The '63 Steelers

by Rudy Dicks

  Huff grew up in a coal town—No. 9 coal mining camp—run by a mining company near Farmington, West Virginia, near the Pennsylvania border. He was raised in a house that his father rented from the company, a home with no running water and an outhouse for a toilet. Like Dick Haley and Lou Michaels, Huff was determined to escape a life submerged in hardship. His father wanted him to quit school at sixteen but, said Huff, “I didn’t want to go in that coal mine. Coal mines and steel mills were tough living.” Huff became the first member of his family to graduate from high school and went on to play for nearby West Virginia University. Butting heads with Jimmy Brown, Jim Taylor, and John Henry Johnson made for a tough living too, but it kept Huff out of the mines, and it fired up a passion for winning that hadn’t cooled forty-five years later.28

  “Let me tell you something,” Huff said. “You beat me once, the next time we tee it up I’m going to knock your head off. You ain’t ever gonna beat me again. You play the game like me and Modzelewski and Grier and Robustelli and Katcavage, and we tee it up again, by God, we’re gonna see.”29

  To survive in the NFL, Huff discovered, you had to learn to be mean. “From the minute practice starts until the season ends, you make yourself mean,” Huff told the journalist Jimmy Breslin. “The minute I come on the field, I say to myself, ‘I’m gonna be the meanest guy on the field. I’m gonna give it to anybody I can get a shot at.’ It gets easier to be mean every year and harder to get out of it at the end of the season. Pretty soon there’s no in-between: you’re mean all year round.”30

  No one could understand and respect that approach to the game better than Ernie Stautner, undersized at six foot two, 230 pounds, but a volcano of a defensive lineman. The 1963 season was Stautner’s fourteenth as a pro, and though his age was listed as thirty-eight, some believed he was as old as forty-one. Skeptics had been saying for a few years that he was over the hill, and it was no different in July of 1963. If Stautner was going to make it through one final season, there was only one way to survive.

  “I gotta be mean,” Stautner said back in camp. “At my size, I can’t afford to play any other way. … You’re gonna see the meanest guy in the league this year.” Stautner was routinely giving away twenty or thirty pounds or more to offensive tackles like the Browns’ Dick Schafrath, the Giants’ Jack Stroud, and the Packers’ Bob Skoronski. “Unless I’m meaner than them, unless I can intimidate them, I’d have no chance in the world against them,” Stautner said of his opponents.31

  Ernie Stautner was born in Bavaria, on the edge of the Alps, and he was three when his father brought the family to upper New York State, where he started a farm. Andy Russell’s father disapproved of his son playing pro football; Ernie Stautner’s father disapproved of his son playing football at all, but the boy was determined to play. He commuted to a high school in Albany; swore his brother, sister, and friends to secrecy about his playing football; hid the newspaper when his name or photo appeared in the sports pages; and made excuses for the cuts and bruises he got from football. By the time Ernie earned all-star honors, his father had relented on his objections.

  But people still kept telling Ernie Stautner he couldn’t play. He enlisted in the Marines and served during World War II. After his discharge, he offered his services to Notre Dame. Not big enough, Frank Leahy told him. Stautner enrolled at Boston College, where he played for four years. Back in his home state, he approached the Giants. Too small for an NFL lineman, Steve Owen told him. “Man, that got my dander up,” Stautner recalled years later. “I said, ‘I want to tell you something. I’m big enough to play for your team or anybody’s team. And you’re going to regret it.’”32 He sounded just like Buddy Dial several years later. Stautner and Dial were snubbed … Nutter cut … the Bears lost faith in Ed Brown—they all had something to prove, and at least Buddy Parker believed in them.

  The second-round pick of the Steelers in the 1950 draft, Stautner was selected to the first of his nine Pro Bowls two years later. He earned those honors on guts and sheer desire.

  “That man ain’t human,” Baltimore Colts tackle Jim Parker once said. “He’s too strong to be human. He keeps coming, coming. Every time he comes back, he’s coming harder.”33

  Stautner was symbolic of the Steeler way of playing defense. The Steelers had no intricate system on defense—nothing like Tom Landry was introducing to the Cowboys. Steeler assistant Buster Ramsey, coach of the defense, didn’t like his unit to gamble. Parker wasn’t much for razzle-dazzle; his teams came at you the same way Stautner did—relentlessly, with no letup.

