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The '63 Steelers

Page 36

by Rudy Dicks


  One can only speculate about the toll that playing like human pinballs took on the players. Some, like defensive back Willie Daniel, eventually suffered from dementia, but he was able to count on the loving care of his wife, Ruth. There’s no telling what nature dictated, or what price was exacted for playing kamikaze football in a meaningless exhibition against Detroit in January 1963, what the cost was for the players who “gave it all they had for the pride these steel-hard giants take in their battering profession.”6 Who knows what was driving these players to prove—like Red Mack back on a high school football field, or John Henry Johnson—that they could be better than the next guy, or good enough to become a pro, or maybe even good enough one day to play for the NFL championship. And at the end, when there were no more practices, no more Sundays to compete against Jimmy Hill of Sam Houston State or Joe Fortunato of Mingo Junction, Ohio, or Joe Walton of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, was it all worth it?

  “I did my job and I walked away happy and I don’t regret anything,” Carpenter said. “And that’s the best part.” Carpenter died June 30, 2011; he was 77. The pay was mediocre and daily life less than glamorous, “but I loved every minute of it,” Russell said. “I was so excited to be a pro. It didn’t matter to me.”7

  Three marquee players from the early sixties were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Bobby Layne in ’67, Stautner in ’69, and Johnson in ’87. After being hospitalized for internal bleeding, Layne died of cardiac arrest on December 1, 1986. He was fifty-nine. Stautner watched the Steelers win the Super Bowl in February 2006 and then died a week and a half later. He was eighty, and he had been coping with Alzheimer’s disease for eight years. John Henry Johnson died June 3, 2011, at age 81.

  Ed Brown, who was named comeback player of the year by UPI a week after the season-ending loss to the Giants, retired after the 1965 season. In its account of his retirement, the AP called Brown “a rather unheralded starter.” Maybe that was true. He didn’t win a championship, and he flopped in the 1963 showdown against the Giants. But on one Saturday night in Cleveland, Ed Brown was good enough to leave Jim Brown in awe, and he threw game-winning passes to Red Mack and Gary Ballman, and for one unlikely season he carried the hopes of Steeler fans on his right arm. His playing days over, Brown went back to California. “My dad asked me, ‘What are you going to do now?’” the quarterback recalled years later. “I said, ‘I don’t know. All I’ve ever done is play football.’” His father bought him a liquor store, and Brown ran it for twelve years. He died of prostate cancer in August 2007.8

  Russell had to leave the team to serve two years of military service, which he completed in Europe. “That’s a long time to be away from football,” he said after the Giant loss. “What I hate about it is that I’ll have to make the team all over again, just like a rookie.”9

  Russell was a lot more intent on resuming his pro football career than he had been starting it. “I was very motivated to return,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about winning championships. I was just thinking, ‘Can I make it back?’”10 Russell returned and endured six straight losing seasons. But he wound up a twelve-year career with seven Pro Bowl appearances and two Super Bowl rings. He was the last active Steeler player from the ’63 squad.

  If there was one football team whose regrets and frustration could match the Steelers’, it was the University of Pittsburgh. The Panthers went 9–1, their finest season since the 9–0–1 team of 1937, yet they wound up snubbed by all the bowls. Navy, the only team that beat Pitt, was invited to the Cotton Bowl to play Texas. Nebraska met Auburn in the Orange Bowl. The Gator Bowl matched North Carolina against Air Force. Pitt was left out.

  The world had been shaken up and scarred in 1963, and not even the most optimistic forecasts for innovation and the economy were going to ease the pains of a chaotic, traumatic year. If U.S. News & World Report had been on target in its conclusion before the Kennedy assassination that the national attitude was “one of some uncertainty rather than one of full confidence,” what in heaven’s name was the state of mind of the American people in the aftermath of November 22, 1963?11

  Sports had changed forever too. Pro football, with a rival league, more lucrative deals for coveted players, and the growth of television, was changing swiftly from the days when Art Rooney Sr. and Bobby Layne could simply shake hands on a new contract. “It’s a new era,” Rooney said days after the season-ending loss to the Giants. “Now it’s really big business.”12

  Sports Illustrated named Pete Rozelle its man of the year, a departure from its practice of honoring athletes, and a nod to the “big business” that pro football had become, as Rooney noted.13

