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

by Chad Millman; Shawn Coyne

  Sadlowski attacked America's manufacturing economy. "First of all, to start an industrial society, you have to capture people," he explained. "You get a bunch of immigrants without any legal resources and you put them in plants. You make language a barrier. If they strike, you beat their heads in. Or you try psychic blackmail, coming up with some Calvinistic scheme whereby the worker will think he's saving his soul by becoming an ox who works from sunrise to sundown . . . you make propaganda about the moral stamina involved in becoming a slave. You surround it with the glamour of the American dream." After referring to steelworkers as slaves, he did something worse. He pitied them. "The poor motherfucker who works for forty years and has nothing to show for it, who feels his whole life has been wasted--he'll disprove that bullshit in forty seconds." Asked how he would change the union, he argued for the same thing Big Steel thought would solve all the problems: technology. "With technology, the ultimate goal of organized labor is for no man to have to go down into the bowels of the earth and dig coal. No man will have to be subjected to the blast furnace. We've reduced labor forces from 520,000 fifteen years ago to 400,000 today. Let's reduce them to 100,000."

  Coyne couldn't believe what he was reading. To Ed Sadlowski, being a steelworker was the equivalent of being an ox? He wanted to shed jobs? What kind of message was that? They were going to take Gateway Center and knock some heads together, bring the union to the membership, what happened to that? Coyne couldn't help but think that "the poor motherfucker wasting forty years of his life with nothing to show for it" would be him. Mike Olszanski, an Inland Steel vet and coeditor at Steel Shavings magazine, remembered how Sadlowski faced the criticism: "You know, I was half asleep, riding on a plane, this guy's got me pumped full of booze, and I don't remember what I said." Coyne had heard the same thing from Ed, but he never forgot the Latin that the brothers at Central Catholic had pounded into his head: in vino veritas.

  Coyne pushed hard in the final months of the campaign, the tension in his blood rising. It culminated at a local union hall in late November. A couple of Fight Back! supporters weren't being let in to their own building. They called Coyne, who got out of bed and drove six miles to the hall on Carson Street. A friend named Pete Mamula met him there and covered Coyne's back as he let loose on the McBride men barring the door. Pittsburgh police came with their attack dogs, and then Coyne got into a Jack Lambert linebacker crouch, inviting the dogs to come and get him. He let loose a primal growl fed by the years of hard work he feared would amount to nothing. The German Shepherds didn't even sniff him. His wife's alarm clicked on at 6:00 A.M. with KDKA's top news story--a wild man raising hell at a union hall. She grabbed her purse, put on her coat, and was out the door before the traffic and weather.

  On February 10, 1977, The New York Times reported that Sadlowski had gotten 44.6 percent of the 600,000 ballots cast. The fight had been lost.

  45

  THE RAIDERS WEREN'T DONE PILING ON THE STEELERS. Knocking Swann unconscious wasn't enough. Ending their season wasn't enough. The words "criminal element" lingered long after Noll said them in reference to Atkinson. In December 1976, Atkinson, with the support of Davis, filed a $3 million lawsuit against Noll for slander, saying in the suit that the remarks were made "for the sole purpose of causing him punishment, embarrassment, and disgrace." Depositions were taken that April, and Dan Rooney was told by his insurance company to just settle the whole mess for $50,000. He refused. They'd go to trial that July in San Francisco, just as training camp was about to start.

  The Steelers had other troubles. Mel Blount, the 1975 defensive player of the year and 1976 Pro Bowl MVP, announced before camp that he was holding out for a new contract. Lambert held out, too. And then the lawsuit went to trial. On the witness list: Chuck Noll, Terry Bradshaw, Jack Ham, and Rocky Bleier. In other words, more players missing more camp.