  “This is the toughest ball club physically that we’ll ever play,” Giant assistant Emlen Tunnell, a future Hall of Fame defensive back, said after returning from Dallas on a scouting mission. “They do nothing fancy. The defense is simple. But they hit, hit, hit.”34

  “That’s their history,” Allie Sherman said. “They play hard.”35

  For all the luster surrounding the Giants, the Steelers had something else on their side, an intangible that went completely against the grain of a team whose approach to football was to treat each game as a human demolition derby. It was romantic and fanciful and a little spooky. For anyone who wanted to believe that the football gods eventually rewarded the unsung, the workers with bloodied knuckles, scraped cheekbones, and unbowed hearts, the Steelers were a team of destiny.

  “There is something eerie about them,” sportswriter Joe Williams wrote. “They don’t know when they are beaten. … They’ve got something going for them besides mundane mechanics. A sort of mysticism that defies analysis, makes assessment impossible. Ray (Buddy) Parker is not a coach, he’s a voodoo doctor who burns candles to a heathen God, revered by his disciples as the ‘last gasp.’”36 Appropriately enough, the story ran in the Press on Friday the thirteenth, a hobgoblin of Parker’s calendar.

  Sherman, by contrast, was much like the former Giant assistant Landry— a human computer. “All week he has been working on blocking, tackling, timing, dull terrestrial commonplaces,” Williams continued, “when he should have been reading tea leaves, attending spiritual séances, boning up on witchcraft.”

  The cast of the ’63 Steelers was shaped by the touch of a wizard. Only some kind of sorcerer could compile such a motley grab bag of players and have them challenging for a conference title on the final Sunday of the season. A headline in the December 10 New York Times cast an epitaph for their year: “The Steelers: A Lot of Discards Seeking a Jackpot.” Times reporter William Wallace counted nine starters on offense who had played for other teams, and six on defense. “There are no publicity heroes on this team, no television nor radio announcers, no product endorsers, just dangerous, hungry football players,” Wallace wrote.

  The Steelers were relatively healthy, but they had lost one vital cog in their defense: cornerback Brady Keys, who had suffered a season-ending injury to his chest when he collided with Jim Brown in November. Still, the defense had coped without him. Bobby Mitchell went wild against the Steelers in D.C., catching eleven passes, but the Eagles’ Tommy McDonald was held to one catch, and Billy Howton had been shut out in Dallas. The Giants, however, presented a new set of problems.

  The suspense in New York was over whether fullback Alex Webster would be ready after missing almost a month with a pulled thigh muscle. The Giants didn’t have a rusher in the top ten. Phil King ranked eleventh and was averaging 3.6 yards a carry. Joe Morrison was averaging 4.8 yards but was tied for fourteenth place in the league. Morrison’s value lay in his versatility: He could play flanker, halfback, fullback, tight end, even defensive back, and he could return punts and kicks. “He was the ultimate team player,” said Wellington Mara, son of the team’s founder, Tim Mara. “He would do anything you asked him.”37

  But that didn’t seem like enough. “Without big Red [Webster] at his effective best, the Giants have little but the magic in the arm of the elderly Tittle,” Arthur Daley wrote. Without a dependable ground game, the Giant attack “becomes a sporadic, hit-or-miss thing.�
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  Those who harped on Tittle’s absence from the lineup in the second week forgot that the Steeler running game racked up 223 yards that day and held New York to just one offensive series in the first quarter. “Tittle still hasn’t discovered the secret of throwing touchdown passes while the opposition has the ball,” Daley wrote.

