The '63 Steelers Read online

  THE ’63 STEELERS

  WRITING SPORTS SERIES

  Richard “Pete” Peterson, Editor

  The Cleveland Indians

  Franklin Lewis

  The Cincinnati Reds

  Lee Allen

  The Chicago White Sox

  Warren Brown

  Dreaming Baseball

  James T. Farrell

  My Greatest Day in Football

  Murray Goodman and Leonard Lewin

  The Detroit Tigers

  Frederick G. Lieb

  The Philadelphia Phillies

  Frederick G. Lieb

  The Washington Senators

  Shirley Povich

  The ’63 Steelers: A Renegade Team’s Chase for Glory

  Rudy Dicks

  THE ’63 STEELERS

  A RENEGADE TEAM’S

  CHASE FOR GLORY

  RUDY DICKS

  THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Kent, Ohio

  ©2012 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2012013505

  ISBN 978-1-60635-143-7

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Every effort has been made to obtain permission from those persons

  interviewed by the author who are quoted in the book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dicks, Rudy.

  The ’63 Steelers : a renegade team’s chase for glory / Rudy Dicks.

  p. cm. — (Writing sports series)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-60635-143-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞

  1. Pittsburgh Steelers (Football team)—History.

  I. Title. II. Title: 1963 Steelers. III. Title: Nineteen sixty three Steelers.

  GV956.P57D5 2012

  796.332'640974886—dc23

  2012013505

  16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

  For the 1963 Pittsburgh Steelers …

  … and for Sheldon J. Dicks, who set an example for

  how to be as tough as Red Mack,

  as compassionate as Art Rooney, and as confident as Bobby Layne …

  … and for Lillian W. Dicks,

  for nurturing in her sons

  a love for reading and writing

  You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

  —Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

  The noblest battles of all are those fought in vain.

  —Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Preseason: An Introduction

  Game 1

  Versus Philadelphia Eagles

  At Franklin Field

  September 15

  Game 2

  Versus New York Giants

  At Pitt Stadium

  September 22

  Game 3

  Versus St. Louis Cardinals

  At Forbes Field

  September 29

  Game 4

  Versus Cleveland Browns

  At Cleveland Municipal Stadium

  October 5

  Game 5

  Versus St. Louis Cardinals

  At Busch Stadium

  October 13

  Game 6

  Versus Washington Redskins

  At Pitt Stadium

  October 20

  Game 7

  Versus Dallas Cowboys

  At Forbes Field

  October 27

  Game 8

  Versus Green Bay Packers

  At Milwaukee County Stadium

  November 3

  Game 9

  Versus Cleveland Browns

  At Pitt Stadium

  November 10

  Game 10

  Versus Washington Redskins

  At D.C. Stadium

  November 17

  Game 11

  Versus Chicago Bears

  At Forbes Field

  November 24

  Game 12

  Versus Philadelphia Eagles

  At Forbes Field

  December 1

  Game 13

  Versus Dallas Cowboys

  At the Cotton Bowl

  December 8

  Game 14

  Versus New York Giants

  At Yankee Stadium

  December 15

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE

  I grew up in the late fifties and early sixties in a ranch-style house at the corner of Rosewae Drive and Skywae Drive in a city that the Saturday Evening Post labeled “Crime Town USA” and that also came to be known as “Murder Town.”1

  Some days my mother would hide the front section of our hometown paper, the Youngstown Vindicator, so that my brothers and I would not be exposed to the gory headlines and stories about guys with funny nicknames getting blown up in cars and their body parts being scattered across the neighbor’s yard. I didn’t find out about her protectiveness until years later, but I wouldn’t have minded anyway, as long as she didn’t take away the sports section. The only bombs I cared about as a kid were the ones quarterbacks threw.

