The Ones Who Hit the Hardest Read online

  Noll was always asking Paul Brown, “Why, why, why?” And he wasn’t just curious about football, either. He went to law school during the off-season. And sold insurance. And worked at a trucking firm. And studied wine and classical music and how to tend roses and how to fly airplanes. He lived his life the way he approached football: Knowledge was the ultimate prize.

  After seven NFL seasons, Noll retired from the Browns. He was healthy, but he wanted to coach, and he was hired by Sid Gillman to handle the defense for the AFL’s Chargers. Gillman revolutionized NFL offense with his precision passing game. His players ran exacting routes, dissecting the field into finely calibrated geometric angles, the distances they covered perfectly timed to how many steps the quarterback dropped back. Today it’s called the West Coast offense, and its timing patterns are a staple in every NFL team’s game plan.

  But Gillman also believed in learning the tics and tells of opponents, basing his schemes on how a defensive back turned his shoulders or what kind of depth a linebacker used in coverage. And the only way to figure that out was by painstaking film study. Gillman used so much film that he was one of the first coaches to hire full-time cameramen. Each of his assistants was required to splice together their own reels, specific to their coaching assignments, and then break down the opponent’s schemes for their boss. It could take hours of manual labor to cut and analyze a single set of downs. Most coaches hated it. Except for Noll. He had studied film as a player—but what Gillman offered was a master class in editing, in using the tools that were being offered to their greatest advantage. He’d spend hours in the darkness, taping together pieces of film, running projectors back and forth. This was where he’d find the answers. It was hard for Noll to turn it off, to stop himself from sharing what he learned, even when it earned him derision. Fellow assistants called him “The Pope,” “Knute Knowledge” and “Knowledge Noll.”

  When Shula, another ex-Paul Brown player, hired Noll to run his defense for the Colts in 1966, he knew all this. And Noll didn’t shy away from sharing opinions with his much-revered boss. Heated arguments could erupt on the proper alignments of defensive backs, or just about anything else. In those moments, they weren’t expert tacticians steeped in the theories of Paul Brown. They weren’t boss and employee. They were just a couple of football-obsessed kids from Cleveland having a spirited debate.

  4

  THE PRIMARY ACTION OF FOOTBALL—TAKING A BALL ACROSS an opponent’s designated line of defense—is as old as community. Historians describe a medieval game that matched one small village against another in bloody conflict. An inflated pig’s bladder served as the ball, and with no rules beyond “no murder or manslaughter,” no limits on the number of players and plenty of liquid courage on hand, the game called “Mob Football” evolved across Europe. Ironically, it was played on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, which was dedicated to preparations for confession and penance and one of the few days in the year when working men were given the day off. The game turned so vicious that royal decrees eventually banned the “hustling over large balls.” But the competition’s popularity proved unrelenting.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, American football rose from this primal tradition and took hold at eastern college campuses. With plenty of leisure time on their hands, the gentlemen of Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Rutgers, and Brown played games like “Bloody Monday,” “Ballown,” and “Old Division Football,” all of which derived from Mob Football. The injuries sustained and the brutality of the contests brought bans from Yale and Harvard in the 1860s. But not before the game had migrated into the eastern prep schools, where “townies” were brought in as last-minute ringers.

  Variations of the game evolved, and standardized rules came with them as interest grew. Postgraduate gentlemen’s clubs and athletic associations began fielding teams to draw new members, and inevitably, the first “professional” football player took the field on a November afternoon in 1892, in Pittsburgh.

  The city had embraced the rugged game in full measure. For most, to live and work in Pittsburgh was to stoically endure, and no game required more physical endurance than football. Local teams organized. Mine and mill workers joined the company-sponsored teams and went to watch their sons play sandlot ball in the spare moments they had between their shifts. The Monaca Scholastics, Garfield Eagles, McKeesport Union Clothier, Homestead Library and Athletic Club, Latrobe Athletic Association, North Side All Stars, Butler Cubs, Bloomfield Rams (the team that Johnny Unitas would lead after being cut from the Steelers), the Allegheny Athletic Association (AAA), and the Pittsburgh Athletic Association (PAA) were just a few of the local teams. And it was the bitter rivalry between these last two squads that ushered in the professional era.

