The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s, and the Fight for America's Soul

by Chad Millman; Shawn Coyne

  At the end of the year, despite the losses and the frustration, all of the Steelers sensed that they were better than what the team's record showed. Only once that season did Noll berate the team in the film room, and that was after the season-opening win over the Lions. Every loss was followed by instruction more than criticism. If a player made a mistake he would stop the projector and ask, "What did you see on that play? Tell me why you made the decision you made."

  "He never lost us," says Russell. "He never said anything that didn't make sense. He said, 'You are going to get worse before you get better.' And we did. He said, 'I am going to teach you how to play this game.' And he did."

  "What made him special was that he was so consistent in terms of his focus and in terms of what was viable and real as far as achieving our ultimate goal of winning the Super Bowl," says Greene. "He was not deterred by anything not going in our direction. And he didn't jump around from one idea to the next, jumping all over us one day and then the next day telling us everything was great."

  Because it wasn't. But Noll could tell it was getting better.

  SECOND QUARTER

  1969-1972

  13

  A THIRD-GENERATION TEXAN AND A FOURTH-GENERATION American, Clinton Williams Murchison was born in 1895, seventy-five miles southeast of Dallas in Athens, Texas. The son of a dry-goods magnate turned banker, he was raised with privileges but behaved like a ranch-raised cowboy. With a wild streak and a remarkable head for figures, Murchison began training for his life's work at the age of nine. The big Texas cattle ranches were in the western part of the state, but livestock trading was ever present in Athens' corrals and wagon yards. At the first clang of the school bell, Clint was out the door, racing downtown to watch and listen to the cowboys trading and haggling over their stock. He was fascinated by the men who could outwit their ignorant prey, trading their weak horse or calf for another man's prize possessions. "If you have to get a calf's price down to eight dollars so you can sell it at ten dollars . . . you learn about people," Murchison once said.

  Murchison's horse-trading was the perfect training for the events that followed on January 10, 1901. A thousand feet beneath a hillock named Spindletop, just two counties south of Athens, lay the largest oil field in North America. An oil well, financed by a couple of easterners interloping on the Texas fields, spewed petroleum one hundred feet in the air. It was a bona fide gusher. Before long, Spindletop was producing more crude than every U.S. oil well that had ever been tapped. Combined.

  The big initial Texas oil fortunes were won by outsiders, led by Pittsburgher James Guffey, who owned the lease for the Spindletop well. When he sold the rights to his well to the European oil company Royal Dutch Shell, it was touted by newspapers across the country as the deal of the century. Then, with a rep for prospecting and a streak of luck, Guffey earned the backing of one of Pittsburgh's richest families, the Mellons, and moved south to the Gulf Coast field region. He struck oil again. The Mellons called the new company Gulf Oil and set up corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh.

  The one conspicuous absentee from the rush was John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The Texas state legislature had long sought to dismantle Standard, and as one of the company's spokesmen put it, "We're out . . . After the way Mr. Rockefeller has been treated by the state of Texas, he'll never put another dime in Texas." But Rockefeller was no fool. While he may not have put another dime in, he continued to take a lot out through his relationships with the railroads and his stranglehold on the majority of petroleum refineries.

  Texas was not about to let the north carpetbag its natural resources. Texas's state senators and representatives passed a series of laws that prohibited vertical integration of the oil business. Oil prospectors were not allowed to refine the oil. Oil pipeline companies couldn't become barrel manufacturers, and up the chain it went. The fallout left the big eastern companies with the work of oil (piping, refining, transporting, etc.) and the native Texans with the fun--leasing land with potential oil reserves, drilling, and then selling the leases to the big companies after the wells came in.

  The oil business, like every Texas commodity, boiled down to horse-trading. And like the cowboys he had learned from in Athens, Clint Murchison and a small band of other individual Texas speculators proved to be outrageously successful traders. Oil leasing worked like this. A landowner with acreage bordering an oil-producing field would sell the rights to sink wells on his property for a fee plus a percentage of the profits from the oil taken from his land. Men like Clint Murchison and his best friend Sid Richardson would move from town to town and buy up lease rights to drill on the thousands of acres of untested land. The trick was to spend little for the rights to land that had not yet come in, hire a wildcatter to dig a well, find the oil, and then sell the pumping rights to the land for multiples of what you paid for it.

