by S. L. Price
America, of course, is the land of renewal. We don’t fancy ourselves a past-haunted people and, at first blush, our new national pastime doesn’t look back, either. Football lacks baseball’s clockless, county-fair feel. It doesn’t, like college basketball’s March Madness, smack of a time when loyalty to city, state, region, or school mattered so much more. But amid all that kinetic flash and fury and TV-perfect pace, it’s easy to miss that football, too, serves a fierce nostalgia, a need to address connections made or frayed or fading fast.
It’s no coincidence that mill and mining towns produced so many great players. Heavy industry and football share the same DNA. Both depend on collective striving, on “the line” and its meld of various skill sets, on the numbing repetition of task. Both feature hierarchical organization, an eternal tension between management suits and product-producing grunts. Both depend on—even celebrate—the implicit trade of health for money. Football can cripple; that is clear. And each gnarled joint and concussed brain is but an echo of the sacrifices made, two and three generations back, by the real steelers, packers, and giants who lost fingers or hearing or lungs on the job.
Indeed, the Quips’ locker room at season’s end feels like nothing so much as the empty building standing less than a mile away on the Ohio River, the one structure left from the titanic mill that died thirty years ago. The rough concrete floor, the open locker doors, the scattered remains of a workforce of thousands—then hundreds, then dozens—remain within the immense, 260,000-square-foot shell where Jones & Laughlin Steel’s seamless tube annex once clattered and hummed. The mill’s end cut the town’s legs off. Quips football has propped it up ever since, each season’s wins and titles like the spidery tingling of a phantom limb, the vibration that almost, for small moments each autumn, feels like the thing that’s gone.
At 10 p.m., sharp, floodlights towering over The Pit snap off. Soon there are footsteps: Murph, the school’s burly, crewcut building manager, is walking up the parking lot to the only pickup truck left. He’s wearing a New York Jets jersey with “REVIS” on the back but, no, it wasn’t a gift from Aliquippa’s latest famous son. “Nah,” he says. “They get rich, and they get cheap.”
He climbs into the cab, guns the engine, rolls down the window. “One of these days they’ll build a new stadium . . .” Murph says, and then he steps on the gas, his last words mixing with the exhaust, “. . . or we’ll merge with Hopewell!”
The engine’s roar follows the headlights cutting up and away through the dark. The field and hills drop back into silence, and almost instantly it’s as if no one had spoken, nothing had happened, ever. That’s an illusion. In the hills beyond, in surrounding kitchens and bars and bedrooms, people are pouring drinks, ordering another, talking about what they saw here, what it means for next week and next year. The game will go on for a while yet.
We represent the struggle. The pain. The oppression. We represent the fight. This is Aliquippa.
—Sean Gilbert, 2010
13
You-Know-Who
Everything was shrinking fast now. By 1980 Aliquippa’s population was down to 17,094, and the exiting stream never stopped; by ’90 there would be just 13,374 left. Half the world that JFK saw when he spoke downtown had dissolved away. One by one, bars and stores boarded up their windows. Ambition withered. Postures sagged. It was not the time and place to think big.
Yet by force of will, personality, ego, delusion, or spite, that is all Don Yannessa did. He made Quips’ home games—complete with fireworks, an Indian on horseback, the dunt-dunt-dunt, and increasingly winning teams—into community events; packed Carl Aschman Stadium (official capacity, 5,500; oft-reported standing room crowd, 9,000) and made himself the unofficial drum major for Western Pennsylvania football. Publicity for his seniors? One fall he sent out a photo of them posed around a gleaming black Corvette. Media guide? Instead of the usual mimeographed notes, Yannessa provided a booklet with records and results and photo after photo of the players and their wondrous coach. The local newspaper couldn’t send a writer on the road? Yannessa rasped postgame comments into a tape recorder and made sure it got there before deadline. His slick quotes sounded more like those of a network color man than some small town ex-lineman, and that figured: he made no bones about wanting to work in TV someday.
After John Evasovich moved back to Aliquippa, he attended the occasional game. He and Yannessa had been teammates, but barely knew each other. After one win in ’82, Evasovich made the mistake of stopping by to congratulate the coach.
“Johnny, you got to get more involved in the program,” Yannessa said.
“Next year, Don, I won’t be on the road as much,” Evasovich said. “I’ll be happy to.”
