The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  The game was in question until the final play, even though the Steelers had a 16-7 lead and the ball with less than two minutes to go. But with Bradshaw foggy from a hit to the head, Hanratty took the snap and fumbled. The Raiders recovered and, with seventeen seconds left, kicked a field goal to make it 16-10. Even worse for Pittsburgh, John Stallworth bobbled the ensuing onside kick and the Raiders had one last shot. But a Stabler completion to Cliff Branch fell short of the end zone, after the Raiders receiver slipped on the ice and was tackled trying to get out of bounds before the clock hit zero. For the second straight season, the Steelers were headed to the Super Bowl.

  “We’ll be bringing our golf shoes,” Ray Mansfield said of the impending trip to Miami. “Not our ice skates.”

  40

  SUPER BOWLS ARE BUILT ON HYPE. THERE HAS TO BE GLAMOUR. There has to be trash talking. There has to be inherent drama. And this one, featuring America’s Team versus the defending champs, the sophisticated oil barons versus the Imp-and-Iron (a Pittsburgh staple—it’s a shot of Imperial whiskey chased down by an Iron City beer) steelworkers, checked all the boxes. And the trash being spewed was especially inspiring. Swann hadn’t been out of the hospital more than a couple of days after getting hit by Atkinson when Cowboys safety Cliff Harris issued this backhanded warning: “I’m not going to hurt anyone intentionally. But getting hit again while he’s running a pass route must be in the back of Swann’s mind. I know it would be in the back of my mind.”

  This was no idle threat. Cowboys players had nicknamed Harris “Captain Crash.” They often worried that the free-hitting safety did not distinguish between friend and foe when someone was roaming in his area. He was so committed to the law of speed times mass equals power that he shed the standard pads safeties wore and replaced them with the lighter, smaller pads worn by kickers.

  “I read what Harris said,” Swann said in response. “He was trying to intimidate me. He needn’t worry. He doesn’t know Lynn Swann. He can’t scare me or the team. I said to myself, ‘The hell with it, I’m gonna play.’”

  Swann had been wobbly in the days leading up to the game. Doctors had told him they weren’t sure he’d recover in time to play, and they warned him that the effects of another hit like the one Atkinson delivered could turn his brain into mush. Noll didn’t even let him practice and listed him as doubtful on the injury report.

  But there were broader factors contributing to the animus between the two teams. As much as they had dominated that year, and even though they were the defending champs, the Steelers felt very much like the enemy. The Cowboys had started the year 4-0. They made the postseason for the ninth time in ten seasons, including two recent trips to the Super Bowl. They won some games by scoring loads of points. And others by stopping those who could. They had an All-American, Heisman-winning, Naval Academy-graduating pitchman of a quarterback, Roger Staubach, lofting bombs to a receiver whose first name was Golden. Even their cheerleaders had fans.

  The Steelers’ version of football was modern, but not all that far removed from the blood battles that had been taking place for the previous thirty years. See something, hit something—whether it was an opposing player or a hole in the offensive line. Noll used to preach not letting paralysis by analysis be your undoing. But the Cowboys were all about analysis.

  And the coach couldn’t have asked the engineers at Texas Instruments to create a better vessel to execute his plans than Roger Staubach. No. 12 was efficient, not flashy. Accurate, cool, calm, and collected. He didn’t just run plays, he perfected them. And people revered him for it. The Cowboys offense was an aerodynamic masterpiece.

  The saying was that Texas Stadium, home of the Cowboys, had a hole in the roof so God could watch his favorite team play. No one said that about Three Rivers, home to the Terrible Towel and ashen skies and sleet that stung the face like a hatpin. No one dreamed of growing up to work in a steel mill; everyone dreamed of being a Cowboy. “We took it personally that they were called America’s Team,” Mel Blount told NFL Films. “Who granted them that?”

  “The fans and media hype of that America’s Team is something we resented,” Bradshaw once said.

