The '63 Steelers Read online

  Neither did defensive back Brady Keys. “He was not a leader,” Keys said. “You could never win with Ed Brown. He wasn’t smart—couldn’t read defenses, couldn’t call audibles. Bobby Layne, he would call audibles and win the game for you. He could read the defense and do those things.”24

  No situation seemed to daunt Layne. He came into games well prepared both from film study and from work on the practice field. Art Rooney Jr. was amazed at how Layne showed up early for practice and stayed late, working with his receivers. If he ever felt pressure, he kept it well hidden. And his confidence was unshakable. “He’s always loved a challenge,” said former college roommate Rooster Andrews. “And he’s just as competitive playing golf or on a fishing trip as he was when he was quarterbacking. Hell, he goes grocery shopping, and he thinks he’s the best damned shopper in Safeway.”25

  “He was the baddest-best pro football player of my time,” said Alex Karras, who was a rookie out of Iowa in 1958 when he met Layne at the Lions’ training camp. “He feared nobody.”26

  When Layne went out on the town, his free spirit flowed as easily as the liquor. During his career, he enjoyed a reputation as the doggone best party-goer in the NFL, hands down. And when Bobby Layne was hosting the festivities, everyone was invited. “He’d go into a place and say, ‘I don’t want anybody to buy any drinks while I’m in here,’” Carpenter recalled. “Nobody could buy a drink, even if he didn’t know him.”27

  Not long after linebacker Joe Schmidt was drafted by the Lions, Layne found out that the front office had hired a man to investigate the quarterback’s nocturnal ramblings. “Bobby came bursting into the room, all aglow,” Schmidt recalled at a Touchdown Club gathering.

  “Hey, Joe,” he said. “We’ve got a live one. Let’s lead him [on] a chase.”

  I felt sorry for the man who had to follow Bobby around. Afterward, I learned that he had been a survivor of the Bataan death march. He followed Bobby from bar to bar until he was worn to a nub. Then he made his report to Eddie Anderson, the president of the football team.

  “I quit, Mr. Anderson,” he said. “Layne is too tough for me. I can’t take it. I’d rather go back to Bataan.”28

  Layne’s exploits, both in two-minute drills and at after-hours nightclubs, became legendary. Some were embellished and refined into myth. Paul Hornung recalled one rumor that he and Layne were picked up drunk in a doorway in downtown Green Bay, singing together, at 5:30 in the morning. “I didn’t know Bobby then,” Hornung said, “and if I did, you can bet your life we wouldn’t have been picked up in a doorway.”29

  No one had the superhuman recuperative powers of Layne. Asked how he could recover and play a game with not much more than a catnap for rest, Layne replied, “I sleep fast!”30 “Unbelievable,” Cordileone said. “The only guy I’ve seen in my life to get completely shit faced, lay down, and get up a half hour later like he never had a drink. I mean, he was unbelievable. Booze never bothered him.”31

  At least not enough to keep him from winning football games. On the eve of the Steelers’ last game of 1958, a Saturday matinee against the Cardinals in Pittsburgh, Layne was preparing in his usual fashion, so the story goes, with a night on the town. Friday night extended into Saturday morning, and Layne was supposedly spotted leading the band at a private club around 9 a.m. Wherever he’d been, Layne made his way to Pitt Stadium, suited up, trotted gingerly onto an icy field, and hit twenty-three of forty-nine passes for 409 yards and two touchdowns. He also ran for a 17-yard touchdown, and the Steelers finished 7–4–1 with a 38–21 victory. The only thing he did not do on the field that day, evidently, was lead the band at halftime.32

  The most infamous and oft-told tale about Layne took place off the field in 1961. It didn’t happen on the eve of a game, as legend had it; it happened on a Monday night, the day after Layne threw four touchdown passes—tying Baugh’s career record—in leading the Steelers to a 30–14 victory in Washington. The front-page headline of Tuesday afternoon’s Press read, “Trolley Intercepts Bobby Layne’s Pass.” Years later, Layne would laugh as he recounted how he ran into “that parked swerving streetcar” but, of course, it was No. 22 who, while driving teammate Tom Tracy’s car, swerved into a No. 85 Bedford trolley, stopped at Sixth and Wylie, around 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. The operator was not hurt, but Layne sustained a cut over his left eyebrow and was taken to the hospital for X-rays. Clearly, he would have been better off with Alex Karras driving.33 The incident became an everlasting funny story in the arsenal of Layne anecdotes, but it could have turned out badly. Three days later, a man and woman were killed instantly when their automobile collided head on with a trolley in Wilkinsburg.34 Almost a year to the day later, a teenager commandeered a trolley in Philadelphia on a Sunday and drove it five miles across town without any mishap, clanging the bell and stopping to take on riders, informing them, “I’m not charging any fares tonight, so get aboard.”35

