by Rudy Dicks
The Eagle offense had fizzled. Hill was en route to a nine-of-twenty-four afternoon with three interceptions. McDonald had caught a pass on the Eagles’ first possession but then was shut out. The Eagles were trying to run out the clock, but Lou Cordileone and Krupa stuffed two carries. Hill was forced to punt, and his 56-yard kick rolled dead on the Steeler 22.
The Eagles were on the way to amassing 145 yards on eight penalties, and 37 of the yards came on first down after the punt, another pass interference penalty on McClellan, guarding Dial, a disputed call made right in front of the visitors’ bench. Even Dial allowed that “it was a close call.” From the 41, Carpenter made a leaping catch on third down for 12 yards to the 29, and then Brown found Dial for 13 more to the 16. There were fifty-eight seconds left. Brown overthrew Carpenter in the end zone on first down. Cross broke up another throw to Dial. On third-and-10, Brown threw incomplete to John Henry Johnson. “I’ve been throwing the ball too quickly,” Brown said later.63
That left it up to Michaels, who had suffered the indignity of having one conversion blocked and another striking the upright in the opener in Philly, to attempt a field goal from the 24. Asked later what he was thinking about when he lined up for the kick, Michaels shot back, “I was thinking of two things: Keep my eye on the ball and follow through.”64
The kick was good. There were forty seconds left. Hill heaved a desperation pass in the final seconds, but Thomas intercepted and returned the ball 25 yards to the Eagle 35 as the clock died.
The Steelers were still in the race. A third tie—the first time in twenty-five years an NFL had had that may—did not hurt them. They could still win the Eastern crown by beating Dallas and the Giants, provided the Browns, winners over St. Louis, lost to either Detroit or Washington. Parker was as content—or relieved—as Halas was the week before, to salvage a tie. “Sure, I settled for the tie,” Parker said. “We were lucky to come out of that one alive.”65
But the locker room was quiet.66 The Steelers had come precipitously close to letting a thirteen-point underdog end their season. Dial was upset not only with the officiating but with the way his team had played. “That was the worst game I’ve ever seen us play,” he said. “We made more mistakes than we’ve ever made. We were watching the scoreboard.”67
Cleveland beat St. Louis, 24–10, knocking the 8–4 Cards from a three-way tie for first place and into a tie for third with 6–3–3 Pittsburgh. Throwing out the Steelers’ ties, each team had a .667 percentage. The Steelers needed Cleveland to lose once over the next two weeks, but with Jim Brown scoring two touchdowns and running for 179 yards to break his own single-season rushing record, it looked nearly impossible for the Browns to lose to either 4–7–1 Detroit or 3–9 Washington.
If there was a game to grab the Steelers’ attention, it was in Dallas, where the Cowboys built a 27–14 halftime lead over the Giants by intercepting Y. A. Tittle three times in the first half. But Tittle rallied New York in the second half, hitting Del Shofner with a 17-yard TD pass to give the Giants a 34–27 victory and allow them to keep a share of first place. Parker’s crew would face the Cowboys in a week.
The Steelers could be grateful just for surviving another Sunday. “It was our worst game of the year,” Parker said. “You’re always lucky when you get a tie, playing a game like that.”68
All season long, except for the rout of the Giants in week 2, the Steelers had to claw their way back, rallying for a victory or just a tie. If it was true, as Ernie Stautner said, that the team had choked against Green Bay, it had not folded under the pressure since that afternoon. They caught a couple of breaks and maybe got shortchanged a few times. But they had played all out. That was Steeler football. That was their heritage. That was how they were either going to become champions or fall one step short.
“Nobody is going to give us anything in this league,” Lou Cordileone said. “You have to earn it yourself.”69
GAME 13
VERSUS DALLAS COWBOYS
AT THE COTTON BOWL
DECEMBER 8
Straight from graduation, months after his selection by the Steelers in the NFL draft, Stanford tackle Frank Atkinson took a slow boat to China.
