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

by Chad Millman; Shawn Coyne

  The only player who seemed to suffer in New Orleans was Dwight White. Soon after landing in New Orleans he collapsed in pain in the lobby of the team hotel. Greene carried him into a cab and took him to a hospital, where White was diagnosed with viral pneumonia. For three days he lay in a hospital bed, shedding pounds. He tried attending a Thursday practice, lasted fifteen minutes and had to be readmitted. Come Saturday night, he had lost twenty pounds and could barely stand.

  The doctors told Noll there was no way he would be ready to play.

  When the players woke up on the morning of the game, it was pouring. The normally balmy New Orleans weather had turned chilly, with the temperature in the mid-40s. And in the Steelers locker room, it looked like a ticket-broker's convention.

  Every player was allotted four Super Bowl tickets, plus the option to buy twenty more at $25 a ticket. Before they left for New Orleans, the players had been approached by Pittsburgh travel agents who were willing to buy tickets for $150 so they could use them in Super Bowl packages for customers. Some of the players took the easy deal right away. Others had bigger plans. And when they got to their hotel and the brokers came up to them with briefcases filled with cash, they got even greedier. For most of them, the bonus for winning the Super Bowl would be equal to or more than their salaries. A chance to earn a little extra dough couldn't be passed up.

  "I concocted a plan with Bradshaw to get another twenty-five tickets," says Moon Mullins. "But when we got them, they weren't fifty-yard-line seats. So we couldn't unload them. Before the game I got to the locker room at like 10:00 A.M. and our equipment man had young kids working with him. So I sent a kid out to get face value for them. That was like $30 or $40. But because the weather was so bad he couldn't even get that, so I ended up eating eight or ten tickets."

  "Swann thought he could get $300 if he waited until the game," says Hanratty. "But by then it was 45 degrees and they were selling tickets outside the stadium for five bucks. I go into the locker room and ask him if he has his tickets and he pulls out twenty of them that he's got to eat. I asked him if he needed salt."

  All the players dealt with the circumstances surrounding the day differently. Some of them were so relaxed they fell asleep at the foot of their lockers. Bradshaw was so nervous he hyperventilated, had sweaty palms, and a bout of diarrhea. At one point he was so anxious that he lit up a cigar to calm himself down. But Noll never wavered.

  "He made a speech before each game," says the former trainer Ralph Berlin. "And basically it was the same speech about doing your job and letting your teammates do their jobs. When we went to the Super Bowl the first time I thought, boy, I can't wait to hear this talk. And he gave the same speech he made for the first exhibition game of the season."

  Besides, inspiration came in another form. The night before the game, Dwight White begged his doctors to let him out of the hospital. He was down to 220 pounds. Perles had told him he wasn't going to play. Noll had told White's backup, Steve Furness, he'd be starting. White was desperate to at least be in uniform, to be introduced. "Dwight White on Super Bowl Sunday called me and said, 'Come get me,'" says Berlin. "He said to the team doc, 'I want to dress, just let me dress.' The doctor, whose name was John Best--players called him John Wayne because he was big and looked like the actor--said to me, 'Let him get dressed. What can happen? He'll play three or four plays and we'll take him back to the hospital.'"

  After watching White struggle to get his jersey over his shoulder pads and pull on pants that sagged like potato sacks, the Steelers roared out of the locker room. By a quirk of scheduling, both Pittsburgh and Minnesota lined up outside the Tulane Stadium tunnel, on the turf that ringed the field, at the same time, waiting to be introduced. An alley of fans held back by rope lined up on both sides of the teams, taking pictures, cheering, screaming. The Steelers were rowdy and laughing and couldn't wait to play football. At one point Steelers safety Glen Edwards saw the Vikings All-Pro defensive tackles, Carl Eller and Alan Page. "Edwards is being funny and shouting and people are taking pictures of us and the Vikes seem uptight," says Russell. "Glen sees Eller and Page and says, 'Hey bub, what's up?' They're stone-faced, refusing to acknowledge him. So he says it again. Still nothing. So Glen gets himself in between these two big Vikings and stares and says, 'Hey man, I am talking to you.' Nothing. So finally he just looks at them and says, 'You dudes better buckle up.' They didn't even respond."