  But what magic remained in that thirty-seven-year-old arm. Tittle ranked as the No. 1 quarterback, ahead of Johnny Unitas, going into the final Sunday, and he had thrown thirty-three touchdown passes and completed 59.8 percent of his throws. That week he was named most valuable player by the AP, “and people [were] coming at him with money in their fists.”39 Tittle also had the respect of opponents. He even drew the admiration of ex-Steeler defensive back Johnny Sample, who never stepped onto the field against a quarterback he couldn’t criticize. “Y. A., I think, was everything you’d want in a smart quarterback,” Sample said.40

  Tittle had capable receivers in Joe Walton and Frank Gifford, but the man who put fear in teams was speedy Del Shofner. “I’d rather cover anyone [other] than Del Shofner,” said Cardinal cornerback Jimmy Hill.41 Two seasons before, as Philadelphia was preparing for a showdown with New York for the Eastern title, Eagles defensive coach Jerry Williams commented, “Our main problem is stopping Del Shofner. … Shofner is the man we’re afraid of.”42

  Pittsburgh had a comparable threat in Buddy Dial, who had caught only six fewer passes than Shofner, scored as many touchdowns (eight), and gained more yards receiving than anyone but Bobby Mitchell. But Ed Brown wasn’t having the kind of year Y. A. Tittle was enjoying.

  “Tittle is famous and in demand,” the New York Times commented, while Brown was “the anonymous quarterback.”43 He had been on three Pro Bowl squads while with the Bears and had led them to a Western Conference title in 1956, when he was regarded as “the boy wonder of football.”44 They faced the Giants in the championship game and were thrashed, 47–7, and Brown was knocked out of the game in the fourth quarter with a concussion suffered when he was hit by defensive end Jim Katcavage. Days before the Steelers traveled to New York, Brown wondered, “I guess he’s still there, isn’t he?”45

  Brown ranked sixth among NFL quarterbacks, but his completion percentage was a poor 47.1, thirteenth among the fifteen rated passers. He had thrown nineteen touchdown passes and had been intercepted seventeen times, four more than Tittle. His average gain per completion was almost identical to his counterpart’s: 8.4 yards versus 8.3. But all that mattered in the final week of the regular season was that Brown had led the Steelers to a point where they could make history. The Steelers had watched as new heroes arose virtually each game. “But more than any other individual player, it has been the ‘Question-Mark Quarterback’ Ed Brown who has kept the hometown team in contention through eleven exciting weeks of football,” Joseph V. Rieland had written two weeks earlier. And Brown did not lack for confidence. “There is no question in his own mind,” wrote Pat Livingston during the preseason, “that he’s the equal of Tittle.”46

  But Brown had not completed 50 percent of his passes in one game since October 20, against the Redskins. He had struggled over the past three games, during which he had completed only thirty-one of seventy-four passes (42%), thrown a total of five touchdowns and six interceptions, and gained 596 yards. No question, he was erratic, but the self-described “too phlegmatic” quarterback hadn’t lost in the past three weeks either.47

  Dial, for one, admitted that coming into the season, he had doubts about whether the Steelers could win without Layne. “I wondered if Brown would work out as well because he is quiet,” Dial said. “But it’s his quiet leadership that helps us and he is tremendous at throwing the right pass after spotting a hole. I’d have to say that Ed has been the main factor in our drive this season.”48

  A touchdown had been the widest margin of victory in the Steelers’ previous five games, so the outcome of the Giants game loomed as a duel between Lou Michaels and Don Chandler, New York’s punter and kicker. Sherman gave the edge to Chandler (nicknamed “Babe”), not because of Michaels’s schizophrenic year, but because of the home field advantage, particularly in December.

  “Yankee Stadium at this time of year is always full of winds, swirling winds,” Sherman said. “They play havoc with a ball that’s not kicked just right. But this is our home and Chandler is better acquainted with the wind conditions here than any other kicker in the league.” Said Chandler: “Yankee Stadium is the toughest place for kickers in the league.”49

  Michaels was only twenty of thirty-eight on field goal attempts, but his misses, including his “oh-fer” against the Browns, had not lost a game for Pittsburgh. Chandler was sixteen of twenty-six. Both could connect from fifty yards. “When their toe explodes against the cadaver of a porker you can hear the ghostly groans of purgatorial agony in the farthermost reaches of the park,” wrote Joe Williams.50

  Touchdown passes from Tittle or Brown packed more excitement, “but in go-for-broke situations the kick can be as poisonous as a cobra cocktail, as suspenseful as a Fleming mystery.” In ninety-one games over thirteen weeks of the ’63 season, Williams calculated that a field goal was the difference in twenty-two games—seventeen victories and five ties.51

  The wind was unpredictable, Chandler said, and was just as tough on a punter. He didn’t mention that the wind was bound to be as rough on a passer as on a kicker or punter.

