Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  The weight program was Abramski’s baby, his joy. It was part of the toughening-up process. According to Abramski, Montana and only one other player, a halfback, didn’t participate in his summer program. Petrucci says that about 20 percent to 30 percent of the squad didn’t take part. Some former players say the number was higher. But here was Abramski’s junior quarterback, a guy who had superstar written all over him — hell, everyone knew it — and he wasn’t there. It ate Abramski up. When the season started, Montana was on the bench. “It’s very painful now, when people say I harbored this hatred for Joe,” Abramski says. “Hell, I loved the kid. I was doing what I thought was right for my squad.”

  “It’s just an unfortunate thing,” says Petrucci. “Here’s a kid who never did anything wrong, never smoked or drank or broke curfew, never gave anyone a hard time, just a terrific kid. And on the other side, you’ve got a good coach who’s stubborn.”

  People who were close to the situation feel that the real source of Abramski’s resentment was not Joe but his father, who had worked with Joe for so long and taught him all the right habits. It was a matter of control, the fact that the father, not the coach, had had more to do with making a star out of the boy.

  And now Abramski had benched that potential star, and his quarterback was 6-3, 215-pound Paul Timko, a big, rough youngster who splattered defenders when he ran the option play but had a throwing arm like a tackle’s. In the scrimmages, Timko would line up at defensive end and take dead aim at Montana, the guy who was trying to take his job away. “Every day he just beat the hell out of me,” Montana said. “I’d be dead when I came home. Football wasn’t much fun at that point.”

  The Ringgold Rams were blown out by Elizabeth Forward 34-6 in the 1972 opener. They won the next two games by forfeit because of a teachers’ strike, but lost the two practice games that were played to fill in the schedule. Timko wasn’t the answer, obviously, especially with an away game coming up against mighty Monessen, the favorite to win the Big Ten league title. During the time of the forfeits, Montana had moved up to become the starter. Timko was shifted to tight end. “Hell, I wanted to play there anyway,” Timko says.

  Keith Bassi, who was the Ringgold fullback, says the scene that night at Monessen was like nothing he has ever seen before or since. “You had to be there,” he says. “I mean, Monessen had some players — Bubba Holmes, who went to Minnesota; Tony Benjamin, who went to Duke. The rumor was that guys there had been held back a year in nursery school so they’d be more mature when they hit high school. We were doing our calisthenics, and there was this big roar, and here they came, 120 of them, in single file from the top of that concrete stadium, biggest stadium in the (Monongahela) Valley. It was like Custer’s Last Stand.”

  The final score was 34-34, Holmes scoring for Monessen in the last moments. “We call it our 34-34 win,” Bassi says. Montana’s passing numbers read 12 for 22, 223 yards and four touchdowns, three of them to Timko, the new tight end.

  Last April, Ringgold threw a welcome-home dinner for Montana at the New Eagle Fire Hall. The 1,000 tickets were sold out in three hours. Among the gifts presented to Montana was a set of videotapes of all his high school games. A month later Joe Ravasio, the current football coach at Ringgold, showed me the original game films in a store room off the boys’ locker room.

  The first pass Montana threw against Monessen was on a scramble to his right; he pulled up and hit Brantley, crossing underneath. The second was a sideline completion to Timko, neatly plunked between two defenders. The show was on. “They played a three-deep, where they give you the short stuff,” said Frank Lawrence, who had been the offensive line coach. “Joe just killed ’em with timed patterns.” It was an eerie feeling, watching Montana drop back from center, set and throw. All his 49er mechanics were there, the quick setup, the nifty glide to the outside, scrambling but under control, buying time, looking for a receiver underneath. It seemed as if he had been doing it all his life, and this was a kid in his first high school start. “Watch Joe now,” Lawrence said as Ringgold scored on a one-yard plunge. “See that? He backpedals after the touchdown and throws his hands up. Same mannerisms as now.”