The following Tuesday, Evasovich answered his phone.
“Don Yannessa,” said the voice. “Congratulations. You were elected president.”
“Of what?” Evasovich said.
“The Quarterback Club.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Raise money,” Yannessa said. Then he hung up.
The team budget was $36,000 a year and ticket sales brought in $40,000; even as the town frayed, Yannessa’s inky mat of hair, gleaming teeth, and sleek cars only seemed to get shinier. He was making $42,000, teaching English, halfheartedly, waiting for the final bell and practice to start. He had a “QUIPS1” license plate bolted to, yes, that black Corvette. It soon made way for a Cadillac.
By fall of 1984, the forty-five-year-old Yannessa had led the Quips to three of the four previous WPIAL title games—though he still hadn’t won a championship—and become a semicelebrity. National Public Radio and CBS’s Charles Kuralt dropped in to produce features. Aliquippa principal Jerry Montini quipped that Yannessa could’ve worked for Barnum & Bailey—closer to the truth than he knew. Yannessa fed reporters his sense of the absurd and astonishing recall; he made anxious parents feel their kids were special; he fed boosters inside dope. And the entire time, like a ringmaster eyeing both the leaping lions and gate totals, he was sizing everyone up for what he needed next.
Zmijanac, who learned all he needed to know about the game—and, as a far pricklier presence, half of what he needed to know about cultivating people—from Yannessa, watched his mentor navigate the tricky course through black fans, white boosters, stern administrators, fellow teachers, and needy sportswriters. “Ain’t you fucking somethin’?” he’d say. Yannessa would laugh, too.
“The best politician I’ve ever known,” Zmijanac said. “Beautiful.”
In the fall of 1983, 20th Century Fox released All The Right Moves, a high school football film starring young Tom Cruise and set in a dying Western Pennsylvania steel town. At one point the head coach, played by Craig T. Nelson, said a potential coaching job is between him “and you-know-who from Aliquippa.” Everyone in Western Pennsylvania chuckled, but the real inside joke was even better: Hollywood Don had finagled his way onto the production as a technical advisor, and appears in the climactic game as the opposing coach. (“I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Block ’em anyway!”) You-know-who was a natural.
Yannessa plugged his own terminology and plays into the film’s game sequences, and has banged the drum so often about his behind-the-scenes maneuvers that (despite the inconvenient fact that the film was based on a magazine story about Duquesne, Pennsylvania, and filmed in the spring of ’83 in Pittsburgh and Johnstown) many, including Yannessa himself, have come to believe that the movie’s about Aliquippa.
Why not? The town’s fictional name, Ampipe, is clearly based on Ambridge. And the way Yannessa describes it one fall day, pointing out production stills on the wall of his home office, you can feel how the screenwriter, Michael Kane, first fell under his rat-a-tat spell.
“Craig T.—the coach? He stayed here for a weekend,” Yannessa said. “There’s Tom Cruise. I was on location for eight weeks. . . . That was his girlfriend at the time, Rebecca De Morna
y. She was pretty. See some pictures here of Craig T. and Cruiser. . . . That’s me and Cruise, right there: tough kid. We put him in the hospital two times; he was pissing blood one time. And this guy here came to me and said, ‘Tell him we’re going to double the football scenes; he’s going to have a double.’ So I went to the hospital to tell him and Cruise said no. He said, ‘If I do it, it has to be real.’”
Not even Joe Paterno could resist Yannessa. It had been more than two decades since the Penn State head coach, bitter over losing Ditka to Pitt, had washed his hands of the town. But in December of 1983, Aliquippa High had a bright receiver named Marques Henderson, and time and Yannessa’s blarney and Joe Pa’s own vaulting ambition made the old grudge seem, well, silly. He agreed to speak at Aliquippa’s annual football banquet, to be held at the Serbian Club.
Late on a Saturday, December 3, Paterno’s private plane landed at Beckett Aviation in Pittsburgh, and Yannessa was waiting. First, he took him to the Quippian Club, the black hub. Paterno took up residence at one corner of the bar, slapped down his first $20 bill. White and black faces crowded around; he bought drinks for the next forty-five minutes, and didn’t the town hear about that for years? Yannessa always reeled in big coaching names, but few bigger than Paterno. And the blacks liked that Joe Pa came to their place first; no doubt Marques Henderson was made aware.