  After a disappointing tie on Columbus Day 1892, the two teams mobilized all of their resources for the rematch scheduled for November 12. Recreation Park on the North Side (the land on the northern shore of the Allegheny River) was commandeered for the game. Both teams scoured the county and country to find the best ringers. The AAA’s leader, O.D. Thompson, went as far as tracking down a former All-America guard from Yale named William “Pudge” Heffelfinger, who was working as a railroad clerk in Chicago. Thompson played at Yale with Walter Camp—who became known as “The Father of Football” for rewriting much of the sport’s rulebook as the coach at Yale and Stanford—and followed his alma mater’s team religiously. But he did not reach Heffelfinger first. The PAA had already offered Heffelfinger $250 to play for them. The first professional player attracted a bidding war, resulting in the AAA’s paying $500 (the equivalent of $12,000 in today’s currency) and $25 for his traveling expenses. Heffelfinger delivered a victory for AAA when he forced a fumble and ran the ball back for the only touchdown of the day.

  Ten years of successful barnstorming teams later, a new professional football league emerged. The original National Football League was made up of just three teams, two from Philadelphia and one from Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Stars won the first NFL championship and a team sponsored by the Franklin Athletic Club in Philadelphia made up of both cities’ finest players won the second, but the league folded after only two seasons.

  Other pro football leagues organized in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, but they remained insular and provincial. Crowds came for games that determined area bragging rights. Interstate exhibitions did not draw nearly as many fans. But by 1920, a critical mass of interest in college football—the University of Pittsburgh Panthers won three national championships—attracted the attention of the founders of the American Professional Football Association, what we know today as the NFL.

  The men that founded the franchises were favored sons of their city, often playing on or coaching the team themselves. The Bears’ George Halas, the son of Hungarian immigrants who settled in Chicago, was one of the original founders. Curly Lambeau, a shipping clerk for a meatpacking company, was the brawn and the brains of Green Bay’s Packers, who joined the NFL in 1921. New York’s Tim Mara was a brilliant bookmaker who, in 1925, had the vision to see that the bedrock of one of the largest cities in the world was the factory workers and longshoreman who would embrace a rough game. Pro football wasn’t for the 21 Club crowd—it engaged the working class, and Mara bet that selling to the man on the subway would be far more lucrative than selling to the man in the limousine.

  In 1933, Pennsylvania added two teams to the mix. Rooney, who had been a local legend as a jock, playing barnstorming baseball and making the U.S. Olympic boxing team in 1920, founded Pittsburgh’s entry. In Philadelphia, Bert Bell formed the Eagles with a couple of college football teammates from the University of Pennsylvania. He’d become the NFL’s second commissioner. Twenty-six years later Bell would collapse after a massive heart attack while watching his Eagles score the winning touchdown against Pittsburgh. Fittingly, he was pronounced dead in the stands at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field.

  In 1934, George Richards, who had built Detroit’s most popul
ar radio station, took over the Lions and bankrolled his team through economic hardship. Lambeau, Halas, Richards, Rooney, Bell, and Mara defined themselves as citizens of their respective cities, and in the first thirty years of the league they fielded teams more out of responsibility than for a return on their investment.

  In 1952, the revenues for the entire NFL were $8,327,000, with a net profit for all the teams of $236,000, a meager 2.84 percent margin. The thought of folding a team, however, was anathema. A good year was breaking even, a great year a single-digit profit. But by the mid 1950s, everything changed.

  The economy and the population boomed after World War II. Under Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership, trade unions made inroads in every major manufacturing industry, fighting to get workers larger wages and benefits and better working conditions. The working class now had leisure time to watch and the money to buy a television, ushering in an entirely new revenue stream for the NFL. Some teams, like the Los Angeles Rams and the Washington Redskins, were able to negotiate television coverage for every game they played, while most others sold them piecemeal to local channels.

  But no matter how the deals were done, everyone would soon realize that TV would change the game.

