approach compelled players to confide in the Rooneys. After Dan addressed the team, Joe Gilliam, the third-year quarterback, pulled the owner aside and told him, “Mr. Rooney, I have to cross. It’s my only shot to make this team.”
In another time, in another era—when black quarterbacks like Gilliam didn’t have to purposely run slow 40s so they weren’t switched to defensive back—Gilliam might have been leading the strike, not trying to break it. He had a slingshot arm and a release so fast that, when Steelers scouts examined it in slow motion on film compared to Bradshaw’s and Hanratty’s, his hand was the only one that remained blurry. He was 6’2” but barely weighed 190 pounds. Unlike Bradshaw, who seemed to crave contact, the lanky Gilliam used his build to glide through tacklers. While winning two black college national championships at Tennessee State, he picked up the nickname “Jefferson Street” Joe. Jefferson Street was the main drag running through State’s campus in the black part of Nashville. And to Tennessee State fans, Gilliam was every bit as talented and charismatic as the “Broadway” Joe who guaranteed titles.
But it was hard to prove that with the Steelers as the third quarterback on the depth chart, unless there was no one else to throw the ball in practice. So Gilliam crossed the picket line, and immediately supplanted the striking Bradshaw as the Steelers starter.
32
BY THE TIME ANTHONY DORSETT REACHED HIGH SCHOOL IN 1969, Namath was the coolest guy in the world leading a rebel football league’s team to play another homegrown hero—Johnny Unitas—in Super Bowl III. The future and past of professional football, forged in western Pennsylvania, was on national display.
And then a congenital defect agitated by the wild life brought down Anthony’s oldest brother, Melvin. The little brother who had dedicated himself to living up to his older brother’s taunts watched him collapse and die of a heart attack in the family home. “When Melvin died, I almost lost it,” Dorsett once said. “I couldn’t stay in the house, and I had to move in with my sister for a time. I was always a scared
kind of kid, afraid of the dark, afraid of dead people. I always slept with a light on. And Melvin’s death was something else. I remember that time to this day, how I’d sit on the swings out in the playground, swinging, swinging, thinking for long periods at a stretch.”
Dorsett grew more insular, failing to find solace at home, at church, or in the community. Aliquippa is not a place for sensitive and fragile young men. Dorsett learned to channel his vulnerability, fear, and isolation into the only acceptable emotional currency available to men around Franklin Avenue—anger.
His speed took on an entirely new dimension. Five foot eleven and 130 pounds, he was incapable of physically hurting anyone on the field. So Dorsett developed a remarkable ability to humiliate the opposition with cuts, jukes, and misdirection, all turned on a dime with dazzling quickness and grace. When he hit the open field, no one could catch him. He’d shake the ball behind him, taunting those trailing. While the beauty of his performances on the field masked his inner turmoil, his anger could not be suppressed off the field. He got into numerous fights at school and on the street. By the end of his junior year at Hopewell High School, his reputation as a Dorsett had come full circle. “I overheard some teachers talking about me: ‘That kid will turn out to be just like his brothers. The wildness is there now, and the wine will be there later. He’s got lots of athletic talent like his brothers, and he’ll wind up just like them—nowhere,’” Dorsett remembered.