  There were some amazing athletic plays by Montana — a 10-yard bootleg to the one, having faked everyone; a 35-yard touchdown pass to Timko, a play on which he rolled left, corkscrewed his body, dodged a rusher and laid the ball into the hands of the tight end, who was surrounded by three defenders.

  We watched it all, junior year and senior year. The somewhat slender kid was gradually filling out, standing taller in the pocket, almost 6-2 now, up to 180 pounds — the makings of a superstar. In the Laurel Highlands game his senior year (won by Ringgold 44-0), Montana rolled to his right, went up on his toes and pump-faked two defensive players out of position before he hit his receiver on a crossing pattern. But the most interesting thing was that the cameraman wasn’t fooled. He kept the camera right on Montana. By then everyone knew what he was capable of.

  He was all-everything his senior year — including Parade All-America as a quarterback — a gifted athlete who starred on a league championship basketball team (“He could stand flat-footed and dunk with two hands,” says Fran Lamendola, his basketball coach), a baseball player good enough to get invited back to a major league tryout camp, a potential standout in sports in which he merely filled in — a victory in his only tennis match, an informal 6-9 high jump, a junior high record in his only attempt at the discus. He was a B student who could have done better if someone had figured out a way to get him indoors, in front of a book, a little longer. He was popular in school, easy to get to know, hard to get close to. His classmates elected him class vice-president his senior year; the Ringgold yearbook, Flame 74, lists him as a member of the choir as a senior. The photo that appears under “Sports Personalities” in the yearbook shows a thin kid with blond, floppy hair that is almost girlish-looking. He is leaning on the wall next to a trophy case; no waist or hips, string-bean legs in long bell-bottoms. “Joe Banana” was one of Abramski’s nicknames for Montana.

  North Carolina State offered him a basketball scholarship. Notre Dame basketball coach Digger Phelps said he would try to arrange it so Montana could play football and basketball. A few dozen college offers came in. Georgia assistant coach Sam Mrvos stood next to Montana’s dad at one practice session, watched Joe throw a bullet while sprinting to his left and told Joe Sr., “We’ll give him a scholarship right now.” Georgia was one of the schools Montana visited, along with Boston College, Minnesota and Notre Dame. His parents had taken him for a look around Penn State, and he had been to Pitt many times to watch the Panthers play.

  It was all window dressing. His mind was already made up. It would be Notre Dame, where his idol, Hanratty, had played.

  “In his senior year, the games at Legion Field were a happening,” said Bob Osleger, the golf coach at Ringgold. “There was this flat bit of ground above the stadium, and Joe’s father would stand there and watch the game, and all these college coaches and scouts would vie for position to stand near him. The whispers would start, about which college coaches were there that night, and I can see it so clearly now. Joe’s dad would be standing there with his hands in his pockets and all these guys jockeying for position around him.”

  Sixteen and a half years later, Montana was back, sitting on the dais at the dinner in the New Eagle Fire Hall, facing a roomful of people who had paid the cut rate of $20 a head, same price they paid for his first welcome-home dinner in ’79. Earlier in the day he had given four speeches to a few thousand school kids — elementary, middle and high school — and there was a gleeful moment when six-year-old Anthony Vaccaro asked him, “Do you know who’s living in your house?”

  “No,” Montana said.

  “I am,” Anthony said, “512 Park Avenue.”

  “Do you sleep in my bedroom?”

  “Yes.”

  But there was also an edge to Monta
na’s return that some kids couldn’t quite understand. That day the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a story that dredged up all the old resentments. Some people felt Montana had turned his back on the Mon Valley when he moved to San Francisco, and that his parents had done likewise when they followed him west. There was mention in the Post-Gazette of his infrequent visits home and how his name had been rejected in a newspaper phone-in poll on the naming of Ringgold’s new stadium. Once again there was an old Abramski quote about all the people who hated him.

  Montana read the piece on his way to Monongahela from the Pittsburgh airport, and his opening remarks to the Ringgold middle school students left a few kids scratching their heads. “What you hear about me, about my feelings, are totally false,” he said. “When they say Joe Montana doesn’t think of the Mon Valley as his home, well, you can tell whoever’s saying it that he’s full of it.” It was a sentiment he would repeat to the high school kids, and at the dinner. His relatives in town knew only too well what he was talking about.