  At one point, while awaiting the team introductions, a shirtless Viking fan in a set of plastic horns collapsed right next to the Steelers, who were herded in their pen. "I was right there, he was turning blue," says Mullins. "We look down and there is a guy just laying on the ground. I think he died. Right there."

  People in the crowd ran over to help. "But he hit the ground and never moved," Bradshaw wrote in It's Only a Game. "The man dropped dead right in front of me! He died with his horns on. And it didn't stop the program for one second."

  There were more than eighty thousand fans waiting for the game to start.

  And the moment it did, the game perfectly reflected the weather: dreary, harsh, unforgiving. The first quarter was played to a scoreless tie, with Bradshaw and the Steelers offense doing the smartest thing they could--staying out of the way of their defense. Greene and Co. befuddled the Vikings All-Pro scrambling quarterback, Fran Tarkenton. It wasn't until the second quarter that the first points were scored. Appropriately, it was a safety by the Steelers defense. With the Vikings backed up deep in their territory, Tarkenton wheeled around to hand the ball off. But it slipped from his grip and rolled toward the goal line. In the mad scramble, Tarkenton beat four other Steelers to the ball, landing on it in the end zone. The first player to tap a finger on Tarkenton and get credit for the safety was Dwight White.

  The Steelers went into halftime ahead by those two points, then pulled ahead early in the third on a short drive capped by a Harris touchdown. But in the fourth, with the Steelers still up 9-0, the Vikings were at the Steelers' five and threatening to score. Until Greene, who had already picked off one of Tarkenton's passes, stripped running back Chuck Foreman and recovered the fumble. The Vikings would score on a blocked punt later in the quarter, but on the next drive the Steelers rushed down the field. The game-winning score, a four-yard touchdown pass from Bradshaw to tight end Larry Brown, was a play called by Joe Gilliam.

  "Honestly, for me it was anticlimactic," says Ham. "The front four was so dominant that game that you could have taken off my uniform and put it back on a hanger." The Steelers limited the Vikings to just seventeen yards on the ground. Tarkenton threw twenty-seven times, completing just eleven while getting picked off three times and having four passes knocked down.

  In the locker room afterward, Russell, the team captain, stood on a podium with one of the game balls in his hand. He was prepared to make a speech about the defense, about how Greene's play that day epitomized this team's rise from also-ran to Super Bowl champ, and then hand the ball to the All-Pro defensive tackle. But at the last second, just before he spoke, he spotted the Chief standing in the corner. He bagged his speech and yelled, "Chief, come up here. This is your ball."

  With tears in his eyes and a stogie in his mouth, Art Rooney wrapped his hands tightly around the ball.

  FOURTH QUARTER

  1975-1977

  37

  NOLL DIDN'T CHANGE HIS GRUMPY, PRAGMATIC APPROACH just because the Steelers had won the Super Bowl. "When we opened camp in 1975, the message was, first of all, win the battle of the hitting," says Greene. "Win that battle. Then you have to protect the quarterback, which means receivers block; the defensive line has to protect against the run and put yourself in a position to rush the passer and give D-backs time to cover. Everyone had to utilize techniques that were taught to them in individual positions. The same things we were doing when we were 1-13 were the same things we were doing in 1975. But with much better players."

  They were more talented, and more motivated. Tim Rooney, one of Art's nephews, timed a
ll the veterans in the 40-yard dash when they first checked into St. Vincent's that summer. And almost to a man, their times were faster than the year before. "We were all shocked," says Wagner. "After practice that night a bunch of us went back out to the fields just to make sure they hadn't shortened the sprint."

  But more than anything, they were confident, carrying themselves with the bravado and swagger of kingpins, no one more so than Lambert. The prickly middle linebacker once stopped first-round draft pick Lynn Swann in the locker room and said, "You should have been number two, I should have been number one."

  Lambert played at a controlled sizzle that entire 1974 season. Calling plays from his middle linebacker position, telling even Joe Greene when he was out of position, and hitting with anger. Sports Illustrated wrote, "He's meaner than Greene." While Greene himself said, "Jack Lambert is so mean that he doesn't even like himself." The only thing that seemed to make his jack-o'-lantern grin glow was winning. And by the end of his first season, to go along with Pittsburgh's W in Super Bowl IX, Lambert was named the NFL's Defensive Rookie of the Year.

