The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  While he was a great draw and was heavily recruited by colleges around the country, Dorsett was not the prince of the city. He led Hopewell to wins over Aliquippa in both his junior and senior years and talked as much trash as he got at the Franklin Avenue pool hall. Dorsett was gifted, better than everyone else on a football field, and his contemporaries hated him for it. He had a shot to make it like Namath had, while they were destined to walk the tunnel. The criticism and undermining that sidetracked his four older brothers came down with even more force on Anthony.

  After his senior year, in which he rushed for more than 1,200 yards in ten games with twenty-three touchdowns, Dorsett was courted by a number of major college football programs. But what stuck with him most were the recruiters and schools that criticized him. The Pittsburgh Steelers’ starting halfback in 1972 was Preston Pearson. He came to Hopewell one Saturday to scout Dorsett for his alma mater, the University of Illinois. He reported that Dorsett was too small to make it as a major college running back. Notre Dame’s report was even less flattering. “That Dorsett’s just a skinny little kid from Aliquippa. He’ll never make it as a major collegiate running back.”

  He packed it away with all of the things his brothers and neighbors had said to him. It forged his internal fear and insecurity into a potent cocktail. The more people he proved wrong and shut up, the better he would feel about himself. The very drive that made Dorsett a terror on the field alienated him from the rest of his teammates. Blocking was not for him. That was for the other guys. He just had to be himself—scan the field and dart—and the touchdowns and applause followed. His team could lose with him, but they couldn’t win without him. Dorsett stood out and took on all comers and with each win he went further and further inside himself. He looked for critics and fought anyone he could find because he needed to. It kept him from thinking about getting hurt.

  Dorsett expected to play for Joe Paterno at Penn State. The Nittany Lions were on their way to a 10-1 season and an invitation to the Sugar Bowl. Since Paterno had taken the reins at Penn State in 1966, the school had won 63 games and lost only 12. But when Dorsett visited State College, Paterno explained to him that he’d have to sit a year or play defense before being handed the ball. He was committed to his junior running back John Cappelletti, and there would be no room for him in the backfield until his sophomore year. Good-bye, Penn State.

  Between recruiting trips, the eighteen-year-old Dorsett learned that his senior year dalliance, a girl from West Virginia who frequently visited an Aliquippa Plan Eleven neighbor, was pregnant. With a baby due the following September and a dependence on his mother, Myrtle, the only person he felt had his best interests in mind, Dorsett knew he couldn’t move far away from Aliquippa. That left him one option. It turned out to be the perfect fit.

  By 1973, the University of Pittsburgh football program was one of the worst in the NCAA. After finishing 1-10 in 1972, there were rumors that the university’s president, Wesley Posvar, would recommend that the school drop out of the NCAA’s Division I and deemphasize football. They weren’t true. Instead, he recruited a head coach who had led a perennial doormat, Iowa State University, to back-to-back bowl games. The day after the 1972 Liberty Bowl, Johnny Majors flew to Pittsburgh and announced that he would accept the job as the Pitt Panthers’ head football coach.

  Majors brought with him a young assistant, Jackie Sherrill, who would help sign his first recruiting class. They desperately needed Anthony Dorsett. Sherrill spent so much time at Hopewell High School schmoozing anyone and everyone who might be able to influence his prize recruit that the principal asked him to fill in one day as a substitute teacher. The night before NCAA letters of intent could be signed, Sherrill was rumored to have slept in his car outside the Dorsett house. The next day, Dorsett signed.

  The freshman superstar arrived at preseason camp in August 1973 weighing 157 pounds. And he found immediate inspiration. “If this is the guy who’s going to lead us to the promised land, then we’re in trouble,” Dorsett overhead an upperclassman in a pack of offensive linemen mutter. He took the first ball from scrimmage eighty yards for a touchdown. Majors ran alongside him slapping his hat on his thigh and screaming, “We’ve got an offense!” He made him the starting tailback after two practices.

