Art Rooney Sr. didn't mind the drive. He always had time to share with the people he cared about. When he arrived at the Steelers offices in the morning, one of the staff would have already prepared a list of wakes or funerals for that day. And when the offices closed, he'd be off on his rounds.
He liked people, wanted to know more about them. Rooney would remember the name of a cab driver and the kind of cigarette he smoked if he met him twice. He treated Dirt Denardo, the head of Three Rivers Stadium's ground crew, with as much respect as the president of the United States.
In the casket that night was the niece of one of Rooney's mentors, State Senator James "Jimmy" Coyne. It was Jimmy Coyne who had once made Rooney a ward boss. Rooney knew Pat Coyne, too. Rooney's father's family had roots in the puddling era, and on his mother's side in Pittsburgh's coal seam. Whenever he was asked where he came from, Rooney would proudly say, "My mother's people were all coal miners and my father's people were all steelworkers." He liked to talk to the guys in the hard hats singing "Here we go Steelers, here we go!" at home games. Rooney read the paper. He knew how dire the straits were for the rank and file.
Rooney made his way into the foyer. All of the long faces at Laughlin Funeral Home livened. He went directly to a corner by the casket where Coyne's children sat vigil. Someone said, "Hey the Chief's here. He's giving tickets to the kids!"
It was the only time that day Pat Coyne smiled.
43
AT PITTSBURGH'S 1977 DAPPER DAN BANQUET, AN ANNUAL celebration of the best of the previous sports year, Tony Dorsett was named the top football player in the state of Pennsylvania. He caught Steelers president Dan Rooney's eye and joked, "Don't let me go! Make me a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers. You won't be sorry." Rooney laughed but knew what he was missing. The Steelers had just lost the 1976 AFC Championship to the Raiders, due in no small part to the fact that star running backs Franco Harris and Rocky Bleier had missed the playoffs with injuries. But with the twenty-first pick in the draft, the Steelers had little chance to claim the Heisman Trophy winner.
Two expansion teams in their second year of operation held the top two picks--Tampa Bay and Seattle. Dorsett had no intention of playing for either of them. Tampa Bay made it clear that they were picking the University of Southern California's Ricky Bell as number one. Bell had played for Tampa Bay's head coach John McKay when McKay coached the Trojans. Dorsett hired agent Mike Trope, who threatened Seattle with a Dorsett defection to the Canadian Football League should they draft him. Not only would Seattle not get the prize back, but they would lose the coveted draft selection, too. Trope had taken two of his clients--Johnny Rodgers and Anthony Davis--to the Great White North before, so it was no idle threat. Seattle was open to trading its pick to the best bidder.
Gil Brandt conferred with Tex Schramm and Tom Landry. They gave Seattle their number-one pick (the twenty-fourth overall) and their three second-round picks in exchange for Seattle's first-rounder. On May 3, 1977, Tony Dorsett was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys. After making a statement to reporters, "We realized we were never going to win the big games without a great tailback. Finally, now, all of the pieces are really set in place. We're going ahead and booking our rooms for the Super Bowl," said Brandt.
He sent a private jet to Pittsburgh International Airport to pick up the missing piece. Dorsett landed and posed in his new Dallas jersey, number 33, and humbly thanked Dallas for the opportunity.
His contract was remarkable. The Cowboys' 1970 number-one draft pick (Duane Thomas) received a three-year deal worth $87,000, $25,000 of that in a signing bonus. Just seven years later, the beneficiary of labor progress and a huge growth in NFL revenue, Dorsett signed a $1,600,000 three-year deal, with $600,000 on signing. Before playing one NFL down, he was one of the highest-paid players in the league, better paid than Pro Bowlers and future Hall of Famers on his own team.
Dorsett moved his mother and father out of Aliquippa's Plan Eleven and bought them a brand-new home. "My mom and dad were the first black family in the neighborhood," Dorsett remembered. But Wesley Dorsett refused to leave the mill. He was proud of his son, but he would not have him put food on his table. He continued the daily trek to one of J&L's basic-oxygen furnaces, donned his green asbestos pants and jacket, and weathered the heat from tap after tap of 3,000-degree steel.