It wasn’t actually a boat; it was a freighter. And China wasn’t the actual destination, but he did make it to Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia during his travels, half by freighter and half by plane. “I visited Seoul after there had been riots. It proved a very interesting three months,” Atkinson said during his first training camp. “I like to travel, meet people and have different experiences.”1
One of those experiences was life as a pro football player. Atkinson didn’t even know he had been drafted until he heard the news while listening to a sports report on the radio in his fraternity house. He had assumed that the Cowboys were the only team interested in him because they had phoned several times. The AFL, craving talent to compete with the NFL, didn’t bother with Atkinson. “This draft business really has me puzzled,” he said.2 The six-foot-three, 250-pound tackle had the distinction of being the Steelers’ top pick in the 1963 draft—because Parker had traded away every one of his first seven picks. Atkinson was picked in the eighth round, the 108th overall pick, eight rounds before fellow rookie Andy Russell.
Russell and Atkinson, both with more interest in an MBA than the NFL, began a friendship that would live on long after their playing careers. For players like Gary Ballman, playing pro football was a dream come true. For Lou Michaels and Dick Haley, it was an exit from a life in the mines or mills. But for Atkinson, it was an adventure like, say, taking a freighter to foreign lands.
“His attitude of playing professional football was a little bit like a guy might say, ‘Between my undergrad and my grad school I’m going to spend one year fooling around in Aspen, waiting tables and skiing,’” Russell said. “‘I’m going to take a year off.’ That’s how he viewed playing professional football. It was a frivolous, personal, fun thing to do. He was going to spend one year doing it and then he was going to go to graduate school. He starts his rookie year, he does very well, and he quits, gets his MBA.”3
What kind of expectations did Atkinson have about playing professionally? “Zero. I was flattered and I was mainly curious,” he said. “I didn’t really have career aspirations.”4 In fact, at that time Atkinson didn’t have many aspirations about anything. “In my senior year I couldn’t even have told you what I planned to be doing the next day,” he said.5
Atkinson had options. He could have chosen a career that paid better, provided more job security, and was less physically demanding—say, with his father’s business, the Atkinson Construction Co., which built freeways, bridges, and dams and handled other major projects. The San Francisco 49ers, whose practice field was minutes away from the Atkinson home, were so sure the Stanford senior had no interest in a pro career that they didn’t bother to send him a preliminary questionnaire before the draft. Atkinson insisted his father was not a millionaire, but an executive on the 49ers, Lou Spadia, scoffed at the notion the Steelers could sign Atkinson. “Why, Atkinson’s old man could buy your ball club,” he said.6
Atkinson made a career choice, as if making a decision on whether or not to visit a given country: He bypassed the family business. “It just doesn’t appeal to me,” he said.7
It didn’t take long for anyone to realize that the Stanford history major was different from most draft picks. “Atkinson is one of the most unusual young grid candidates at Rooney U. in years,” beat writer Jack Sell wrote.8
The Steelers’ defensive line loomed as questionable on the right side, away from Lou Michaels and Joe Krupa. Big Daddy Lipscomb had died, and his likely successor, Lou Cordileone, was a guy who had done almost as much traveling around the NFL as Atkinson had done in the Far East. Ernie Stautner had spent thirteen years in the league, and his role was going to be reduced to that of player and coach. John Baker had been inconsistent. Buddy Parker needed someone to step in immediately and help at right end and tack
le, but using a first-year player went against everything Parker preached. “He’d rather get a 10-year veteran off the dust bin than a rookie who was a superstar,” Atkinson said.9
Atkinson sustained a pinched nerve in his left shoulder in the first contact drill in camp, but trainer Roger McGill fixed him up with a harness for protection, and the rookie returned to drills in a few days. He made an impression in the team’s intrasquad scrimmage, and it lasted. The Steelers lost their exhibition opener to the Packers, 27–7, but Atkinson “did the best job of the new players,” it was noted.10
“I started like our second exhibition game,” he said. “Like a minute before kickoff, Buddy Parker said, ‘Hey, Frank, you’re starting; it’s going to be on the left side. First time I’d ever played that. And that was a good game, so I started getting my reps in there.”11
Atkinson was tempted to cut his career even shorter when he saw John Reger in critical condition in the season opener, knocked out and struggling to breathe after a collision. “I’m standing on the sideline saying, ‘If this is going the way I think it’s going to go, I’m just going back in the locker room right now and take a shower and get out of here,’” Atkinson recalled. “That was the scariest thing I’d ever seen on a football field. There’s Reger, he’s on the verge of death. He’s back in a couple weeks playing. Tough guy.”12