  What made Murchison was that he didn't just profit from lease transactions, he retained a percentage of profits from future wells, too. He'd buy 95 percent of a lease for $1,000 (5 percent would be retained by the owner of the land) and then sell 80 percent of the rights to a big oil company for $100,000. Not only would he reap a $99,000 profit from the transaction, he would also then own 15 percent of the underground oil for as long as it produced. The hard work of the oil-lease market favored the quick-footed and savvy individual over big business. And the Murchison family bank gave Clint a head start. He could leverage credit to buy more leases that would produce oil, which he could put up as collateral to find more credit. His financing by finagling strategy made him outrageously rich. By 1957, The New York Times estimated his wealth at $400 million and named him one of the seventy richest men in America.

  For Clint Sr., "money was like manure--you got to spread it around to make things grow." This philosophy became the guiding principle for his relationship with his three sons, John, Clint Jr., and Burk Murchison. After eleven-year-old Burk died of pneumonia, Clint Sr. took a deeper interest in John and Clint Jr. He vowed to give them a leg up, like he'd gotten, when they began their inevitable business careers. After John graduated from Yale and Clint Jr. from MIT with an advanced degree from Duke, Clint Sr. brought them back to Dallas to give them their head start. In 1949, he handed them the reins to a $75 million company he had built for them called Murchison Brothers, a conglomerate holding company with majority stakes in twenty different businesses.

  John and Clint Jr. proved as resourceful as their father. Nicknamed "Vice and Versa" because of their opposite approach to the world (John conservative, Clint Jr. aggressive), Clint Sr. used to say, "One of my boys won't make up his mind at all. The other makes it up too fast." The combination was lightning in a bottle. They leveraged Murchison Brothers and doubled its holdings in just ten years. While Clint Jr. found the opportunities to buy, sell, and invest, John oversaw the deal points. Between them they had interests in more than a hundred companies in construction, insurance, banking, hotels, oil, gas, and even book publishing. Their biggest deal, outdueling a Woolworth heir to take control of one of Wall Street's most influential holding companies, landed them on the cover of Time magazine. At the time, the only other Texas businessman awarded such an honor had been their father.

  The rush of a business deal intoxicated Clint Jr., but once the transaction was done, he had little interest in the paperwork. He'd tire of the details until the next opportunity arose and the process would begin anew. His brother, John, would let off steam by flying to a ski mountain that the brothers had bought in Vail, Colorado, but Clint Jr. didn't want to relax. He wanted to be entertained.

  And there was one thing that would always keep his interest.

  14

  AFTER WINNING THEIR FIRST GAME OF 1969, THE STEELERS lost the next 13, finishing 1-13. The Bears, with their win over Pittsburgh, matched that record. The futility of the two teams meant a coin flip for the number-one overall choice in the 1970 draft. On January 9, two days before the Minnesota Vikings and Kansas City Chiefs played in Super Bowl IV, exe
cs from both teams met NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle at the Fairmont Hotel in New York. In his pocket, Rozelle carried a 1921 silver dollar.

  No matter who won the toss, there was only one player that any scout worth his suitcase considered taking with that top spot: Terry Bradshaw.

  Bradshaw was a burly, cocksure, church-going blond from Shreveport, Louisiana, with a right arm made of gunpowder. Pop, pop, pop--the ball came out of his hand with a vapor trail behind it, traveling fifty yards on a straight line. He knew this was his gift. "Some families inherit intelligence, some get good looks," Bradshaw wrote in his autobiography It's Only a Game. "We got right arms."