After the fanfare and jubilation, Tony Dorsett proceeded to alienate the entire Dallas metropolitan area. Mel Renfro and Rayfield Wright gave Dorsett the compete lowdown about what he was walking into. The city had more than its share of citizens who still referred to black men as "boy" and "nigger." North Dallas continued to be white and South Dallas black. The Cowboy organization was built on clean-cut, deferential players, especially black players, and he would be expected to keep his mouth shut, learn Landry's system, and defer to the Cowboys' front office.
But after all the sweat and pain it took him to reach the top of his profession, Dorsett had little interest in toeing the line. He bought the obligatory nouveau-riche toys--the big house with the Jacuzzi, the motorcycle, the custom van (the thing to have in 1977) and a dove-gray Lincoln Continental with "TD" engraved on every door. And he would enjoy the bachelor life as much as he pleased. He also announced that he would prefer that people pronounce his last name "Dor-SETT," rather than the Pittsburgh pronunciation, "DOR-sitt." "The name is French, and I liked the sound of it that way. It wasn't as if I had changed my name to some exotic African name. I just wanted it pronounced the way I liked it pronounced," said Dorsett.
In his very first week in Dallas, Dorsett got into a fight at a disco. Harassed at the door and made to wait while white men and women brushed by him, he steamed. When he was finally admitted, he approached a woman to dance, she accepted, and after the song ended he took her to the bar for a drink. The bartender served him then asked him to take his companion and drinks elsewhere. Dorsett refused. The bartender called him a "nigger son of a bitch" and the two men squared off. The disco's manager eventually intervened, the police were called, and Dorsett was charged with two counts of assault. The charges were later dropped.
Dorsett continued to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Whenever a fight broke out around town," he once said, "it seemed that I happened to wind up in the middle of it all." Tex Schramm called him into his office for a talk. But to little avail. When asked about Dorsett's troubles, quarterback Roger Staubach recalled that "being an outspoken black man in Dallas wasn't easy then. If he had been white, perhaps a lot of what happened would have been overlooked."
When the 1977 training camp opened, Dorsett was shocked to find a distinct separation between white and black players. "All through high school and at the University of Pittsburgh, all the black and white guys hung around together. We partied like friends. We liked each other. On the Cowboys there were black and white cliques." Landry's system added to his discomfort. At the most basic level, it was counterintuitive to him.
"As you're coming up in football as a kid, 'even' is to the right and 'odd' is to the left," he once said, "there were times in those workouts when I was tired and my concentration lapsed, and I'd find myself going back to my old ways." Dorsett didn't like all of the contact in practice either. He was used to walking through plays at Hopewell and Pitt without being hit, but at camp he took a beating and for the first time suffered an injury that kept him off the field. He missed the entire preseason.
The put-on seriousness turned him off, too. Dorsett like to goof around with one of his fellow rookies, wide receiver Tony Hill. They were quickly dressed down by a veteran: "This is football, not kindergarten." For Dorsett, treating the game as business took the heart and fun out of the team equation. Every player was so intent on making sure his individual performance satisfied the computer that there was little chance of guys joining together and being better than the sum of their parts. The Cowboys were sterile. The one exception was the receiver coach, former Cowboys tight end Mike Ditka. "In a game in Pittsburgh, one of our receivers was bumped out
on the sidelines," said Dorsett. "One of the Steelers piled on with a late hit. Although a flag was thrown and Pittsburgh was penalized, it didn't calm Mike Ditka down much. He picked up the football and fired it at the head of the guy who had made the late hit. Coach Landry didn't appreciate that show of emotion."
Dorsett didn't fit in, and Landry had no intention of bending the rules to accommodate him. He'd done that with Duane Thomas. Preston Pearson, the former Steeler who'd passed on Dorsett when he was scouting him as a possible recruit for Pearson's alma mater, the University of Illinois, was awarded the starting tailback position at the beginning of the season. Dorsett was put in sporadically, and in the first three games of the year, he'd only been given the ball twenty-one times. But the Cowboys were winning, and Landry seemed intractable about giving Dorsett more opportunities.
