The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  But it still wasn’t over. The Raiders had magically beaten the Dolphins in the final seconds the week before, and with a little more than a minute left and down 17-13, Stabler had the ball again. Before the first play of the drive he stood in the huddle and surveyed the field for a moment. He made eye contact with Russell, who was manning his linebacker position, and for a moment, they held each other’s gaze. Then Stabler winked. He expected to break Russell’s heart.

  But it didn’t happen. Three plays later Stabler was intercepted again. Harris scored a game-clinching touchdown as the Steelers won, 24-13, picking off Stabler three times and holding the Raiders to just twenty-nine yards on the ground. For the first time, the Steelers were headed to the Super Bowl, to face the Minnesota Vikings. “Our Super Bowl dynasty was born that day against Oakland,” says Harris, who had 111 yards that day.

  “You hear people brag about being in the zone,” Greene told NFL Films. “They don’t know what the hell the zone is all about. ’Cause you visit the zone probably once in your life. I don’t want to trivialize it. Because I played thirteen years and I was in the zone one time. That day our team was in the zone.”

  Here’s what Chuck Noll remembered from his experience with the Colts in Super Bowl III: His team lost to Joe Namath’s Jets because the players were tight. The Colts were huge favorites, the biggest of the three Super Bowls up to that point, and when the game began he could see agony on their faces. Namath had been lounging by the pool, sipping drinks and guaranteeing wins, while his guys were too worried about losing to win the game.

  He wouldn’t make that mistake with the Steelers. So with Bourbon Street beckoning his rowdy group, he told them to go have fun. There’d be no curfew, no bed check. He made the Super Bowl week no different than a week of practice in Pittsburgh. The players had Monday and Tuesday off and wives were allowed to stay in their hotel rooms. “I think he learned that you can’t make the game bigger than life,” Ham says.

  For vets like Mansfield and Russell, being let loose on New Orleans to play in the Super Bowl, after so many years of struggle, was like being freed from prison. Bourbon Street was the ultimate playground, and they tried every slide on the lot, bringing anyone who would come along. Mike Wagner learned to eat oysters and shoot them down with beers. At one point Russell wound up on top of Mansfield’s rental car as though he were King Kong. That was the last they saw of the car that night. “We just drank way too much and had no idea where it was,” Russell says. “We had to go back the next morning and look all over downtown New Orleans to find it. I’ll tell you, by the time we started practicing on Wednesday, we were begging for a bed check.”

  That week, Russell and Mansfield had become media darlings. In the light of day they were the most eloquent, personable, happy representatives of the Steelers; the go-to quotes for every scribe covering the game. “Andy and Ray had such great personalities and [a great] understanding of [how to deal] with the press,” says Greene. “That week they kind of showed the young team how to handle all this, and then I think I picked up on that, and so did Bradshaw, and Franco, and Lynn.”

  Others found different ways to distinguish themselves. Ernie Holmes carved his Afro into the shape of an arrow, pointed toward his forehead. “I’m an individual who has a dream,” he said at the time. “A dream to go forward.”

  Noll just let his team be. Even with 11:00 P.M. curfews, players were roaming the hallways of the hotel with a couple of drinks in their hand. The night before the game, Greene and Holmes and friends were sipping bourbon and cokes and drinking beer and dancing.

  The only player who seemed to suffer in New Orleans was Dwight White. Soon after landing in New Orleans he collapsed in pain in the lobby of the team hotel. Greene carried him into a cab and took him to a hospital, where White was diagnosed with viral pneumonia. For three days he lay in a hospital bed, shedding pounds. He tried attending a Thursday practice, lasted fifteen minutes and had to be readmitted. Come Saturday night, he had lost twenty pounds and could barely stand.

  The doctors told Noll there was no way he would be ready to play.

  When the players woke up on the morning of the game, it was pouring. The normally balmy New Orleans weather had turned chilly, with the temperature in the mid-40s. And in the Steelers locker room, it looked like a ticket-broker’s convention.