  The entire football world knew of Bobby Layne the legend, but just what Layne was like as a person wasn’t clear. “I didn’t know him too well as a man,” Karras said. “Maybe nobody did.”36

  Layne could throw a baseball nearly as well as he could a football. He loved to drink Cutty Sark and he loved to sing the American traditional song “Ida Red,” according to Karras. Layne made a habit of befriending rookie players and, like Karras, they would drink with the quarterback and drive him to bars and nightclubs. One night while Karras was behind the wheel, Layne, “in a drunken stupor,” told the lineman about his father’s death. According to Layne’s biographer, Layne, his parents, and his two sisters had squeezed into their tiny coupe for a short trip, when Layne’s father slumped back after apparently suffering a heart attack. Layne, who was sitting in the back seat behind his father, was pinned in the rear of the car. “I’m not sure he ever got over being trapped like that when his father died,” said Layne’s wife, Carol.37

  Layne turned silent as Karras drove. “Then he suddenly said he didn’t like the dark,” Karras said. “He was too scared to sleep, he said.” No wonder Layne liked to hang around with Big Daddy Lipscomb and buy scotch for the ferocious lineman with the soft heart.38

  Brown, by comparison, was more of a loner, although he hung out with his teammates at Dante’s and roomed with Lou Cordileone, and then with Dick Haley. “He was really subdued,” said Haley. “He was a funny guy,” said Mack, who averaged 24.7 yards on his twenty-five receptions during the ’63 season. “You couldn’t get close to him.”39

  The son of a jeweler and watchmaker, Ed Brown earned the nickname “All-Around Brown” while playing quarterback and kicking and punting for the University of San Francisco. In his senior year he led the Dons to a 9–0 record, but the team was denied a bowl invitation because it refused to drop two black players, Ollie Matson and Burl Toler, from the team for the postseason game, which was a customary concession at the time. Nine players from that team had NFL careers, including Toler and Matson, and three became Hall of Famers: Matson, Gino Marchetti, and Bob St. Clair.

  With his thick black hair, cleft chin, and sober gaze, Brown bore a resemblance to the actor Clint Walker, and the bachelor quarterback had a reputation for being popular with women. Any quarterback who succeeded Layne was bound to pale in comparison with the charismatic Texan, but Brown wasn’t about to change his style. He knew himself, and he made no apologies for his temperament.

  Halfway through the ’63 season, days after turning thirty-four, Brown was asked why he wasn’t more demonstrative on the field. “There’s more to this game of football than showing a lot of fire and fight,” Brown replied.

  I’m not built like some guys, I guess. I do my job the quiet way.

  When you’re around as long as I have [been], you learn to take things in stride. Maybe I am too phlegmatic out there. Maybe I don’t get mad enough. What good is it to be that way? My job is to run the team the best I know how and to help win games.40

  As if it weren’t daunting enough to succeed a quarterback with Hall o
f Fame credentials, Brown soon found Layne watching over his shoulder—literally. Three days after the win over the Giants, the Steelers announced that Layne would work in the scouting booth—“the coop atop the roof” of Forbes Field—where he would phone in suggestions to the bench. In the second period of the St. Louis game, he phoned in his observations on the Cardinals’ defense. “They’re jumping into the gap. Maybe he [Brown] better work on a long count,” Layne drawled. Not long after, he phoned Mike Nixon, the backfield coach, and barked, “Tell Brown to get rid of the ball a little faster. He’s giving their backs time to move and cover our receivers.” Near the end of the quarter, with Buddy Dial speeding into the end zone, Brown hesitated, and safety Larry Wilson recovered in time to make the interception.41

  It was a working arrangement that was bound to produce friction over the season. “I can remember hearing that Brown was asked to talk to Bobby on the headphones,” Andy Russell said, “and he threw the phone down and said, ‘You’re full of shit,’ and walked away. There was a little animosity between the two—or irritation—one quarterback picking on another.”42

