The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  And that first game he played like he belonged, completing 17 of 31 passes for 257 yards, including a sweet, rainbow of a bomb to Lynn Swann that went for a fifty-four-yard touchdown, in a 30-0 win over the Colts. Noll, who let his quarterbacks call their own plays, tried to ignore the thirty-one passes. Instead, he focused on the Steelers’ first shutout since 1972.

  But in the next game, a 35-35 tie with the Broncos, Gilliam threw the ball fifty times. That was twelve more than the any Steelers quarterback had thrown in the first two games combined the season before. While Gilliam was being hailed as the league’s greatest new gunslinger—he was Sports Illustrated’s cover man after the Colts game—Noll was quietly stewing. Gilliam was most comfortable in chaos, when the game played out like pinball, with the ball careening around at laser speed and him reacting. He had a zest for throwing the ball, and his was as pretty a ball as there was in the NFL. But he also played with the same desperation that forced him to cross the line. Being a third-stringer, being a black quarterback, and being Joe Gilliam and not Joe Namath all conspired against his better nature. And his freelancing—throwing from his shoulder, throwing with both feet in the air—defied the carefully calibrated plans that Noll had established. He had tailored his game plan, and his team, not just to his philosophies, but to the rules established by the NFL. The way to win was to run, not to gun.

  But Gilliam consistently brushed him off when Noll asked for running plays. The third game of the season was against Oakland. And this time the Steelers were shut out, 17-0, their first goose-egg loss in ten seasons. By now, the word was out on Gilliam. There’d be no running game when he was calling the plays. Against the Raiders he completed just 8 of 31 passes. Several times on third and short he ignored Harris in the backfield and tried to throw into the teeth of the Raiders D. At one point Noll told Bradshaw to start warming up and, when he did, fans started cheering and chanting, “We want Bradshaw!” No one in Pittsburgh had said that since 1970.

  But Noll didn’t pull the trigger. Instead, he gave Gilliam more time to develop the talent that was obviously there. In return there was only frustration. Two more picks in a nail-biter win against the Oilers. The next week he threw twenty-three incompletions in a win against the Chiefs, and the week after that he went just 5 for 18 for sixty-six yards in a 20-16 squeaker over the Browns.

  The Steelers were now 4-1-1 to start the year. But the quarterback situation had turned ugly. Bradshaw asked to be traded and practically went into hiding. He didn’t go to restaurants or read the newspaper, for fear of what he’d read. “He was going home, being alone, staying in his apartment,” remembers Greene.

  Meanwhile, Gilliam received death threats. It wasn’t just about who was the better player, Gilliam or Bradshaw. The underlying issue was always the color of Gilliam’s skin. When he appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated after that season-opening win against the Colts, Gilliam wasn’t just tagged as the Steelers quarterback. He was “Pittsburgh’s Black Quarterback.” The death threats he received weren’t because he was playing badly; they were because he was black and playing badly. While Noll didn’t set out to be a groundbreaking coach, he had inadvertently become one. Gilliam was the first black quarterback to win an opening-day start. And Noll had to consider the consequences of benching a black quarterback who had won four of his first six games for a white one most people knew he didn’t trust.

  Everyone seemed to have an opinion. Dwight White openly backed Gilliam. John Henry Johnson, a Hall of Fame Steeler running back, lobbied in the Courier for Hanratty. Joe Greene, who had become close with Bradshaw during the players’ strike, wanted his fellow number-one pick. “Bradshaw was really struggling with all this,” says Joe Gordon, the Steelers’ PR man at the time. “It was Joe who took him under his wing, took him to dinner, said everything would be okay.”

  “I didn’t think about it as anything other than Terry gave us the best chance to win,” says Greene. “The controversy was in the air, it was on the airwaves, there was madness. But there wasn’t any in the locker room.”

  “White guys loved black guys, black guys loved white guys,” says Hanratty. “Swann and I would bet on USC and Notre Dame. We all truly liked each other. If someone had a party, everyone showed. Back then everyone was poor, so color meant nothing on our team. Joe Gilliam was talking about how poor he was and his dad was a coach. My dad had W2s that had $2,500 for the year.”

  Before that seventh game of the season, against the Falcons, Noll named Bradshaw his starting quarterback.

