by Rudy Dicks
“Gifford turned the game around,” Parker said later. “If he doesn’t hold that ball, we take over, and I think we would have won. Give the credit to Gifford. I thought we would win it with one of our late rallies until Gifford made that catch. It was a great play, the turning point.”97
“We were a team that could have our back broken,” Art Rooney Jr. said, “and that was the play that did it.”98
The Giants got the ball right back, after Barnes broke up a pass intended for Ballman on third-and-2 from the Steeler 35. Tittle hit Aaron Thomas with a 31-yard pass, and an unsportsmanlike conduct call on Pittsburgh advanced the ball to the visitors’ 15. A 14-yard throw to Gifford put the Giants on the 1, and Morrison plunged in for his third touchdown to make it 30–10 with 5:50 left in the quarter but no magic left in the Steelers’ season. There would be no Ballman kickoff return to save them, no bomb to Red Mack to rescue them, no Dick Haley interception to pull the game out.
The Steelers reached the Giant 25, but Barnes intercepted Brown. Pittsburgh got the ball back, and with half a minute left in the quarter Brown hit Dial with a 40-yard TD pass to make it 30–17. Michaels and Chandler each missed field goal attempts in the fourth quarter, but Chandler connected from 41 yards with 2:25 left in the game to make the final Giants 33, Steelers 17. The Giants were headed to Wrigley Field to play the Bears for the NFL championship. The Steelers were about to tumble into fourth place at 7–4–3, with Cleveland in second place at 10–4, and St. Louis third at 9–5. It was an inglorious finish to a season that had sparkled with hints of destiny, a tease that Steeler history was about to be rewritten. And there were a few more insults to endure.
“The Steelers looked like a consignment of rusted corrugated iron roofing in their big chance for their first sectional title,” Harold Rosenthal wrote for the New York Herald Tribune. “Their reputed hard noses were rubbed vigorously into the semifrozen turf, their vaunted ball control was a hollow mockery.”99
The truth was, the Steelers weren’t manhandled. Even Rosenthal conceded that Johnson “was a terror in the rushing department,” totaling a game-high 104 yards. Tittle had a game worthy of an MVP, but the Steelers had sabotaged themselves. Michaels missed an early field goal, and a muffed hold cost Pittsburgh another attempt. Ballman’s fumble cost the Steelers an opportunity. Pittsburgh could have gotten a field goal instead of running Sapp on fourth-and-1. Prime chances, no points. And, of course, there was Gifford, who had made the greatest one-handed catch in Yankee Stadium since Brooklyn’s Sandy Amorós in the 1955 World Series. “Gifford was the guy who killed us,” Parker said.100
But the player who bore the role of goat was Ed Brown. As tough as Tittle was on the Steeler secondary, the Giant defensive backs got a big break because of Brown’s scattershot throws. “Ballman would have had five touchdowns if Brown had been able to hit him,” Parker said.101
Parker would rue his decision to force the best field general he ever had into retirement. “I have no doubt we would have beaten the Giants with Layne at quarterback that day,” he reflected later. “Ed Brown was never the leader Layne was, and that’s what we needed that day—a leader.”102
Ernie Stautner was so angry with Brown in the locker room that he was ready to take a poke at the quarterback. “I might have, except I was too tired,” he said.103
If ever a team needed to win just one game, Layne had earned the reputation as the guy who could do it. “I don’t know if Bobby would have made that great a difference on the season as a whole, but once we got to that final game, Layne would have been the difference between us winning and losing,” Art Rooney told Ray Didinger years later, after the Steelers won their first Super Bowl. “A game like that, with everything riding on one roll of the dice, was Bobby’s meat,” Stautner reflected more than a decade later.104
Huff was right: The difference was Tittle. It wasn’t just a case of Brown losing his touch; “many of his throws were so far off target as to appear ludicrous,” wrote Tex Maule.105
“I think maybe the pressure got to the guy more than anything else,” Art Rooney Jr. said. “Brown was a real good football player. He was not a great player. I don’t think he had the confidence in himself.”106
The Giants didn’t miss Webster, but the Steelers could have used Brady Keys. “When we played the Giants I could always hold Del Shofner,” Keys said. “He never scored on me. That was the difference in the game.”107
“That’s a lucky football team,” Lou Michaels fumed in the locker room. “That’s the story of their lives—L-U-C-K.”108
