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

by Chad Millman; Shawn Coyne

  None of the nine Super Bowls before had been as intense or full of hatred. To those watching and to those playing, this game felt more like a gang war, and it had all the vitriol that comes with it. The Cowboys thought they were superior to the Steelers. And the Steelers, even while defending the Lombardi Trophy, felt aggrieved. The game wasn't just about winning or losing a title. It was about proving whose way was better. "They mess up your head too much," Lambert had said before the game. "If they beat you, you feel like you've been tricked instead of whipped. I hate teams like that." Lambert was even ticked about the Steelers' standard accommodations in Miami--chosen by the NFL--compared to the Cowboys' glamorous beachfront hotel in Fort Lauderdale. "I hope Staubach is eaten by sharks," he told reporters during the week. All that turned it into a happening. The price for scalped tickets was the highest for any Super Bowl. The NFL granted more press credentials than it ever had. The cost of commercial time reached its all-time high, $110,000 for a sixty-second spot. Even Hollywood cashed in, using the game as the backdrop for scenes in the movie Black Sunday, in which terrorists blow up a blimp over the Super Bowl. "I remember walking out of the tunnel and seeing Robert Shaw, who starred in the movie, standing on the sideline, and I thought, oh man, the stars are even here," says Bleier. "I had no idea they were shooting a movie that day."

  The pregame warm-ups were pandemonium. The movie was shooting. The halftime act, Up With People, warmed up the Orange Bowl crowd of more than eighty thousand people. Someone had forgotten to put up the net behind the goalposts that Steelers kicker Roy Gerela was using for his practice kicks, so all of his balls kept drifting into the stands, where fans would run away with them. At one point he became so frustrated that he walked into the stands, in uniform, and grabbed a ball from a spectator. Other fans started shoving the kicker and security had to escort him back down to the field.

  It would get worse for Gerela.

  On the game's opening kickoff, the Steelers kicker lofted the ball to Preston Pearson, the former Steeler who had signed with the Cowboys during the off-season. Pearson cradled it and then, using the trickery the Steelers so despised, handed the ball off to Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, the Cowboys first-round pick that year as a linebacker. At Henderson's first press conference, reporters made the mistake of calling him Tom several times. Henderson stopped the session and said, "My name is Thomas. If my sister has a daughter, I don't want her growing up to call me Uncle Tom."

  He was brash and full of attitude and as fast as a sagebrush fire. Even though he barely played defense that rookie season, Henderson's impact was felt on special teams, where he was split out wide on punt coverages. And he was the only linebacker in the league running the reverse on a kickoff. Which is how he scampered forty-eight yards, then a Super Bowl record, before being tackled by Gerela at the Steelers' forty-four. Poor Gerela. On the play he injured his rib cage, which, along with his lack of quality practice time, affected him for the rest of the day.

  The Cowboys stalled, but on the next drive, following a blocked Steeler punt, Staubach connected with Drew Pearson on a twenty-nine-yard pass for the game's first score. Standing on the sidelines, Bradshaw thought to himself, "We're going to lose."

  But in the following Steelers series, on his first pass of the game, Swann offered Bradshaw some confidence. "I decided if I was going to play I had to make the first catch," Swann once told NFL Films. "I didn't care where it was going to be, I had to make the first catch." Even if it was practically uncatchable. From midfield, Bradshaw dropped back. Swann, lined up wide on the right side, was bumped toward the sideline by corner Mark Washington. Bradshaw lofted a deep, parabolic ball that looked like it was going to sail out of bounds. Swann tiptoed along the green turf, treading close to the white paint, perilously close to falling out of play. At the last possible moment he leapt into the air, let Washington run by him as he reached back, and then grabbed the ball, which was about four feet out of bounds, back into play with his fingertips. He landed with a couple of toe taps and fell out of bounds for a thirty-two-yard gain. "Andy and I were kneeling down, and when Bradshaw threw that pass, it looked like he was just throwing it away," says Ham. "Everything except Lynn's two feet were out of bounds, and he twisted to bring it back in. Andy and I just looked at each other as if to say, 'How did he do that?'"

  More important is what he did: He caught that first pass. And set up the Steelers' game-tying touchdown, a Bradshaw-to-Grossman throw three plays later.

