The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s, and the Fight for America's Soul

by Chad Millman; Shawn Coyne

Every year, Nunn traveled across the United States covering black college football games for the paper. At the end of the season he put together a black college All-American team. It was a tradition that had been started by his father, Bill Sr., who was the paper's managing editor and good friends with the Chief. One afternoon Dan and Nunn ran into each other, two sons whose fathers were friends, and began a conversation. A writer from the Courier often hung around the Steelers offices at the Roosevelt, and Rooney asked Nunn why he never saw him there. "I told him about certain things I felt and things he wasn't aware of," says Nunn. "I told him how I put out this All-American team every year and got calls from some NFL teams about the players, but no one on the Steelers ever called."

  After that, Dan told Art Jr. to pick Nunn's brain. Maybe there was talent the Steelers should be paying attention to. "At first, all we did was look at each other," Rooney says. "I was thinking, this black guy is getting a free job and he was thinking I'm just a rich white kid who couldn't get a job anywhere else."

  But they were stuck in a room together. So they started talking. Nunn told Rooney about what he looked for in players he named to his All-American team and how he put it together. He went to the biggest black college football game every week, anywhere in the country. On top of that he had an extensive network of coaches feeding him the names of players who were, for the most part, playing in places that weren't on an NFL scout's itinerary. "After twenty minutes of talking I was blown away," says Rooney. "I told my dad, 'We've got to hire this guy.'"

  Nunn paid immediate dividends after joining the team full-time in 1969. He helped the Steelers find Blount, who was playing at Southern University, in 1970, and Ernie Holmes the next year and Joe Gilliam from Tennessee State in 1972. "I wasn't just a black college players scout," says Nunn. But the credibility he had with black college football coaches was now the Steelers' credibility.

  In 1974, Nunn was with scouts from several teams making a swing through the Deep South. Scouts often traveled in packs, partly to share notes, partly to reassure each other that they weren't missing anything, and partly to figure out who their opponents liked. One rainy afternoon the group was at Alabama A&M scouting an all-conference receiver named John Stallworth. They had him run some pass-catching drills and then, on a slick field, timed him in the 40. His times were slow, too slow to keep anyone's interest. But Nunn believed that Stallworth had just had a bad day.

  The next day, as the scout patrol left town, Nunn told the group he was feeling sick and was going to stay behind to rest. Then he snuck over to A&M, picked Stallworth up, and drove him to a high school field far from campus. Unlike the other scouts, he had seen Stallworth play several times and watched him run away from defensive backs with ease. He was convinced the receiver was special and he wanted to time Stallworth again, on a dry field, without anyone else around. He was much faster than the day before. "I found when I first started that nobody lied to anybody," Nunn says. "All these scouts shared information, and a lot of that is because everyone was afraid of making mistakes. Well, a part of doing the job is not sharing info with the Giants or Browns."

  Nunn became so enamored with Stallworth that, when he received the player's game film from the A&M coaches, he ignored their request to pass it along to other teams when he was done watching. He kept it hidden in his office. As the draft neared, he had Noll convinced that Stallworth was a game-changer. But he was so sure of his subterfuge that he told Noll not to draft Stallworth in the second round, when the coach preferred, because he knew he'd be around in the fourth. Nunn was right. And his strategy helped shape the draft that compelled the Steelers to do the one thing Joe Greene worried his team never would: fulfill its potential.

  The Steelers' first-round pick in that 1974 draft was Lynn Swann, the acrobatic receiver from USC who was the most prolific pass catcher in school history. Swann's mom had wanted a girl, thus the name, and she enrolled her son in ballet lessons, thus the twisting mid-air pirouettes he executed while catching a ball. Like Stallworth, scouts had clocked Swann in the 40 and been disappointed with his times. But Noll didn't care about stopwatches. He cared about what he saw on film--when judging football players, that was the only thing you could trust, and he simply couldn't believe that Swann wasn't faster and more graceful than anyone else playing.

  In the second round, where Noll had been desperate to take Stallworth, he instead took a beanpole linebacker from Kent State named Jack Lambert. This was an Art Rooney Jr. special. Lambert was 6'5", 210 pounds, but he was as mean as a snake--and he looked just as nasty. Where his two front teeth had once been was a gap as big as a mouse hole. From inside his helmet he looked like a jack-o'-lantern.

  The Steelers liked what they saw of Lambert on film. It wasn't his physicality that impressed them--at his size he actually looked lacking compared to other players--but it was his speed and instincts. He was as technically sound as any pro--his feet moved laterally, his hips stayed square to the line of scrimmage, and his shoulders were low when he tackled. These minor things, the steps more talented players let slide, helped him get where he was going a half step faster than anyone else. When he exploded on a ball carrier or a receiver, the force didn't come from his lithe frame. It came from his being in perfect position on nearly every play.