  5

  EVENTUALLY, NOLL DID INTRODUCE HIMSELF TO THE PITTSBURGH press. This was a grizzled group, having lived through black winters where coal dust blocked out the sun and blanketed streets in midnight-colored ash. They were used to losing seasons and gruff coaches. While asking Noll a question, one of the reporters ticked off the names of the local teams, one by one—Steelers, Pitt, Pirates, Penguins—and commented that Pittsburgh was a “city of losers.”

  “We’ll change history,” Noll said. “Losing has nothing to do with geography.” Noll was hired just ten days before the NFL draft, and the Steelers, winners of two games and in need of a roster overhaul, had the fourth overall pick.

  Most coaches, then and now, treat the draft as a combination of toy-store raid and having to face a firing squad. They have the most talented young football players available to them. They test them, study them, envision how they’d fit in their scheme and how they’ll mesh with veterans. In less lucid moments, late on a sleepless night, they think about how a player will credit them for making it to the Hall of Fame. Choose right and the coach will be hailed as a genius, or at least win some games. Choose wrong and, well, in a game that relies on talent, those with none to coach will be lost.

  But for Noll, the draft was nothing less than the first step in executing a grand human experiment. He had sold the Rooneys on a theory that the only way to build a team was through the prudent choosing of young talent. He promised that he would mold them into the players he wanted them to be, full-speed extensions of him on the field. Technically sound, smart. It’s seems obvious, sure, but in fact football coaches are a notoriously myopic bunch. Rookies are raw, they make mistakes, they lose you games. Veterans know how to win—that’s how the axiom had always gone. And coaches don’t want to risk their futures by training some green player so he can be better for the next guy roaming the sidelines.

  Buddy Parker, an irascible Texan who won back-to-back NFL titles with the Lions in 1952 and 1953, was the Steelers coach from 1957 to 1965. He despised young players, and he’d give away top-round picks for fading veterans nearly every year. In 1958, it was two first-rounders for thirty-two-year-old quarterback Bobby Layne, a fellow Texan recovering from a badly broken leg who had been Parker’s quarterback with the Lions. In 1961 Parker traded the team’s first five draft choices. “Pittsburgh was the last spot for a lot of veteran and older players who really were on the downside of their careers,” says former Steelers player and coach Dick Hoak. “I was drafted in the seventh round in 1961, and I was our second pick.”

  While the moves helped Parker lead the Steelers to their best run ever—four of his eight teams finished with winning records—they destroyed the franchise’s future. In 1964, a year removed from finishing the season one win from playing in the NFL title game, the Steelers went 5-9. During training camp the next year they lost four straight exhibition games. And practices were akin to high school scrimmages. Parker saw how bad the talent was—the aging team he had cobbled together—and quit. He told the Chief, “I can’t win with this bunch of stiffs.”

  Three years later, nothing had changed. But from the moment they first met, Noll presented the Rooneys with a solution. “He pointed out that the Steelers had traded away their future,” Dan Rooney wrote. “He thought the way to build a championship team was through the draft. Get young, raw talent, then teach them the fundamentals of the game. Above all he counseled patience. He knew it would take some time to rebuild the team and instill in the players a winning attitude.”

  It was a plan that seemed so logical, so simple, that if they allowed him to follow it, they’d all one day see the football equivalent of a man strolling on the moon—the Steelers would be respectable. Maybe they’d even win.

  6

  THE ORIGIN OF U.S. TRADE UNIONS BEGINS WITH THE PUDDLERS. They thought of themselves as part of a higher class than the blast-furnace and rolling-mill workers, and they came together to formalize their prejudices. What set them above the laborers was their knowledge of how long it took to heat and squeeze pig iron into steel. It gave them power. The supply was always behind demand. Mill owners loathed the reality that if the puddlers walked off the job, production would come to a screeching halt.

  In 1849, a group of Pittsburgh puddlers did just that. They turned off their furnaces and demanded better working conditions and higher wages. It was the first strike in steel industry history, starting in May and lasting nearly six months. But the puddlers did not come out on top. Because those on strike didn’t have the full cooperation of every puddler in the industry, replacement workers were hired, wages were cut, and the troublemakers who left the job were blacklisted. Full power would only come when all of the puddlers stuck together.

