The Ones Who Hit the Hardest

by Chad Millman

  The Steel Curtain, meanwhile, was starting to show some wear late in games. The front four no longer had the power to penetrate the offensive line on its own, so coaches called more blitzes. That made the Steelers vulnerable on the edges and in the middle of the field. As they never had before, teams found soft spots in the defense and exploited them. The Oilers scored fourteen second-half points to hand them their first loss. Kansas City scored twenty-one second-half points in a mid-season game, nearly pulling off an upset. The week after that, the Saints took a fourth-quarter lead against a sputtering Steeler D, which had to be bailed out by a late Bradshaw touchdown pass. “Our defense just wasn’t as good,” says Ham. “We were a little bit older. One game, after Bradshaw had won it for us and there were about three seconds left, he came off the field and said to me, ‘Do you think you can hold them?’ He was laughing.”

  The inability to close out games was a concern, but the panic was relative. The Steelers D gave up the fewest points in the league that year and didn’t allow a first-quarter touchdown. Noll, however, wasn’t amused by any slumps, perceived or otherwise. And after a 10-7 loss to the Rams—in which Bradshaw threw three picks and Franco Harris was limited to fifty yards—dropped his team to 9-2, he decided something had to be said.

  Noll had a habit of laying into the team after wins and praising them after losses. It was his way of making sure that no one became complacent with success or too overcome by failure. It was also how he avoided having to divine inspiration from defeat. But after the Rams loss, he felt he had no choice. While meeting with the team, he began a story: “Gentlemen, I want to tell you a story about two monks who go for a walk by a stream. Sometime down the stream there is a fair maiden who wants to come across. The first monk goes across, brings her to the edge, and sets her down. The two monks continue down the stream in silence, and sometime further down they stop again. The second monk says to the first, ‘You know, it’s against our belief and our religion to come into contact with a person of opposite sex, and you disregarded that.’ The first monk responded, ‘I set her down back there, but you carried her all the way here.’

  “Okay, I’ll see you guys tomorrow at ten o’clock.”

  There was total silence in the room as the Steelers looked at one another in bewilderment.

  But it worked. The Steelers finished the season on a five-game win streak. “I can remember, with a couple of weeks left in the season, Joe Greene said to one of the writers, ‘I’ll see you at the summit,’” says Petersen. “I asked one of my teammates what Greene meant by the summit. He just looked at me and said, ‘The Super Bowl.’ I thought, if Joe Greene thinks we’re going to the Super Bowl, we must be going to the Super Bowl.”

  49

  “HOLLYWOOD” HENDERSON WAS DOING WHAT HE LOVED best. Talking, boasting, grabbing attention by the mouthful. Super Bowl XIII, once again in Miami and a rematch between the Cowboys and the Steelers, was just days away. And the brashest, biggest mouth on the Cowboys had an audience of reporters hanging on his every word. He had to deliver.

  In the three seasons since Henderson had opened Super Bowl X with a record-setting kickoff return, he had become one of the most dynamic players in football. The speed he displayed as a rookie that sunny afternoon in Miami, sprinting up the field as fast as a man half his size, had been put to use as a pass-rushing linebacker. In 1977, his first year starting every game, Henderson destroyed quarterbacks and made three interceptions—one of which he returned seventy-nine yards for a touchdown—and was voted to the Pro Bowl. Oh yeah, the Cowboys won the Super Bowl, too.

  It was the perfect storm of accolades and accomplishment for a player who believed he had become bigger than the star on his helmet. When Schramm told Henderson a business associate of the linebacker’s was reportedly shady, Henderson screamed, telling Schramm he had no business deciding who he hung out with. When Giants fans cheered as he was carted off the field early in the 1978 season because of a sprained ankle, he flipped them the bird. One finger for seventy-five thousand fans. After the 1977 season, the Cowboys were one of the pro teams asked to compete in ABC’s The Superstars competition. Landry and Schramm decided to send ten players—and Henderson, a Pro Bowler and the best athlete on the team, wasn’t invited. So he bought himself a ticket and spent a few days taunting his teammates. One afternoon he challenged Staubach to a swim race. Another day he bought a bikini bottom on the beach and spent the afternoon sunbathing. “It seemed like every two hours I was on my way to my room with a different gal,” he wrote in his autobiography, Out of Control. “I was watching the guys watch me as I go.”