  He was the son of a welder who loved football. And with his three brothers and sometimes even his mom, Bradshaw would play football in his backyard. He had been practicing the game from the time he was four years old, throwing wadded-up pieces of paper as far across the living room as they would go. He eventually graduated to footballs. He'd get a new one every year for Christmas and would polish it with brown shoe polish to help it stay fresh. Lying on his bed at night he'd toss the ball into the air until it made a soft thud against his bedroom ceiling, where it would leave a slight brown smudge. Bradshaw played with the ball so often--in the rain, in the sun--that it would expand and snap the laces before the next Christmas came around again. So he'd take out his shoe-laces to tie the ball back together again.

  But Bradshaw, at heart, was a country kid. Every summer he and his brothers stayed with his grandparents at their forty-acre farm in Hall Summit, which was "25 miles and 50 years," Bradshaw wrote, from Shreveport. He learned how to pick cotton and cantaloupe and watermelons; how to stretch out animal skins so the eye sockets stayed round when drying out; how to fix a prolapsed uterus in a cow and how to make buttermilk and paste. Dresses were made from flour sacks, biscuits were made from scratch, transportation was a couple of Clydesdales hooked up to a wagon, and Saturday nights were for going into town to get hair-cuts and listen to the Grand Ole Opry. And the bathroom? That was a two-hole outhouse filled with horseflies the size of thoroughbreds and situated way on the other side of a briar patch.

  Being outside was the perfect release for Bradshaw, a rambunctious kid who struggled in the classroom. Years later, he'd write that he suffered from attention deficit disorder. But at the time he was just a boy who couldn't sit still in class, who failed the tests he actually did sit through, and who constantly wondered why everyone thought he was so dumb, especially when he knew he could eventually figure everything out. He just didn't learn the way so many kids in his class did. He learned by doing, by freewheeling his way through a situation and reacting. In a classroom--forced to study by rote, to follow the plan laid out for him by a teacher and not the path his head was telling him to take--he had to suppress all that energy.

  That's why he was never more confident than when he was outside, playing a game, letting his physical skills dictate how life in that moment would unfold. His instincts were his most trusted guide. That's why, when he was a junior in high school and backing up a high school All-American, he never stopped believing it was his destiny to be a professional football player. What else could he possibly do?

  When Bradshaw finally got a chance to play his senior year, he unleashed three years of pent-up energy on his opponents. He flung the ball around like he'd been doing in his bedroom since he was seven years old: with precision and joy. If the coach called a run, Bradshaw might decide to pass anyway. The coach would never bench the guy who just threw a touchdown pass, he reasoned, and Bradshaw always assumed he'd throw a touchdown pass. In ways he'd never be in the classroom, he was unafraid of consequences, of failure. Nothing about the game he played was dependent upon study. It was all so easy. In his only season as a starter, Bradshaw led Woodlawn High School to the state championship game, where it lost by a field goal.

  He received scholarship offers from Baylor. And from Louisiana State. And letters from nearly two hundred other schools. As a javelin thrower he set a then national high school record of more than 245 feet, which earned him calls from schools in Europe who wanted him on their track teams.

  Every Louisiana high school kid's dream was to play for LSU. Not Bradshaw. The quarterback he'd played behind in high school was already in Baton Rouge, and he was sitting on the bench. Bradshaw figured that if the guy he couldn't beat out in high school wasn't playing, what chance did he have? But rather than disappoint all the folks in Shreveport who wanted to see him as a Tiger, Bradshaw, as he wrote in It's Only a Game, purposely failed the LSU entrance exam. "I am not claiming I could have passed that test easily if I had wanted to go to LSU," he wrote. "I know I didn't study for it, I didn't care about it and I definitely didn't want to go to LSU."

  For all his big-time talent, Bradshaw was a small-town country kid. The slower the pace, the more comfortable he felt. So instead of LSU or Baylor or any of the showpiece football schools that recruited him, he settled on tiny, unheralded Louisiana Tech in Ruston, where his talents for sitting on the bench were more appreciated than his golden arm. For two years he backed up the starter, again waiting his turn, still believing he was a future NFL star. He sat until early in his junior season, when the number-one QB was knocked out of a game and Bradshaw finally got his shot. By the end of the season, little Louisiana Tech was 9-2 and Bradshaw, now 6'3" and 210 pounds, led the nation in combined rushing and passing yardage. He was, as he always expected to be, a prospect.