  None of the nine Super Bowls before had been as intense or full of hatred. To those watching and to those playing, this game felt more like a gang war, and it had all the vitriol that comes with it. The Cowboys thought they were superior to the Steelers. And the Steelers, even while defending the Lombardi Trophy, felt aggrieved. The game wasn’t just about winning or losing a title. It was about proving whose way was better. “They mess up your head too much,” Lambert had said before the game. “If they beat you, you feel like you’ve been tricked instead of whipped. I hate teams like that.” Lambert was even ticked about the Steelers’ standard accommodations in Miami—chosen by the NFL—compared to the Cowboys’ glamorous beachfront hotel in Fort Lauderdale. “I hope Staubach is eaten by sharks,” he told reporters during the week. All that turned it into a happening. The price for scalped tickets was the highest for any Super Bowl. The NFL granted more press credentials than it ever had. The cost of commercial time reached its all-time high, $110,000 for a sixty-second spot. Even Hollywood cashed in, using the game as the backdrop for scenes in the movie Black Sunday, in which terrorists blow up a blimp over the Super Bowl. “I remember walking out of the tunnel and seeing Robert Shaw, who starred in the movie, standing on the sideline, and I thought, oh man, the stars are even here,” says Bleier. “I had no idea they were shooting a movie that day.”

  The pregame warm-ups were pandemonium. The movie was shooting. The halftime act, Up With People, warmed up the Orange Bowl crowd of more than eighty thousand people. Someone had forgotten to put up the net behind the goalposts that Steelers kicker Roy Gerela was using for his practice kicks, so all of his balls kept drifting into the stands, where fans would run away with them. At one point he became so frustrated that he walked into the stands, in uniform, and grabbed a ball from a spectator. Other fans started shoving the kicker and security had to escort him back down to the field.

  It would get worse for Gerela.

  On the game’s opening kickoff, the Steelers kicker lofted the ball to Preston Pearson, the former Steeler who had signed with the Cowboys during the off-season. Pearson cradled it and then, using the trickery the Steelers so despised, handed the ball off to Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, the Cowboys first-round pick that year as a linebacker. At Henderson’s first press conference, reporters made the mistake of calling him Tom several times. Henderson stopped the session and said, “My name is Thomas. If my sister has a daughter, I don’t want her growing up to call me Uncle Tom.”

  He was brash and full of attitude and as fast as a sagebrush fire. Even though he barely played defense that rookie season, Henderson’s impact was felt on special teams, where he was split out wide on punt coverages. And he was the only linebacker in the league running the reverse on a kickoff. Which is how he scampered forty-eight yards, then a Super Bowl record, before being tackled by Gerela at the Steelers’ forty-four. Poor Gerela. On the play he injured his rib cage, which, along with his lack of quality practice time, affected him for the rest of the day.

  The Cowboys stalled, but on the next drive, following a blocked Steeler punt, Staubach connected with Drew Pearson on a twenty-nine-yard pass for the game’s first score. Standing on the sidelines, Bradshaw thought to himself, “We’re going to lose.”

  But in the following Steelers series, on his first pass of the game, Swann offered Bradshaw some confidence. “I decided if I was going to play I had to make the first catch,” Swann once told NFL Films. “I didn’t care where it was going to be, I had to make the first catch.” Even if it was practically uncatchable. From midfield, Bradshaw dropped back. Swann, lined up wide on the right side, was bumped toward the sideline by corner Mark Washington. Bradshaw lofted a deep, parabolic ball that looked like it was going to sail out of bounds. Swann tiptoed along the green turf, treading close to the white paint, perilously c
lose to falling out of play. At the last possible moment he leapt into the air, let Washington run by him as he reached back, and then grabbed the ball, which was about four feet out of bounds, back into play with his fingertips. He landed with a couple of toe taps and fell out of bounds for a thirty-two-yard gain. “Andy and I were kneeling down, and when Bradshaw threw that pass, it looked like he was just throwing it away,” says Ham. “Everything except Lynn’s two feet were out of bounds, and he twisted to bring it back in. Andy and I just looked at each other as if to say, ‘How did he do that?’”

  More important is what he did: He caught that first pass. And set up the Steelers’ game-tying touchdown, a Bradshaw-to-Grossman throw three plays later.