  That ’63 Post story said that there had been seventy-five bombings in Youngstown over a decade’s time, which, if accurate, means that the only person busier than the wise guys in town was my mother stashing away sections of the afternoon paper. But the world of Cadillac Charlie, the Crab, Tar Baby, and the “bug” (the numbers game) was far from ours in northeast Ohio. My view from the crest of the hill on Rosewae was filled with more innocence than Lake Wobegon: dads mowing the lawn, moms working in the garden, kids riding bikes, and the fireworks in the distance from Idora Park, where my dad would take my mom on Sunday nights in the summer to listen and dance to Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman. You could phone us by dialing SWeetbriar 23065 or send us a letter using a new number introduced in the summer of ’63, something called a zip code, which replaced our old postal code, number 11.

  There were much scarier places, I knew, such as the Deep South, Europe, and Africa, because I had seen them up close, bigger than life, when my dad took us downtown to the Palace, Paramount, and Warner theaters, which showed To Kill a Mockingbird, The Guns of Navarone, and Lawrence of Arabia. Good thing, I told myself, that we lived someplace safe.

  The next-door neighbors had a son in high school who played catch with me, coaxed me to show off my basketball-dribbling skills in front of his friend, and one afternoon tried to teach me to play the guitar. Because of his hairstyle, he reminded me of Edd “Kookie” Byrnes from 77 Sunset Strip, and I was sure that he owned a black leather jacket; maybe he even snuck Marlboro cigarettes like they showed on TV ads. After our family moved away a few years later, I turned on my transistor radio one morning and heard his voice booming out, singing the Isley Brothers’ “Nobody But Me.” It was Dick Belley, and for nearly half a century his version would remain as popular as it was in ’67. Music fans remember Dick Belley as a member of the Human Beinz, who played at Idora Park regularly, but I remember him as a decent older boy who took the time to befriend a kid.

  We played Wiffle ball in the backyard, and kickball and kick-the-can in a cul-de-sac, and we loaded kids into our station wagon to go to the drive-in with a cooler full of pop, but my favorite spot of all was the one right in front of me every time I stepped out the front door: a stretch of green lawn that looked as lush to me as any fairway at Augusta would
to a golf fan. It was the biggest yard in the neighborhood, and the best for tackle football, and it was where the neighborhood kids always played.

  When we weren’t playing football, we were watching it on TV. Growing up in Youngstown, what was more intimidating than any mobsters was being a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and finding yourself outnumbered by Cleveland Browns fans. Youngstown’s equidistant location between Cleveland and Pittsburgh was convenient for the mob’s itinerary, but it didn’t mean loyalties were divided equally between the teams. Even I started out, tentatively, as a Browns fan. Without cable TV, the Internet, or Monday Night Football, my exposure to other teams was limited to the daily newspaper and football magazines.

  One late November Sunday morning when I was seven, I asked my dad if we would be rooting for the Browns that afternoon. My father was born and raised on the Iron Range in Minnesota, so he had more allegiance to the University of Minnesota, Bronislau “Bronko” Nagurski, and the Duluth Eskimos barnstorming team than he did to the Browns. He paused and then told me about the man who played quarterback for the Steelers, the Browns’ opponent that day. “His name is Bobby Layne,” my dad said, “and he believes he can do anything.”

  I wasn’t convinced, especially considering the Browns were 6–2 and the Steelers 3–4–1, and my doubts were justified as Cleveland clung to a 20–14 lead in the final minutes. But then the man who would be dubbed “Last-Minute Layne” in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the next day began working his two-minute magic as my dad and I watched on our black-and-white TV.2 Two pass completions, a penalty, and a run put the Steelers on the Browns’ 17, and with only forty seconds left, Layne hit Gern Nagler under the goalpost with a touchdown pass.