  His reign lasted three games, at which point Noll, who could tolerate Joe Greene throwing a ball into the stands during a game, could no longer tolerate Bradshaw. Despite winning two of those three starts, Bradshaw was replaced by Hanratty, who promptly went 5 for 15 with three interceptions in his one start. Afterward, even Noll recognized the folly of his ways and told reporters, “I just wish one of them would take the bull by the horns and win the job.”

  It wasn’t until the eleventh game of the year, a 28-7 win over the Saints in New Orleans, the site of that year’s Super Bowl, that the team’s lineup was set. Bradshaw didn’t win the job, but he would be the quarterback. And the next game, he promptly led the Steelers to a disappointing home loss to Houston. That week, Greene was so upset he held a players-only meeting and told his teammates that if they didn’t win the Super Bowl, he was quitting. Then, for emphasis, he grabbed all the stuff from his locker, packed it in a bag and walked to the parking lot. “But, really, what I was thinking was, Man, I hope someone comes to get me,” Greene says.

  You’d think, with all the turmoil and handwringing, that this was a team in a death spiral. But in fact, the Oilers loss was only their third of the season. The Steelers were actually on their way to clinching the AFC Central.

  The Steelers had a drill they ran during every practice. The first-string quarterback, running backs, and offensive line lined up against the defensive line, linebackers, and secondary. The Steelers defense would run the opponent’s scheme against their starting offense. And then the offense would run the opponent’s plays against the defense. But in the last five minutes of every practice, Perles, the defensive line coach, had Greene, White, Holmes, and Greenwood line up in what he called a Stunt 4-3. “George would put it out there and say, ‘Dick, try and beat it,’” says Hoak. “He’d say, ‘I don’t care what you call or what you do, try and beat it.’ So we tried to beat it and see what would work against it. There wasn’t a whole lot, but every once in a while we would come up with something that would gash some yards on it. So George would go back in and later that night he would tinker around with it.”

  The Steelers defense had been dominant that year, at times carrying the offense while it worked through its identity issues. But no one thought that would be enough during the playoffs. Heading into the postseason’s first-round matchup, in Three Rivers against the league’s best running back, O. J. Simpson, and the Buffalo Bills, Sports Illustrated wrote that the Steelers were the only playoff team without a quarterback and predicted they’d lose.

  This is when Perles unveiled his new defense. In most defensive alignments the linemen either set up in the space between offensive blockers or go head-to-head. Either way, the center was almost always left open. The theory for this kind of strategy was simple: It forced the offensive blockers to commit to a defensive player, making it more difficult for guards to pull or tackles to trap, unless those players were exceptionally fast. It also meant that linebackers had an easier path to the ball carrier, since the offensive linemen were occupied by their defensive counterparts. It was bland, but historically effective.

  Perles flipped it on its head.

  Holmes and Greene, the Steeler tackles, were not only exceptionally big but also remarkably fast. Their reaction time off the ball usually beat the blockers they faced. So he had them both line up in the gaps between the center and the guards on either side. Instead of waiting for the offensive line to attack them, they attacked the offens
ive line, and forced the guards to double team one of them with the center. To make matters worse, Greene lined up at an angle, making it more difficult for blockers to find something to grab on to, and Holmes added a stunt, meaning sometimes he’d slide over and dip behind Greene as he was occupied. Originally this was designed to be a pass-rushing scheme. Either Greene and Holmes would use their speed to split the blockers and have a shortened path to the quarterback, or they’d be double-teamed, leaving the defensive ends White and Greenwood in one-on-one situations.

  But instead, it became the definition of a Steel Curtain against the run. The alignment plugged the middle on every down. One of them was always there, blowing up the point of attack. It also made it nearly impossible for guards to pull, since it left either Holmes or Green unblocked at the snap, giving them an unabated route to the running back. It was a simple yet ingenious adjustment by Perles, like slicing bread. The only option available to the offense was a wide sweep. Against the Steelers, whom Noll had built for speed, that was not viable. “Joe set the tone for us in that stunt 4-3,” says Jack Ham. “He wouldn’t get sacks but he bought into it and that was a domino effect. He took a beating in that stunt turned toward the center because he had to be double-teamed, but it was our main defense.”

  That afternoon, O. J. Simpson rushed for just forty-nine yards, and the Steelers won 32-14. Leaving the stadium that day, Joe Greene’s wife said to him, “If you can hold O. J. Simpson under fifty yards, nothing can stop you now.”