  At the beginning of his freshman season, Pitt’s sports information director, Dean Billik, sat Dorsett on a bench and told him that they were going to change his name. He’d be Tony instead of Anthony. They wanted to distinguish him from Anthony Davis, star running back for the University of Southern California. They’d build a campaign around him as T.D.—“Touchdown” Tony Dorsett. Not wanting to rock the boat, he agreed. But he was as quick to take insult as ever. He’d been told his entire life that he would not amount to anything. Anthony Dorsett finally meant something, and now he was told his name wasn’t good enough.

  Dorsett was overwhelmed by campus life. He made little effort to make friends because he didn’t really know how, even with guys on the team. On September 14, 1973, Anthony Dorsett Jr. was born to unwed mother Karen Casterlow in Weirton, West Virginia, while his namesake played his first college game. Tony Dorsett ran for 103 yards against the Georgia Bulldogs and Pitt tied the SEC power 10-10, shocking the city and the entire college football world. The media bore down on him.

  When word spread of Dorsett’s child and his decision not to marry his son’s mother, he alienated every steelworker who had ever knocked someone up but did the right thing and married his girl and then walked into the J&L hiring office. Western PA and working-class tradition always held that a man stepped up when he got a girl pregnant. You were no longer free to do as you pleased. But Dorsett didn’t see it that way. His best opportunity to support the mother and child was to achieve his professional goals—not marry a girl he wasn’t committed to and abandon his God-given gifts to take a job at the steel mill. He wasn’t going to ruin his life to please other people.

  The pressure mounted. “Even with my success on the football field, there were more than a few times during my freshman year when I was so down that I felt like dropping out of college. The limelight, the demands on me, being a part of everything and at the same time apart from everything—all of those things weighed heavily on me . . . I [have] to be around people that I know and trust.” He went back to Aliquippa, again and again, until his mother told him enough. “If you quit, son, you’ll break my heart.”

  Johnny Majors gained Dorsett’s trust and Jackie Sherrill made sure he would want for nothing, often arranging private parties on Mount Washington for Dorsett’s small cadre of friends. Tony lit up Notre Dame for 209 yards on 29 carries on his way to a 1,686-yard season, an NCAA freshman rushing record, and made consensus All-America. Pitt went to its first bowl game in eighteen years and finished the season 6-5-1. Majors was named NCAA Coach of the Year, but there was little doubt about who had turned the team around.

  The 1974 season would test Dorsett’s resolve. He was speared, eye-gouged, cheap-shotted, and harassed all year long, but he pushed through, played hurt, and racked up another thousand-yard season. His ego grew. Playing Army during his junior season, he caught a fifty-one-yard touchdown pass from Pitt quarterback Matt Cavanaugh, stopped at the goal line and held out the ball toward the Army defenders. He shook it at them as they approached, stepped over the line for the score and then tossed the ball at them. His showboating did not endear him to his hometown crowd. Pittsburghers loved to watch him play, but they had no use for his taunting. He’d become bigger than the team, and many resented the way he put himself in the spotlight.

  At the end of his junior year, he expected to win the Heisman Trophy. Instead, when Ohio State’s Archie Griffin was selected for a record second year in a row, Dorsett had no reservations about voicing his opinion. “I had outrushed him in total yards. And with all the other things I had accomplished, I was more deserving of the award than he was.” Dorsett had the audacity to break western PA football-player code and speak about his own accompli
shments above the team. Even Joe Namath spoke as part of a “we,” not an “I.” Dorsett gave no credence to the oft-repeated mantra of head coaches from peewee to pro: “There’s no ‘I’ in team.” If it were all team, why was he the lightning rod for media attention?

  Pitt had steadily improved from 6-5-1 to 7-4 and 8-4 in his first three years, and Johnny Majors let his star speak and do as he pleased.

  When asked about Archie Griffin’s career rushing record of 5,177 yards, Dorsett calmly predicted that he’d finish his college career with at least 6,000, an unheard-of milestone. He became the go-to guy for headlines. Dorsett also started taking every gratuity and freebie offered, even taking a page from Namath when he accepted a raccoon coat from a Pittsburgh furrier. “The media made a big deal out of it,” Dorsett said. “They thought it was too much for a college senior to be going around dressed in an expensive raccoon coat while the other guys on the team were wearing cloth or something. Hell, fur coat or not, I couldn’t hide anywhere. Besides, the coat kept me nice and warm.”