  The Cowboys answered with a field goal, and then the two teams settled into a slugfest. The Steelers drove toward midfield, and then Bradshaw was sacked. The Cowboys drove inside the Steelers’ twenty, and two sacks of Staubach pushed them back to midfield. Lambert was so caught up in the game that he ripped off his elbow pads and screamed that he wanted to hurt someone.

  Then, with a little more than three minutes left in the half, Bradshaw dropped back to his own goal line. Swann was sprinting on a fly pattern down the middle of the field, again with Washington trailing. At midfield Swann tipped the ball and jumped into the air. As Washington fell, grasping at Swann’s waist, Swann tracked the ball. He was parallel to the ground with his neck stretched toward the sky, and he put his hands up to his shoulders and, just before landing, cradled the ball into his chest. It was his second catch of the game.

  Unfortunately, this brilliant effort, unlike the first, would be wasted, as Gerela, fighting his rib injury, couldn’t get much lift on a thirty-six-yard field goal try with twenty seconds left and hooked a line drive to the left. At the half, the Cowboys led, 10-7.

  And the score stayed that way into the third, as Gerela lined up for another game-tying kick from the thirty-three-yard line. Before the play, on the sidelines, he had been grabbing his left side, trying to stretch it out. On the field, as he lined up the kick, he shielded his eyes from the glaring sun. And again, he missed. As Gerela hung his head, Cliff Harris, Captain Crash, tapped the kicker on the head and yelled into his face mask, “Nice going, that really helps us.” Lambert saw Harris taunting his kicker and, from behind, grabbed Harris by his shoulder pads and whipped him to the ground. “The ref said to me, ‘You’re out, Lambert. You’re out of this game,’” Lambert told NFL Films. “And I said, ‘Wait a minute, this is the Super Bowl—you can’t throw me out.’ He said, ‘Well, then, you get back in the huddle and just shut up.’ I said, ‘Yessir.’”

  “When he threw Cliff Harris down I ran on the field and chewed him out,” says Russell. “I was like, what are you doing, that’s stupid, you can’t do that or you’ll get thrown out of the game. I know the announcers said that turned us around. No it didn’t. He was being stupid.”

  But in the fourth quarter, the Steelers did chip away. First it was a safety off a blocked punt. Then a Gerela field goal. Then another field goal. And finally, up 15-10 with a little more than three minutes left in the game, the Steelers had the ball on their thirty-six-yard line. It was third and four, and the Steelers, with the most dominant rushing attack of the era, needed a first down to eat up more clock and seal a win. But in the huddle, Bradshaw called 69 Maximum Flanker Post. In other words: Go deep, Lynn Swann.

  Bradshaw, as he had been the Super Bowl before, as he had been during his entire career up to this point, was pestered with questions about his intelligence. No one made note of the fact that he called his own plays, while Navy genius Staubach only followed Landry’s orders. This game, this play, being better than Staubach when it mattered most, meant something to him.

  The Cowboys had the play read perfectly and Cliff Harris came screaming through a hole in the offensive line on a blitz. Just before he leveled his helmet into Bradshaw’s left cheek, the quarterback unloaded a ball that traveled seventy yards in the air. Waiting at the other end, on the Cowboys’ five-yard line, was Swann, who sauntered in for a touchdown.

  Bradshaw never saw it. He was severely concussed. “I was in the locker room and the game was just about over when I finally understood what happened,” he said afterward.

  The Cowboys didn’t quit, scoring on the next drive to make it 21-17. And then, with Hanratty playing in place of Bradshaw, and his team facing a fourth down and nine near midfield and a little more than a minute left, Chuck Noll decided to go for it and try to ice the game, rather than punt. His theory was simple: The Cowboys had already blocked a punt. But his defense was on the way to setting a Super Bowl record with seven sacks. He trusted his defense.

  He was right. When Staubach’s last Hail Mary pass fell incomplete, the Steelers were Super Bowl champs.

  Swann, who had been lying in a hospital bed pondering whether his days in football were over when the Super Bowl hype began, finished the day with four receptions, 161 yards, a touchdown, the game’s MVP and two career-defining catches. “I don’t care what kind of catch a guy makes if he beats me,” said his most frequent victim that day, Cowboys corner Mark Washington. “Swann just beat me one time too many.”