And, of course, it wasn’t the story of the Steelers. Their lot was the saga of a snake bitten team. Four years earlier, Jack Butler, who would finish his career as a Steeler defensive back with fifty-two interceptions, sustained a career-ending knee injury late in the season. As he lay in his bed at Mercy Hospital, he reflected, “Buddy Parker says you have to be lucky in this league. He’s so right.”109
The disappointment from that day would ease for some of the players who went on to play in championship games, but some of the dismay lingered over a lifetime. “I felt we were going to win the whole thing,” Red Mack said. “I truly did. After all these years, I look back and say, ‘I just can’t imagine that we lost that game.’”110
There was plenty of room for analyzing and second-guessing. “You can hunt excuses,” Clendon Thomas said forty-five years later. “Here I am talking about it at my age and remembering. You can’t help but what-if yourself. What if we’d brought our ice shoes. What if we’d not had Brady hurt.”111
Anyone could have gone back to the start of the season and started wondering. What if John Henry Johnson hadn’t hurt his ankle and had been available to bust the Browns’ goal line stands in Cleveland? What if the Steelers had been able to keep Charley Johnson from snatching away a victory in the final seconds in St. Louis? And if Lou Michaels hadn’t hit a crooked upright on a point-after in the opener? If John Reger had been able to hang on to Bill Wade’s mistake of a pass in the final minute, two days after the Kennedy assassination? And what if Gifford … ?
Buddy Parker had his own theory. He might have had regrets about not keeping Layne on the squad, but the team had gone into the season with a loss he felt was too hard to overcome. “One man cost us that championship. Big Daddy Lipscomb,” Parker said three years later. “With Lipscomb, there is no doubt we would have won another game or two.”112
Could the 1963 Steelers actually have gone 11–2–1 or 10–2–2 instead of 7–4–3? Or even 12–2? It would have taken a few breaks, but with a couple, Pittsburgh and Art Rooney wouldn’t have had to wait another eleven seasons to get a shot at the franchise’s first championship. But this was not the Steelers’ day for even a tidbit of luck. Some aspects of the game can be defined with scientific precision, Timothy Gay demonstrates in The Physics of Football, but Gay is also well aware of one incontrovertible, inexplicable truth about football, which former Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant duly noted: “There are coaches who spend 18 hours a day coaching the perfect game and they lose because the ball is oval and they can’t control the bounce.”113
After the final gun, there was little from which the Steelers could draw consolation. “I feel kinda crushed,” Dial told Rooney after the game. “I never felt so confident of winning a game in my life. I thought we had it.”
“So did I,” Rooney replied. “So did I.”114
Two days later, George Halas, “a stubborn old codger,” was named coach of the year by United Press International, drawing twenty-five of the forty-two votes cast. Parker and Wally Lemm of the Cardinals each got six votes. Halas’s Bears and the Packers each placed six players on the first team of the ’63 all-NFL selections, offense and defense, as voted by UPI and AP. The Giants had five players named to the squad; the Cardinals had two. The Steelers had none. What they had were a seldom-used halfback picked up in midseason, a rookie starting at linebacker and another playing regularly at defensive tackle, a cornerback who went undrafted a
nd made the team after asking for a tryout, a defensive tackle unloaded by three other teams, and a bunch of other players nobody wanted and nobody believed in—a group that Parker assembled like a mad scientist and had battling for a berth in the NFL Championship Game right up until the final period on the final Sunday of the regular season.115
The Browns earned a berth in the Runner-Up Bowl against the 11–2–1 Packers, who finished second to the 11–1–2 Bears in the Western Conference. That was probably best for the Steelers. Another postseason exhibition would do nothing to ease the crush of falling short of the championship game—again. In a final bit of irony and a nod to the quirks of the system, the Cardinals, at 9–5, with one more loss than Pittsburgh, finished in third place by a few percentage points: .643 to .636. It’s doubtful any Steelers noticed, let alone complained, the way some New York observers did when the Steelers were a threat to win the conference with fewer victories than the Giants.