  It was hard not to watch Henderson, no matter what he did. He played with complete abandon on kickoffs, punts, and every down on defense, laying waste to opponents with a well-placed helmet to the bottom of their chin. He darted around like a squirrel in traffic, at angles that seemed impossible to achieve for a man who was 6’2”, 221 pounds. But he lived just as recklessly.

  Being in big-money Dallas, a place every bit as glamorous as the TV show it inspired, encouraged Henderson to party as hard as he played. And he developed a cocaine habit. Not just a social one. He would do a line in the morning to kill the pain of all the sniffing he did the night before. He’s wake up with clots of blood stuffing up his nose, injuries from the previous night’s bash. He’d blow them out, feel the sting, and then snort more coke to make everything numb again. He did coke before practice, spent $1,000 a week on the drug, and carried around a roll of toilet paper to tend to his incessant runny noses. His pregame routine included packing his nose full of powder, popping amphetamines, Percodan, and some codeine pills.

  None of it seemed to impact his performance. And it only amped-up his attitude. Nearly every week he was making claims to reporters about the team the Cowboys were about to play, then backing up his braggadocio on the field. Before Dallas met the Redskins on Thanksgiving, with both teams at 8-4, Henderson called his opponents turkeys and said, “We’re gonna pluck ’em and cook ’em.” Then the Cowboys beat ’em, 37-10.

  Henderson had missed several games early in 1978 due to the ankle injury he suffered against the Giants, and the Cowboys struggled, starting just 6-4. But with Hollywood back in the lineup and fully recovered for the second half of the season, Dallas’s Doomsday Defense stiffened up. The Cowboys finished the year with a six-game winning streak, leading the league in sacks and rushing yards allowed. Staubach, meanwhile, tossed an NFC-best twenty-five touchdown passes, led the league in passing efficiency, and captained an offense that scored more points than any team in the NFL, including the Steelers.

  They played with the swagger of the NFL champs they were, something that Henderson never tired of reminding people about. He’d taken to planning out what he was going to say before big games, knowing reporters were waiting on him. And as the Cowboys prepped to leave for Los Angeles and the NFC title game against the Rams, Henderson’s headlines were: “The Rams don’t have enough class to go to the Super Bowl.” He repeated it all week long and even added, “If they don’t choke, I will choke them.”

  The morning of the game he snorted a pile of coke, climbed into a limo he’d rented for the day, threw on a fur coat, and went to the stadium. That afternoon, after a scoreless first half, the Cowboys blew out the Rams, leading 21-0 late in the fourth. The TV cameras were always looking for Henderson now, and they found him on the sideline. The microphone picked him up when he said, “It’s 21-0, the Rams are choking, and I ain’t through yet.” On the next series, he intercepted a pass, returned it sixty-nine yards for a touchdown, and then, to celebrate, gently flipped the ball over the goalpost crossbar with a sublime finger roll.

  He would have dunked it, but “My legs were dead. My cocaine use was starting to age me.”

  50

  THE STEELERS EASILY DISPATCHED THE BRONCOS AND THE Oilers by a combined score of 67-15 in the playoffs. Super Bowl XIII would be what championships are supposed to be but rarely are: The two best teams playing at the highest l
evels and with a hatred for each other. In the previous decade the two franchises had combined to play in five Super Bowls, winning four of them. The winner would be the first franchise with three Super Bowl titles. It also happened to be the greatest collection of talent on a single field in NFL history, then and now. The Steelers had ten Pro Bowlers, the Cowboys nine. Noll and Landry would eventually be enshrined in Canton, and so would fourteen players who started that day, including nine from the Steelers and five from the Cowboys. Newsweek, splitting its cover diagonally down the middle, put Bradshaw on one side and Henderson on the other, under the cover line, A REALLY SUPER BOWL.

  A poll of writers taken early in the pregame hype listed Henderson as the player they most wanted to interview. And he didn’t want to disappoint. That’s how he found himself in his favorite spot: surrounded by reporters, ready to talk.