  Pennsylvania governor David L. Lawrence was the preeminent fan among the estimated 10,000 Steelers diehards who made the three-hour trip from Pittsburgh to Municipal Stadium on the shores of Lake Erie, and his reaction was duly noted by the Post-Gazette: “The governor cast aside dignity for a brief moment in the press box by throwing his hat high in the air and announcing to one and all: ‘That was the greatest play of all time.’”3

  A bit of an exaggeration, even for a politician, because the only great plays for Pittsburgh in the previous twenty-six years of the Steelers’ existence had been performed downtown at the Nixon Theater. In that time span, the Steelers had experienced only five winning seasons and only once made it to a postseason game. But the heroics were plenty impressive to a seven-year-old, and when Layne kicked the extra point that gave the Steelers a 21–20 victory, he converted me into a Bobby Layne fan and a Pittsburgh Steeler rooter. I would always remember that day, November 22, 1959, but I could never imagine that the afternoon four years later, to the day, would be even more memorable.

  Over the next couple of years, my dad took me to Forbes Field to watch the Vince Lombardi Packer teams, which were evolving into a powerhouse; the expansion Cowboys team led by young quarterback Don Meredith and coached by Tom Landry; and the team that I grew to hate, the Browns, powered by Jim Brown. I struggled in my heart—probably as much as the players did on the field—through a 5–6–1 season in 1960, and then a 6–8 record in ’61 before the Steelers’ second-place finish in ’62, at 9–5, allowed me to dream that they could win the Eastern Conference in ’63.

  On a Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, I was in school, watching the hands on the clock inch toward 3:15 p.m., and eagerly looking forward to a trip to Forbes Field in less than forty-eight hours to watch the Steelers play the Western Conference leader, the Chicago Bears, when the bell rang, dismissing us for the weekend. I was almost to the door when someone rushed up and announced that President Kennedy had been shot.

  My brothers and I attended a very small private school in downtown Youngstown, which, in a spooky coincidence, was named the Kennedy School, after the school’s headmistress. We studied current events all year through the newspaper, so we had scrutinized the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential race, especially when the rivals campaigned fiercely in Youngstown, a key industrial city in a pivotal state. We even held our own mock election.

  I remember an older schoolmate who cried over news of the assassination. I did not. I wonder now how many eleven-year-olds did. Mostly, I guess, I felt puzzled. We grew up playing with cap guns and watching men shoot pistols and rifles on Combat! and Gunsmoke and The Untouchables, and reading comic books with illustrations of soldiers who had been shot, but we didn’t comprehend that guns—real guns with real bullets—were fired on our own streets. We had studied Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, but it was the kind of event that seemed isolated and frozen in history, as unlikely to be duplicated in our day as an Indian attack in the neighborhood.

  Ten years later, my college professor Dewey Ganzel would tell us in his course on Hemingway that there are two seminal events in a young person’s life: when he realizes that other people die, and when he realizes that he himself will one day die. That spring of ’63, I started to learn about death.

  In the first week of May, my Uncle Shorty, a family doctor who treated us to root beer floats, took us for spins on his sailboat, and played taps on his old Army bugle at bedtime outside the family cabin in Minnesota, died of cancer. I wondered what kind of cruel disease could kill a man who lived his life with such gusto.

  One week later, a story in the Vindicator reported that Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, the Steelers’ mountain of a defensive tackle, had died from an overdose of heroin at age thirty-one, and I was left baffled by how a 290-pound man as quick as a cougar could be felled by a needle, the same instrument we faced every fall when given flu shots, the kind my deceased uncle had administered.

  Yet another week later, news came that Ernie Davis, the marvel of a running back from Syracuse, a Heisman Trophy winner, and the first overall pick in the 1962 draft, had died from leukemia. How is it, I wondered, that an athlete so fast and powerful could outrun everything except this curious disease? We caught colds and suffered through scarlet fever and strep throat and the mumps, but as lousy as we felt, these illnesses did not kill us. How awful could a disease be that it could kill a grown man who could dart through tacklers and leave them clawing at his jersey in vain?

