The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  “When Ham showed up, Art Rooney thought the guy was a delivery boy because he was such an unimposing figure,” says Vito Stellino, who covered the Steelers for the Post-Gazette in the 1970s. “But he had such quickness when he diagnosed plays. That left side—with Greene and Greenwood, Ham and Blount—was unbelievable.”

  Ham’s greatest gift was his reaction to the ball. With the front four occupying blockers he was always able to get a clean jump on a short pass or a sweep to his side. Those ham hock-size legs churned through the patch of field he covered and made it a total dead zone for the offense. “I remember not being timed all that great in the 40 at Penn State,” says Ham. “But we were also clocked at ten yards, and at that I was very good.”

  Ham’s game was effortless, which freed his mind. During the end of the Steelers’ 1975 season-opening blowout win over the Chargers, Ham and Russell had been taken out. Along the sidelines, as the reserves finished out the game, Ham asked Russell how his investment-banking business was going. Russell, trying to watch the game, blew him off. So Ham started talking about the coal brokerage business he had started during the off-season. “There are so many different types of coal,” he started and then continued to describe them in detail. The Chargers punted. The Steelers took over. Franco Harris fell at Russell and Ham’s feet, but Ham kept on talking about coal.

  Then Bradshaw threw a pick and the linebackers coach put Ham back in the game. He ran onto the field, caused a fumble on the first play, ran back to Russell, took a knee, and picked up the conversation right where he had left off.

  That 1975 season, the Steelers did the same thing. The Super Bowl against the Vikings was just the beginning of the team’s ascent. After starting 1-1 in ’75, they went on an eleven-game win streak, not losing again until the last game of the season, when they already had the AFC Central title locked up. Through the first six games that season, Pittsburgh went 5-1 and the defense gave up more than a hundred yards passing just twice. They didn’t just win those first few weeks, they embarrassed teams. 37-0. 42-6. 34-3. The Steel Curtain was so unlike anything pro football had ever seen that Time magazine put Greene, Greenwood, White, and Holmes on the cover, calling them “Half a Ton of Trouble.”

  It wasn’t just the Steelers defense that dominated. Beginning with a 16-13 win over the Packers in the sixth week of the season, the Steelers went on a stretch where they gained more than two hundred yards on the ground in five of six games. The one time they fell short, they gained 183. Bleier, who had become a starter at fullback midway through the 1974 season, was the perfect blocking, battering, inside-running complement to Harris. He picked up yards in small bites, while Harris, with his long strides, ate them whole.

  They were helped along by some radical changes in the offensive line, beginning with the coach—Bad Rad. In January 1974, after two seasons at Colorado, Radakovich and the rest of the staff were canned. Looking for a job, he went down to the Senior Bowl, where he saw Noll in the lobby of a hotel. Radakovich told his old boss he needed work. Right there, Noll said, “You wanna coach our offensive line?”

  “I thought about it for thirty seconds,” says Radakovich. “Then I said, ‘Sure.’ I had played both ways in college. I knew I’d figure it out.”

  That first Super Bowl year the offense rarely found its rhythm. But in 1975, especially during its streak of two-hundred-yard rushing games, the Steelers offensive line provided protection worthy of the Secret Service. It wasn’t just the trap that helped the unit elevate its game. Or the installation of new personnel—Webster and Mansfield, for example, split duties at center. It was the techniques and tricks that Radakovich was teaching.

  One day during a film session, Radakovich noticed his linemen’s jerseys being held and tugged by defensive linemen. It reminded him that when he coached the defensive line he had taught his players to pull on players’ sleeves. To combat that, he asked Tony Parisi, the equipment manager, to tailor all of the offensive linemen’s shirtsleeves, making them as tight as possible around the chest and biceps. Parisi enlisted his wife to do all the sewing. Then Radakovich’s wife bought roll after roll of two-sided tape and before games any slack left over in the jerseys was taped down.

