The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  Noll treated his team the same way he did his squads of the early seventies: Run the ball, play good defense, don’t lose games with mistakes. Only, instead of teaching young talent to do all that, he just unleashed it. After losing to the Browns, the Steelers D held the Bengals to 171 total yards in a 23-6 win. It was vintage Steelers. Kruczek threw the ball just twelve times, while Harris ran it forty-one times for 143 yards and two touchdowns.

  Then the Steelers got serious. The next week they shut out the Giants 27-0, limiting New York’s offense to 151 total yards. The next week: another shutout, this one 23-0 against the Chargers, who gained just 134 total yards and had nearly as many turnovers, five, as first downs, seven. They did it one more time the following game against the Chiefs, blanking them 45-0 as both Harris and Bleier rushed for more than a hundred yards. The Steelers won the next three games, too, but were disappointed with their performances. After all, they gave up three points to the Dolphins, sixteen to the Oilers, and then three to the Bengals. Following one more shutout in the penultimate game of the season, a 42-0 win over Tampa Bay, the Steelers had an eight-game win streak, had given up just 28 points during that span, at one point had not allowed a touchdown in twenty-two straight quarters, and needed to beat Houston in the season finale to win the AFC Central. And they did that in style, pitching a 21-0 shutout. The Oilers had eleven punts and only nine first downs.

  The defense was so dominant, and the offense so bland, that both Harris and Bleier rushed for a thousand yards that year. Passes were so rare that Stallworth and Swann once stood up and clapped during a film session when a scene of Swann catching the ball flickered across the screen.

  But during a first-round thrashing of the Colts, both Harris and Bleier were injured. The Steelers went into the AFC Championship against the Raiders, for the third year in a row, playing a rookie quarterback and a third-string running back, and they lost 24-7 in a game that was never close. Lambert called it the most heartbreaking loss of his career. “Give me a six-pack and an hour’s rest and let’s go again,” he said after the game. “Because I think we can beat them.”

  Russell and Mansfield, wouldn’t get the chance. The two men—partners in fun and football from the Steelers’ most hapless days to their brightest—had decided to retire, together. “I never wanted Chuck Noll to come to me and say, ‘It’s time to seek your life’s work,’” says Russell. “I decided I would be the one that told him.”

  42

  FOR A FEW DAYS IN OCTOBER 1976, PAT COYNE CHECKED OUT of the Sadlowski campaign. He had to bury his mother.

  Mass cards from steelworkers in Clairton, Braddock, Homestead, the South Side, Aliquippa, Ambridge, and Chicago were stacked by the open casket. Laid-off McKeesport National Tube worker Ronnie Demarkski, dressed in his best flannel shirt and dungarees, brought two sacks of homemade pierogis to Pat’s wife. Retired rigger Tony Franchini had two gallons of what Coyne called his “dago red” in the trunk of his Galaxy 500. They’d all end up at Coyne’s house after the viewing for a proper Irish wake. Uncomfortable in situations that required restraint, Coyne did his best to shake every gnarled hand extended to him. He made small talk: “Yeah, that Lambert’s a mean son of a bitch.” It would all be over soon.

  The viewing was at Laughlin Funeral Home in Pittsburgh’s South Hills, just six miles from 940 North Lincoln Avenue on the North Side. But for a seventy-one-year-old man with Coke-bottle glasses, it’s a bleary hump. Pittsburgh’s streets were known for axle-snapping potholes, and the day’s ash and soot from the mills in the air blocked out any moon or starlight. The only evening glow came from the few blast furnaces that hadn’t gone cold during the current wave of layoffs.

  The old man drove across the Allegheny River on the Fort Duquesne Bridge, which had only recently been completed. It used to be called “the bridge to nowhere,” a jagged mess constructed by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. It took PennDot five years to figure out that no one ever bothered to clear the rights to the land for the access ramps on the North Side, so the bridge literally stopped in midair for another six years until they got it back to earth.

  Once he made it over the Fort Duquesne, he stayed in the right-hand lane to exit onto another bridge, the Fort Pitt. It would take him over the Monongahela and into a tunnel dynamited out of Mount Washington. On the other side, he followed Route 19 a few miles on Banksville Road, then turned left onto Potomac Avenue, and then right onto West Liberty Avenue. He took West Liberty until it changed into Washington Road and tried to find a parking space at number 222, but the lot was a sea of pickup trucks and battered Chevrolets. He pulled up to the curb next to the funeral home’s awning and shut off the engine. A man from the home came out to tell the old man he couldn’t park there, but instead offered a pleasant, “Good evening, Mr. Rooney.”

  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, n
ow, 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 lo
st. 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 détente. 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.