  Layne had been acclaimed as a master of late-game heroics. A couple of other quarterbacks in the division drew reverence by earning their masters—degrees, that is—in off-the-field career development. As October broke, Brown had already led the Steelers over the Cards and Charley Johnson, who, not even twenty-five, was hailed as “the erudite St. Louis Cardinal physicist.”43 Next, Brown had to go up against Frank Ryan, who, at twenty-seven, had a master’s degree in math and was studying at Rice for his PhD and was regarded as “another quarterback whose intelligence hovers around the genius range.” One story in a football magazine featuring the two quarterbacks was titled “Inside Football’s Biggest Brains.”44 Brown, in his tenth year, was more likely to be given the tag “journeyman,” but, as phlegmatic as he was, was not likely to complain about it.

  As the Steelers began gearing up for the Browns, Cordileone, for one, was not awed by Ryan’s resume. “He can’t play with a slide rule,” the defensive tackle sniffed. “Did you ever see a mathematician without a slide rule?”45

  The Browns seemed to be energized. For the first time since the team’s inaugural season of 1946, Paul Brown was not on the Cleveland sidelines calling plays. Art Modell had fired the fifty-four-year-old coach in the second week of January and replaced him with assistant Blanton Collier. On January 10, the same day that Buddy Parker settled on a one-year contract with Art Rooney, and civic leaders unveiled a model of the North Side stadium that was to be built at a cost of $45,170,000 and finished by 1966, Paul Brown made his first comments since being fired. “It did come as a shock and surprise to me,” he admitted.46

  Jim Brown and his teammates were playing as if they had been liberated from the constraints of Paul Brown’s coaching. Ryan’s emergence had given the team another dimension to their powerful offense. No longer did Cleveland employ a strategy of simply handing off to Jimmy Brown and letting him ramble for 135 or 150 yards. Ryan, after having taken the starting job from Jim Ninowski, ranked as the No. 2 quarterback in the league, behind Y. A. Tittle, with forty-one completions in sixty-four attempts for 674 yards, six touchdowns, and four interceptions in three games. Ed Brown ranked eighth.

  Jim Brown, “running as he never ran before,” had scored six touchdowns and racked up 489 yards rushing on fifty-seven carries—an average of 8.6 yards a carry—and was 262 yards ahead of the Cards’ Joe Childress, in second place. In fact, during the entire ’62 season, only twelve backs in the league had done better over fourteen games than Brown had in three.47

  The Steelers’ running attack was clicking, too, and Pittsburgh’s domination of the Giants impressed Gene Ward of the New York Daily News enough for him to rate John Henry Johnson and Dick Hoak as the top backfield combination in the league.48 But the ankle Johnson injured against the Cardinals proved to be problematic, and at Wednesday’s practice he and linebacker George Tarasovic were limping. Trainer Roger McGill said he expected both to be ready for the Browns, but the next day it was clear that Johnson’s swollen ankle would prevent him from playing. “I don’t see how he can,” Buddy Parker said. “He can hardly walk.”49

  That meant that Bob Ferguson, who had sparked the second-half surge against the Cards, would start. Johnson’s absence also meant that if the running game faltered, the pressure would fall on Ed Brown to move the Steelers.

  Whatever Ed Brown lacked in personality, the team was making up for it collectively. He may not have been the inspirational type, but neither was Parker. The other thirty-six players on the roster, aside from Brown, found motivation from within or from each other. No team in the NFL quite reflected its plucky population and grimy environment quite so much as the underdog Pittsburgh Steelers, and no one fit the role of overachiever better than Hoak. Hoak was a seventh-round draft pick in 1961 out of Penn State, where he’d played quarterback. He was a local kid, from nearby Jeanette, an overachiever without great athletic gifts, but a guy with a blue-collar worker’s mentality. “He digs in there,” Parker said. “He’s not afraid to hit.” Hoak was “an inconspicuous introvert” during the first two weeks of camp in his rookie season, but he had “a flair for doing his job well—if not spectacularly.”50 He stepped in for the injured Tom Tracy in the preseason opener and had fourteen carries for 61 yards—eight fewer than the Colts’ team total—and earned a start in the next exhibition game.