  Dorsett’s senior year was everything he had promised, and more. He’d adopted the habit of wearing tear-away jerseys—which were so effective that they were banned in 1979—so that opposing defenses couldn’t grab him in desperation and pull him down as he ran past them. He’d go through box after box, game after game, leaving the indelible image of a man who could not be taken down.

  The first game that season was against Notre Dame, which ABC had moved from the middle of the season. “As far as people tuning in to see Pitt versus Notre Dame, it was probably people tuning in to see Notre Dame play Tony,” said Matt Cavanaugh, who knew that Dorsett had a bull’s-eye on his back. He had ripped apart Notre Dame every one of his years at Pitt, rushing for an astronomical 303 yards the year before.

  But Dorsett delivered another masterpiece, 181 yards in a 31-10 rout at South Bend. The Pitt Panthers finished the regular season with a domination of Joe Paterno’s Nittany Lions, 24-7. Dorsett’s guarantee of 6,000-plus yards in his college career was icing on the cake. He finished with 6,082 and picked up the Heisman Trophy. On January 1, 1977, Pitt blew out Georgia in the Sugar Bowl 27-3 to win the national championship with a perfect 12-0 record.

  Tony Dorsett had backed up every claim he’d made.

  33

  THE STEELERS SPENT EVERY PRESEASON PRACTICING AT ST. Vincent’s College in Latrobe, an hour east of Pittsburgh. But it might as well have been a century away. Nestled in the rolling Laurel Highlands, the school’s steeple-topped buildings and campus full of Benedictine monks was far from the steel and dust the players were used to. It was the perfect place to bring a team together. Especially one being ripped apart. With the veterans picketing, rookies took every snap. They got one-on-one coaching and learned to play in the NFL at their own speed—first a walk and then a run. “We got an opportunity to show what we could do,” says former tight end Randy Grossman, who signed with the team as an undrafted rookie that year. “My reality check came before the veterans came in, against a defensive back from BU who was a rookie. We were running a drill and I ran a really good pattern and he is all over me and the lightbulb went off: What I did to be good was not good enough anymore.”

  Of course, some rooks were more ready than others. After he was drafted, Jack Lambert spent every Saturday until training camp driving from his home in Ohio to Pittsburgh—two and a half hours each way—for film sessions with his new coaches. And on the first day of camp, for Noll’s beloved Oklahoma drill, he put his tenacious but spindly middle linebacker against his undersized, pissed-off center, Mike Webster. “First set of plays, Bam! Lambert gets knocked on his ass,” Art Rooney once said. “They lined up again and Wham! Lambert goes down again.” Seconds later the two ended up in a fight. In fact, nearly every time Lambert lined up in the Oklahoma drill it ended with him winning or him fighting. “His attitude and his style, it was real,” says Russell. “He was legitimately a tough guy and the way he exploded was genuine.”

  Russell already knew about Lambert’s social skills. They had met at a Steelers off-season banquet, held after one of the days Lambert spent watching film. Russell, who worked as a banker during the off-season, arrived in a pinstriped suit. Lambert had blond hair hanging to his shoulders. After Russell introduced himself he remembered, “Lambert staring at me hard, without smiling, shaking my hand with a powerful grip, as though I was the rookie and he was the veteran.” It didn’t take long for the old-timers to learn this about Lambert once they abandoned the strike and reported to camp in mid-August. They were feeling frisky, having ended their strike after nearly six weeks without a resolution. Free agency would continue to be a battle they’d fight for years. But they still wanted penance from the rookies for the pickets they’d carried on their behalf and, in the grand tradition of training camp, one of them tried to make Lambert sing the Kent State fight song. His response was simply: “Kiss my ass—I’m not singing anything.”

  No one asked again.