  In Bradshaw's senior year, NFL scouts packed their bags and hopped on puddle-jumpers and unfolded their maps, looking for Ruston and the kid they had heard was a sure thing. Scouts are a dedicated bunch. They carried their own lightbulbs in case motel bulbs were too dim for them to read their reports. Sometimes they drove more than fifty thousand miles a year. This is how scouts lived and dreamed: The harder the prospect was to scout, and the more difficult he was to find, the better he must be.

  Anyone could tout the star at Notre Dame or USC. But an eyewitness account of transcendence, tucked away in the woods, was gold to a scout. It's how he made his bones. And none of them could go back to their coaches and owners without having laid eyes on the country-strong kid in Ruston. When Art Rooney Jr. went down there he interviewed everyone from the student manager to the quarterbacks coach. "And everything I had seen, everything I had heard, made me a full-throated member of the chorus, singing Bradshaw's praises," he wrote in his autobiography. His biggest worry was that other scouts would come away from Ruston feeling the same way he did.

  They did.

  Bradshaw looked as good during his senior year as he had the year before. Slinging the ball through defenses that were now geared to stop him alone, he still threw for nearly 2,500 yards. His stats would have been even better, but in most games, Louisiana Tech was so far ahead that he was pulled to make sure he stayed healthy. The scouting service BLESTO, made up of a group of teams who filed scouting reports for the entire league so travel expenses could be shared, had him ranked number one out of a thousand prospects.

  But it wasn't until it was clear that the hapless Steelers would have a shot at choosing Bradshaw that Noll made a trip to the Senior Bowl to visit this prospect for the first time. The word of his scouts wasn't good enough. "He was a doubting Thomas, he had to see to believe," wrote Rooney Jr. "Noll could be maddening."

  As is still the tradition, NFL coaches took over each Senior Bowl squad, and Bradshaw's was coached by Don Shula. "We'll see how he picks up teaching," Noll told his scouts before the trip. This was, of course, paramount to Noll. It wasn't that he didn't believe his scouts when they said that Bradshaw had otherworldly talent. He trusted their instincts on dozens of prospects he never saw. But this was his potential quarterback, his extension on the field. A million-dollar arm didn't mean anything if the guy using it had a ten-cent head.

  Noll was impressed when Bradshaw ran a 4.7 forty-yard dash. And he nodded in approval when Bradshaw completed 17 of 31 passes for 267 yards and two touchdowns to win the Senior Bowl MVP. H
e might have even chuckled at the way Bradshaw was so excited to play that he went the entire game without buckling his chin strap. But what sealed it for Noll was the IQ test--twenty-five math questions, twenty-five verbal--he gave Bradshaw. The kid who purposely failed his entrance exam into LSU did well enough to please one of the most cerebral coaches in the NFL.

  Now he only hoped he could get him, because there was still the matter of that coin flip. Art Rooney, an old gambler imbued with all the superstition that comes from a life spent at the track, had a theory about coin flips: Always let the other guy call it. It put the pressure on him. Gambler's logic. Problem was, Dan was representing the Steelers at the Fairmont Hotel in New York, where the flip was happening. And Art never told his son his theory. "Pete shows us the coin, both sides, and he says, 'Okay, Dan, do you want to call it?'" Dan Rooney once remembered. "I said, 'No, let him call it.'"

  The Bears rep called heads. It was tails. Rozelle picked up the coin and handed it to Rooney. And when Rooney and Noll took their wives out to dinner to celebrate having the number-one choice, the owner gave the coach that 1921 silver dollar. The coach subsequently turned that dollar into a franchise quarterback. "The night before 1970 draft, we were upstairs in Dan Rooney's office and the personnel people and Chuck were talking because the Cardinals had made us an offer, seven players, for the right to the first choice," says Joe Gordon, the Steelers longtime PR rep. "But Chuck was adamant that we not do it. He said, 'That was just more mediocrity--it wasn't going to get us any closer to a championship. It might have helped us win a couple more games, but not in the long run.'"