  “It was Camelot,” says then Post-Gazette Steelers beat writer Vito Stellino. “All they cared about was winning.”

  And that’s all they did.

  41

  THERE WAS LIGHTNESS DEEP WITHIN CHUCK NOLL. THERE was civility and etiquette and appreciation, too, all of it revealed in waves, when the consumption of football and practice had ended. His wife saw it. Their son did, too. It was evidence that he believed it when he told his players their existence after football would matter more than their existence during football, that he meant it when, as he cut them, he said, “It’s time to do your life’s work.”

  “After every Super Bowl he took all the coaches somewhere. We went to a place called Walker’s Cay in the Bahamas, and to Acapulco. He treated the whole staff and our wives,” says Dick Hoak. “We would go for a week. He was the boss but he was different there. He had this place on top of a hill in Acapulco and we would go up for cocktails at five o’clock and then go to dinner somewhere. He treated the wives like, wow, it was amazing. People called him Chuck Knox, he never wanted any fame, didn’t care who knew him other than what they knew about him as a coach. American Express wanted him to do something after the second Super Bowl and he said go get the players. His only motivation was to win football games. The only promotion he ever did was a billboard for a friend who worked at a local bank.

  “Every year before training he would have a party at his house and he would do all the cooking: steaks on the grill, chicken, pork, everything, and then all these bottles of wine, and we would all be there until two or three o’clock in the morning. He was so warm and intelligent. He was always teaching. When we would go scouting he would take us up in his plane and show us around. You’d go play golf with him, and he used to tell me what I was doing, coaching me around the golf course, and I would look at him and say, ‘Chuck, I’m shooting about 78 and you’re shooting a 92.’ But that’s the way he was.

  “He had built a home in Hilton Head and had some other properties in the area, so one year in March we were all working on the playbook and he says, ‘Come on, let’s go, we’re all going to Hilton Head. I got places for you to stay and we’ll work on the playbook there’. But we never worked on the playbook. We played golf every day and he would take us out on his boat.

  “We’d go to the Senior Bowl and he’d take us driving and sightseeing. The year we went to Palm Springs to practice for the last game of the year against San Diego, in 1972, he took us to dinner every night, and then he’d drive the car into the mountains and park the car and say, ‘Let’s look at the sky and at the stars.’ Then he would point out all the different things that were up there. If you got to know Chuck a little bit he was a really comfortable guy.

  “Really, he was the kind of guy who, if something happened to you and you had to give your ki
ds to somebody, you’d give them to him.”

  It may have been a new year, but Lynn Swann, now a Super Bowl MVP, was still a target. It took less than two quarters of the 1976 season for him, and the rest of the Steelers, to be reminded of that.

  They played their home opener against the Raiders in Oakland. As Bradshaw dropped back to pass, Swann sprinted down the right sideline, covered by his old pal George Atkinson, and then cut toward the middle of the field. Bradshaw unleashed a pass for Franco Harris. But, fifteen yards away from the play, Atkinson took a forearm to the back of Swann’s head. The receiver crumbled to the ground, unconscious, with a concussion. The Steelers lost the game, Swann went on the disabled list. But what lingered were Chuck Noll’s comments after the game. “You have a criminal element in all aspects of society. Apparently we have it in the NFL, too. Maybe we have a law-and-order problem.”

  For his hit, Atkinson was fined $1,500. For his reaction to the hit, Noll was fined $1,000.

  Things would get so much worse. The team started just 1-4, including falling to the Browns for their third straight loss. During the game, and again after the play, one of the Browns lifted Bradshaw, flung him over his hip, and planted the quarterback into the turf on top of his head. He’d miss four games and half of four others. The backup quarterback—replacing Terry Hanratty, who had been picked up by the Bucs in the expansion draft, and Joe Gilliam, who had been released—was a rookie, Mike Kruczek. “If we have to be in this position,” Joe Greene said after the loss to the Browns. “I’d rather be in it with this team, with these people, and particularly with the man running it.”