As the season progressed, Atkinson worked his way into the starting lineup, but he was making other plans as well. UCLA helped him work out an arrangement, around his NFL commitment, to work on his MBA degree. When Atkinson showed up for training camp in ’64, he loomed as the successor to Ernie Stautner, who was retiring as a player and becoming a full-time coach. The fourteen-year veteran offered qualified praise for Atkinson. “He improved quite a bit and I have reason to believe he will improve a lot more,” Stautner said. “He’s a strong kid and he’s still filling out. His will power will determine how far he goes. It all will depend on how much he wants to play.”13
Atkinson had his own timetable, but he figured on playing the ’64 season. “I even told the Steelers the second year that this is my last year—sort of the gentlemanly thing to do so they could make plans accordingly,” he said. “They didn’t like me very much after that. They released me—the night before the opener. If you’re not on the squad at the start of the year, you’re out of luck.”14
The Denver Broncos of the AFL obtained the rights to Atkinson, and he played for them that season. “That wasn’t so much fun,” he said. “I was just waiting for it to get over. I found out how good the game got, and I found out I could play it. Once I was satisfied there, I wasn’t quite as interested.”15
It was a great opportunity, like jumping on and off a freighter, as if he were an explorer riding the rails, but a career in finance was beckoning. Years later, Chuck Noll would arrive as coach, and he would advise players that football was but a stopover before you “get on with your life’s work.” Atkinson didn’t need to be told that it was already time for him to get on with his and “ultimately went into the venture capital business in San Francisco before anyone had even heard of venture capitalists,” Russell said. Atkinson left football behind, with no regrets about leaving so soon, so abruptly. “Being a Steeler, I’m really proud of that, and it was really a wonderful experience,” he said. “But it was one of those things you wouldn’t [trade for] a million bucks. … but you wouldn’t necessarily want to do it again.”16
Atkinson’s name was relegated to a line in the Steelers’ all-time roster, one more entry in Parker’s picked-apart carcasses of drafts. Atkinson had performed well enough as a rookie to crack the starting lineup of a coach who shunned rookies. Who knows how far he could have gone if he had devoted his life to football? Of course, Atkinson never had everlasting fame in mind when he signed with the Steelers. Two years after he left football, Atkinson’s name popped up coincidentally in a Detroit sports column, whose author commented, “Atkinson’s whereabouts today are unknown.”17
Move forward another ten years, and Atkinson’s name was back in a Pittsburgh newspaper. “Remember Frank Atkinson?” the Post-Gazette’s Al Abrams asked in a 1976 column, a month after the Steelers beat Dallas in Super Bowl X. “Of course, you don’t.” Abrams had learned that over the previous two years Atkinson had flown from the Middle East to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to watch the Steelers’ first two Super Bowl appearances through the satellite station that relayed the game to U.S. forces overseas.18 Evidently Atkinson’s allegiance to his former team ran deeper than his love for the pro game.
Abrams reported that Atkinson, “a man of many distinctions,” had been living in Beirut but had relocated to Dusseldorf, Germany, in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War.19 No wonder his whereabouts were unknown. The tackle who had once lined up with Ernie Stautner, Joe Krupa, and Lou Michaels was a vice president for Triad International Marketing, a company run by Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, who would go on to become a key figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair. Khashoggi had attended Stanford University and was, presumably, a football fan. Atkinson was just getting started in business. He would go on to a variety of other positions, such as working with a private equity investment firm and a firm providing investment banking services to technology companies. A guy who hitchhiked around Asia by freighter wasn’t likely to be pinned down in one spot forever.20
Parker was hoping for another unheralded gem like Frank Atkinson as the NFL draft got underway in Chicago the day after the 20–20 tie with Philadelphia. The Steelers had hung onto their No. 1 selection, the tenth overall pick. The draft began at 10:05 a.m. and ended at 7:18 a.m. the next day, Tuesday. Parker, one of five coaches who did not attend, resisted the opportunity to pick Miami quarterback George Mira and instead selected hometown hero Paul Martha of the University of Pittsburgh, one spot ahead of Ohio State halfback Paul Warfield, who went to the Browns and would go on to the Hall of Fame. With Bob Ferguson’s exit still a raw wound, Parker had evidently had his fill of Ohio State backs. In the second round, Parker selected Notre Dame end Jim Kelly.