  Every player was allotted four Super Bowl tickets, plus the option to buy twenty more at $25 a ticket. Before they left for New Orleans, the players had been approached by Pittsburgh travel agents who were willing to buy tickets for $150 so they could use them in Super Bowl packages for customers. Some of the players took the easy deal right away. Others had bigger plans. And when they got to their hotel and the brokers came up to them with briefcases filled with cash, they got even greedier. For most of them, the bonus for winning the Super Bowl would be equal to or more than their salaries. A chance to earn a little extra dough couldn’t be passed up.

  “I concocted a plan with Bradshaw to get another twenty-five tickets,” says Moon Mullins. “But when we got them, they weren’t fifty-yard-line seats. So we couldn’t unload them. Before the game I got to the locker room at like 10:00 A.M. and our equipment man had young kids working with him. So I sent a kid out to get face value for them. That was like $30 or $40. But because the weather was so bad he couldn’t even get that, so I ended up eating eight or ten tickets.”

  “Swann thought he could get $300 if he waited until the game,” says Hanratty. “But by then it was 45 degrees and they were selling tickets outside the stadium for five bucks. I go into the locker room and ask him if he has his tickets and he pulls out twenty of them that he’s got to eat. I asked him if he needed salt.”

  All the players dealt with the circumstances surrounding the day differently. Some of them were so relaxed they fell asleep at the foot of their lockers. Bradshaw was so nervous he hyperventilated, had sweaty palms, and a bout of diarrhea. At one point he was so anxious that he lit up a cigar to calm himself down. But Noll never wavered.

  “He made a speech before each game,” says the former trainer Ralph Berlin. “And basically it was the same speech about doing your job and letting your teammates do their jobs. When we went to the Super Bowl the first time I thought, boy, I can’t wait to hear this talk. And he gave the same speech he made for the first exhibition game of the season.”

  Besides, inspiration came in another form. The night before the game, Dwight White begged his doctors to let him out of the hospital. He was down to 220 pounds. Perles had told him he wasn’t going to play. Noll had told White’s backup, Steve Furness, he’d be starting. White was desperate to at least be in uniform, to be introduced. “Dwight White on Super Bowl Sunday called me and said, ‘Come get me,’” says Berlin. “He said to the team doc, ‘I want to dress, just let me dress.’ The doctor, whose name was John Best—players called him John Wayne because he was big and looked like the actor—said to me, ‘Let him get dressed. What can happen? He’ll play three or four plays and we’ll take him back to the hospital.’”

  After watching White struggle to get his jersey over his shoulder pads and pull on pants that sagged like potato sacks, the Steelers roared out of the locker room. By a quirk of scheduling, both Pittsburgh and Minnesota lined up outside the Tulane Stadium tunnel, on the turf that ringed the field, at the same time, waiting to be introduced. An alley of fans held back by rope lined up on both sides of the teams, taking pictures, cheering, screaming. The Steelers were rowdy and laughing and couldn’t wait to play football. At one point Steelers safety Glen Edwards saw the Vikings All-Pro defensive tackles, Carl Eller and Alan Page. “Edwards is being funny and shouting and people are taking pictures of us and the Vikes seem uptight,” says Russell. “Glen sees Eller and Page and says, ‘Hey bub, what’s up?’ They’re stone-faced, refusing to acknowledge him. So he says it again. Still nothing. So Glen gets himself in between these two big Vikings and stares and says, ‘Hey man, I am talking to you.’ Nothing. So finally he just look
s at them and says, ‘You dudes better buckle up.’ They didn’t even respond.”

  At one point, while awaiting the team introductions, a shirtless Viking fan in a set of plastic horns collapsed right next to the Steelers, who were herded in their pen. “I was right there, he was turning blue,” says Mullins. “We look down and there is a guy just laying on the ground. I think he died. Right there.”

  People in the crowd ran over to help. “But he hit the ground and never moved,” Bradshaw wrote in It’s Only a Game. “The man dropped dead right in front of me! He died with his horns on. And it didn’t stop the program for one second.”

  There were more than eighty thousand fans waiting for the game to start.

