The Ones Who Hit the Hardest Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  FIRST QUARTER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  SECOND QUARTER - 1969-1972

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  THIRD QUARTER - 1973-1974

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  FOURTH QUARTER - 1975-1977

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  OVERTIME - 1978-1979

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

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  First printing, September 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Chad Millman and Shawn Coyne

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  To Stacy, Zac, Owen, Bibb, Bleecker, Waverly, and Crosby.

  They earned it.

  I believe the game is designed to reward

  the ones who hit the hardest.

  If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t play.

  JACK LAMBERT

  PROLOGUE

  ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, 1969, THE FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD COMMISSIONER of the National Football League checked into a Jacksonville hotel. Forewarned that a charismatic, game-changing quarterback was in town for an all-star football game, hotel security was doing its best to hold fans at bay. But the commissioner couldn’t help but notice the bevy of young women in the hotel’s lobby and lounge, waiting expectantly for the star to make his entrance. This wasn’t the kind of crowd Pete Rozelle was used to. Red-faced men in fedoras were more his speed. He settled into his suite, ordered a rusty nail and a bowl of nuts from room service and waited, just like the others, for the guy the kids were calling Broadway Joe.

  Five days earlier, Joe Namath had led the New York Jets to victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Rozelle had read William N. Wallace’s column for The New York Times the morning after the game:Because of what Joe Namath accomplished in the Super Bowl yesterday, pro football will never quite be the same again . . . The reason for having such games, these Super Bowls, is so that once in a long while the impossible can happen . . . if it could never happen, the great talent of Joe Willie Namath would be pumping gas in Beaver Falls without rhyme or reason.

  Namath won with deception, handing the ball off when the Colts expected pass, and passing when the Colts were thinking run. When he threw the ball, it wasn’t to Don Maynard, one of the top wideouts in pro football, but to a little known possession receiver named George Sauer Jr. He called the Jets plays brilliantly and, despite a stirring effort by legendary Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas, Baltimore played the patsy. Namath even guaranteed a Jets win days before kickoff. And his ability to back up his claim—seemingly singlehandedly—broke every tenet of proper pro football behavior.

  But what made Rozelle wince the most was what happened after the game. As Namath left the field, filmed for posterity in heroic slow motion by NFL Films, he threw up his right index finger, signaling I’m Number One. Namath was the exact opposite of what Rozelle wanted from his league and his players—he was a bigger story than the game itself.

  Rozelle firmly believed that professional football was America’s favorite sport because it appealed to what the new president of the United States, Richard Nixon, defined as the “silent majority”—working men and their families. “They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care,” Nixon decreed. Working men belonged to a union and drove the economic engine that made the United States the envy of the world. They wore hard hats—steelworkers, autoworkers, construction workers, meat packers, mechanics, and tradesmen. They’d fought hard to gain middle-class status and they resented the entitled youth culture that was tearing the country apart. They liked to place friendly wagers on games and chased shots of whiskey with their city’s hometown beer. These men loved professional football because most of them had played the game once upon a time themselves and found it to be an apt metaphor for the hard and honest lives they lived.

  Rozelle understood that the National Football League had deep roots in America’s industrial cities�
�Green Bay, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York. With their flattop hair-cuts and high-top black shoes, NFL players were the sons of workers who didn’t draw attention to themselves. Like their fathers, they knew how fragile a job was and the importance of getting on with the men they worked with, especially those who paid their wages. The NFL owners and coaches were paternal authoritarians. To play football was to be a tool of the establishment, and the hierarchy of the game mirrored the traditional social structure of the culture. There was a top, and there was a bottom. The power flowed from owner to general manager to coaches. And on the bottom were the players. They kept their mouths shut and sacrificed for the good of the team.

  Joe Namath should have fit right in. He was born and raised in western Pennsylvania, the son of a steelworker at the Babcock and Wilcox works in Beaver Falls. His father, John, took young Joe through the mill when he was eleven so he could feel the searing heat, choke on the dust and fumes, and shudder under the constant grind and crash of the machinery. He got the message—make something of yourself so you don’t have to come here for the rest of your life.