  Another innovation was making his players buy the padded gloves, at $100 a pop, that boxers wore when they were in training. The most important move for an offensive linemen is that first explosion off the ball and the pop with his hands into the opponent’s chest. That turned palms into hamburger. And if players compensated by using their fists instead, they’d find their knuckles breaking against shoulder pads and helmets. “He was ahead of his time and made us feel like the aggressors,” says Mullins. “That and the fact that Bad Rad was a maniac. He made me stay after practice once and he was holding these pads, like gladiator shields, but he didn’t have any pads on himself. He was making me hit him and we went for half an hour nonstop. I was just trying to knock his ass off and he kept goading me. Finally, I stepped in a hole and fell and he was bragging that he put me down. Two days later he showed me his body and it was black and blue all over. He said his wife was going to kill me for beating him up.”

  By the middle of 1975, the Steelers offense had become the defense’s equivalent. In early November, at 6-1, the team was still in a three-way tie for first with the Bengals and the Oilers, and Houston was up next at Three Rivers. Joe Greene was out with an injury. L. C. Greenwood would leave the game with a sprained ankle. And with less than a minute remaining, the two teams were tied at seventeen, after the Steelers blew a ten-point lead.

  Pittsburgh had the ball on its own twenty-two, nearly the length of the field ahead of it. These were the moments that sent Noll into an empty place. For all the reserve and calm and intellect he displayed during practice, his lack of control of the games—the time when he knew it was all up to the players—forced him to actually lose it. Players often heard him muttering to himself. Especially when the game was in Bradshaw’s hands. But that season, Bradshaw seemed more at ease than ever before. Winning a Super Bowl had helped. “There was nothing anyone could say about him anymore,” says Greene. Some players also believed that being forced to sit and watch and earn back his job during the switcheroo with Gilliam had helped Bradshaw, too. “His biggest advantage was when he was forced to come back,” says Bleier. “He was a tall, strapping good-looking guy, always a great athlete, so natural it all came easy, he was never short, never fat, never second-guessed himself. He became one of the guys sitting on the bench in the locker room, he sat around and bullshitted with us.”

  The Steeler huddles, which had been a raucous affair, with Stallworth and Swann screaming that they were open and Mansfield and Webster trying to dictate what plays to call, became more focused and directed. “They were Brad’s,” says Mullins. “He was in control.”

  As he was that day against Houston. Calmly, methodically, Bradshaw moved the Steelers down the field. He ran once for eight yards. He threw it three more times for sixty-eight yards. That included a twenty-one-yard, game-winning touchdown pass to Stallworth. For the day he completed 17 of 28 passes for 219 yards and three touchdowns. For the season, at that point, he had ten touchdowns and just four interceptions. It was the fiftieth win of Chuck Noll’s career, and it put the Steelers on the path to another AFC Central title.

  38

  BEFORE HE RETIRED AT THE END OF 1976, I. W. ABEL COMMITTED to securing his legacy. And to get through the rough patch the steel industry was experiencing, he felt it was more important than ever to keep in close contact with the manufacturers.

  Abel could see the inevitable necessity of giving back some of the wage and benefit guarantees he’d gained. The USWA’s own in-house economic advisor, Edward Ayoub, estimated that the costs of labor (hourly wage, plus health plan, plus pension) would reach $22 to $25 per hour in 1982. The day was rapidly approaching when the steel companies would revert to Henry Clay Frick tactics—give us concessions or we’ll shut down the plant. What the USWA needed was unity, not internal bad b
lood. Its new president had to be pragmatic, or the entire U.S. Steel industry would be exported to Germany and Japan.

  While Ed Sadlowski was a pain in his ass, Abel couldn’t deny that he was reaching the rank and file. His “Steelworkers Fight Back!” campaign gave the out-of-work a chance to vent a lot of pent-up frustration. But it wasn’t pleasant to be vilified—Abel had been just like Sadlowski in 1936 and 1965—and he certainly didn’t like Sadlowski’s rhetoric, or the fact that he made his name by attacking Abel’s leadership. He claimed that Abel was so in bed with the steel manufacturers—eating expensive lunches at the Duquesne Club and sharing limousines in Washington—that Big Steel had rendered the USWA powerless. Sadlowski charged that Abel couldn’t care less about the man on the shop floor. In his ten years as president, Abel had hiked up union dues but had never given the man on the job the right to even ratify his own contract.