  What clinched the Steelers' decision to take him was what one of the scouts saw the day it rained--a drenching downpour--at a Kent State practice. The field was too muddy, so Kent State practiced on a nearby blacktop in light pads and at half speed. Well, almost half speed. On one play Lambert dove across the line to make a tackle, skidded on the pavement, and stood up with gravel embedded in his forearm from his wrist to his elbow. He looked at it, picked out the rocks, and went back to the huddle.

  After choosing Stallworth in the fourth round, the Steelers picked up Wisconsin center Mike Webster in the fifth. Webster was no bigger than a linebacker--225 pounds, tops--but during the Senior Bowl that year he consistently knocked the defensive tackle lined up across from him--a highly rated prospect--in the opposite direction of the quarterback. Coaches like that. "He was just crushing it," Noll once said. "I thought to myself, if the guy he's playing is a first-rounder, what's Webster?"

  Noll felt lucky to get him when he did.

  30

  ABOUT TWENTY-SIX MILES NORTH OF PITTSBURGH'S THREE-RIVER triangle, Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, sits on the western edge of the Ohio River.

  For more than a century, Aliquippa and the hundreds of acres of surrounding Woodlawn farms remained much as they always were--dense hillocks descending into lush valleys abutting the Ohio. But as the nineteenth century ticked into the twentieth, it became ground zero for a grand social experiment.

  The late 1800s in the steel industry were marked by two massive changes: First, the richest industrialist in the world, Andrew Carnegie, sold his two thousand Carnegie Steel mills to the richest banker in the world, J. P. Morgan. Morgan then combined his new company with two other major steel producers he owned, Gary's Federal Steel and National Steel. Together, they were known as United States Steel, which became the largest corporation in the world and controlled 67 percent of the nation's steel-mill capacity. With so much work controlled by one company, steel workers from all over Pittsburgh--mostly immigrants, all long-suffering, doing dangerous work for menial pay, and finding few options for more gainful employment--began to rise up in defiance.

  By 1900, Christian reform movements--inspired by Rev. George Hodges at Pittsburgh's Calvary Episcopal Church--that wanted to better the living and working conditions of laborers were gaining momentum, too. One Iron City steel magnate--and dedicated churchgoer--named B. F. Jones Jr., who ran the Jones and Laughlin mills, had difficulty facing fellow worshipers at Sunday service. J&L's South Side works hugged the Monongahela, and the shanties that climbed up nearby Mount Washington were deplorable. With such a small plot of land convenient to the mill, landowners gouged their tenants, making grown men and families share tiny rooms in unsanitary conditions. To make e
nds meet, a typical man and wife with at least one child would share a two-room apartment with up to twelve other "boarders." Each bed--stacked one above the other in bunks--was shared by two men. One man slept while the other man worked.

  Jones reasoned that if he could somehow raise the standard of living for his workers--a cause that was becoming a prime focus of progressive politicians--while still keeping the laborer dependent on the company, he could keep J&L vital. He mapped out a "vision of the family," a self-contained city fully owned and run by J&L management. And soft-selling the takeover of an entire community as a "family" project proved remarkably effective.

  What attracted Jones Jr. to the notion of a J&L town was not only the ability to manage the workers at the mill, but to oversee their private lives. Vices would be forbidden, and with the ties the company had to the county's Republican political machine, law and order would be sponsored and controlled by J&L. He had great faith that steel corporations would not only build the country's railroads and high-rises, they would build the next generation of hearty, healthy, law-abiding American laborers. Capitalism would make the new American man.

  In 1905, as the radical Industrial Workers of the World union formed to unite all workers as a single concern, Jones and Laughlin acquired the land around Aliquippa Park and bought up other massive swaths of acreage around the town. He set aside seven miles of waterfront for the Aliquippa Steel Works. Its first tin mill began production in December 1910, and by 1916 rod, wire, nail, and blooming mills were on line.

  The workforce would enter the Aliquippa Works through a gated viaduct under an Aliquippa & Southern Railroad embankment off of Franklin Avenue--the town's main street--which merged with Station Street at the entrance to form a "Y." The funnel was both an efficient way to control shift changes and to monitor outside agitators. It was also a perfect metaphor for a steelworker's transition from home to hearth and back again. One side of the tunnel was work, the other the rewards of work--"the best possible place for a steelworker to raise a family," B. F. Jones Jr. called it.