  It helped that on this team, there was very little divide. It was as Noll had intended when he set up the locker room: The offense and the defense came together as one. They played poker together every Tuesday night, usually at Harris’s house. Frenchy Fuqua, the flamboyant running back who once wore platform shoes with goldfish in the heels, showed up. So did Greene, who started the game his rookie year. Gerry “Moon” Mullins, the offensive tackle, was usually there. Even Bradshaw, who kept to himself more and more, played a hand or two every once in a while. “It was a nice place for camaraderie,” says Greene. “We were all bad. Frenchy and Franco never folded. Frenchy bet into the blind without even seeing his cards. Moon Mullins was the most consistent player. Lynn Swann lost every week. He wanted to win, sure, but that wasn’t going to keep him from coming.”

  “Stallworth came every week, too, but he never played,” says Mullins. “He just showed up with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and drank the beer.”

  Drinking helped lubricate the bonding process. After games, Three Rivers locker-room attendants left a garbage can filled with beer and ice in the sauna next to the showers. Still dressed in their pants and socks, players popped open a beer, set the steam on high, and rehashed everything that had just happened. “That period of time was just our time, no coaches,” says Bleier. “And that helped pull the team together because you could bitch at one another.”

  But the beer bonding started during training camp, when veterans took the rookies out for chugging contests. The rooks had relay races, head-to-head, winner advances, loser sits. One year Bradshaw was cheering on Gilliam and Gilliam puked in Bradshaw’s face. Inevitably, the rookie winners, one from offense and one from defense, had to face the veteran champs, who were always Holmes and Ray Mansfield. That’s when the contest ended.

  Mansfield and Russell, the two holdovers from the pre-Chuck Noll era, set the social tone for those teams. They were a decade older than a lot of the young stars who were starting to dominate. But their m.o. wasn’t to haze, it was to adopt and teach. Mansfield earned the players’ respect because he was so tough, so old school. “He regarded training camp as a place to get in shape, not to come to already in shape,” says Wagner. “He had this willpower and big heart—you could see he was hurting, but he wasn’t going to let his body succumb to fatigue and stress.”

  Russell, meanwhile, was still making Pro Bowls after a decade in the league. Talent follows talent. And from the beginning, when players saw he had bought into Noll’s plans without complaint, they followed his lead. “He was the first guy I can recall during Chuck’s time that provided leadership,” says Greene. “He interpreted what Chuck said in meetings and would always come in after meetings and explain what he meant. He was also so good with the press—sometimes we would read his quotes in the paper to figure out what Chuck was saying.”

  In Noll, the players had a constant focal point of amusement, in the way employees rally around the ticks and mannerisms of the man who controls their fate. His axioms became their
axioms, what they repeated at the bars when they were blowing off steam. If a guy was constantly screwing up in games, they’d sit around and tell him, “It may be time for your life’s work,” a Noll favorite when he was cutting a player. A lack of physical play earned this rip, in a stoic voice, “You are not winning the battle of the hitting.” Poor performance in practice was followed later that night by, “You know what the problem is? The problem is execution—you are not executing.”

  But mostly, they laughed about his flailing attempts at motivation. Because while he could be so eloquent when explaining the details of the trap and parried so well with the press, he was utterly lost when trying to lift the team with his words. He always claimed he didn’t want players he had to inspire, but professionals who inspired themselves. That may have been a ruse. “He would start out telling a story about two squirrels,” says Bleier. “And he’d say, ‘Okay, there were two squirrels, one lived high in the tree in the branches, and one lived near the ground. And so you guys have to know to work together and play hard and do what we planned. Good practice.’ We’d look around and be like, what happened to the squirrels? But he never missed a beat, he didn’t stutter or stop or apologize. He just said, ‘You know what needs to be done.’ That was it.”

  Says Grossman: “He was the kid who would tell a joke and at the end have to say, ‘You get it, you get it?’”

  No one ever did. But they picked up on almost everything else Noll said.

  34

  THE CONTROVERSY BY THE END OF STEELERS CAMP IN 1974 wasn’t Lambert’s defiance toward the veterans. Or residue from the failed strike. What had everyone so surprised was that, even though the veterans had returned to camp a month before the season began, Joe Gilliam remained the Steelers’ starting quarterback. He had been perfect that preseason, literally, leading the Steelers to a 6-0 exhibition record. His passes were crisp and confident, his reads accurate. “Jefferson Street” Joe walked through camp as though he were taking a Sunday stroll, straight past Terry Bradshaw on the depth chart.