  Buddy Parker resigned during the first week of September 1965 after four consecutive preseason losses. Upset that his authority had been usurped when Dan Rooney balked at a proposed trade with Philadelphia, Parker finally made good on his threat to quit. He returned to Texas to run a business. Two years later, he said in an interview, “No, I don’t miss football really.”14 That sentiment is believable, on one hand; anyone who suffered so mightily after a loss might feel immense relief to be unburdened by the weight of coaching responsibilities and the dread of one more loss. On the other hand, how could someone who practically mortgaged his soul and sanity to win football games for fifteen years not feel the lure of his raison d’être? And how could he have undergone such a change of heart after declaring a year earlier, “I’ll listen to any job, head coach or assistant”?15

  Parker’s abrupt decision to quit the Lions lingered as one of his regrets. Surely there were others. In the fall of ’75, about nine months after the Steelers won their first Super Bowl, Parker praised Rooney and said, “I would have liked to have won a championship for him. I guess I was about a decade too soon.”16 But he was right on time in Detroit.

  Parker died on March 22, 1982, from kidney failure, two weeks after being hospitalized for a ruptured ulcer. “The charge that I was in too big a hurry to give the Steelers a championship is true,” Parker was quoted as saying in his obituary. “The charge that I gave away too many draft choices for veterans I thought could help us win is true.”17 He was sixty-eight.

  Noll took over the Steelers in 1969—Hoak’s last year as a running back—and, after winning the opener, lost the next thirteen games. In 1974, he took the Steelers to the Super Bowl and brought home the franchise’s first championship, eleven seasons after Buddy Parker and a blood-’n’-guts team of renegades came mighty close to doing it themselves.

  But what if Y. A. Tittle’s third-down pass had glanced harmlessly off Frank Gifford’s hand and fallen onto the frozen field at Yankee Stadium? What if Don Chandler had been forced to punt and Brown had led the Steelers on a scoring drive that put them ahead, 17–16, and they had hung onto the lead? “Maybe take the game. Who knows?” Parker said afterward.18 What would have happened in a rematch with the Bears two weeks later on the frozen turf at Wrigley Field? “I don’t know. I think we could have beat ’em, but who knows?” Cordileone said forty-seven years later. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.”19

  “We would have beat them,” Russell said with no hesitation. “I think we did beat ’em in Pittsburgh.”20

  Rooney made the trip to Chicago to watch his friend George Halas coach the Bears to a 14–10 victory over the Giants. After the game, Rooney said, “Yeah, the Steelers could have beaten both of them, only we weren’t in there.”21

  After all the second-guessing, the analyzing and reflection, sometimes there’s no room for logic. Sometimes you’re left with the quirks of the game, like a crooked upright on a goalpost, or the volleyball bounces of a pass that gave St. Louis a touchdown in the Cardinals’ victory. The ’63 season looked like it could have been the year the Steelers had been waiting for since 1933.22

  “I put it down in the book as it wasn’t meant to be,” Michaels said. “That’s the way it happened. And that’s the way it worked. What can you say about it? There are things that sometimes happen for yo
u, sometimes don’t happen for you.”23

  AFTERWORD

  The eleven-year-old kid who watched the Steelers cling to a championship dream bounced back, too. Days after the 33–17 loss to the Giants, he even made the front page of the Youngstown Vindicator, standing in a sleigh driven by Santa Claus and pulled by a couple of donkeys wearing fake reindeer antlers. Sitting in a sleigh pulled by donkeys was probably the Christmas equivalent of playing in the Runner-Up Bowl. The headmistress of the school had arranged the event and alerted the newspaper to a good photo opportunity. It was no Morris Berman photograph of Y. A. Tittle for eternity, but it was good enough for a sixth-grader. And he had a broad grin despite the frigid weather and the aftermath of the Steeler loss.

