by Chad Millman
Sadlowski wanted to bring democracy to the USWA. He’d change the union’s bylaws so that the rank and file could ratify the USWA contract. The local union elections, which had long ago become as fixed as a banana republic’s, would mean something under Sadlowski, too. They had always been treated as lifetime-achievement awards for guys who hadn’t been inside a mill for years. He wanted the local leaders to come directly from the shop floor. Sadlowski would kick out the 600 USWA staff reps who colonized Five Gateway Center in favor of new blood from the locals. Those would be the guys invading Pittsburgh for executive board meetings. Not the lawyers and stuffed suits that McBride favored. There would be lively debate and communication between the leaders and the workforce, not decrees issued from a corporate tower. And most of all, Sadlowski would give the men back the only tool they had to confront their bosses—the strike.
The New York Times Magazine characterized Sadlowski as “a rebel candidate for president of the steelworkers (that) wants to take his union—and the whole labor movement—back to the class struggle.” Meet the Press interviewed him, as did Phil Donahue and Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. Sadlowski attracted liberal icons to his cause. Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Kennedy advisors Theodore Sorensen and Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith were identified as supporters of his campaign. Momentum was building.
Pete Seeger waived his fee and agreed to come to Homestead for a concert to support Sadlowski’s campaign. On a frigid January night in 1977, Seeger took the stage at Homestead’s dilapidated Leona Theater. Behind him was a mural of the 1892 Homestead Strike. There were so many steelworkers jumping up and down with Imp and Iron-fueled joy that Pat Coyne worried that the balcony would fall. Rolling Stone’s Joe Klein covered the concert and rhetorically wondered if it might be “the beginning of a new era in trade union activism, or just a momentary indulgence in nostalgia?”
But all was not rosy for Sadlowski. A supporter in Texas was shot in the neck distributing his literature, and Sadlowski’s opponent, Lloyd McBride, accused him of being a communist posing as a steelworker to overthrow the union. The old guard wasn’t pulling any punches, and tension in Pittsburgh rose to new heights. Lawyer Tom Geoghegan, a volunteer consultant, was in a clubby businessman’s bar one night near U.S. Steel headquarters with a bunch of Sadlowski people, “not socializing with them, just in the same bar with them.” Geoghegan recalled, “I turned to my friend Betsy, but she was just watching as Pat Coyne over at the bar was picking up people by the hair.”
The USWA’s 1977 election held no less than the future of industrial America in its hands. Sadlowski’s people believed that if the steelworkers didn’t get one of their own in the top spot, their USWA leadership would blindly lead them to the slaughterhouse. A. H. Raskin, the assistant editor of The New York Times’ editorial page, presciently commented in 1972, “The basic membership re-education essential to thoroughgoing changes remains undone. It is easier to keep doing things the familiar way, even if the end of the road is economic suicide.”
The Steelworkers Fight Back! movement wasn’t interested in suicide. If their jobs were going to be killed, they would hit Big Steel with everything they had before going down—maybe even take over the mills themselves.
But even with across-the-board liberal support, Sadlowski’s campaign was a huge Hail Mary. With Abel’s aggressive recruitment of other trade unions into the USWA fold, steelworkers accounted for only 40 percent of the dues-paying membership. Just to have a chance, Sadlowski would have to take all of the basic steel membership ballots and hope for a low turnout among the USWA’s “Chock full o’Nuts” waitress rank-and-file crowd.
McBride’s men could do the math, too—1.5 million dues-paying USWA members minus 400,000 actual steelworkers did not add up to zero. Even if the entire steel industry went under, there would still be enough income for the USWA to soldier on. While the staff reps at Five Gateway Center were sympathetic to the rank and file, they had families, too. They had bills to pay and wives and kids who depended on them to provide. The entire U.S. economy was in freefall. If Sadlowski won, they had no doubt he’d fire them. If McBride won, their jobs were secure. Whether or not the United Steelworkers of America had any steelworkers made little difference anymore. It was every man for himself.
A month before the election, a four-color photo of an exhausted Ed Sadlowski along with an eight-page interview appeared in the January 1977 issue of Penthouse. He didn’t look like his campaign poster. He was in a garish paisley shirt and an ill-fitting leisure suit, and his expression was no longer rugged confidence—he was no longer looking into the far distance. He seemed to be lost, looking directly into the camera, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the moment. It wasn’t until after Pat Coyne read the interview that he realized that Ed Sadlowski was not afraid of losing, but rather terrified he’d win.
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 Atkin
son. 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, meetings, 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.”