  The USWA scheduled an executive meeting in upstate New York just prior to the 1976 national convention. Nominations for a new administration had to be decided. If it would bring the old-timers and the upstarts together, Abel would reach out to Sadlowski and get him into what Abel’s men referred to as the union’s “official family.” Abel was looking at fellow 1936 SWOC veteran Lloyd McBride for the top spot. Maybe, he thought, he should put Sadlowski on the ticket as vice president.

  But before he did anything, he was going to extract a little public blood from the kid. “The second afternoon of the meetings Abel pulls out this big file of papers and starts reading insulting stuff I had said about him. He developed this theme of one big lie, saying I said stuff so often that people were believing it, like Hitler,” Sadlowski remembers, “I said, ‘Well, the things I’ve been saying are not lies.’

  “Then Abel shifted gears and started saying there had been too much divisiveness and we ought to close ranks,” Sadlowski recalled, “For two more days they were feeding me, softening me up, shaking my hand and then offering to let bygones be bygones and have me join the club.” The whole time Sadlowski considered his supporters, laid-off workers desperate to stand toe-to-toe with the corporations that held their fate in their hands. He thought of Local 1397 president Ronnie Weisen in Homestead, who led a group of Sadlowski’s supporters into a downtown Mellon bank with a load of fish. They stuffed them in strongboxes to protest a source of U.S. Steel’s capital and the anything-for-a-buck attitude of Big Steel.

  And then there was Pat Coyne. Coyne was still an employed USWA staff rep, but he’d made so many enemies at work supporting Sadlowski that no one would get in an elevator with him. He stopped going into the office and was spending more time at confession than he did at Five Gateway Center. At that moment, he was talking with a concert promoter in New York to bring folk-singer activist Pete Seeger into Homestead for a Fight Back! benefit. If Sadlowski abandoned the movement, Coyne would be out of work with a wife and four kids to support and probably black-balled from the unions.

  After another make-nice session, Sadlowski stood and looked Abel directly in the eye. “I’ve listened,” he said. “Now it’s my turn. I don’t want things to continue the way they’ve been either. But let’s go back to day one. You’ve lied, cheated, deceived, connived, stuffed ballot boxes . . .” Abel’s eyes glazed over. The rest of the board sighed as Sadlowski ranted. Then a Canadian representative turned red. “It’s obvious, Sadlowski, that President Abel threw out the olive branch and you stuck it up his ass.”

  That was the end of the peace process. In September 1976, Sadlowski announced his candidacy for USWA President.

  39

  AS THE PLAYOFFS BEGAN, THE STEELERS WERE NOT NEARLY the same team that, a year before, had been expected to lose its opening-round playoff game. They scored more points and gave up fewer points than in 1974. Lynn Swann, who had just eleven catches as a rookie, had eleven touchdowns in his second year. The D-line led a team that recorded a league-high forty sacks. Eight of eleven starters on defense went to the Pro Bowl. That opening-round game, a ho-hum, exactly-what-was-expected 28-10 win over the Colts, was actually memorable for just one thing: the invention of the Terrible Towel.

  It was radio announcer Myron Cope who thought of the idea. Once upon a time, before becoming the man who was as associated with the Steelers as any Rooney, Cope had been one of the nation’s most glorious sportswriters. His writing was no different than his talking, full of humor and insight that pulled on your eyelids and gave you no choice but to pay attention. He wrote for the papers in Pittsburgh and for Sports Illustrated, and he wrote books. In 1963 his magazine profile of Cassius Clay was named the nation’s best. But at heart he was a lifelong Pittsburgh guy who loved the Steelers. He was the high-pitched, record-scratching voice of the team, shouting out “Yoi” and “Double Yoi” with every big run or dropped ball. His game calls were stream-of-consciousness poetry—fueled by the cigarette hanging between his fingers.

  The towel wasn’t born from in-the-booth inspiration, though. It was plain old duty. His radio bosses told him to think of a gimmick for the upcoming playoff game with the Colts. “I don’t do gimmicks,” Cope told them.

  “Your contract is up in three months,” they responded.

  “I love gimmicks,” said Cope.

  On his nightly sports broadcast, he told fans to bring yellow dish towels to the game. “The Terrible Towel is poised to strike,” he said. “If you don’t have one, buy one, and if you don’t want to buy one, dye one!” Then he threw towels at the faces of the weatherman and the two anchors sharing his desk.