  Two seasons later, Hoak was an unlikely candidate to rise among the NFL rushing leaders. “Off his physical appearance, he doesn’t impress one as a power runner but he runs with as much power as anybody on the team,” beat writer Pat Livingston wrote. “He also has a deceptive gait that throws a defender off stride, a quality that he substitutes effectively for speed.”51 All in all, a euphemistic description of an undersized (although listed by the Steelers as five foot eleven, 190 pounds) and slow runner, but one who had earned the respect of teammates and opponents alike for going all-out on every play. “If the Steelers had 37 guys like Hoak, we’d win the championship for sure,” center Madison Monroe “Buzz” Nutter said.52

  Brady Keys, a fourteenth-round pick the year before Hoak arrived, was an unheralded player who turned into a relentless cover man and daring tackler. He wasn’t the most gifted defensive back, but he was indispensable to the Steelers. He was a fighter, a toiler who didn’t get a lot of praise or recognition, but he was someone who wouldn’t quit, and those were qualities Pittsburgh fans could admire. “I’m not a spectacular type of ball player,” he admitted. “I never have a bad day and I never have a great day. Therefore, I get no credit at all.”53

  He could have been speaking for all his teammates, but the sum of the scrapyard parts was making the ’63 squad click. “There are no stars on this ball club,” one anonymous veteran observed, “unless it would be John Henry Johnson. It’s a team made up of 37 good, solid athletes who play together. Every one of them has a weakness but, playing together, the team as a unit can cover up every one of those weaknesses.”54

  On Friday the Steelers left by bus for Cleveland. On Saturday afternoon, Zsa Zsa Gabor and her husband, a business acquaintance of the University of Pittsburgh’s vice-chancellor, showed up among some 22,000 fans to watch the Panthers beat California, 35–15, at Pitt Stadium. Zsa Zsa left at halftime to catch a flight to New York. That evening, 86,684 fans—the biggest crowd in Cleveland football history—turned out at the lakefront stadium for the 8 p.m. Steeler game. A year earlier, at the exhibition doubleheader, one writer compared the atmosphere to New Year’s Eve in Times Square, and a regular-season Steelers-Browns game on a Saturday night had to match—or surpass—that frantic spirit. It was a game that would see the lead change hands seven times and have fans glancing at the clock as if, indeed, the New Year were approaching.55

  The Steelers took the kickoff and came out throwing. Brown missed Mack deep down the right sideline but, a play later, connected with him on a deep curl for 20 yards at the Steeler 44. Br
own was shaken up after running up the middle for 7 yards, so Terry Nofsinger came in and hit Mack down the left sideline for a 27-yard gain to the Cleveland 17. Hoak was stopped at the line, and Ferguson could gain only 5 yards on two carries, so Lou Michaels came on and kicked an 18-yard field goal.

  The Browns’ mix of running and passing looked unstoppable on their first drive. Jim Brown took a pitch and gained 21 yards on a sweep to the left side. Ryan hit Collins for 12 yards on a slant to the Steeler 49 and, from the 38, connected again for a 21-yard pickup to the 17. Brown gained 9 yards on a sweep to the right side, then burst up the middle, with a block from tackle John Brown, for an 8-yard touchdown to put the Browns ahead, 7–3, with 5:51 left in the first quarter.

  Ed Brown returned at quarterback, and the teams exchanged punts. Pittsburgh took over on its 31, and on first down, Brown hooked up with Mack for a 42-yard gain to the Browns’ 27. One play later, Brown hit Carpenter, who was Cleveland’s No. 1 draft pick in 1956, over the middle for 17 yards to the 9. A pass interference call on Jim Shofner gave the Steelers first-and-goal at the 2, a spot on the field where Pittsburgh sorely needed John Henry Johnson. “He’s the only back we have who can jump over the defense on the goal line,” Parker said later.56

  Hoak picked up a yard before getting stuffed by tackles Jim Kanicki and Frank Parker and linebacker Galen Fiss on the last play of the first quarter. On second down, Ferguson was thrown for a yard loss by defensive back Bernie Parrish. On third down at the 2, Ferguson picked up a yard but was stopped by linebacker Vince Costello and tackle Bob Gain. “You gotta get something when you get down there,” Parker said later. “You can’t go away without anything.”57 Parker sent in Michaels for an 8-yard field goal that made it 7–6.