Then Yannessa drove Paterno crosstown to the Serbian Club, the white and black boosters from the Quippian trailing fast behind. Paterno bought more drinks, until everybody finally sat down. Joe Pa spoke, and per his deal with Yannessa, he was hustled off the dais so he could get back on the plane while everyone was still eating. At that point, Porky Palombo, Yannessa’s uncle, handed Paterno a white envelope stocked with $400.
“Just something for coming,” Porky said.
“Put it back in your kitty,” Paterno said. “I didn’t come here for that. I came here for Don.”
Yannessa snorted. “You came here for Marques Henderson,” he said, and even Joe laughed at that. He didn’t take the money, though.
Still, after eleven years at Aliquippa, Yannessa had proven himself great in everything but winning. And no one wanted to hear the excuse that Aliquippa played “up” two classes. Yes, its tenth-to-twelfth-grade enrollment of 449 students technically placed the school in the WPIAL’s Class A division; two schools with larger enrollments, in fact, did compete in Class A. Yes, the Quips ignored reality altogether, skipped past AA (enrollment range 486–688), and insisted on slugging it out in AAA (but, hell, some still insisted that they could play with the big boys competing in the WPIAL’s recently created AAAA division). And yes, Aliquippa was by far the smallest of the thirty-five schools playing in its section, up against Ambridge and its enrollment of 989 students, Hopewell with 917, and the largest, Moon, at 1,140.
Really, it was no shock that his teams had a habit of fading at season’s end; by then, injuries and exhaustion made it impossible to hide Aliquippa’s comparative lack of depth. The Quips kept losing in the WPIAL title game—to Thomas Jefferson in ’80 (enrollment: 924), Steel Valley (770) in ’82, Mt. Pleasant (848) in ’83. “We’ve got the copper trophy three times now,” Yannessa said. “I think I’m going to melt them down into bullets and shoot myself.” Not to his face, of course (Love the guy!), but people were starting to compare him with Bud Grant, the Minnesota Vikings coach who went to four Super Bowls but never won.
Finally, in 1984, just as the shutdown at the mill was hitting another horrific peak—660 jobs slashed at the Aliquippa Works the previous summer—Yannessa broke through. Powered by the unstoppable Rapheal “Pudgy” Abercrombie, a 5-foot-5 butterball who churned his way to a record 4,606 yards at Aliquippa, and guided by quarterback Vic Lay, the ’84 Quips bulled through the regular season, losing just one game—by a single point—crushing Hopewell and Blackhawk, edging Ambridge. In the WPIAL AAA title game at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, a November grudge match against Mt. Pleasant, Aliquippa found itself down by a point with seven minutes to play, facing sixty-three yards of empty.
Just as he had nearly thirty years before, as a sophomore backup on Aliquippa’s 1955 WPIAL champs, Yannessa found himself praying on the sideline. With 5:53 left and Aliquippa facing a fourth-and-6 on its own 41-yard line, he had no choice but to go for it. Yannessa prayed harder. Lay, who hadn’t completed a pass all game, coolly fired a 17-yard strike to Kevin Haley. Minutes later Abercrombie, who finished the day with 240 rushing yards, used the final 12 to score and give Aliquippa the win, 20-15. It had taken Yannessa a dozen years—and those last seven plays—to go from loser to winner. His wife cried.
Twenty years had passed since Aschman’s last season, since Aliquippa had last won. Now the team took the same route home from Pittsburgh that it had in ’55 and ’64 with King Carl, north on the other side of the Ohio River, through the streets of Ambridge, across the bridge and into the guts of the old downtown. Yannessa, riding in the back of a van, nibbled on shrimp cocktail and sipped champagne. At one point he noticed Zmijanac, his defensive coordinator, riding in a nearby car. Yannessa, buzzing now, rolled down a window.
“Hey,” he screamed. “What’d Aliquippa do tonight?!”
It wasn’t the same as it had been, decades back. Still, some five hundred fans were waiting at Aschman Stadium. Men, women, and children kissed the coach, patted his back. Fireworks lit up the sky, and they all sang the alma mater and everyone yelled for him to speak. And stunningly, for perhaps the only time in his life, Hollywood Don said, “No words needed,” and raised the trophy into the cool night air.