  Namath grew up looking for an edge—something to keep him from walking through the B&W gates the day after he graduated high school. He found it at a pool hall called The Blue Room. At fifteen he walked into the joint and lost his mother’s grocery money. From then on, Namath would be the hustler, not the hustled. He put on a seemingly effortless cool—sitting cross-legged and wearing sunglasses for the baseball team photo, smoking and drinking with male and female acquaintances from the Blue Room—while working tirelessly to perfect his athletic skills. Joe Namath acted as if he didn’t need anyone. As quarterback, he led Beaver Falls High to a Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL) championship. As a left fielder, he led the baseball team to one, too. Then he went off to play for Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama.

  He led Alabama to a national championship in 1964 (sportswriters awarded the prize prior to bowl games in ’64) and into the Orange Bowl against Texas. His popularity was such that NBC bought the rights to that game for $600,000 and introduced the U.S. to prime-time football. It didn’t matter that Namath, who had been plagued by knee woes since his junior year, wouldn’t start because of injured ligaments. Twenty-five million people still tuned in, hoping to see him get in the game. And of course he did, coming off the bench and leading the Crimson Tide back from a 21-7 deficit to a nail-biting 21-17 loss. He was named Most Valuable Player, but was too busy to pick up the trophy. Joe Namath was on his way to Miami to sign the most lucrative contract in the history of professional sports.

  By 1969, the son of a steelworker from western Pennsylvania was the biggest name in football. That much Pete Rozelle was happy about, as happy as he was when the face of the game had been Johnny Unitas, another son of the Pittsburgh area. But the similarities between these two icons ended with geography. Unitas wore his hair in a crew cut. Namath grew his out. Unitas was clean-shaven. Namath wore a Fu Manchu. Unitas had a family and was a discreet drinker. Namath got hammered publicly and chased women. Unitas owned a stake in a beer distributor in Baltimore. Namath owned his own bar on the trendy Upper East Side of Manhattan called Bachelors III.

  It was the bar that proved the tipping point for Pete Rozelle. A Lucchese family capo named Carmine Tramunti, a Colombo family hit man named Carmine “Junior” Persico, and a Gambino soldier named Dave Iacovetti were all regulars. The hallway leading to the restrooms was lined with pay phones where bets were placed by Bachelors III clientele. For Rozelle, Namath’s association with these elements tarnished the reputation of the league and would eventually alienate its blue-collar fans. And Namath’s signature on the standard player’s contract gave Rozelle the authority to make him sell his stake in the bar.

  Namath was due to play in the AFL All-Star Game scheduled for that coming Sunday at the Gator Bowl. Out of respect, Pete Rozelle flew to Jacksonville to tell him to sell immediately, before the newspapers found out that Rozelle was making Namath do it. They would have a drink in Rozelle’s suite, work it out, and Rozelle would be back in New York the next day. No need to air dirty laundry in public.

  But Namath, the biggest sports star in the world, never returned the commissioner of the National Football League’s call.

  FIRST QUARTER

  1

  FOR AS LONG AS ART ROONEY HAD OWNED THE PITTSBURGH Steelers—thirty-six mostly winless years by the time January 1969 rolled around—their offices had been housed in hotels. These were the perfect locations for the affable Rooney, who liked to pad around the lobbies in his stocking feet, chomping on cigars made in Pennsylvania Amish country, talking to porters, shoe-shine men, guests, clerks, and local politicos. As a well-connected city ward boss, as the owner of a pro franchise, as a man who had turned his ability to pick winners at the track into a horseracing empire that included thoroughbreds and tracks around the country, Rooney was as powerful a presence in Pittsburgh as any Carnegie or Mellon, only more approachable. To priest, pauper, or Pittsburgh scion, Rooney’s office door, like the hotels he worked in, was always open.