The atmosphere on the flight back from New York to Pittsburgh was appropriately funereal. All flights are somber after a loss, but on this one, something really had died: the dream of a championship. Rooney sat slouched in a front seat. “We could have won it,” he said repeatedly.116
A sequence of four photos on the front page of Monday morning’s Post-Gazette showed the Giants’ Barnes recovering the fumble Ballman lost in the end zone, then eluding Carpenter on the return. “You know Gary never forgot that?” Carpenter said forty-four years later.117
Surely only historians and the most diehard of fans would remember years later—or for merely weeks afterward. Any casual fan glancing through a press guide or a record book in the future would look at the 1963 standings and never imagine that this fourth-place team had stuffed Jimmy Brown in the end zone; come from behind to beat the Cardinals, Redskins, and Cowboys; slugged out a standstill with the eventual world champion Bears; and then let a conference title slip away, just like the ball that squirted out of Ballman’s arms. The names on the Steeler roster may not have gotten the publicity that the Giant players enjoyed, but it could boast “an oldster or two who needed only to have the light turned his way to make people realize he had been a star for a long time”—players like Joe Krupa, Preston Carpenter, and Buzz Nutter.118
On Monday morning, the Post-Gazette’s banner headline, in all caps, read: “GIANTS END STEELER HOPES, 33–17.” The italicized banner head at the very top of the page, above the Post-Gazette’s flag, was directed at another page 1 story. The headline read: “2 Below Zero Is Predicted for Today.”
It looked as though it was going to be a long, cold winter in Pittsburgh.
EPILOGUE
The two teams that had battled for a berth in the NFL title game on the last Sunday of the ’63 regular season seemed destined for another showdown the following year. Indeed, it came to pass, and in Yankee Stadium again. Only this time the game that took place on the first anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and the battle between the Steelers and Giants, wasn’t for first place in the Eastern Conference—it was to avoid last place.
The Giants were in the cellar, with a 2–6–2 record and, with a win, could drop the 3–7 Steelers into last place. Pittsburgh romped, 44–17. They had beaten the Giants, 27–24, in the second week, a game that produced an iconic photo in NFL history. Defensive end John Baker barreled into Y. A. Tittle, leaving him kneeling, dazed, and bloodied in the end zone. Yat’s helmet was knocked off, and he was lucky his head wasn’t, too. The image was immortalized by Post-Gazette photographer Morris Berman. Tittle retired at the end of the season. Big John Baker played his last season with the Steelers in 1967 and then spent a year with the Lions before returning to his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, where he served as sheriff for twenty-four years. He died at age seventy-two on October 31, 2007.
Buddy Parker’s team was on its way to a 5–9 record with a new cast. The highlight of their year came in Cleveland on October 10, a Saturday night, when John Henry Johnson jitterbugged for 200 yards in a 23–7 win over the eventual NFL champs. It must have turned into another sad night for the “Gang at Sophie’s Café.” The victory gave Pittsburgh a 3–2 record, but the Steelers went on to lose their next five games, during which their proud defense gave up at least thirty points each week, before the rout of the Giants.
If there is a day that officially marked the team’s descent back to the Steeler Ice Age of the thirties and forties, it was probably October 18, 1964, the afternoon of a 30–10 loss in Minnesota that started the slide. The team would not win more than five games in a season until 1971, Chuck Noll’s third year. It would then take three more seasons—a total of six—for Noll to accomplish what Parker was confident he could do in five: bring Pittsburgh and the Rooneys an NFL title.
Cleveland, at 10–3–1, edged out 9–3–2 St. Louis for the Eastern Conference title in 1964 and routed Baltimore in the championship game, 27–0. The Bears had nearly as bad a fall as the Giants that year but avoided last place, with a 5–9 record.
The Steeler lineup that had challenged for the Eastern Conference title the year before unraveled quickly. This time Parker’s moves did not pan out; they backfired with a vengeance. The Buddy Dial trade blew up, and first-round draft pick Paul Martha proved to be no replacement for the sure-handed Texan. Myron Pottios was injured in the preseason. In the aftermath of his tussle with Lou Michaels, Red Mack was dealt to Philadelphia, returned to Pittsburgh in ’65, and in ’66 became a member of the Packers during their Super Bowl I season.