  Weather was the other factor that could alter the course of the game. The forecast was for clear but very cold weather on Sunday, and Parker insisted that he preferred a dry, fast field, even though wet conditions might slow Tittle’s passing game. “I can’t agree with this talk that we’d be better off on a wet field,” he said. “On a wet field, football becomes impossible. The defensive backs can’t cover the receivers, the runners can’t cut and you can’t run anything but quick, straight-ahead plays.”52

  A tarp was placed on the Yankee Stadium field Wednesday night. It snowed Thursday morning, but the tarp protected the field, and the Giants were able to work out at 1:30 p.m. for an hour before the tarp was put back on.53 Piles of snow lay on the perimeter of the field when the Steelers had a run-through on Saturday.

  Most athletes, including professional football players, are creatures of habit whose lives run on routine and repetition; that’s why Parker stuck to his practice of giving players two days off once he made the change after the Packer game. Players can be almost as superstitious about changes as Parker was—well, not quite. But one season-long Steeler routine was altered during the week before the Giant game.

  The Steelers regularly gathered for get-togethers, a practice that Parker encouraged. Bobby Layne organized bowling nights on Mondays and hosted all-night card parties. Some Steelers drank together every week at a restaurant called Dante’s, where Layne once held court. Brown, who enjoyed a cocktail every bit as much as Layne and Parker, was a regular, sipping Scotch on crushed ice with a dash of Drambuie. But on the Wednesday before the Giants game, as sportswriter and later, broadcaster, Myron Cope recounted, Brown was a no-show, evidently abstaining before the big game, leaving “his insides [as] dry as a temperance union president’s.”54

  Lou Cordileone couldn’t convince his roommate to go out.

  I said to Ed Brown, “Come on. We got to go out.”

  “No, we can’t. I got to be ready.”

  “Eddie, yo, fuck, you can’t change your routine the last game of the season. C’mon, let’s go out. Let’s fool around.” Nobody went out. I don’t think I went out one night. I said, “I’m not going to go out by myself. The hell with you guys.”55

  Cope, no stranger himself to the establishment, said of Brown, “It is not in his nature to lock himself in a room.” Furthermore, Cope observed, Brown “contravened the very motto that had carried the Steelers to the brink of the title: ‘Stay loose.’”56

  Brown had his own premonition of how the game would unfold. “Ed was a good friend of mine,” Cordileone said. “We’re bullshitt
ing the night before the game. We were in the [hotel] room, watching television, and people are coming around, like my family. It was so funny. Ed Brown said, ‘Well, I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow. If we can take the kickoff and go down and Michaels kicks a field goal, we’ll win the game. And if he misses the field goal, we’re in trouble.”57

  Inside Toots Shor’s on Saturday night, while temperatures fell into the mid-teens in Manhattan, Art Rooney was staying loose with the help of a crowd of friends and well-wishers. If sentiment could sway the outcome of the next day’s game, the Steelers would have been a prohibitive favorite. No one was admired and respected more around the NFL than the Steelers owner, and he was long overdue for a championship. “Good-Guy Rooney Deserves Winner,” read the headline over one column, and it expressed a universal feeling. “He’s still a kind, generous, thoughtful, God-fearing man whose honesty is almost painful,” columnist Arthur Daley wrote. Even New York sportswriters found it difficult not to pull for the Steeler patriarch. “How can I root against Art Rooney in the big showdown?” a colleague of Daley’s said.58

  Rooney himself believed that he was on the cusp of ending three decades of frustration and disappointment. “Boys,” he said, “I’d like to win this one. It’s been a long, long time.”59

  The players stood to make another $5,000 or $6,000 with a berth in the title game, but they were aware of what Sunday’s game meant to the Steelers owner. During Saturday’s workout at Yankee Stadium, “The Steelers crackled with noisy confidence, tickled by the prospect of kicking the daylights out of all those New York players who pose for Madison Avenue’s shirts ads.”60

  On Sunday morning, as he waited for the team bus outside the Belmont Plaza Hotel at Lexington Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street, Buddy Dial stood alongside the Reverend Robert Messenger, who had conducted some religious services for the Steelers during the year.

  “You know something?” Dial said to Rev. Messenger. “I want to win this game more than any game I ever played in.”