  35

  THE HEDGE BUYING THAT I. W. ABEL FEARED AND TRIED TO stop would eventually wipe out western Pennsylvania’s workforce.

  Steelworkers slaved night and day, working overtime and double shifts to grind out as much finished product as possible, meeting the heightened demand from steel-dependent manufacturers prior to new union contract negotiations. But there was a funeral pall in every mill, on every shift. The workers knew that as soon as Abel announced a deal with Big Steel, at least a quarter of them would be laid off. The cycle was always the same: Demand for steel plummeted, the older generation got a big pay raise and the young guys were sent packing until demand came back. They wouldn’t be recalled for months, sometimes even a year.

  Like squirrels storing nuts in the fall, the workers stashed as much cash in their bank accounts as they could during the hedge season and prepared for the inevitable.

  At least the timing wasn’t bad. Contracts were always up in August, which meant layoffs came in the fall. And that meant tens of thousands of rabid Steelers fans had nothing to do from September to January but loaf in union halls and old-time Pittsburgh joints like Joe Chiodo’s tavern in Homestead. Chiodo’s was on Main Street, not far from the gates of the Homestead works. The specialty of the house was the “mystery meat sandwich,” which changed daily according to what Chiodo could get cheap in the strip district, Pittsburgh’s wholesale clearinghouse for meat and produce. Hung from the tavern’s rafters was an ancient collection of brassieres, along with a hodgepodge of unique Pittsburgh artifacts.

  A rite of passage for a Pittsburgh son was to walk into Chiodo’s with his father. The old man would order two and two (two drafts and two sandwiches) and the bartender would wink at the dad and tell the boy what each piece of garbage on the rafters meant. The stories were mostly about football players—Steelers like Johnny “Blood” McNally, Bobby Layne, and Ernie Stautner, some Pitt Panthers like Mike Ditka and coach Jock Southerland and a handful of high school stars—Johnny Unitas of St. Justin’s, Dan Rooney at North Catholic, and big Pat Coyne at Central Catholic. Around 1973, there were rumblings from regulars to take down Stautner’s and Ditka’s pictures. Stautner was the defensive coordinator for Tom Landry’s Doomsday Defense in Dallas, and Ditka was the Cowboys’ receiver coach. But Joe Chiodo would have none of it. Once on the wall, you were there for good.

  Joe Chiodo loved Art Rooney and his Steelers as much as he loved steelworkers. He used to explain to anyone who would listen, “When my father died, Mr. Rooney came to the wake. Can you imagine a guy like Art Rooney paying his respects to a poor immigrant who could barely speak English?” Chiodo loved Rooney’s team so much that he revived a tradition started by another tavern owner in the forties: Owney Mc-Manus’s “Ham and Cabbage” runs. McManus was a close friend of Art Rooney’s from their boxing days. He’d load a carful of his patrons onto the same train as Rooney’s Steelers when they played on the road. The boondoggles caught on and were named after the specialty of McManus’s tavern, “Ham and Cabbage.”

  Chiodo began his own runs to Steeler games in the sixties, filling cars and buses with steelworkers looking for an excuse to go on a weekend bender. One Sunday, the gang made the short trip to Pitt Stadium together. It was a typical Pittsburgh day, the sky pouring down a mixture of rain, ash, and soot onto every miserable soul who chose to step outside. By the beginning of the second half, only the well-oiled ticket holders remained. The Steelers were getting creamed. Chiodo’s gang took cover under the press-box overhang, sighing with each blown play. When one of them said “Fuck the Steelers” it wasn’t long before most of them joined in.

  Chiodo asked them to stop. He knew Art Rooney and his family sat in the press box. The steelworkers ignored him and added another line to the chant: “Fuck the Steelers . . . Fuck the Rooneys!”

  Chiodo lunged for the biggest loudmouth, but the giant had a much longer reach. He grabbed Chiodo by the throat and wouldn’t let go. The rest of the group came to their senses and pulled the leviathan off of Chiodo. But Chiodo’s tenacity had helped him make his point: The Rooney family never heard “Fuck the Rooneys” from a steelworker again.