Dorsett's off-field troubles continued. He was stopped by the highway patrol, which discovered that a woman sitting in his passenger seat had a stash of cocaine in her purse. And there were many incidents that Cowboys management kept quiet. Gil Brandt let him know that he was being monitored: "Tony, I hear you were at [such and such a place] last night." Eventually, Schramm sent Dorsett to New York to have a sit-down with Pete Rozelle. The commissioner diplomatically warned him about the risk to his career if he continued his path. Dorsett ignored all of it. As far as he was concerned, if the Cowboys wanted him to sit on the bench and rob him of the satisfaction he felt on the field, he was at least going to have a good time in his off-hours.
Realizing that his icy approach wasn't working, Landry finally called Dorsett into his office in the middle of the season and dressed him down. He told his troubled number-one pick that he was disappointed in the way he was working out. Dorsett was unmoved and told him he had decided to ride out the season and think about next year. Landry needed Dorsett to hit his stride going into the playoffs. Preston Pearson was still starting, and would prove to be a talented third-down specialist, but there was little doubt that his best years running the ball were behind him. Landry's strategy of keeping his cocky rookie down to break him into the Cowboy mold had backfired. He knew that his best hope for another Super Bowl was an age-old coach-player deal: "If you showed some intensity in practice, some more hard work, it might be different." Dorsett got the message. "After that conversation with Tom, I decided to run my butt off all the time in practice and show him and the other coaches and players that I meant business." This gave Landry an excuse to bench the hard-working Preston Pearson.
Dorsett's first professional start was in Pittsburgh against the Steelers in the tenth game of the 1977 season. He ran for seventy-three yards and a touchdown and caught four passes for thirty-seven yards. But the Steelers beat the Cowboys 28-13. Two weeks later, Landry called Dorsett's number twenty-three times against the Philadelphia Eagles. The critics were finally silenced. Dorsett ran for a Cowboys-record 206 yards, including an eighty-four-yard touchdown. Roger Staubach admitted, "If it hadn't been for Tony Dorsett, we would have lost. A couple of years earlier we lost games like that. It showed the Cowboys that when the rest of the team was not playing particularly well, we could still win because we had Tony Dorsett as a weapon."
Dorsett finished the regular season with 1,007 yards and was named the NFL's Rookie of the Year. After nine games on the bench to begin the year and below-average carries for a featured running back (the Steelers' Franco Harris was handed the ball more than three hundred times, while Dorsett had just over two hundred carries), his production exceeded everyone's expectations. Dorsett and Landry had reached a detente. As long as he performed on the field, his head coach would look the other way. Landry had learned the hard lesson with Duane Thomas. Sometimes you have to leave the gifted alone.
A former Cowboy had been watching Dorsett's career with keen interest. "One night I was having a party," Dorsett remembered, "and all of the sudden the doorbell rang. We wondered who could be calling at that hour of the night. I went to answer the door. There was Duane Thomas, standing all alone in the darkness."
44
EDWARD SADLOWSKI'S USWA TICKET WAS A RAINBOW coalition--Ignacio "Nash" Rodriguez for secretary, Andy Kmec for treasurer, Oliver Montgomery for vice president of human affairs, and Marvin Weinstock for vice president of administration. While their multicultural Fight Back! message appealed to the national media, it was the black and white campaign poster that brought film crews, magazine profilers, and television cameras on the campaign trail.
The poster featured Sadlowski on the left side of the frame. Wearing a white crewneck T-shirt beneath a blue open-at-the-collar work shirt, and covered by a worn dungaree coat, he looked liked he'd just gotten home from the blast-furnace graveyard shift. His eyes were a thousand miles away and a five o'clock shadow covered his neck and jaw. The right side of the frame was the grim yet comforting view of a mill. Smokestacks rising out of tin sheet-covered rolling mills on the banks of a steel-gray river. The photograph could have been taken in Chicago, Gary, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, or Baltimore. Sadlowski looked like a man with a vision, ready to put the industry on his back and take it to new heights. The subtext was, I'm one of you, and I've got a mission.
