The '63 Steelers Read online

  Despite fortifying his backfield and watching Ed Brown emerge as a shootout quarterback and a worthy successor to Bobby Layne, Parker was in a “touchy” mood all week.27 Who knows what was swirling in the mind of a coach with no tolerance for failure, but maybe doubts about his team began creeping in. Maybe ’63 was going to fall short the way the ’62 season had, as he watched injuries hamper his linebacking corps for the second straight year. Two seasons before, after the Browns edged the Steelers, 30–28, Cleveland coach Paul Brown almost sounded as if he felt sorry for his counterpart. “Parker has all the horses,” Brown said, “but the Steelers are a snake-bitten team.”28

  So many hopes, so much infusion of new talent, yet so many disappointing seasons had forged a fatalistic outlook in the fans. The Steelers couldn’t catch a break. Reger was still recuperating, and now Bob Schmitz, John Henry Johnson, and Thomas were hurting with foot injuries. Yet every time a key member of an opposing team suffered an injury, it seemed, he got healthy just in time to face the Steelers. “The stars are always ready for the snake-bitten Steelers,” Livingston wrote.29

  This week, two Cardinal starters, defensive back Bill Stacy and former Heisman Trophy winner John David Crow, were healthy enough to rejoin the team, although they were not scheduled to start because their fill-ins had been doing so well. “It puts us at our peak of strength, personnel-wise,” Lemm said.30

  Parker couldn’t say the same. A sprained right ankle shelved Michaels during Saturday night’s loss. Dick Haley hurt his shoulder, and Dick Hoak bruised his back. Thomas sustained a stone bruise on his right heel while tackling Jim Brown on Cleveland’s first play from scrimmage. “The heel isn’t discolored or swollen but it sure hurts,” Thomas said. “I just couldn’t run.”31 The Steelers had X-rays taken on Monday, and they came back negative. Thomas, along with John Henry Johnson, mostly watched Wednesday’s practice, but trainer Roger McGill said the safety should be OK by game day.

  Parker had been juggling his linebacking corps since the opener. George Tarasovic, who’d hurt his foot in the victory over St. Louis, had “half-limped” through the Browns game, and Schmitz looked to be out Sunday because of a bad ankle.32 But Johnson was the one Parker stewed over. “He’s a slow healer,” the coach said. “John Henry’s a real football player when he’s right, but once he gets hurt it takes him a long time to get ready again.”33

  No one could doubt the fullback’s willingness to take hits and absorb punishment as well as dish out the same. Several weeks later, a healthy Johnson would express his resentment over not only the notion that he was shirking his duty but a broader insinuation that seemed ingrained in Parker’s beliefs. “I couldn’t have played on that ankle even if I had been filled with pain-killing drugs,” Johnson said. “Besides, I get tired of certain individuals always taking shots at Negroes when they get injured. Some guys act like we aren’t supposed to get hurt like other guys in the league.”34

  In his game story, reporter Pat Livingston wrote in his lead about the lemming, a peculiar mouselike creature that undertakes mass migrations but eventually drowns while trying to cross the sea. Livingston was addressing the squad coached by Wally Lemm, who had led the Houston Oilers to a title in the old AFL just two years earlier. But the reference seemed more appropriate for the Steelers, with their history of letdowns and breakdowns, especially in the Parker years, when the arrival of a coach who had won two titles whipped up hope among the diehard fans.35

  Twice the Browns had kept the Steelers out of the end zone with goal line stands the week before, forcing Pittsburgh to settle for field goals. But on this day in St. Louis, with clear skies and temperatures in the 70s, Pittsburgh’s goal line defense would prove even more impressive than Cleveland’s.

  The Steelers took the opening kickoff but were forced to punt. Starting from his 26, Charley Johnson misfired twice but hit rookie tight end Jackie Smith for 14 yards and back Bill Triplett for 15, to the Steeler 34. Triplett gained a yard and then burst up the middle for 26 more, setting up first-and-goal at the 7. Andy Russell, starting at linebacker in a personal homecoming, broke up a pass to Conrad on first down. Two carries by Triplett moved the Cards to the 1. On fourth down, Childress tried to ram his way through the center of the line, but linebacker Myron Pottios stopped him short, and Pittsburgh took over.