  It was a fiasco, and not just because of the lost practice. During his cross-examination, Noll was forced to admit that players like Joe Greene, Blount, and Glen Edwards were part of the criminal element, too, because of their dirty play. Upon hearing that while holding out in his native Georgia, Blount announced he was going to sue Noll for $5 million. Even when Noll won, he lost. In late July, after a two-week trial, a jury dismissed Atkinson's suit. Later that day, Edwards announced he was unhappy with his contract. A week later, Lambert's agent declared that his client "wants to be traded." The war of words escalated in late August, when Noll announced his team captains and didn't include Lambert on the list. The capricious middle linebacker blasted his coach in the papers, who returned fire by saying Lambert didn't deserve to be a captain because he was a holdout.

  The careful, egoless ecosystem that Noll had built had been pierced. And even though Lambert and Blount reported to camp just before the season began, and the disgruntled Blount agreed to drop his lawsuit, the team was fractured. It was so obvious that the Chief felt it necessary to come down from the mount and make a case for unity. "This isn't like baseball," said Art Rooney Sr. "Baseball is an individual game. You can have eight players who dislike each other and the management, and they can still go up to the plate and hit. But this is a team game. Everybody has to work together."

  The Chief's speech didn't help. The Raiders came into Three Rivers the second week of the season and beat up the home team, forcing five turnovers in a 16-7 win. A few weeks later, Bradshaw broke his wrist and would spend most of the season playing in a cast. Edwards, who signed a new deal, decided he was still unhappy with his contract and left the team just days before a November loss to the Broncos. In December, the night before a game with the Bengals, Noll slipped on a patch of ice and broke his arm. The next day, the Steelers lost. For those who didn't know any better, who hadn't seen up close what a fortress of unity the Steelers had once been, it seemed like the sky was falling, literally. "Honestly," says Ted Petersen, a rookie offensive lineman that season. "I didn't want to practice because there was black soot raining down."

  The vibe on the team was different, more ornery and businesslike than it had ever been during Noll's era. Big personalities on the team, the throwbacks who treated the game like, well, a game, were disappearing. Hanratty went to Tampa Bay in the 1976 expansion draft. Mansfield and Russell were gone, too. But the Blount holdout, the Lambert holdout, and the fact that rookies like Tony Dorsett were getting million-dollar contracts while the veterans--three years after the strike--had to now fight well-heeled rookies for their jobs and management for every last dollar they felt they were due put a spotlight on issues that had been festering for years. Issues that were easy for coaches to squelch when Super Bowls were being won and parades were being held and rings were being handed out. But less so when players were losing and underpaid.

  As the stakes grew, so did the pressure to perform. And players looked for every advantage. There was a long tradition of players using amphetamines before games to, the players presumed, make themselves more alert and move faster. In locker rooms all over the NFL there were bowls of them, available to be gulped by the handful. The Steelers were no different. "I used them," says Russell. "I thought they would make me better." But when Noll took over the team in 1969, he discouraged players from taking speed. "He thought the pills made you play bad and kept you from using your brain," says Russell. "And he was right--I was much better player without them."

  Noll knew his players were using steroids, too. He wasn't unfamiliar with the drug. He had been a coach with the Chargers in 1963, when former U.S. weight-lifting coach Alvin Roy became the team's strength coach and introduced Dianabol to the team, the first evidence of its use in professional football. But he was suspicious of its usefulness. "He didn't know why players would use it," says Art Rooney Jr. "He thought it would make your nuts shrink."

  Still, unlike the shakiness and hyperactivity that came with amphetamines, it was harder to see the negative impacts of steroids. Players got bigger, they got stronger, they got better. "Chuck was a disciplinarian on the important things, mee
tings, practice, travel," says Mike Wagner. "But at times he kind of hid in his room, hoping no one was misbehaving. He wasn't always looking to enforce the rules."

  In the mid to late 1970s, as Arnold Schwarzenegger propelled the Mr. Universe contest into the mainstream and weight training became more popular, NFL players became more dedicated to weight lifting. It became a year-round commitment--training camps were no longer for getting in shape but for showing how hard you had worked out during the off-season. The Steelers were no different. While they had a weight room in the bowels of Three Rivers, a lot of guys trained on their own, in the back room of a restaurant called the Red Bull Inn, on the side of the road in the middle of Pennsylvania deer country. "Believe it or not, our facility wasn't as well outfitted as the Red Bull," remembers Petersen. "And since it wasn't downtown, we didn't have to fight traffic to get there."