  Like Noll, Lambert both seized on and was seized by the moment. He fell into a defense that catered to his skills, emphasizing geometry and angles over brute strength. As mean as he was, as intimidating as that face could be, he was never the biggest man on the field. At 6'4" and just 218 pounds, he barely outweighed some receivers. "I give away twenty pounds whenever I step on the field," Lambert once said. "So I have to be twenty pounds more aggressive."

  "Smilin' Jack," as Lambert was called, was a natural heir to the middle-linebacking legends who defined intimidation in pro football. The Giants' Sam Huff, another toothless hitter, the Packers' Ray Nitschke, the Bears' Dick Butkus. It didn't matter that Lambert's bookshelves were lined with Updike and Kafka and Joseph Heller. Or that his favorite hobby was playing Taso, a high-speed, highly complex version of chess. Or that, as a kid working on his family farm on Ohio, all he dreamed about was living on a beach, bodysurfing in the ocean, and fishing for his supper. Or that his teeth weren't lost in a barroom brawl or from hitting bone after biting an opponent. Instead they were the victims of a hard pick set by a teammate during a high school basketball practice. Lambert was so self-conscious about his smile at the time that, after losing his false set while swimming in a quarry as a teenager, he wouldn't go back to school for a week, until the dentist had made him a new bridge.

  Of course almost no one knew any of these things. Lambert was most effective when opponents worried about--and fans lustily cheered for--the guy whose feet pumped like pistons before every snap. "Jack Lambert wasn't great because of his tough-guy attitude," says Russell. "He was a great player because he was very, very smart. He never made a mistake and his techniques were excellent. It had nothing to do with his personality, but the fans loved him for that."

  Of course inside the Steelers locker room, his penchant for scowling and blowing up made him a favorite target. Nothing was sacred on this team. Egos were constantly kept in check. Says Grossman: "If anyone thought they were going to promote themselves, they would have been beat down so fast and thrown out of the locker room. "

  Grossman, a nice Jewish kid from Philly, was mockingly called Rabbi. Bleier's constant talking often led to his being taped to the goal posts or stuffed in a tub of ice. Bradshaw's acting--he often rolled around the turf like he'd been shot after taking a sack, only to bounce back onto the field a play later--garnered him a faux Academy Award.

  The merry prankster on the Steelers had always been Hanratty. He was so affable and self-assured, even as a backup, that he could get away with anything. "The only guy I never screwed with was Ernie [Holmes]," he says. On the practice field he'd amble up to Lambert, whose long blond locks always peeked from under his helmet, and say, "What's up, Straw-head? I need a guy for Halloween. What are you doing? What do you charge?" Once, he started blowing him kisses, at which point Lambert yelled at Noll, "Get Hanratty over here to stop blowing me kisses," which led to convulsive laughter from the rest of the defense.

  But mostly, Hanratty toyed with Lambert at his locker. He'd fill a cup with water and hide it underneath Lambert's shoulder pads, which were propped on the top the locker. When Lambert pulled down the pads, the water would drop onto his head. "I got him once. And the next morning he walks in. I'm at my locker and we nod at each other. Then he pulls down the pads and the same thing happens again. Next day, same thing. Finally I say, 'You dumb bastard, get on a stool and check for water before you pull your pads down.' He does that the next day. Then the day after that, I get him again."

  During practice one week leading up to a game against the Broncos and their star linebacker Randy Gradishar, who had played at Ohio State, Hanratty kept poking Lambert. He'd tell him how good Gradishar was, that he was the best linebacker that Ohio had ever produced, and that if Lambert hadn't been such a screwup he would have been a first-round pick, too, just like Gradishar. When the two Ohioans finally met on the field before the game, Gradishar stuck out his hand and said, "Hi, I'm Randy Gradishar." Lambert's response was simply, "Who gives a fuck?"