  First, he predicted the Cowboys would shut the Steelers out, just as they had the Rams in the NFC title game. Then, he went on to insult as many Steelers as he could think of. Lambert was a “toothless chimpanzee.” Grossman, who would be lined up opposite Henderson during the game, was just a backup who only played “when someone dies or breaks a leg.” Finally, he finished his rant with a shot at Bradshaw, saying the quarterback “couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted him the ‘c’ and the ‘t.’”

  Bradshaw wasn’t reading the papers that week. The first time he heard the slight was when reporters asked him how he felt about it. He laughed it off, pretending to struggle after spelling out the “c” and the “t.” But it punctured the thin veil of confidence he’d built during the year. It was up to Greene, forever Bradshaw’s booster, to remind reporters—and the Cowboys—that the game wasn’t being played during the week. “We’re just going to go on the field,” he said “and get the job done.” Noll’s response was even simpler: “Empty barrels make the most noise.”

  But Noll and the Steelers were particularly concerned about the Cowboys’ Flex defense, which had been flummoxing opponents all season. The brainchild of Landry, the Flex ran counter to everything football players instinctively try to do: seek and destroy. It was thoughtful, required patience, and asked players to react, rather than pursue. The defensive linemen didn’t line up on top of players, the way the Steelers did in their Stunt 4-3, they lined up in gaps, sometimes a couple of feet off the line of scrimmage. They were responsible for reading the direction of the play, closing a gap or keeping offensive linemen occupied, so linebackers behind them could shoot into holes. Every player on the front seven had one gap responsibility, except the middle linebacker, who had two. The defense was designed to funnel plays toward that player in the middle.

  As they did the Cowboys offense, the Steelers hated the Flex for its trickery and its air of superiority. “Preparing for the Flex was difficult,” says Petersen. “They had an even front, no nose tackle, and that was different than most teams. Randy White might be up on the ball and Harvey Martin might be off the ball. Or vice versa. But when they lined up like that it was easy for one of them to slide down the line, which made it hard for our offensive tackles to slide down and trap them.”

  During practices leading up to the game, Noll and his offensive staff altered the Steeler trap they had been running for years. Normally, they’d have a guard pull by stepping behind the center and blocking the defensive linemen on his opposite side. That sealed a hole on that side of the line of scrimmage. But against the Flex, with a defensive tackle always lined up a few feet off the ball and sliding down the line to avoid flying bodies, it would be impossible to run that kind of trap. He’d see the guard coming and sidestep the block. So the Steelers improvised. The guard who normally pulled would hold his ground. And the tackle would now pull, taking on the flexing Cowboys defender. It delayed the trap, giving the Steelers players a chance to clear space while the tackle scrambled down the line for a clean shot on the roving defender. Says Petersen: “It was something we did just for them.”

  “I remember reading Sports Illustrated’s break down of the positions,” says Ray Pinney, who was the starting right tackle that day. “The Cowboys had Harvey Martin and Too Tall Jones and Randy White and were bigger and stronger and faster and they didn’t give us one ounce of respect. They thought that the Cowboys D-line was going to beat up on us.”

  The Steelers felt—and acted—differently. In fact, Noll was so impressed with his team’s final practice the Friday before the game, he cut it short. They were ready.

  It rained the night before the game and deep into the morning. Palm trees swayed violently. Bradshaw, watching the green leaves whip in the wind from his room, hoped the field would be muddy, slowing down Dorsett and the ’Boys. He forgot about the tarp covering the grass. At a morning chapel service, Steelers players began bickering about whether or not it was appropriate to pray for winning. “Of course,” says Petersen, “most of these guys had rings already, so I didn’t think it was fair to pray for anything but winning.”

  After coming in from warm-ups the team had thirty minutes before it needed to be back on the field. They had already done the coin flip and the Cowboys had won. They elected to receive the ball. As the players gathered around Noll in the locker room, he did something he rarely ever did: He made a speech. It wasn’t rah-rah and it wasn’t a fable about squirrels in trees or monks walking by a creek. It was about football and strategy and psychology. He said, “Okay, here’s the way the game is going to play out. They are going to take the opening kickoff and run the ball down our throats. But trust me, they know they can’t beat you guys just playing smash-mouth football, beating you man-to-man. Eventually they will reach into their bag of tricks. That’s when you know the game is over. We will have won at that moment.”