  The Steelers couldn’t move the ball, and Brown’s 39-yard punt left the Cards in good position after defensive back Pat Fischer returned it 7 yards to the Steeler 37. But Pittsburgh held, forcing Jim Bakken to kick a 44-yard field goal.

  Red Mack’s 28-yard reception put the Steelers on the Cards’ 40, but two incompletions left it up to Lou Michaels, and he hit a 45-yard field goal for a 3–3 tie with 3:25 left in the quarter. The Steelers moved deep enough into St. Louis territory for Michaels to try again from 42 yards on the first series of the second quarter, but lineman Joe Robb blocked the kick.

  On first down, Johnson hit Smith with a 53-yard pass, setting up first-and-goal at the 6. Crow rammed up the middle for 5 yards, but Childress was stopped cold. On third down, Johnson’s pitchout was off line, and rookie defensive back Jim Bradshaw recovered the ball on the 16.

  After Hoak picked up a yard, Mack, “who is built on the lines of a broomstick but is tougher than steel,” dashed down the left side and took in Brown’s pass, eluding a diving Jimmy Hill at the St. Louis 40 and a desperate lunge by Fischer at the 5 for an 83-yard TD.36 Pittsburgh led, 10–3, with 4:45 gone in the quarter.

  Starting from his 15, Charley Johnson got his team moving, hitting Sonny Randle with a 23-yard pass to put the Cards on the Steeler 36. Childress picked up 8 yards to make it second-and-2 at the 18, but Johnson threw incomplete to Childress, and Brady Keys stopped Childress on a run around left end for 1 yard. Lemm decided to go for it on fourth-and-1 at the 17, but rookie defensive tackle Frank Atkinson stopped Crow for no gain. The Steelers had held again.

  Brown hit Dial with a 41-yard pass to move the ball to the St. Louis 43. Pittsburgh could gain only 3 yards, so Michaels drilled a 47-yard field goal to put the Steelers up 13–3 with 1:26 left before halftime.

  Charley Johnson wasn’t about to run out the clock. He was on his way to a Pro Bowl year—the only one he would enjoy in a fifteen-year NFL career that held such promise. He would lead the league in pass attempts, rank second behind Johnny Unitas in both completions and passing yardage, and finish second to Y. A. Tittle in touchdown passes. But he would also finish second, behind Norm Snead, in interceptions. Starting from his 27, Johnson hit Randle for a gain of 7 yards, but on second down, Pottios intercepted and returned the ball 32 yards to the St. Louis 6. “Pottios was by far the best football player on the field,” Johnson said afterward.37 That impression was growing around the league. In late August, the new coach of the Colts, Don Shula, had paid the Steeler linebacker high praise after an exhibition game. “Pottios is a great football player,” Shula said.38

  Two Hoak carries moved the ball to the 1, setting up a sneak by Brown for a touchdown and a 20–3 halftime lead. Charley Johnson, hitting eight of sixteen passes, was moving the ball, but he had only a field goal to show for it.

  Everything seemed to be working for the Steelers—except for Ferguson, who had a mere 13 yards rushing after six carries. But Pittsburgh had kept St. Louis out of the end zone and forced “the baby-faced chemical engineer” into an interception and a pitchout that turned into a fumble.39 “This game was even more frustrating for me than the one at Pittsburgh,” Johnson said later.40

  The Steelers looked to be on the verge of going 3–1–1 and pushing themselves into sole possession of second place in the Eastern Conference. Cleveland was on the way to grinding out a 35–24 win over the Giants, which would leave New York and St. Louis tied for third at 3–2. With a seventeen-point lead, the Steelers had the luxury of glancing at the scoreboard or listening to the scores announced over the PA system in the stadium.

  The Cardinals took the second-half kickoff, and Johnson led them on a Steeler-like march,
mixing short passes with the run on a seventeen-play drive. Twelve plays left them with fourth-and-2 on the Steeler 15. Whether he was mule headed or had unwavering confidence in his offensive line, Lemm disdained the field goal once again. Johnson plunged into the line and picked up 5 yards, setting up first-and-goal at the 10.