  And the moment it did, the game perfectly reflected the weather: dreary, harsh, unforgiving. The first quarter was played to a scoreless tie, with Bradshaw and the Steelers offense doing the smartest thing they could—staying out of the way of their defense. Greene and Co. befuddled the Vikings All-Pro scrambling quarterback, Fran Tarkenton. It wasn’t until the second quarter that the first points were scored. Appropriately, it was a safety by the Steelers defense. With the Vikings backed up deep in their territory, Tarkenton wheeled around to hand the ball off. But it slipped from his grip and rolled toward the goal line. In the mad scramble, Tarkenton beat four other Steelers to the ball, landing on it in the end zone. The first player to tap a finger on Tarkenton and get credit for the safety was Dwight White.

  The Steelers went into halftime ahead by those two points, then pulled ahead early in the third on a short drive capped by a Harris touchdown. But in the fourth, with the Steelers still up 9-0, the Vikings were at the Steelers’ five and threatening to score. Until Greene, who had already picked off one of Tarkenton’s passes, stripped running back Chuck Foreman and recovered the fumble. The Vikings would score on a blocked punt later in the quarter, but on the next drive the Steelers rushed down the field. The game-winning score, a four-yard touchdown pass from Bradshaw to tight end Larry Brown, was a play called by Joe Gilliam.

  “Honestly, for me it was anticlimactic,” says Ham. “The front four was so dominant that game that you could have taken off my uniform and put it back on a hanger.” The Steelers limited the Vikings to just seventeen yards on the ground. Tarkenton threw twenty-seven times, completing just eleven while getting picked off three times and having four passes knocked down.

  In the locker room afterward, Russell, the team captain, stood on a podium with one of the game balls in his hand. He was prepared to make a speech about the defense, about how Greene’s play that day epitomized this team’s rise from also-ran to Super Bowl champ, and then hand the ball to the All-Pro defensive tackle. But at the last second, just before he spoke, he spotted the Chief standing in the corner. He bagged his speech and yelled, “Chief, come up here. This is your ball.”

  With tears in his eyes and a stogie in his mouth, Art Rooney wrapped his hands tightly around the ball.

  FOURTH QUARTER

  1975-1977

  37

  NOLL DIDN’T CHANGE HIS GRUMPY, PRAGMATIC APPROACH just because the Steelers had won the Super Bowl. “When we opened camp in 1975, the message was, first of all, win the battle of the hitting,” says Greene. “Win that battle. Then you have to protect the quarterback, which means receivers block; the defensive line has to protect against the run and put yourself in a position to rush the passer and give D-backs time to cover. Everyone had to utilize techniques that were taught to them in individual positions. The same things we were doing when we were 1-13 were the same things we were doing in 1975. But with much better players.”

  They were more talented, and more motivated. Tim Rooney, one of Art’s nephews, timed all the veterans in the 40-yard dash when they first checked into St. Vincent’s that summer. And almost to a man, their times were faster than the year before. “We were all shocked,” says Wagner. “After practice that night a bunch of us went back out to the fields just to make sure they hadn’t shortened the sprint.”

  But more than anything, they were confident, carrying themselves with the bravado and swagger of kingpins, no one more so than Lambert. The prickly middle linebacker once stopped first-round draft pick Lynn Swann in the locker room and said, “You should have been number two, I should have been number one.”

  Lambert played at a controlled sizzle that entire 1974 season. Calling plays from his middle linebacker position, telling even Joe Greene when he was out of position, and hitting with anger. Sports Illustrated wrote, “He’s meaner than Greene.” While Greene himself said, “Jack Lambert is so mean that he doesn’t even like himself.” The only thing that seemed to make his jack-o’-lantern grin glow was winning. And by the end of his first season, to go along with Pittsburgh’s W in Super Bowl IX, Lambert was named the NFL’s Defensive Rookie of the Year.

  Like Noll, Lambert both seized on and was seized by the moment. He fell into a defense that catered to his skills, emphasizing geometry and angles over brute strength. As mean as he was, as intimidating as that face could be, he was never the biggest man on the field. At 6’4” and just 218 pounds, he barely outweighed some receivers. “I give away twenty pounds whenever I step on the field,” Lambert once said. “So I have to be twenty pounds more aggressive.”