  Some players were too relaxed to screw with--there was no payoff in their reaction. Jack Ham was one of those guys. Icicles ran hotter than Ham. He had thighs as big as an offensive guard's, the first step of a wide receiver, and the technique of a coach. "Ham was a better linebacker than Lambert," says Russell. "The best I ever saw. He was Mr. Cool. He never tried to be macho or get in a fight. He would say something funny to defuse a situation. They had two totally different styles."

  "When Ham showed up, Art Rooney thought the guy was a delivery boy because he was such an unimposing figure," says Vito Stellino, who covered the Steelers for the Post-Gazette in the 1970s. "But he had such quickness when he diagnosed plays. That left side--with Greene and Greenwood, Ham and Blount--was unbelievable."

  Ham's greatest gift was his reaction to the ball. With the front four occupying blockers he was always able to get a clean jump on a short pass or a sweep to his side. Those ham hock-size legs churned through the patch of field he covered and made it a total dead zone for the offense. "I remember not being timed all that great in the 40 at Penn State," says Ham. "But we were also clocked at ten yards, and at that I was very good."

  Ham's game was effortless, which freed his mind. During the end of the Steelers' 1975 season-opening blowout win over the Chargers, Ham and Russell had been taken out. Along the sidelines, as the reserves finished out the game, Ham asked Russell how his investment-banking business was going. Russell, trying to watch the game, blew him off. So Ham started talking about the coal brokerage business he had started during the off-season. "There are so many different types of coal," he started and then continued to describe them in detail. The Chargers punted. The Steelers took over. Franco Harris fell at Russell and Ham's feet, but Ham kept on talking about coal.

  Then Bradshaw threw a pick and the linebackers coach put Ham back in the game. He ran onto the field, caused a fumble on the first play, ran back to Russell, took a knee, and picked up the conversation right where he had left off.

  That 1975 season, the Steelers did the same thing. The Super Bowl against the Vikings was just the beginning of the team's ascent. After starting 1-1 in '75, they went on an eleven-game win streak, not losing again until the last game of the season, when they already had the AFC Central title locked up. Through the first six games that season, Pittsburgh went 5-1 and the defense gave up more than a hundred yards passing just twice. They didn't just win those first few weeks, they embarrassed teams. 37-0. 42-6. 34-3. The Steel Curtain was so unlike anything pro football had ever seen that Time magazine put Greene, Greenwood, White, and Holmes on the cover, calling them "Half a Ton of Trouble."

  It wasn't just the Steelers defense that dominated. Beginning with a 16-13 win over the Packers in the sixth week of the season, the Steelers went on a stretch where they gained more than two hundred yards on the ground in five of six games. The one time they fell short, they gained
183. Bleier, who had become a starter at fullback midway through the 1974 season, was the perfect blocking, battering, inside-running complement to Harris. He picked up yards in small bites, while Harris, with his long strides, ate them whole.

  They were helped along by some radical changes in the offensive line, beginning with the coach--Bad Rad. In January 1974, after two seasons at Colorado, Radakovich and the rest of the staff were canned. Looking for a job, he went down to the Senior Bowl, where he saw Noll in the lobby of a hotel. Radakovich told his old boss he needed work. Right there, Noll said, "You wanna coach our offensive line?"

  "I thought about it for thirty seconds," says Radakovich. "Then I said, 'Sure.' I had played both ways in college. I knew I'd figure it out."

  That first Super Bowl year the offense rarely found its rhythm. But in 1975, especially during its streak of two-hundred-yard rushing games, the Steelers offensive line provided protection worthy of the Secret Service. It wasn't just the trap that helped the unit elevate its game. Or the installation of new personnel--Webster and Mansfield, for example, split duties at center. It was the techniques and tricks that Radakovich was teaching.

  One day during a film session, Radakovich noticed his linemen's jerseys being held and tugged by defensive linemen. It reminded him that when he coached the defensive line he had taught his players to pull on players' sleeves. To combat that, he asked Tony Parisi, the equipment manager, to tailor all of the offensive linemen's shirtsleeves, making them as tight as possible around the chest and biceps. Parisi enlisted his wife to do all the sewing. Then Radakovich's wife bought roll after roll of two-sided tape and before games any slack left over in the jerseys was taped down.