  It still looked as if the Steeler defense was going to stifle Johnson again. The secondary had given up 145 yards passing in the first half but it was getting along without Thomas, sidelined by his injured heel. “We made four perfect defensive plays,” defensive coach Buster Ramsey said of the final sequence in the series. Keys broke up a pass to Randle, and Glen Glass broke up one to Conrad. On third down, Johnson threw incomplete to Smith. On fourth down, the Cards tried a halfback pass. “We figured Crow would throw to Conrad,” Ramsey said, “and we played that right.”41

  In his book The Physics of Football, Timothy Gay plots the trajectories of a kick, a punt, and a pass, but the path of an oblong ball is as unpredictable when it’s batted around in the air as when it squirts and tumbles along the ground. Conrad, the intended receiver, fell down on the play. Glass deflected Crow’s pass, but it ricocheted right into Smith’s hands for a touchdown, making it 20–10. Steelers assistant coach Vern “Torgy” Torgeson almost sounded like a typical fatalistic fan of a snake-bitten team when he observed later, “When they score on plays like that, you’re not about to win.”42

  But the Steelers bounced back. Brown hit Gary Ballman with a 33-yard pass on the next drive to set up a 46-yard field goal by Michaels, boosting the Steeler lead to 23–10 with 1:44 left in the third quarter. Brown wasn’t matching his form against Cleveland. He had hit several bombs, but he was only four of eleven passing at the half, en route to an eight of twenty-three afternoon, and Ferguson wasn’t duplicating his first performance against the Cards. But as heroic as the Steeler defense looked, the lead seemed secure as the quarter ended with a Stovall punt, even though the Steelers had to punt right back. Russell had broken up several passes and roamed over the field making tackles, and he was in the right place again when he recovered Smith’s fumble at the Steeler 32 after a 37-yard reception early in the fourth quarter.

  The Steelers missed a chance to increase their lead when Michaels missed a 34-yard field goal on the ensuing drive (although some in the press box thought the officials blew the call), but the way the defense was playing, it didn’t seem consequential—and certainly not vital—at the time. The Steelers looked as if they had held again after Charley Johnson failed to hit his targets, but a 25-yard pass interference call on third-and-10 moved the Cards to their 45. On first down, however, Johnson was dumped for a 10-yard loss, leaving him with 9:56 to work a small miracle.43

  The Cardinals almost had enough track stars to field an Olympic team of their own. Besides Bob Paremore, with his 9.3 speed, and Smith, who had won the state hurdles while in high school, Randle had 9.6 speed in the 100. After Johnson picked himself off the ground, he connected with Randle on a 54-yard pass, down to the Steeler 11.

  After Triplett lost a yard and Johnson threw incomplete, the Cardinal QB made like Frank Ryan the week before, running up the middle for 9 yards, making it fourth-and-2 at the 3, the third time the Cards were to challenge Pittsburgh near the goal line. Several weeks later, the Pittsburgh Courier would rhapsodize about the Steeler defense: “For three seasons, the names of John Reger, Myron Pottios, Joe Krupa, George Tarasovic and Ernie Stautner have stood for line savagery of the most riotous sort.” The crew was living up to its reputation for “rock-and-sock football” on this sunny afternoon. The Cardinals had no better success this time against this grizzled crew: Childress picked up only a yard over right guard, Krupa’s territory, and Pittsburgh took over. “Three times the Cards got that close the Steelers’ derriers [sic] left marks at the goal line,” wrote Al Abrams. The Steelers looked like a crew that was defending the Alamo.44

  The Cardinals had gotten the benefit of a fluke play, but the Steelers were catching breaks too. They couldn’t move past the 6 after their goal line stand, but a roughing-the-kicker penalty on Brown’s punt gave them new life. Hoak’s 18-yard run off-tackle dug them out of a hole, but three plays later, Brown had to punt and got off a feeble 31-yarder that left the Cards on their 40.

  A thirteen-point lead seemed safe with only 4:24 left in the game, especially the way the Steelers were playing, and Michaels’s 34-yard miss did not loom as a pivotal failure. Johnson was not yet a polished NFL quarterback, and he had receivers who were still raw. Smith, a tenth-round draft pick playing for the injured Taz Anderson, had more of an impact in high school playing clarinet in the band than catching passes. Hampered by injuries, he got into the last game in his junior year, with his team playing in the single wing. “I ran so goofy that the other team couldn’t figure out what I was doing,” he said.45

  Clendon Thomas would look back and remember Smith as one of the most talented receivers he faced during his career, but on this day the sixth-year safety mostly watched from the sideline. “Jackie Smith could run away from a lot of people,” Thomas said.46 After Childress went around left end for 5 yards, Smith got open, and Johnson hit him with a 55-yard touchdown pass to make it 23–17 with 3:48 left in the game. Smith would finish the day with nine catches for 212 yards—more yardage than he’d gained in his senior year in college.