  “Smilin’ Jack,” as Lambert was called, was a natural heir to the middle-linebacking legends who defined intimidation in pro football. The Giants’ Sam Huff, another toothless hitter, the Packers’ Ray Nitschke, the Bears’ Dick Butkus. It didn’t matter that Lambert’s bookshelves were lined with Updike and Kafka and Joseph Heller. Or that his favorite hobby was playing Taso, a high-speed, highly complex version of chess. Or that, as a kid working on his family farm on Ohio, all he dreamed about was living on a beach, bodysurfing in the ocean, and fishing for his supper. Or that his teeth weren’t lost in a barroom brawl or from hitting bone after biting an opponent. Instead they were the victims of a hard pick set by a teammate during a high school basketball practice. Lambert was so self-conscious about his smile at the time that, after losing his false set while swimming in a quarry as a teenager, he wouldn’t go back to school for a week, until the dentist had made him a new bridge.

  Of course almost no one knew any of these things. Lambert was most effective when opponents worried about—and fans lustily cheered for—the guy whose feet pumped like pistons before every snap. “Jack Lambert wasn’t great because of his tough-guy attitude,” says Russell. “He was a great player because he was very, very smart. He never made a mistake and his techniques were excellent. It had nothing to do with his personality, but the fans loved him for that.”

  Of course inside the Steelers locker room, his penchant for scowling and blowing up made him a favorite target. Nothing was sacred on this team. Egos were constantly kept in check. Says Grossman: “If anyone thought they were going to promote themselves, they would have been beat down so fast and thrown out of the locker room. “

  Grossman, a nice Jewish kid from Philly, was mockingly called Rabbi. Bleier’s constant talking often led to his being taped to the goal posts or stuffed in a tub of ice. Bradshaw’s acting—he often rolled around the turf like he’d been shot after taking a sack, only to bounce back onto the field a play later—garnered him a faux Academy Award.

  The merry prankster on the Steelers had always been Hanratty. He was so affable and self-assured, even as a backup, that he could get away with anything. “The only guy I never screwed with was Ernie [Holmes],” he says. On the practice field he’d amble up to Lambert, whose long blond locks always peeked from under his helmet, and say, “What’s up, Straw-head? I need a guy for Halloween. What are you doing? What do you charge?” Once, he started blowing him kisses, at which point Lambert yelled at Noll, “Get Hanratty over here to stop blowing me kisses,” which led to convulsive laughter from the rest of the defense.

  But mostly, Hanratty toyed with Lambert at his locker. He’d fill a cup with water and hide it underneath Lambert’s shoulder pads, which were prop
ped on the top the locker. When Lambert pulled down the pads, the water would drop onto his head. “I got him once. And the next morning he walks in. I’m at my locker and we nod at each other. Then he pulls down the pads and the same thing happens again. Next day, same thing. Finally I say, ‘You dumb bastard, get on a stool and check for water before you pull your pads down.’ He does that the next day. Then the day after that, I get him again.”

  During practice one week leading up to a game against the Broncos and their star linebacker Randy Gradishar, who had played at Ohio State, Hanratty kept poking Lambert. He’d tell him how good Gradishar was, that he was the best linebacker that Ohio had ever produced, and that if Lambert hadn’t been such a screwup he would have been a first-round pick, too, just like Gradishar. When the two Ohioans finally met on the field before the game, Gradishar stuck out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Randy Gradishar.” Lambert’s response was simply, “Who gives a fuck?”

  Some players were too relaxed to screw with—there was no payoff in their reaction. Jack Ham was one of those guys. Icicles ran hotter than Ham. He had thighs as big as an offensive guard’s, the first step of a wide receiver, and the technique of a coach. “Ham was a better linebacker than Lambert,” says Russell. “The best I ever saw. He was Mr. Cool. He never tried to be macho or get in a fight. He would say something funny to defuse a situation. They had two totally different styles.”