  The Cowboys answered with a field goal, and then the two teams settled into a slugfest. The Steelers drove toward midfield, and then Bradshaw was sacked. The Cowboys drove inside the Steelers' twenty, and two sacks of Staubach pushed them back to midfield. Lambert was so caught up in the game that he ripped off his elbow pads and screamed that he wanted to hurt someone.

  Then, with a little more than three minutes left in the half, Bradshaw dropped back to his own goal line. Swann was sprinting on a fly pattern down the middle of the field, again with Washington trailing. At midfield Swann tipped the ball and jumped into the air. As Washington fell, grasping at Swann's waist, Swann tracked the ball. He was parallel to the ground with his neck stretched toward the sky, and he put his hands up to his shoulders and, just before landing, cradled the ball into his chest. It was his second catch of the game.

  Unfortunately, this brilliant effort, unlike the first, would be wasted, as Gerela, fighting his rib injury, couldn't get much lift on a thirty-six-yard field goal try with twenty seconds left and hooked a line drive to the left. At the half, the Cowboys led, 10-7.

  And the score stayed that way into the third, as Gerela lined up for another game-tying kick from the thirty-three-yard line. Before the play, on the sidelines, he had been grabbing his left side, trying to stretch it out. On the field, as he lined up the kick, he shielded his eyes from the glaring sun. And again, he missed. As Gerela hung his head, Cliff Harris, Captain Crash, tapped the kicker on the head and yelled into his face mask, "Nice going, that really helps us." Lambert saw Harris taunting his kicker and, from behind, grabbed Harris by his shoulder pads and whipped him to the ground. "The ref said to me, 'You're out, Lambert. You're out of this game,'" Lambert told NFL Films. "And I said, 'Wait a minute, this is the Super Bowl--you can't throw me out.' He said, 'Well, then, you get back in the huddle and just shut up.' I said, 'Yessir.'"

  "When he threw Cliff Harris down I ran on the field and chewed him out," says Russell. "I was like, what are you doing, that's stupid, you can't do that or you'll get thrown out of the game. I know the announcers said that turned us around. No it didn't. He was being stupid."

  But in the fourth quarter, the Steelers did chip away. First it was a safety off a blocked punt. Then a Gerela field goal. Then another field goal. And finally, up 15-10 with a little more than three minutes left in the game, the Steelers had the ball on their thirty-six-yard line. It was third and four, and the Steelers, with the most dominant rushing attack of the era, needed a first down to eat up more clock and seal a win. But in the huddle, Bradshaw called 69 Maximum Flanker Post. In other words: Go deep, Lynn Swann.

  Bradshaw, as he had been the Super Bowl before, as he had been during his entire career up to this point, was pestered with questions about his intelligence. No one made note of the fact that he called his own plays, while Navy genius Staubach only followed Landry's orders. This game, this play, being better than Staubach when it mattered most, meant something to him.

  The Cowboys had the play read perfectly and Cliff Harris came screaming through a hole in the offensive line on a blitz. Just before he leveled his helmet into Bradshaw's left cheek, the quarterback unloaded a ball that traveled seventy yards in the air. Waiting at the other end, on the Cowboys' five-yard line, was Swann, who sauntered in for a touchdown.

  Bradshaw never saw it. He was severely concussed. "I was in the locker room and the game was just about over when I finally understood what happened," he said afterward.

  The Cowboys didn't quit, scoring on
the next drive to make it 21-17. And then, with Hanratty playing in place of Bradshaw, and his team facing a fourth down and nine near midfield and a little more than a minute left, Chuck Noll decided to go for it and try to ice the game, rather than punt. His theory was simple: The Cowboys had already blocked a punt. But his defense was on the way to setting a Super Bowl record with seven sacks. He trusted his defense.

  He was right. When Staubach's last Hail Mary pass fell incomplete, the Steelers were Super Bowl champs.

  Swann, who had been lying in a hospital bed pondering whether his days in football were over when the Super Bowl hype began, finished the day with four receptions, 161 yards, a touchdown, the game's MVP and two career-defining catches. "I don't care what kind of catch a guy makes if he beats me," said his most frequent victim that day, Cowboys corner Mark Washington. "Swann just beat me one time too many."