Sadlowski wanted to bring democracy to the USWA. He'd change the union's bylaws so that the rank and file could ratify the USWA contract. The local union elections, which had long ago become as fixed as a banana republic's, would mean something under Sadlowski, too. They had always been treated as lifetime-achievement awards for guys who hadn't been inside a mill for years. He wanted the local leaders to come directly from the shop floor. Sadlowski would kick out the 600 USWA staff reps who colonized Five Gateway Center in favor of new blood from the locals. Those would be the guys invading Pittsburgh for executive board meetings. Not the lawyers and stuffed suits that McBride favored. There would be lively debate and communication between the leaders and the workforce, not decrees issued from a corporate tower. And most of all, Sadlowski would give the men back the only tool they had to confront their bosses--the strike.
The New York Times Magazine characterized Sadlowski as "a rebel candidate for president of the steelworkers (that) wants to take his union--and the whole labor movement--back to the class struggle." Meet the Press interviewed him, as did Phil Donahue and Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. Sadlowski attracted liberal icons to his cause. Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Kennedy advisors Theodore Sorensen and Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith were identified as supporters of his campaign. Momentum was building.
Pete Seeger waived his fee and agreed to come to Homestead for a concert to support Sadlowski's campaign. On a frigid January night in 1977, Seeger took the stage at Homestead's dilapidated Leona Theater. Behind him was a mural of the 1892 Homestead Strike. There were so many steelworkers jumping up and down with Imp and Iron-fueled joy that Pat Coyne worried that the balcony would fall. Rolling Stone's Joe Klein covered the concert and rhetorically wondered if it might be "the beginning of a new era in trade union activism, or just a momentary indulgence in nostalgia?"
But all was not rosy for Sadlowski. A supporter in Texas was shot in the neck distributing his literature, and Sadlowski's opponent, Lloyd McBride, accused him of being a communist posing as a steelworker to overthrow the union. The old guard wasn't pulling any punches, and tension in Pittsburgh rose to new heights. Lawyer Tom Geoghegan, a volunteer consultant, was in a clubby businessman's bar one night near U.S. Steel headquarters with a bunch of Sadlowski people, "not socializing with them, just in the same bar with them." Geoghegan recalled, "I turned to my friend Betsy, but she was just watching as Pat Coyne over at the bar was picking up people by the hair."
The USWA's 1977 election held no less than the future of industrial America in its hands. Sadlowski's people believed that if the steelworkers didn't get one of their own in the top spot, their USWA leadership would blindly lead them to the slaughterhouse. A. H. Raskin, the assistant editor of The New York Times' editorial page, presciently commented in 1972, "The basic membership re-education essenti
al to thoroughgoing changes remains undone. It is easier to keep doing things the familiar way, even if the end of the road is economic suicide."
The Steelworkers Fight Back! movement wasn't interested in suicide. If their jobs were going to be killed, they would hit Big Steel with everything they had before going down--maybe even take over the mills themselves.
But even with across-the-board liberal support, Sadlowski's campaign was a huge Hail Mary. With Abel's aggressive recruitment of other trade unions into the USWA fold, steelworkers accounted for only 40 percent of the dues-paying membership. Just to have a chance, Sadlowski would have to take all of the basic steel membership ballots and hope for a low turnout among the USWA's "Chock full o'Nuts" waitress rank-and-file crowd.
McBride's men could do the math, too--1.5 million dues-paying USWA members minus 400,000 actual steelworkers did not add up to zero. Even if the entire steel industry went under, there would still be enough income for the USWA to soldier on. While the staff reps at Five Gateway Center were sympathetic to the rank and file, they had families, too. They had bills to pay and wives and kids who depended on them to provide. The entire U.S. economy was in freefall. If Sadlowski won, they had no doubt he'd fire them. If McBride won, their jobs were secure. Whether or not the United Steelworkers of America had any steelworkers made little difference anymore. It was every man for himself.
A month before the election, a four-color photo of an exhausted Ed Sadlowski along with an eight-page interview appeared in the January 1977 issue of Penthouse. He didn't look like his campaign poster. He was in a garish paisley shirt and an ill-fitting leisure suit, and his expression was no longer rugged confidence--he was no longer looking into the far distance. He seemed to be lost, looking directly into the camera, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the moment. It wasn't until after Pat Coyne read the interview that he realized that Ed Sadlowski was not afraid of losing, but rather terrified he'd win.
The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s, and the Fight for America's Soul Page 23