  Christmas was a week away, and four days after the holiday, the NFL title game between the Bears and Giants was held at Wrigley Field on another frozen field, with temperatures in the single digits. If you were a Steeler fan, it was tough to resist watching and imagining how Pittsburgh would have done in a rematch with Wade and Ditka. Hampered by an injured knee, Tittle threw five interceptions, and Del Shofner dropped a pass in the end zone. For a Steeler fan, it figured that such lapses couldn’t have happened against Pittsburgh two weeks earlier. The Bears won, 14–10. The winner’s share, per player, was $5,899.77, the loser’s share $4,218.15, a much better payday than the Steelers got playing in the Playoff Bowl the year before.1

  With little off-season coverage, the draft over, no such thing as sports talk radio shows, and no 24–7 sports on TV, football practically went into hibernation until the College All-Star Game in the first week of August in ’64—which brought one more reminder that it could have been the Steelers playing George Mira, Carl Eller, and Charlie Taylor instead of the Bears. But there were other diversions to keep a young Steeler fan from dwelling on disappointment.

  The Beatles were only weeks away from appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, opening up a whole new world of transistor radio, rock ’n’ roll, and 45 rpm records to a sixth-grader. The Beatles would even play at the Civic Arena, the same venue Leonard Bernstein had condemned for its acoustics. Later, there would be a school dance with Beatles songs playing on a record player, and the discovery that a girl’s hand in yours could feel as soft and comfortable as a nicely broken-in baseball glove. And probably smell better.

  And there would always be reminders of life and death. At the end of July, during training camp, Willie Galimore, who had scored the opening touchdown in the Steelers-Bears 17–17 tie, and teammate John Farrington, whose 54-yard reception set up Galimore’s score, died in a car crash. The kid, now twelve, went with his dad to see Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate, speak at Idora Park in the summer. Maybe it was the memory of Kennedy or just a disinterest in politics, but the kid probably would have had a better time there riding the Wildcat or hearing the Human Beinz in concert.

  The wait for a good Steeler team would seem as interminable as the last week of school before summer vacation—magnified a hundred times. Seasons of 2–12 … 5–8–1 … 2–11–1 went by—and so did the coaches. In that time, the rival Browns won a championship and so did the New York Mets; Forbes Field was torn down and the Beatles disbanded—just as easily as the ’63 Steelers were disassembled. Tucked inside those events was a lesson about how brick and mortar could be crushed, but you could hang on to the smell and sights and sounds of a Sunday afternoon, and the spectacle of John Henry Johnson running with a football like a man dashing out of a burning building could become imbedded in your memory as securely as a tattoo on your arm. And if the Mets could win a World Series, well, how could anyone doubt that we could land a man on the moon, even if it wasn’t Big Daddy Lipscomb? And who would dare scoff that even the Steelers could win a championship?

  At last, seeing black-and-gold uniforms in a playoff game on TV made you feel the way you do when your lungs give thanks as you explode to the surface after holding your breath underwater for as long as you can. As the clock ticked off the final seconds on January 12, 1975, to make it official that the Steelers were, indeed, after forty-one seasons, champions of the NFL, it felt as if all the noisemakers, confetti, and cheers on New Year’s Eve in Times Square were fluttering inside your stomach. At some point, another lesson seeped into the kid’s subconscious, where it would linger like some valuable tool or device that had been neglected and forgotten in a corner of a garage or attic, then discovered with the exclamation, “I’ve been looking for this!” No one articulated and described that lesson better than Pat Conroy in My Losing Season. “Winning is wonderful in every aspect, but the darker music of loss resonates on deeper, richer planes,” Conroy wrote. “Loss is a fiercer, more uncompromising teacher, coldhearted but clear-eyed in its understanding that life is more dilemma than game, and more trial than free pass.” And there could hardly be a more fitting performer to applaud Conroy’s tale than Andy Russell, who went from a player on a 1–13 team to a Super Bowl champion. Conroy’s contention that loss teaches us more is “absolutely true,” Russell wrote in “A Letter to Pat Conroy,” one of the chapters in Russell’s book, Beyond the Goalpost.2

  Forty-one years after two uncles, Big Daddy Lipscomb, Ernie Davis, John F. Kennedy, and the ’63 Steelers’ dream died, I returned to Rosewae Drive and the front yard where I once wore away the grass diving after footballs. It was a sunny, balmy spring afternoon, but there were no kids outside playing catch, no mothers tending their gardens. There was an addition on one end of the house—our house—and the trees had grown a lot bigger. But mostly I was surprised at how small the yard was compared to how I remembered it. Maybe the whole world looked bigger back then—bigger with hope and dreams. As big as Big Daddy, as big as New York.