  "It was Camelot," says then Post-Gazette Steelers beat writer Vito Stellino. "All they cared about was winning."

  And that's all they did.

  41

  THERE WAS LIGHTNESS DEEP WITHIN CHUCK NOLL. THERE was civility and etiquette and appreciation, too, all of it revealed in waves, when the consumption of football and practice had ended. His wife saw it. Their son did, too. It was evidence that he believed it when he told his players their existence after football would matter more than their existence during football, that he meant it when, as he cut them, he said, "It's time to do your life's work."

  "After every Super Bowl he took all the coaches somewhere. We went to a place called Walker's Cay in the Bahamas, and to Acapulco. He treated the whole staff and our wives," says Dick Hoak. "We would go for a week. He was the boss but he was different there. He had this place on top of a hill in Acapulco and we would go up for cocktails at five o'clock and then go to dinner somewhere. He treated the wives like, wow, it was amazing. People called him Chuck Knox, he never wanted any fame, didn't care who knew him other than what they knew about him as a coach. American Express wanted him to do something after the second Super Bowl and he said go get the players. His only motivation was to win football games. The only promotion he ever did was a billboard for a friend who worked at a local bank.

  "Every year before training he would have a party at his house and he would do all the cooking: steaks on the grill, chicken, pork, everything, and then all these bottles of wine, and we would all be there until two or three o'clock in the morning. He was so warm and intelligent. He was always teaching. When we would go scouting he would take us up in his plane and show us around. You'd go play golf with him, and he used to tell me what I was doing, coaching me around the golf course, and I would look at him and say, 'Chuck, I'm shooting about 78 and you're shooting a 92.' But that's the way he was.

  "He had built a home in Hilton Head and had some other properties in the area, so one year in March we were all working on the playbook and he says, 'Come on, let's go, we're all going to Hilton Head. I got places for you to stay and we'll work on the playbook there'. But we never worked on the playbook. We played golf every day and he would take us out on his boat.

  "We'd go to the Senior Bowl and he'd take us driving and sightseeing. The year we went to Palm Springs to practice for the last game of the year against San Diego, in 1972, he took us to dinner every night, and then he'd drive the car into the mountains and park the car and say, 'Let's look at the sky and at the stars.' Then he would point out all the different things that were up there. If you got to know Chuck a little bit he was a really comfortable guy.

  "Really, he was the kind of guy who, if something happened to you and you had to give your kids to somebody, you'd give them to him."

  It may have been a new year, but Lynn Swann, now a Super Bowl MVP, was still a target. It took less than two quarters of the 1976 season for him, and the rest of the Steelers, to be reminded of that.

  They played their home opener against the Raiders in Oakland. As Bradshaw dropped back to pass, Swann sprinted down the right sideline, covered by his old pal George Atkinson, and then cut toward the middle of the field. Bradshaw unleashed a pass for Franco Harris. But, fifteen yards away from the play, Atkinson took a forearm to the back of Swann's head. The receiver crumbled to the ground, unconscious, with a concussion. The Steelers lost the game, Swann went on the disabled list. But what lingered were Chuck Noll's comments after the game. "You have a criminal element in all aspects of society. Apparently we have it in the NFL, too. Maybe we have a law-and-order problem."

  For his hit, Atkinson was fined $1,500. For his reaction to the hit, Noll was fined $1,000.

  Things would get so much worse. The team started just 1-4, including falling to the Browns for their third straight loss. During the game, and again after the play, one of the Browns lifted Bradshaw, flung him over his hip, and planted the quarterback into the turf on top of his head. He'd miss four games and half of four others. The backup quarterback--replacing Terry Hanratty, who had been picked up by the Bucs in the expansion draft, and Joe Gilliam, who had been released--was a rookie, Mike Kruczek. "If we have to be in this position," Joe Greene said after the loss to the Browns. "I'd rather be in it with this team, with these people, and particularly with the man running it."

  Noll treated his team the same way he did his squads of the early seventies: Run the ball, play good defense, don't lose games with mistakes. Only, instead of teaching young talent to do all that, he just unleashed it. After losing to the Browns, the Steelers D held the Bengals to 171 total yards in a 23-6 win. It was vintage Steelers. Kruczek threw the ball just twelve times, while Harris ran it forty-one times for 143 yards and two touchdowns.