  Jon Kolb worked out there. Mike Webster did, too. The smell of sweat mixed with the aroma of the steaks and chops coming from the Red Bull's kitchen. By 1977, with Ray Mansfield retired, Webster was now the Steelers' unchallenged starting center. And he was obsessive about his training, as he had always been. Growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, Webster had pushed a plow through potato fields. It taught him to get low, use his leverage, and drive his legs. And to work. When he was drafted by the Steelers in 1974, he was an undersized 225 pounds. But he was in the weight room every day, sometimes two hours before a game, pumping iron. Even when he became a perennial Pro Bowler, he'd come back from the game in Hawaii and coaches would find him running the steps in Three Rivers Stadium. "He was a compulsive individual," says Petersen. "No one out-trained him, no one outworked him."

  Every season, Webster seemed to get bigger. His biceps bulged against his tapered Steelers jersey. Soon, he had morphed from a proportioned 225-pound center into a hulking 255-pound specimen. Years later, espn .com reported. Webster admitted to physicians that he had used steroids. "We used to call it the scholarship program," says one former Steelers beat writer. "Before guys started using steroids they'd be 230 pounds. A year later they'd be 260 and chiseled."

  Still, who was using was rarely openly discussed. "It wasn't like they were handing them out in the locker room," says Moon Mullins. "You would look at people and wonder if they were 300 pounds and solid muscle, what was up. But it was a different era, it was more footloose and fancy free."

  "Here's an example of how little we knew about anything," says Petersen. "I remember looking at Time magazine as a rookie and it had a big article on cocaine and how it was a rich man's drug and that it was harmless. A buddy called and asked me if I was taking it, because he thought I had so much money."

  Into this disarray on the team that season entered Steve Courson, a fifth-round pick out of the University of South Carolina. Courson had been a dominant athlete at his Pennsylvania high school as both a linebacker and offensive lineman. But once he got to college, he found himself falling behind. He had heard about steroids while in high school, and during his freshman year at South Carolina, he began to take them regularly. "The team doctor just handed me a prescription," Courson wrote in his book, False Glory.

  Within a month of first trying them, the 6'5" Courson had pumped up from 232 pounds to 260, his bench press had increased from 400 pounds to 450, and he was running faster 40s than he ever had. He soon fell into a cycle that would continue throughout college. By the time he was drafted and heading to his first training camp with the Steelers, Courson was taking triple the amount he had used as a freshman. And he punctured the cloistered culture that had existed around the drug. "I am sure there were other guys on that team that used them," says Mullins. "But Steve was just so open about it. He was a hulking person with huge arms and huge chest, and you looked at him and [figured that] if he [was] that big, he must be experimenting with gorilla hormones. He was a student of this stuff--he did a lot of reading, and he had patterned some of the things that had been done in the 1950s with the weight lifters in the Olympics. That was his model."

  There were times that Courson's strength worked against him. On drive blocks for running plays, rather than pancaking defenders, Courson was so strong that opponents bounced off his hands, enabling them to keep their feet and slide back into the play. On more than one occasion, Bad Rad kicked him out of practice and told him to stop bench-pressing. "He was running faster and jumping higher and yet he wasn't the athlete the Kolb and Webster were," says Radakovich. "But we didn't know if what he was doing was good or bad or what the hell it did."

  No one did. Roy, the Chargers strength coach, went on to jobs with the Chiefs, Raiders and, from 1973 to 1975, the Cowboys. His successor in Dallas, Bob Ward, once estimated that 25 percent of his team, "maybe more," used steroids. But eventually, they'd all learn. Webster died of a heart attack at fifty. Jim Clack died of a heart attack at fifty-eight. Steelers defensive lineman Steve Furness, a suspected user, died of a heart attack at forty-nine. There were other players, on other teams--known steroid users--whose lives ended just as quickly and tragically. Ex-Raider Lyle Alzado believed his steroid use caused the brain tumors that eventually killed him. Bob Young, an All-Pro lineman with the Cardinals in the 1970s and an admitted user, collapsed from a heart attack at fifty-two. Courson, who bench-pressed 600 pounds at his strongest, was diagnosed with a heart ailment at the end of his career and became a staunch opponent of the drug. He wrote a tell-all about his use, testified before Congress, and did hundreds of presentations to high schools and colleges every year. Right up until he was killed at fifty, crushed while trying to save his dog from a falling tree that he had just chopped down.