  “My 14-year-old granddaughter, Jamie, was afraid to go to school that day,” says Montana’s aunt, Elinor Johnson. “She was afraid the kids were going to boo him.”

  “The kids were telling me he doesn’t really care about Monongahela,” Jamie says. “There’s a picture of Joe on a locker in school that says, ‘My Hero — Joke!’ They don’t know him. They hear what some people say. Sometimes I’ll get upset, sometimes I’ll walk away.”

  “You grew up working in a mill or a factory,” says Pam Giordenango, Jamie’s mother. “Now the mill’s closed, the factory’s closed. Heavy industry moved out of the Valley. People lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their families. They’re bitter. Whatever they read in the news gives them something to bitch about, other than the fact that they can’t make their house payments, can’t afford to put food on the table. Now here comes Joe, who’s made a lot of money playing football. He’s an easy target.”

  I am standing in front of the armory, the old place where Montana practiced basketball at night. It seems small, much too small to hold a basketball court. A blue Chevy pulls up and stops. “If you want to get inside, you have to get the key from the minister down the street,” the woman in the car says. She seems friendly. On an impulse I ask her, “What do you think of Joe Montana?”

  “I don’t like him,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “Stillers,” she says.

  Stillers? A bitter family in town?

  “Stillers, Pittsburgh Stillers,” she says. “Joe should be a Stiller.”

  A youngster asked Montana the same question earlier in the day. How come you aren’t a Steeler, if you like this town so much?

  “The football draft is like the draft in the Army,” Montana had said. “When they call you, you go.”

  “Hey, you’re in Steeler country,” Elinor Johnson says. “They don’t want Joe to beat Terry Bradshaw’s record. You can get your man in the street, your man in the bar, he’ll tell you that.”

  There’s more, of course, like the fact that Montana’s parents worked for Civic Finance — his father was the manager, his mother a secretary — while the area was going through a financial crisis. “One person who defaulted on a loan can spread more bad news around town than 50 people can spread good news,” says Carl Crawley. And then the fact that the Montanas left for California, to be with Joe and Jennifer. Joe Jr. had instigated the move in 1986. He had always been close to his parents, but how could you be close when you were 2,500 miles apart? “Joe said, ‘Quit and come out here with Jennifer and me,’” his father says. “It’s hard, though, when you’ve lived somewhere all your life, when your roots are there.”

  There had also been a newspaper story about a financial mix-up, an accusation that Montana had billed a Monongahela group for speaking at a dinner held to honor him for being the ’82 Super Bowl MVP. It was a bum rap. Montana was an infrequent public speaker in those days, and the few appearances he made were mostly unpaid charity work. There was no fee for his Monongahela appearance, only a guarantee of airfare, but when he put in an appearance at a second affair, in nearby Washington, Pa., there was a tap dance about who would pick up the expense for Montana’s trip home. “I never knew a thing about it until I read all that stuff in the paper,” Montana says.

  As for the stadium that does not bear his name, the newspaper poll drew on a wide area, feeding on neighborhood rivalries and jealousies. None of the other local heroes was acceptable either, not Stan Musial, not Ken Griffey.

  Perhaps the main cause of conflict is that Montana has always guarded his privacy. “We’ve come back to Monongahela four or five times in the last few years to visit relatives,” Jennifer Montana says, “but people don’t know that. What is he supposed to do, go down to the corner drugstore and hang out?”

  That’s probably what the people of Monongahela wanted. They wanted a superstar to act like one. But Montana’s public persona had become a nightmare for him. “I love to eat out,” he says, “but it’s just no fun anymore. There’s always a group of people coming by your table, always some guy just pulling up a chair and lighting a cigarette and starting to talk football.”