  Then the Steelers got serious. The next week they shut out the Giants 27-0, limiting New York's offense to 151 total yards. The next week: another shutout, this one 23-0 against the Chargers, who gained just 134 total yards and had nearly as many turnovers, five, as first downs, seven. They did it one more time the following game against the Chiefs, blanking them 45-0 as both Harris and Bleier rushed for more than a hundred yards. The Steelers won the next three games, too, but were disappointed with their performances. After all, they gave up three points to the Dolphins, sixteen to the Oilers, and then three to the Bengals. Following one more shutout in the penultimate game of the season, a 42-0 win over Tampa Bay, the Steelers had an eight-game win streak, had given up just 28 points during that span, at one point had not allowed a touchdown in twenty-two straight quarters, and needed to beat Houston in the season finale to win the AFC Central. And they did that in style, pitching a 21-0 shutout. The Oilers had eleven punts and only nine first downs.

  The defense was so dominant, and the offense so bland, that both Harris and Bleier rushed for a thousand yards that year. Passes were so rare that Stallworth and Swann once stood up and clapped during a film session when a scene of Swann catching the ball flickered across the screen.

  But during a first-round thrashing of the Colts, both Harris and Bleier were injured. The Steelers went into the AFC Championship against the Raiders, for the third year in a row, playing a rookie quarterback and a third-string running back, and they lost 24-7 in a game that was never close. Lambert called it the most heartbreaking loss of his career. "Give me a six-pack and an hour's rest and let's go again," he said after the game. "Because I think we can beat them."

  Russell and Mansfield, wouldn't get the chance. The two men--partners in fun and football from the Steelers' most hapless days to their brightest--had decided to retire, together. "I never wanted Chuck Noll to come to me and say, 'It's time to seek your life's work,'" says Russell. "I decided I would be the one that told him."

  42

  FOR A FEW DAYS IN OCTOBER 1976, PAT COYNE CHECKED OUT of the Sadlowski campaign. He had to bury his mother.

  Mass cards from steelworkers in Clairton, Braddock, Homestead, the South Side, Aliquippa, Ambridge, and Chicago were stacked by the open casket. Laid-off McKeesport National Tube worker Ronnie Demarkski, dressed in his best flannel shirt and dungarees, brought two sa
cks of homemade pierogis to Pat's wife. Retired rigger Tony Franchini had two gallons of what Coyne called his "dago red" in the trunk of his Galaxy 500. They'd all end up at Coyne's house after the viewing for a proper Irish wake. Uncomfortable in situations that required restraint, Coyne did his best to shake every gnarled hand extended to him. He made small talk: "Yeah, that Lambert's a mean son of a bitch." It would all be over soon.

  The viewing was at Laughlin Funeral Home in Pittsburgh's South Hills, just six miles from 940 North Lincoln Avenue on the North Side. But for a seventy-one-year-old man with Coke-bottle glasses, it's a bleary hump. Pittsburgh's streets were known for axle-snapping potholes, and the day's ash and soot from the mills in the air blocked out any moon or starlight. The only evening glow came from the few blast furnaces that hadn't gone cold during the current wave of layoffs.

  The old man drove across the Allegheny River on the Fort Duquesne Bridge, which had only recently been completed. It used to be called "the bridge to nowhere," a jagged mess constructed by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. It took PennDot five years to figure out that no one ever bothered to clear the rights to the land for the access ramps on the North Side, so the bridge literally stopped in midair for another six years until they got it back to earth.

  Once he made it over the Fort Duquesne, he stayed in the right-hand lane to exit onto another bridge, the Fort Pitt. It would take him over the Monongahela and into a tunnel dynamited out of Mount Washington. On the other side, he followed Route 19 a few miles on Banksville Road, then turned left onto Potomac Avenue, and then right onto West Liberty Avenue. He took West Liberty until it changed into Washington Road and tried to find a parking space at number 222, but the lot was a sea of pickup trucks and battered Chevrolets. He pulled up to the curb next to the funeral home's awning and shut off the engine. A man from the home came out to tell the old man he couldn't park there, but instead offered a pleasant, "Good evening, Mr. Rooney."