Two days later, Sunday’s Beaver County Times spoke of how the win, “helped the townspeople forget their troubles, even if only for a few hours. Politicians weren’t squabbling and insecure workers weren’t thinking about their uncertain futures.” One black man from Plan 11 said, “The community needed this.”
Though Yannessa—spawn of a steelworking family, son of the borough—had told reporters just after the game how happy he was to lift the town’s spirits, though he thanked God for letting him win the big one at last, nothing for him really changed. Something in his nature—call it an extra layer of what-the-fuck confidence—left him unaffected by the usual slings. Yannessa had never been that tormented by big losses, and the long-awaited win came less as blessed relief than It’s-about-time! arrival. And he wasn’t about to become complacent.
The next September, for the 1985 season opener, Yannessa arranged to have three parachutists drop out of the Pennsylvania sky and onto the 50-yard line. One held a sign that read “Fighting Quips,” the second held one reading “1984 WPIAL,” and a third sign read “Champions.” No coach in the area—hell, nationwide—had the imagination and balls to pull off such a stunt. And that, as he said later that fall, was nothing. Yannessa was already roughing out a scheme for Opening Night 1986.
“I want to get the Indian and the horse to parachute out of a helicopter,” he said. “See if they can land at the fifty-yard line and just gallop away.”
You can’t pinpoint an exact date, because the creating of a cultural icon is usually a matter of accretion, a layering of moments that stack up until, suddenly, everyone understands that the person in question matters far more than he or she should. It wouldn’t be until January 1991, in fact, when Saturday Night Live premiered a sketch called “Bill Swerski’s Superfans,” that Mike Ditka arrived at that point of American fame where hero worship, ubiquity, and ridicule mingle and even the most oblivious get the joke, where he had become not just a football great but a personality, an archetype called “Da Coach”: Eyes popping, mustache bristling, everybody’s half-unhinged uncle wreaking havoc over Sunday dinner.
But by the end of ’85, it had started to build. Since taking over as head coach of the Chicago Bears in January 1982, Ditka had proven himself the perfectly imperfect change-agent for the mustied franchise: hot-tempered, decidedly unslick, all but boiling with the need to win. He
promised his players they’d be champions in three years, screamed, threw clipboards and headsets, broke his right hand punching a locker in ’83 (“Go out and win one for Lefty,” he commanded), lost the ’84 NFC title game to the eventual Super Bowl champion 49ers, came back the next season to beat them on the road—and was picked up for drunk driving after celebrating on the team flight home. His players also happened to be catnip for sportswriters, and soon all the Ditka stories that had been told for years in Aliquippa bars, Pitt alumni gatherings, and NFL coaching offices began spilling into the mainstream.
Didn’t you know? Ditka had knocked himself out hitting a steel blocking sled at Pitt, punched out two teammates in a huddle, and in his spare time—playing Pitt basketball—called Kentucky’s legendary coach, Adolph Rupp, “an old goat” during an on-court argument. Ditka joined the Bears out of college, in his first game barked at veteran teammate Ted Karras “to get the lead out of your ass” (Karras took a swing at him), won NFL Rookie of the Year. The guy had pedigree, all of it hard-earned: he rampaged at the knee of legendary Bears founder George Halas, revolutionized the tight end position from blocking lump into offensive weapon, and in 1963 led Chicago to its first championship in seventeen years.
A few years later, after standing up to the old man in a contract dispute (“Halas throws nickels around like manhole covers,” Ditka growled—thus proving himself outspoken and poetic), he got shipped off to the losing hell of Philadelphia. He drank too much there. Revitalized by a move to the Cowboys, Ditka once stood up before a play was called and punched a Vikings linebacker in the face.
In Dallas, Ditka played four years for another legend, Tom Landry. He caught a touchdown pass in the team’s ’72 Super Bowl win over Miami, but within the franchise was known for his frantic clashes with teammate Dan Reeves in racquetball, golf, and any other competition a bunch of overcaffeinated machos could dream up. “And it killed Ditka, because no matter what they played Reeves would win most of it,” said longtime Dallas executive Gil Brandt. “Just absolutely killed him. They used to bounce golf balls: who could catch them between their thumbs, all kinds of stuff; used to play cards all the time, darts. . . .”