  In the early seventies, Chiodo’s buses were joined by tens and sometimes hundreds of others on the road. And when a home game was blacked out on TV because Three Rivers wasn’t sold out, out-of-work steelworkers too poor to buy tickets would split cheap motel rooms in East Liverpool, Ohio, and Meadville, Pennsylvania. Any town outside the seventy-five-mile blackout radius. Those who couldn’t afford even that trip wound up in American Legion or VFW halls, appliance stores, or anyplace that had a television. Some entrepreneurial families in the boonies even rented out places in their living rooms to Steeler Nation.

  From road game to road game, laid-off hard hats chanting “Pittsburgh’s going to the Super Bowl . . . we’ve got a feeling,” became evangelists. Their faith sustained them.

  36

  THE DAY BEFORE THE STEELERS BEAT THE BILLS, THE RAIDERS had upset the Dolphins in Miami’s bid to repeat as Super Bowl champs. The game changed leads several times, including three times with between five and two minutes remaining. Then with two minutes left and trailing by five, Ken Stabler drove the Raiders down the field. With thirty-five seconds left from the Dolphins eight-yard line, the Snake dropped back and looked right. No one was open, so he scrambled left. As a Dolphin tackler grabbed both of Stabler’s shoetops from behind and he fell to the ground, the quarterback lofted the ball into the end zone. Between three Dolphins, the Raiders came down with the ball—and the last-second win. Afterward, in the heat of the moment, John Madden said, “When the best plays the best, anything can happen.”

  Madden wasn’t the only one who acted as if the Super Bowl had just been played. Nearly every newspaper in the country wrote about that second-round playoff game as though the rest of the season were a foregone conclusion.

  Chuck Noll disagreed. And that Tuesday, addressing his team for the first time since their win over the Bills, he let them know. “He didn’t raise his voice, but his voice changed,” Greene told NFL Films. “And he said, ‘The best team in the NFL didn’t play the other day, and the Super Bowl wasn’t played the other day. It’s being played in two weeks. And the best team in the NFL is sitting here in this room.’”

  “Joe Greene was sitting next to me,” Russell said to NFL Films. “He stood out of his desk chair, and it was almost stuck to his legs—the whole thing was turned sideways, because it’s a small school desk—and he looked like he was re
ady to play right there.”

  The animus between the Raiders and Steelers was fierce. They had knocked each other out of the playoffs the previous two seasons, and split two regular-season games. The Raiders were still bitter about the Immaculate Reception. One game, the Steelers players complained that the Raiders were greased up. L. C. Greenwood talked about how they were constantly trying to clip him. After Pittsburgh was shut out in Oakland in the second game of 1974, the Raiders cornerbacks taunted the Steelers and pointed to the scoreboard. “It was a blood feud,” Lynn Swann once said. “We disliked the Raiders. We had no respect for them.”

  It showed, even before the game began. While lounging in the hallway outside his locker room waiting to get taped, L. C. Greenwood watched the Vikings and the Rams in the NFC Championship, which was played before the Raiders-Steelers game. A Raider walked by and said, “Hey L.C., what are you watching?”

  Greenwood responded: “Just waiting to see who we’re going to play in the Super Bowl.”

  That week in practice, Greenwood, Greene, and White goaded Ernie Holmes every day, telling him how Gene Upshaw, the Raiders All-Pro guard, was going to make him look foolish. By the time the game started, Holmes—surrounded by black flag-waving Raider fans—couldn’t wait to butt his head into a Raiders helmet. As the Steelers lined up on defense for the first time, Holmes started yelling to Upshaw, who was still in the Raiders huddle and had his back to him. “Gene, Gene . . . Hey, Eugene!” Holmes screamed. When Upshaw finally turned around, Holmes said, just loud enough to be heard, “I’m going to kick your ass.”

  For most of the game, that wasn’t the case. It was 3-0 Oakland after one, 3-3 at the half and 10-3 Oakland after three quarters. But the Stunt 4-3 was wearing down the Raiders offense, keeping the score close until the Steelers could make a game of it. In the fourth, they finally did. Down a touchdown, Franco Harris ended a nine-play, sixty-one-yard drive with a nine-yard touchdown. On the next series, with the Raiders running game going nowhere, Stabler dropped back to pass and was picked off by Ham, who returned it to the Raiders nine. A Bradshaw to Swann TD pass gave the Steelers the lead for good.