  In the early days, he settled in at the Fort Pitt Hotel, where his ground-floor suite had windows facing the street. Friends who hung around for late-night poker games appreciated that they could climb through the windows to leave instead of taking the longer, more public way through the lobby. In the late 1940s, Rooney moved the Steelers home base to the fourth floor of a respectable office building. But that location didn’t last. One of his top players was afraid he’d forget he was so high up and, after a too-late night spent chatting with Rooney, accidentally walk out the window. So Rooney moved to the Roosevelt, at the corner of Sixth Street and Penn Avenue. The office was on the ground floor, but it didn’t have any windows. Everyone would have to leave through the ornately designed English Tudor lobby.

  The only thing more important to Rooney than being on the ground floor was always being able to make phone calls. When he needed to hear what was happening with his horses, or get down a bet on a pony, it had to happen as quickly as possible. Business depended on it. If one of his five sons tied up the lines for too long he’d scream at them, “Go find a pay phone.” Once, when he was trying to call his wife and kept getting a busy signal, he sent a telegram to his house, asking her to hang up.

  Rooney breathed the working-class ethos that defined his town; no matter how influential he became, he still lived like a real burgher, like the son of a saloonkeeper he had always been. He and his wife, Kathleen, raised their boys in the two-story, redbrick Victorian house on the rapidly deteriorating north side of town where he grew up. Even in the late 1960s, as increasing television revenue lined the pockets of NFL owners, Rooney still walked to work almost every day. And on the days he took a car, it was one of his sons picking him up, not a chauffeur, and in an Imperial, not a limo.

  Rooney had bought the Steelers at the height of the Depression for $2,500, money earned by betting on horses and promoting local fighters. For the franchise’s first thirteen seasons, he dipped into his own pocket to keep it alive. During the leanest times, he resorted to desperate measures to fill out the roster. “They had a league rule that teams had to have eighteen guys dressed and the ref would count the guys on your bench,” says Art Rooney Jr., the second of Rooney’s sons, who was a longtime Steelers scout. “My grandfather had a brewery with a lot of fat guys, and they would dress these guys and put ’em on the sideline. But no one had any intention of playing them.”

  Still, Rooney Sr. ran his team as if it were a city trust, not something he owned outright. The Steelers were Pittsburgh, the nickname chosen by fans in a contest. The team practiced in South Park, an Allegheny County-owned field normally used for fairs and stock shows, where anyone could watch. Rooney, a man who Time magazine once wrote “looked like a football,” knew he was the owner, but he just thought of himself as the guy lucky enough to pay the bills.

  As the decades turned and his
influence increased, Rooney persisted in reaching out to the community, to forge the bonds that come from close contact. He became ubiquitous at funerals of old friends from his neighborhood. Young family members of the deceased would elbow each other, whispering, “There’s the Chief,” the nickname he’d picked up over the years. Then, as Rooney walked to the coffin to pay his respects, he’d slip the gawking kids tickets to a game.

  Early on, the Steelers were so bad—the team had only eight winning seasons in its first thirty-six years of existence—that fans sometimes challenged the players to fights in bars. But there was a you-can’t-blame-the-old-man attitude among the locals. Rooney’s decency was undeniable, his mistakes born from good intentions. Even he didn’t try to hide the stink on his teams. When the Steelers got new uniforms in the late 1960s but still continued to suffer, Rooney couldn’t help but comment that his team looked like “the same old Steelers.”

  All of his coaches, no matter how badly their teams performed, no matter how badly they behaved, were treated by Rooney as geniuses. And when they walked through the doors of his ground-floor office at the Roosevelt Hotel they were greeted with the warmth of a blast furnace. He’d ask about the team and its progress, but his was a hands-off approach to ownership. He did not interfere with personnel decisions.

  During training camp in 1955, the three youngest of his five sons, Tim and the twins, John and Pat, watched practice every day. The Steelers had three veteran quarterbacks in camp—Jim Finks, Ted Marchibroda, and Vic Eaton—and one rookie who barely got any reps, a spindly local kid named Johnny Unitas. The old pros called Unitas “Clem Kadiddlehopper” after the hick played by Red Skelton on his famous TV show at the time.