  But even amidst the confusion, there were moments to build on. That year the Steelers drafted a quarterback from the University of Minnesota named Tony Dungy, whom they had decided to convert to safety. The day he got off the shuttle bus and arrived at the William Penn Hotel for team meetings that spring, he ran into a guy in a cowboy hat who sized him up and said, "You look like a rookie."

  "I am," Dungy responded.

  "I'm Mel Blount," the Pro Bowl corner said. "Let me know if you need anything."

  During camp Dungy backed up Donnie Shell, who, rather than shun the competition, invited the rook into his dorm room to talk about that day's practice. "I would sit there at night and ask questions," says Dungy. "He was explaining what you should do, and no one was worried about losing their job. They all wanted to get everyone ready to play because anyone might help. The offensive guys would come up after a play in practice and tell you how to line up."

  Dungy took note of the way Noll managed his practices and his players. "We had a wide variety of personalities on that team," says Dungy. "And that was his thing--he wanted you to be an individual as long as you functioned within the team concept. He didn't try to pigeonhole everyone. You could do it in your own way with flair as long it worked with the team."

  The teaching was constant, even for a sub like Dungy, a converted offensive player who made more mistakes than plays. "I would come off the field and he would ask me where my eyes were, and what was I thinking, and I know you know what to do but why didn't you get it done," says Dungy. "There was nothing accusatory, just questions to make me think about how to improve."

  The Steelers did win their division again, but had the AFC's fourth-best record. And it was indicative of their season that the historical footnote that emerged from that season was this: On October 30 against the Oilers, after Bradshaw and Kruczek were injured, Dungy was called upon to be the emergency quarterback. He already had an interception in the game as a backup safety. Then he threw one, too, becoming the only player since the AFL-NFL merger to accomplish that feat.

  46

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1977, ALMOST A YEAR AFTER ED SADLOWSKI lost the USWA election, Pat Coyne was out of a job. While Sadlowski settled back into a position as a rep for District 31, Coyne relied on his wife's salary as a grade-school music teacher. It was enough to pay the utilities and put tuna casserole on the table for his four kids. Bu
t his oldest daughter was a senior in high school and applying to the most expensive private colleges in the country. And she was smart enough to get accepted. How was he going to tell her she couldn't go? He had to keep it together not only for his family, but the steelworkers who kept showing up asking, "What am I going to do now, Pat?"

  Pittsburgh's steelworkers were barely hanging on. In October, USWA president Lloyd McBride went to Washington to meet with Jimmy Carter and his administration to complain about foreign imports. At a press conference prior to the meeting, McBride described Carter's attitude toward the steelworkers as "aloof." Carter wasn't all that interested in meeting with him in the first place, but relented after McBride reminded him that his union helped put him in office. "Our union has been suffering the most dramatic loss of jobs in the union's history," McBride told the press afterward. Asked to be more specific, he added, "Sixty thousand members of the union are receiving assistance from the federal government," a polite way of saying food stamps.

  Steelworkers would come by the Coyne's at all hours of the day and night, half in the bag and weepy. Ever the big wheel, Coyne would lend them money he couldn't spare.

  On Sundays, Coyne's house would fill with guys from all over western Pennsylvania. They'd bring Mickey's wide-mouth malt liquor and cheap potato chips, smoke nasty cigars, and watch Coyne rage at Terry Bradshaw on the console color television in the basement. One of the regulars, Pete Mamula, never tired of telling the story of when he and Coyne first met at the downtown Oyster House. "We're all sitting there and this huge figure steps up to the bar and lines up five shots of John Jameson whiskey. He takes out his Zippo and lights them, then knocks 'em back one after the other. The whole joint loved it! Coyne's drinking fire!"