  The power of Cope’s voice was such that, on a wet Sunday afternoon, more than thirty thousand Steelers fans carried Terrible Towels into Three Rivers for the game against the Colts. But after the easy win, everyone—fans, players, Cope—knew it would take more than towels to win the AFC Championship. That’s because the Steelers were playing a familiar foe: the Raiders.

  For years there had been rumors circulating around the NFL that Al Davis, in order to give his plodding running backs an advantage over speedier teams, had instructed his grounds crew to soak the Raiders’ home field the night before games. Come Sunday, even with a bright northern California sun burning high in the sky, football would be played on a slow, sloppy track. No one ever proved it. But the conspiratorial Davis remained convinced that teams were always looking to retaliate. Teams, for example, like the Steelers.

  The night before the Steelers-Raiders AFC title game, Dan Rooney was at an NFL-hosted party inside a fancy club at Three Rivers. The club had picture windows with a great view of the field below and, on this wintry night, it was easy to see the sleet being blown sideways by the Ohio River-driven wind swirling around the inside of the stadium. Rooney became so worried the turf would freeze over that he called his grounds crew and had them put a tarp on the field in the dark of night, as well as high-powered heaters to keep ice from forming.

  Problem was, the wind ripped the tarp in half long after the party had ended and the crew had gone home. Water seeped in and collected along the sidelines, where it froze into skid-friendly slicks of ice. Those happened to be the spots where the Raiders receivers, who loved running sideline patterns, spent most of the game. “Our game was to throw the deep ball,” Davis once told NFL Films. “With that ice we had to narrow the field. I’ll never forget Pete Rozelle saying to me, ‘Well it’s the same for both sides.’ And I said, ‘Goddammit, Pete, you don’t know what you are talking about—it’s not the same for both sides’.”

  This was the fourth consecutive year that these two teams had met in the playoffs, and the second straight time the winner would play in the Super Bowl. And the Raiders were feeling confident—if not in themselves, then in the fact that Joe Greene was expected to see limited time because of a pinched nerve. “We saw Jaws on our flight from the coast,” John Madden said before the game. “And that shark reminded me of Mean Joe.”

  But the two teams’ familiarity with each other, as well their shared contempt, combined with the subzero temperature, made for an ugly
game. “You couldn’t play perfect football,” Noll said afterward.

  They could barely play good football. There were nine fumbles in the game, including four in the span of eight plays. Three of those were recovered by the defense. Five other times quarterbacks threw interceptions—and one of those was fumbled, too. Through three quarters the score was 3-0 Steelers.

  What the game lacked in skill it made up for in violence. “The hardest hitting I’ve seen all season,” Noll said after the game. As hard as Lambert and Greene hit players, the Raiders secondary, led by safeties George Atkinson and Jack Tatum hit harder. One of Atkinson’s favorite maneuvers was something he named “The Hook.” As a receiver ran by, Atkinson would wrap his arm around the pass-catcher’s neck and fling him to the ground. And the elegant Lynn Swann had a neck that Atkinson was particularly fond of flinging.

  Swann was nettlesome to a defense. He wasn’t very big and he played with the grace of a dancer. But he spent much of his time careening through the middle of the field, making catches, getting pummeled, and then bouncing back up as though he were a cartoon character. That day against the Raiders he hadn’t been remarkably effective, catching just two passes. On the second one, as he drifted across the middle and caught the ball, Atkinson applied The Hook, throwing Swann to the turf, knocking him out cold and forcing yet another fumble. “I was out of the ball game and later on in an ambulance going to the hospital,” Swann once told NFL Films.

  But in that moment, he was unconscious on the frozen Three Rivers turf. And from the sidelines ran Joe Greene. He scooped Swann up in both arms like he would a sleeping child. But because of Greene’s pinched nerve, he struggled for a grip. Swann’s neck was exposed as his head lay back and one of his legs dangled freely while Greene struggled to maintain his hold. As he reached the sideline, teammates came to Greene’s and Swann’s aid, as Greene’s arm went dead and the limp Swann nearly tumbled back onto the field. Years later, Swann would give Greene an autographed copy of that picture saying, “Thank you.” Greene told him, “I appreciate it, but really, I just didn’t want the team to waste a time-out.”