  The one thing that hadn’t changed over four decades was the rich sheen of the grass, and I didn’t have to close my eyes to see my neighborhood pals playing tackle football on it, or to picture an overcast, late fall Sunday afternoon long ago, on a day the flag dangled limp at half-mast, along with our spirits, and the sight of Mike Ditka ricocheting through a half-dozen defenders as Clendon Thomas gave chase and the eleven-year-old kid in the stands at Forbes Field clenched his fists and pleaded, “Catch him. Catch him.”

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1. John Kobler, “Crime Town USA,” Saturday Evening Post, March 9, 1963, 71.

  2. Jack Sell, “Last-Minute Layne Deflates Browns,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 23, 1959.

  3. Al Abrams, “The Comeback Kids,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 23, 1959.

  4. George Strickler, “Packers Win; Bears Tie, Retain Lead,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 25, 1963; Pat Livingston, “Steelers Warned,” Pittsburgh Press, Sept. 21, 1963.

  5. Art Rooney Jr., conversation, March 10, 2008.

  6. Bill Conlin, “Bears ‘Lucky’ to Tie Steelers,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Nov. 25, 1963.

  7. Al Abrams, “A Bear of a Tie,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 25, 1963; Lou Cordileone, conversation, Aug. 13, 2008; Lou Michaels, conversation, Aug. 29, 2007; Conlin, “Bears ‘Lucky.’”

  8. Robert Riger, Best Plays of the Year 1963: A Documentary of Pro Football in the National Football League (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 69.

  PRESEASON

  1. Ray Didinger, Pittsburgh Steelers (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 21.

  2. Jack Sell, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Steelers Hire Buddy Parker for 5 Years,” Aug. 28, 1957.

  3. Art Rooney Jr., conversation, April 29, 2010.

  4. Didinger, Pittsburgh Steelers, 21.

  5. Jack Goodwin, “Fran Watches Layne in Awe and in Desperation,” Minneapolis Star, Nov. 5, 1962.

  6. Steve Hubbard, “Destiny’s Derelicts,” Pittsburgh Press, Jan. 3, 1988.

  7. Myron Cope, “Pro Football’s Gashouse Gang,” True, Sept. 1964, 106; Andy Russell, conversation, April 19, 2010; Frank Atkinson, conversation, Oct. 10, 2007.

  8. Cope, “Pro Football’s Gashouse Gang,” 106; Lou Cordileone, conversation, Aug. 13, 2008
.

  9. Andy Russell, interview, April 19, 2010.

  10. Richard Sandomir, “Little Consolation in Third-Place Game,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2011.

  11. Sandy Grady in Didinger, Pittsburgh Steelers, 22.

  12. Lou Cordileone, conversation, Aug. 13, 2008.

  13. “Parker Slated to Remain as Steelers’ Coach But Layne’s Career Nears End,” Youngstown Vindicator, Jan. 8, 1963 (United Press International, published in Vindicator).

  14. Lou Cordileone, conversation, Aug. 13, 2008.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Mike Shropshire, The Ice Bowl: The Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers Season of 1967 (New York: D. I. Fine Books, 1997), 59.

  17. Tarasovic was listed as defensive end that year; he played linebacker in ’63.

  18. Jack Sell, “Eagles Top Steelers in Wild Fray, 35 to 24,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dec. 4, 1961.

  19. Didinger, Pittsburgh Steelers, 29.

  20. Michael Richman, “Eddie LeBaron,” Coffin Corner, 25, no. 3 (2003): 1.

  21. Tex Maule, “Pro Football Scouting Reports,” Sports Illustrated, Sept. 9, 1963, 54; Andy Russell, interview, April 19, 2010; Bobby Layne with Fred Katz, “Pro Football’s 11 Meanest Men,” Sport, Nov. 1964, 16.

  22. Jimmy Brown with Myron Cope, Off My Chest (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 44–45.

  23. Stephen Norwood, Real Football: Conversations on America’s Game (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 109.

  24. “Packers Picked to Lead the Pack,” Pittsburgh Press, Sept. 1, 1963.

  25. Tex Maule, “The Cowboys Can Ride High on Better Defense,” Sports Illustrated, Sept. 9, 1963, 52.

 

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