  He did what he had to do publicly — sign autographs and give interviews — but his privacy was his, and that included trips back home. In Monongahela, it was hard to understand. He was still Joey, the local kid. It’s a complex area, the Mon Valley, fiercely loyal at times, but a place where it’s easy to form resentments. And it’s the area that Montana left in the fall of 1974 for a strange sojourn at Notre Dame that mirrored his entire athletic career — lows, moments of despair, followed by glorious highs.

  He was 18 when he arrived in South Bend, still skinny, still shy with people he didn’t know, a bit at sea so far away from his hometown and his parents. He had become engaged to his high school sweetheart, Kim Moses, from Monongahela Valley Catholic High. They would be married in the second semester of his freshman year and divorced less than three years later.

  At Notre Dame he found himself amid an incredible collection of talent. He was a high school hotshot who was surrounded by hotshots, a hatchery fish in the deep ocean. Forty-six players who played for Notre Dame during the Montana years would be drafted by the NFL, eight in the first round. The Irish won a national championship under Ara Parseghian the year before Montana arrived in South Bend, and they would win another one, under Dan Devine, in ’77, Montana’s junior year.

  Montana saw no varsity action his first year and got only minimal playing time in the freshman games. The eye-catching recruit was Gary Forystek, a big, strong, rocket-armed kid from Livonia, Mich. Montana? Well, he had that sleepy look about him. He missed home. He would call his dad three, four times a week. Joe Sr. told him to hang in. On a whim Montana once drove home in the middle of the night. Joe Sr. occasionally would make the eight-hour drive from Monongahela to watch Joe Jr. in an afternoon scrimmage, grab a bite to eat with his son, and then drive home to be at work the next day.

  “His dad would sometimes show up in the middle of the night, and we’d all go out at 1 a.m. for a stack of pancakes,” says Montana’s freshman roommate, Nick DeCicco. “It was crazy.”

  “The fact is, his father was his best friend,” says Steve Orsini, Montana’s former teammate at Notre Dame. “The person Joe felt closest to was back in Monongahela.”

  Parseghian resigned suddenly, for health reasons, on Dec. 15, 1974, and the new coach was Devine, from the Green Bay Packers. “I asked the coaches about my quarterbacks when I first got there,” Devine says. “No one said much about Joe. He’d been something like the seventh or eighth quarterback. Then he had a fine spring practice, really outstanding. I came home and told my wife, ‘I’m gonna start Joe Montana in the final spring game,’ and she said, ‘Who’s Joe Montana?’ I said, ‘He’s the guy who’s going to feed our family for the next few years.’”

  It took a while in coming, until
Montana came off the bench as a sophomore to pull out two games in the fourth quarter, and then did it again as a junior. The players couldn’t figure out why it was taking the coach so long to grasp something they already knew, that this skinny, sleepy-eyed kid from Monongahela was the man, the guy who could get it done when he had to.

  “Whenever he came on the field,” says L.A. Raider nose guard Bob Golic, who played at Notre Dame with Montana, “the players knew they had a friend coming in.”

  “When the pressure came,” says 49er free safety Dave Waymer, who started his Notre Dame career as a wideout, “we knew he was the guy who wouldn’t overheat.”

  Montana started the season behind Rick Slager as a sophomore in ’75, and behind Rusty Lisch in ’77, Joe’s year of junior eligibility after he had separated his shoulder and missed all of ’76. The time Montana spent on the bench still bothers him; the resentment of Devine is still there. Waymer says the reason was that Montana was a Parseghian recruit, and Devine favored his own guys, which really doesn’t figure because Montana went nowhere under Parseghian.

  Walsh, the former 49ers coach, says there’s something about Montana when you first see him on the practice field, “an almost blasè look, although actually he’s anything but that. I could see a college coach being put off by the fact that he’s not responding overtly, so he’d say, ‘Well, this guy’s not motivated, he’s not with the program.’”

  Devine says Montana simply wasn’t ready to start at the beginning of his sophomore year. He said that he got him in “as soon as he had medical clearance to play” as a junior. Montana feels that there was something about him that Devine just didn’t like.