  One month later, my Uncle Rudy, the man I was named after, suffered a fatal heart attack in his home in Hibbing, Minnesota. I traveled with my mother and two brothers all night by train from Youngstown to St. Paul, Minnesota, and then by car another 150 miles north. On the morning of the funeral I rode in a car in a slow procession filled with men in military uniforms looking somber and pained, while a soldier beat an ominous rhythm on a drum throughout the entire route.

  I cried for my uncles, but not for Big Daddy or Ernie Davis or the president. Yet they had the kind of impact on an eleven-year-old kid that would last a lifetime.

  The morning after the Kennedy assassination brought a clear sky and unseasonably mild weather, allowing my friends and me to play tackle football in our yard. Life went on; I had learned that by gazing at my uncle’s casket in a Minnesota cemetery. On any other Saturday afternoon in the fall my dad and I would watch college football, but on that day we watched Walter Cronkite and broadcasters with grim faces talking about a funeral and a murder suspect. My dad stared at the TV screen and said, “I wonder if they’ll play the game.”

  I glanced at him but kept silent. I wondered to myself, “How could they not play the game? The Chicago Bears are coming to Pittsburgh, and we have tickets.”

  Years later, I would look back at my resolve to see that game, and I would not fault myself for being insensitive or immature. I was eleven, and a young boy lives his hopes and dreams through his favorite team, not through politicians or statesmen. And I was far from alone in my thinking. A total of 334,892 fans would show up for the seven games on the NFL schedule that Sunday, only four involving teams still in a race for a division title, as mine was. It wasn’t until I grew older that I began to resent what I considered the self-righteous sermonizing by coaches who compared losing to death. Surely tho
se coaches never realized that the ones most likely to agree with them were eleven-year-old football fans.

  The Steelers were in fourth place in the Eastern Conference at 6–3–1 that weekend but mathematically, and improbably, still in the race with three other teams when my dad and I set off for what the Chicago Tribune called “dingy, antiquated Forbes Field.” “What a depressing place that is for a football game,” Giants coach Allie Sherman had commented before meeting the Steelers at the cozier, cleaner, more attractive Pitt Stadium in the second week of the season.4

  Forbes Field had once been a showcase for sports—about half a century earlier. In ’63 it was like an antebellum mansion in desperate need of repair. But it had the character, if not the charm, of a true ballpark. It had a tall scoreboard in left like Fenway, ivy on the brick walls like Wrigley, an outfield as big as Montana—deep enough to stash the batting cage against the center field wall—and a right-field grandstand that reminded me of Tiger Stadium. It was dirty, stinky, worn down, and beat up, and the seats were crummy for watching football, but I adored Forbes Field like no other ballpark I have ever seen.

  The crowd was a sellout of 36,465 fans, but it was subdued for the 2:05 p.m. kickoff, with temperatures near 40 and a clear sky that would turn gloomy and cloudy. “It was the most eerie game,” said Art Rooney Jr., son of the founder and owner of the Steelers. Gradually, the crowd came alive as the Steelers battled 9–1 Chicago to a standstill and then took a 17–14 lead 6:25 into the fourth quarter.5

  The Steelers’ shot at an upset looked even better after a penalty and a sack left the Bears with second-and-36 at their own 22-yard line with five-and-a-half minutes to go in the settling dusk. But then came a play that would forever remain vivid in my mind. Quarterback Bill Wade hit former Pitt All-America Mike Ditka, described by one reporter as “an earthquake of a man,” and for a few seconds it seemed as if worlds had collided and the field trembled and the rickety wooden stands we sat in shook.6

  “Mike grabbed it with those big paws of his and was immediately pounced on by a half dozen Steelers,” wrote Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Al Abrams. “He must have had eight guys on his back,” said Lou Cordileone, the Steelers’ right defensive tackle. “He should have been stopped five times,” defensive end and kicker Lou Michaels said. Steelers defensive back Dick Haley said of the scene: “It looked like a bunch of kids trying to flag down a runaway truck.”7