Michaels’s status was as shaky as Mack’s. When Parker obtained kicker Mike Clark in a trade with Philadelphia, Michaels grew upset over ribbing about the deal, and KO’d teammate Jim Bradshaw. Michaels was suspended and then traded to Baltimore, and he would gain lasting notoriety for a confrontation with Joe Namath at a bar on the eve of Super Bowl III. “He stood there and he pointed to me,” Michaels recalled, “and he said, ‘We’re going to kick the s-h-i-t out of you, and I’m going to do it.’” Namath taunted Michaels and poked fun at the Colts and Johnny Unitas. Michaels seethed, but no one was KO’d, and they parted amicably.1
The ’63 season was the last in Pittsburgh for Frank Atkinson, Preston Carpenter, Glenn Glass, Lou Cordileone, and John Reger. Carpenter played two years with the Redskins, another with the Vikings, and one more with the Dolphins. “As long as I was playing football I didn’t care where I went,” he said.2 Reger played for the Redskins for three more years as a teammate of Sam Huff.
Cordileone was out of football for a few seasons, then came back to play for two years for the Saints. He took a shot—a brief one—at the career as a mortician he had envisioned once his playing days ended. “I went to school for about a week,” he recalled. “I said, ‘You know what? I can’t do this.’”3 He found something more to his liking: owning a bar in the French Quarter called the Huddle, where he installed two barber chairs instead of stools at one end of the bar. “I just thought they’d be more comfortable,” he said.4 It was there that Cordileone got as close as he could to landing in a championship game as a Steeler. When the Steelers made it to Super Bowl IX, their first title game, held at the Superdome, the former defensive tackle was there as saloonkeeper, greeting friends and fans from Pittsburgh in town for the game. He eventually moved to California.
Thomas’s all-around skills helped the Steelers in ’64 when injuries reduced their receiving corps. The former Oklahoma Sooner switched over to wide receiver and caught forty-two passes over two seasons before returning to safety. He retired after the ’68 season.
When George Allen left the Bears to become head coach of the Rams after the ’65 season, he obtained Pottios, and the linebacker played there through 1970. When Allen took over the Redskins for the ’71 season, he brought over Pottios as part of the “Over-the-Hill Gang,” which went to the Super Bowl in the next season and lost to the unbeaten Miami Dolphins. Pottios, who’d grown up in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, in the same county as Haley, retired after the ’73 season.
Brady
Keys concluded his eight-year NFL career with a half season in Minnesota and a final one with the Cardinals. Before leaving the Steelers, he embarked on an entrepreneurial career, beginning with his All Pro Fried Chicken franchises. “I want to be a model for black people who want to go into business for themselves,” Keys said in a 1969 interview.5
Theron Sapp played two more seasons with the Steelers before retiring. He too went into the fried chicken business, back in his home state. He earned the nickname “Drought Breaker” for a touchdown he made for Georgia, but the one he scored in Dallas helped the Steelers keep alive a dream of breaking a drought of their own.
Bob Ferguson’s NFL career ended after playing in just two games with the Vikings after his trade from Pittsburgh. He returned to Ohio State to earn a masters in sociology, got elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1996, and died on December 30, 2004.
Bob Schmitz’s playing career ended after the 1966 season. He spent thirty-three years as an NFL scout with BLESTO, the Steelers and Jets. He was just days into his retirement in June 2004 when he died from an apparent heart attack. He was sixty-five.
Several players stayed in football after their playing days and excelled in new roles. Ernie Stautner coached for more than thirty years, prominently as defensive line coach and defensive coordinator for Tom Landry’s Cowboys. Dick Haley played one more year with the Steelers and then began a distinguished career in evaluating talent, becoming the director of player personnel and helping Art Rooney Jr. draft the kind of players who would make them perennial Super Bowl contenders. The ’63 year was Hoak’s last on a winning team as a player, but he would share in the franchise’s glory years. When he retired after the ’69 season, he ranked as the second-leading rusher in team history, behind John Henry Johnson. He returned to the team as coach of the running backs, a position he held for thirty-four years, and was on the staff for five Super Bowl victories.