  The town was laid out under the auspices of the Woodlawn Land Company (a wholly owned subsidiary of Jones and Laughlin) which averaged building one house a day for several years on a series of twelve "plans." The houses were offered for sale only to J&L employees (at cost plus 6 percent interest), which removed any possibility of land speculation. By 1914, the majority of the community and much of the works were in place, and the draw of affordable housing with indoor plumbing, electricity, and in most cases central heating brought wave after wave of inner-city escapees, Southern black migrants, and immigrant settlers. With the blast furnaces, hearths, and finishing mills churning out thousands of tons of finished steel a day, the Aliquippa mills proved to be a crucial national resource.

  Thirteen different ethnicities made up Aliquippa, with Slavs, Serbs, Italians, and Greeks making up the largest segments. Each of the twelve plans were defined by hills, one per plan. To get from one plan to the next required going down the neighborhood hill to Franklin Avenue, walking to the next plan's central street and then back up that plan's hill. Plan One and Plan Two were closest to the mill and housed mostly unskilled laborers from Serbia and Croatia. Plans Three, Four, and Five housed more senior workers made up of German, Irish, and Polish immigrants. Plan Six was the highest hill and the perfect distance away from the soot and ash. It housed the senior management of the plant and J&L's in-the-pocket politicians. Plans Seven, Eight, and Nine extended farther away from the plant and housed skilled workers from Northern Europe, usually former puddlers or sons of puddlers given skilled jobs. Plan Ten housed the company's midlevel foremen and supervisors. Plan Eleven was originally made up of Italian immigrants from the Southern province of Patrica and later transitioned into a predominantly Southern black neighborhood. Plan Twelve was made up mostly of older generations of Irish. J&L's management kept a keen eye on the makeup of each plan so that there were clearly defined pockets for each ethnicity. Keeping the workers divided down cultural and ethnic lines maintained important prejudices between the workers. If they fought among each other--and they did--it was that much more difficult to organize. By 1920, Aliquippa's population increased from 3,140 to 15,426 and 40 percent of the arrivals were foreign-born, few with any formal education.

  With upward of $20 million invested in Aliquippa, J&L hired a version of the "Coal and Iron Police," privately paid but recognized as law and order forces by the State of Pennsylvania.

  Part of keeping Aliquippa clean meant keeping out the union. The only public access to the rank-and-file workers was at "the tunnel," and local police huddled at the entrance shift after shift. With their headquarters directly adjacent to the J&L's offices, and with its own shooting range directly behind, the message could not have been clearer to organizers who might enter town: You are not welcome here.

  For the Aliquippa workers, though, economic dependency was much more effective than physical threats. Forty percent of the workers had mortgages with the Woodlawn Company. Their payments were taken directly out of their paychecks. And at any time the company could kick them out of their houses and repay them what they put in minus a 3 percent financing charge and cost for depreciation. The threat of eviction was enough for most workers to refuse any home visits from union officials. The company owned the stores, the houses, the electricity, the busses, the trolleys, the railroad, the water company, and for all intents and purposes the Aliquippa Gazette, which supplied ample pro-company, anti-union editorials every day. All company-owned services were deducted from worker's wages, making payday a practical farce, since credit purchases at the company store, mortgages, police fines, etc. would be deducted. Families would be left with just a few dollars a week. And those dollars were spent in the beer halls, bars, and gambling joints on the one patch of land J&L inadvertently neglected to purchase, a crooked lane known as McDonald Hollow, forcing the family to live off company credit again until the next payday.

  By the 1930s, Jones and Laughlin Steel was the fourth-largest steel maker in the country, with just under 5 percent of the total market and a capitalization of $181 million. The Aliquippa Works alone, if cut out from J&L, ranked as the nation's sixth-largest steel producer, employing 10,000 of the town's 30,000 residents.

  But to those who didn't live there, the area became known as "Little Siberia."

  In February 1944, Wesley and Myrtle Dorsett boarded a train in North Carolina with their two young children--Juanita and Melvin--plus Myrtle's parents and their most valuable possessions in tow. Myrtle was pregnant with her third child and knew that tobacco farming would not put enough food on her growing family's table. The jobs were in the north. And like more than 1.5 million Southern blacks, the Dorsetts went to better their lot, where a black man could work for an honest wage and vote without harassment.

  World War II left a large hole in the Aliquippa Works labor pool. Wesley joined the mill march and eventually moved the family into a shared two-story on the black side of the Plan Eleven hill. Each morning, afternoon, or evening (depending upon his shift assignment) Wesley would go through the tunnel and turn left, making his way to one of J&L's open-hearth furnaces that converted the nearby blast-furnace pig iron. Myrtle kept the house, and by 1959 had filled it with five more kids: Ernie, Tyrone, Keith, Anthony, and Sheree.

  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.