  Curiously, with the Steelers needing to run out the clock, Brown threw a pass to Dial on first down. It went incomplete. After Hoak picked up 2 yards, Brown threw a 13-yard pass to Mack for a first down on the 35. Ferguson gained 5 yards up the middle, but Mack drew a personal foul for running into a Cardinal defender after the whistle. Instead of having second-and-5 at the 40, the Steelers faced second-and-20 at their 25, and the clock stopped. Brown was sacked for a 6-yard loss, and Hoak, with 2:40 left, gained only 2 yards around right end.

  Brown got off a 36-yard punt, giving the Cards the ball on their 43, but some of the 23,715 hometown fans started to leave when Lou Cordileone dropped Johnson for an 18-yard loss, forcing the Cards to use their last time-out with 1:33 left.

  With the Steeler goal line 75 yards away and no time-outs, what Wally Lemm needed wasn’t more time. What he needed was Bobby Layne at quarterback, or Johnny Unitas. But a baby-faced PhD candidate? Johnson threw an incompletion, and then “the Texas towhead” showed why he was so highly regarded as a future star.47

  “Pitiful as it was to Steeler fans, one had to admire the artistry of Charley Johnson … and the brilliance of his performance when the chips were on the line,” Pat Livingston wrote. “In a march that defied credulity, the 24-year-old youngster directed the greatest race against the clock football ever has seen.”48

  Perhaps Livingston had forgotten about Layne’s two-minute drills, like the one against the Browns in 1959, or the 80-yard drive, capped by Jim Doran’s TD catch, that won the 1953 NFL title for Detroit. Maybe he had forgotten about Unitas moving the Colts into a tie in regulation before Baltimore beat the Giants in sudden death in the ’58 title game. No matter. Never had a chemical engineer’s performance looked quite so mesmerizing.

  The difference between playing the two sides of the ball, Thomas, a former two-way star, explained before the first Cardinal game, is that on defense, “You can’t afford a mistake. Make a mistake on defense … give up a touchdown, and there’s no way you can get it back.” And when a passer like Charley Johnson was in a groove, there was no letup from the pressure. “There are times when you feel like you’re in the back end of a shooting gallery when those quarterbacks start throwing,” Thomas said.49

  That’s the effect a young quarterback like Johnson could induce in a defensive secondary. If only Thomas had been healthy enough to play more than a handful of downs, the Cardinal quarterback might have had to change his strategy. Ramsey put the Steelers in a “prevent defense,” designed to give up yardage but use up the clock while discouraging long passes. A day later, Livingston would label it an “idiotic defense.”50 He had just written a feature on the
assistant coach for the Press’s Sunday magazine titled “The Volatile Mr. Ramsey.” Livingston described “the leather-lunged Tennessean” as “this great bull of a man, a shoulder-swaggering megaphone of instructions and warnings … as bouncy as a three-month old puppy and as violent as an explosion.”

  Garrard “Buster” Ramsey handled the defense while Parker concentrated on the offense during the week. Ramsey had a penchant for heckling opponents, and he had a knack for unsettling them. One anonymous Giant player suggested that the NFL ban the coach. “If they don’t,” the player vowed, “I’m going to belt him good some day.”51

  Ramsey took an ultra-conservative approach on defense. Asked before the season opener why the Steelers didn’t more often “red-dog”—the term that became more popular as “blitz”—he replied, “I don’t feel defense is the place to gamble on the football field.”52 He was not nearly as daring as Cardinal defensive coordinator Chuck Drulis, who was refining the safety blitz with Larry Wilson, perfecting the timing to rush in to sack the quarterback. It would take little imagination to envision the havoc that Clendon Thomas—or Brady Keys—could have wrought with some surprise blitzes.

  Faced with third-and-28 from his 25, Johnson started taking advantage of Ramsey’s tactics, while looking as much like an artist as a genius. He hit Childress, coming out of the backfield, and the eighth-year back from Auburn came up less than a yard shy of the first down. The Cards finally converted a shot on fourth down when Johnson hit Conrad for 3 yards and the first down and then picked up 17 on a pass to Smith.