  Soon the “Iron City Forge of the Sons of Vulcan” was organized in a hotel bar on Diamond Street in 1858, and the puddler’s life improved immeasurably. The union forced the big steelmakers to increase wages during the demand boom from the Civil War. But when the Bessemer process came to the United States at the Edgar Thompson Works in 1875, the puddlers’ days were numbered. The small forges, and the skilled craftsmen needed to run them, fell by the wayside as steel became a larger, more automated business. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle describes the Bessemer best as, “Three giant caldrons, big enough for all the devils of hell to brew their broth in, full of something white and blinding, bubbling and splashing, roaring as if volcanoes were blowing through it—one had to shout to be heard in the place. Liquid fire would leap from these caldrons and scatter like bombs below . . . and suddenly without an instant’s warning, one of the giant kettles began to tilt and topple, flinging out a jet of hissing roaring flame . . .” Puddlers now manned the hellish kettles, their expertise superfluous. The Sons of Vulcan scrambled to merge with the blast-furnace and rolling-mill laborers to form the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union.

  With the early work done by the Sons of Vulcan, Amalgamated contracts were honored throughout the industry. But in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Andrew Carnegie put Henry Clay Frick in charge of the Homestead Steel Works. Frick had no love of the union—wage increases came straight out of profits—and he was determined to tear it apart. With the Amalgamated contract due to expire at the end of June 1892, Frick demanded a new deal that called for a 22 percent decrease in wages. If the Amalgamated did not agree to his terms, he would no longer recognize its power. He’d simply hire nonunion workers to take Amalgamated jobs. When the Amalgamated refused, Frick called for the construction of a ten-foot fence around the Homestead Works to be topped with barbed wire. He had sniper towers erected to further discourage anyone from entering the mill. Once the fence and towers were complete, Frick locked out all of the union workers and fired them.

  Frick had alr
eady advertised for replacement workers in newspapers around the country. With a prearranged Pittsburgh police escort and a barge full of Pinkerton detectives as rear-guard security, the new workers were to be protected while they entered the mill. They never made it.

  A bloody revolt ensued between three hundred Pinkertons and four thousand Amalgamated strikers, resulting in the deaths of two Pinkertons and four union members and dozens of other casualties. The state militia was called in to seize Homestead on July 7, 1892, in what became a standoff, with striking workers on one side and government troops protecting Carnegie Steel on the other. The Amalgamated had stopped replacement workers from entering the mill and now wanted an audience with Carnegie Steel to hammer out a deal. But even after being stabbed by a radical anarchist at his company office, Frick refused to negotiate. Unable to support their families, many strikers were slowly starving to death. They snuck back into the mill and worked under Frick’s terms. A year later, when every other steel manufacturer joined Carnegie Steel in its refusal to recognize the union, the Amalgamated’s membership dropped to fifty-three members.

  For the next forty years, the Amalgamated struggled. Calls for national steel strikes in 1901, 1919, and 1936 failed. Strikers were beaten and some killed. Big Steel would not negotiate an across-the-board contract for every worker on its payroll, nor would it improve working conditions or work hours.

  7

  IN 1952, A GROUP OF TEXAS BUSINESSMEN LED BY BROTHERS Giles and Connell Miller, heirs of a Dallas textile fortune, bid on the failed New York Yanks football franchise. The Yanks owner, Ted Collins, had lost one and a half million dollars in a failed attempt to compete with the Giants for New York allegiance. Collins sold the team back to the NFL, and while a group from Baltimore also bid for the franchise, Dallas won the day with a vote of 11-1 by the NFL owners. The lone dissent was Art Rooney, who believed that Baltimore was a better home for the team. With three African-American players on the Yanks, Rooney suspected that the South’s deeply ingrained racism would keep fans from Dallas’s Cotton Bowl on Sunday. Rooney proved prescient. After just five games, the Texans couldn’t make their payroll. They gave the team back to the NFL and the Texans finished 1-11, their sole win coming on Thanksgiving Day against the Chicago Bears at their “home” stadium—the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio. At the end of the season, Baltimore, led by another textile millionaire, Carroll Rosenbloom, was awarded the remains of the Dallas Texans, and the Baltimore Colts began play in 1953.