  The Cowboys received the kick and Dorsett proceeded to tear up his hometown team. On three of the first four plays of the game, he gained thirty-eight yards. But on the fifth, a first and ten from the Steelers’ forty-seven, the Cowboys used the tricks that Noll had predicted they would and that his players so despised. Dorsett took a pitch from Staubach and then handed it to Drew Pearson, who let it slip and slide out of his fingers and onto the ground. Steelers defensive tackle John Banaszak fell on the ball right on top of the Super Bowl logo painted at midfield. “On the sideline we all looked at each other and were like, ‘Oh my god, how did he know?’” says Cliff Stoudt, a second-year quarterback that season. “From an emotional point of view we thought, he’s right, game’s over.”

  Bradshaw, calling the plays, methodically moved the Steelers down the field. A short gain on the ground, followed by ten yards through the air. Then, on first and ten from the Cowboys twenty-eight, Bradshaw huddled up his team and called “43-I Takeoff.”

  While watching Cowboys film, Swann had noticed that the Cowboys safeties tended to bite hard when they thought the quarterback was taking a three-step drop. In “43-I Takeoff” Bradshaw takes a three-step drop and Stallworth makes a sharp cut toward the middle of the field. During practice, when the time was right in the game, Swann had suggested to Bradshaw that he fake the three-step drop and have him sprint for the end zone. That was “42-I Takeoff” which was designed to go to him, not Stallworth. Bradshaw just looked at Swann, smiled as if to say, “Thanks for the call, I’ll get you next time,” and called the play for Stallworth.

  Then Bradshaw made a quick three-step drop, faked and lofted a wobbly, floating, ugly pass to Stallworth, who had beaten two defenders into the end zone and leapt for the pass.

  Five minutes into the game, the Steelers were up 7-0.

  But Bradshaw’s magic didn’t last. On the next drive, he threw a pick. The one after that, he fumbled, setting the Cowboys up at the Steelers’ forty-one. As they had during the season, the Steelers brought the blitz all game long. Seven, eight men at the line of scrimmage, supplementing a front four that no longer devastated the pocket around the passer. It had already produced two sacks. And as the Cowboys faced third and eight from the Steelers thirty-nine, Pittsburgh brought it ag
ain. Staubach dropped back and, just as Lambert jumped with his arms in the air, like the Grim Reaper ready to smother another victim, he unloaded a pass to Tony Hill, who was cutting toward the sideline.

  The Steelers’ defensive backs were locked in one-on-one coverage. Mel Blount chased Drew Pearson down the field, with his back to Staubach and the rest of the field. Hill cut underneath him, caught Staubach’s pass and raced down the sideline past Blount, who didn’t see him until Hill was already on his way to the end zone, tying the game at seven.

  It didn’t take long for the Cowboys to take the lead. On the next series, the first of the second quarter, Bradshaw had his team driving. As he dropped back to pass near midfield, the ball squirted out of his hand. He shuffled right, picked it up on one bounce, sprinted right and was sandwiched by Henderson and linebacker Mike Hegman. As Henderson wrapped Bradshaw up and threw him onto the ground, Hegman pulled the ball from the quarterback’s grasp. He ran untouched thirty-seven yards to the end zone. Cowboys 14, Steelers 7.

  Three minutes into the second quarter there had been three fumbles (two by Bradshaw), one interception (Bradshaw again) and three touchdowns. “Terry never got shaken by those mistakes, though,” says Stoudt. “He never got shaken by anything. He would just come to the sideline. Of course, I was going to make more if we won that game than I did the entire season. So I was thinking, come on man, you’re costing me money. I was just like a fan.”

  That’s when things got really wacky.

  After the tackle by Henderson, Bradshaw walked to the sidelines with his non-throwing left arm hanging limply by his side. Doctors told him that his left shoulder might be separated. No time to tape him up, let alone take a painkilling injection. Instead Bradshaw went back on the field, called two straight handoffs and then a ten-yard pass to Stallworth, who broke one tackle, spun outside, and sprinted seventy yards, with his sleeves flapping against his spindly arms as he ran, tying the record for the longest Super Bowl score in history. Cowboys 14, Steelers 14.