Martha played six seasons with the Steelers, but he lasted as a safety, not as the heir to Buddy Dial’s position. Martha had six receptions in his rookie year. Like Atkinson, he would play an additional year with Denver and find his true calling as a high-powered attorney and executive, notably with the 49ers and Pittsburgh Penguins of the NHL.
Parker had little time to enjoy what he envisioned as a draft bonanza; his team was still clinging to an outside shot at a division title, but it couldn’t afford a loss or even a tie against the Cowboys. Despite all the heady expectations, Dallas “never got out of its cleat prints” in ’63 and dropped to 3–9 after blowing a 27–14 lead against New York and falling, 34–27, as Y. A. Tittle broke Bobby Layne’s career record for touchdown passes.21 After losing at Forbes Field in late October, the Cowboys had gone 2–3 but, tellingly, had given up twenty points in both wins and twenty-seven points or more in all three losses. Landry had fallen way short in his goal of shoring up his defense.
Still, after scrambling for a tie against a last-place team riddled with dissension, Parker was wary of a team that had nothing to lose. “That’s about all they have left, knocking us out [of] the race,” the coach said. “It hasn’t been a very happy season for those fellows, you know. They’ve had their bad moments and darn few good ones, but they have the personnel to explode anytime they go out on the field. I hope they don’t pick this weekend to do it.”22
A year earlier, Don Meredith had made as bold a prediction as Landry had about the future greatness of the team. “In the next couple of years, maybe sooner, the Cowboys are going to be right at the top year after year. [Landry]’s pretty close right now to what he wants. When he gets it, the Cowboys and the Packers will be playing for the championship.”23
That scenario was still a few years away. The Dallas defense was spotty in ’62, but the offense ranked second in the league in scoring and yardage. They had two powerful backs in fullback Amos
Marsh and halfback Don Perkins, who, “with disregard for life and limb, used his 200 pounds like a human projectile.”24 Perkins ranked sixth among rushers, with 612 yards. Billy Howton was in his last days as a receiver, but Frank Clarke—“one of the most dangerous runners in football”—was coming off a year in which he caught fourteen TD passes.25
Meredith may have been “the most promising young thrower in pro football,” but in no way was he about to be hailed as a brainy counterpart to Charley Johnson or Frank Ryan.26 “What worries his colleagues is his blithe spirit,” Sports Illustrated reported. Meredith clearly had more in common with Layne on a football field than he did with any quarterback working on a PhD. In the huddle during one 1961 game, he reportedly told a receiver, “Just run downfield, I’ll find you.”27 He was the kind of brash, gunslinging Texas kid Parker knew all too well, and he had nothing to lose in the final two weeks.
The Cowboys had the kind of explosive attack that unnerved Steeler center Buzz Nutter. “They’ve got a great offensive team, the kind of team that gives us trouble,” he said. “Frankly, I’d rather be playing either Chicago or Green Bay than these guys.”28
Said team president Art Rooney: “They’re good enough to knock us out of the box Sunday unless we play up to par.”29
That week the Pittsburgh Opera was preparing for performances of Aida, featuring three members of the Metropolitan Opera, to be held at the Syria Mosque. On Sunday morning, Pat Livingston warned Steeler fans, “It could be a tragic showdown” in Dallas. Although the four-year-old Cowboy franchise had endured “a campaign of horror,” Pittsburgh “can point to a long history of similar frustrations and heartbreak.”30 The game had all the makings of melodrama for the Steeler franchise.
Most disturbing, Livingston wrote in echoing Parker’s lament, was “the Steelers’ inexplicable capacity for freezing up in the games they have to win. This appears to be a team that tightens up when the chips are on the line, a team that fails to play to its potential when it has to win.”31 That was not truly accurate. The Steelers had blown a game in St. Louis, and maybe, indeed, they had choked against Green Bay. But they had not lost since the debacle in Milwaukee, and they had staged two comebacks besides stuffing Cleveland and beating Chicago everywhere but on the scoreboard.