The '63 Steelers Read online

  When no one came across the bridge, well, it was easy enough to pick a fight among your own. And you never had to go far to find a willing participant. It was the quickest solution to a difference of opinion. “Many North Side kids believed that the way to settle an argument was with your fists or by letting loose with a barrage of filthy language,” with the second option, naturally, providing an easy invitation to put up your dukes. People tended to feel “that North Side kids were nothing more than hoodlums,” Art Rooney Jr. commented.2

  Throwing punches—or at least thinking about it—was as integral to the routine of daily life as school and sports, a task unbounded by age, size, or skill. The North Side had upstanding, law-abiding citizens who would become sources of pride to the community, to be sure. “On the other hand,” Rooney reflected, “there were also plenty of hooligans, and a lot of them ended up in the pokey.”3

  So it was no surprise that while growing up on the North Side, William Richard “Red” Mack learned early in life the lessons that would help a 175-pound offensive back survive for six seasons in the NFL against players who outweighed him by seventy-five pounds or more, and defensive backs— including teammates—who thought that a roundhouse forearm to the head, delivered like a scythe in a farm field, was more effective than a textbook tackle around the hips. The final score, Mack came to realize, really didn’t settle anything.

  “From my childhood, living on the North Side,” Mack said, “if you won, you fought. If you lost, you fought. You always had to defend yourself. Right or wrong, you had to defend yourself, and I always had that mental attitude. It didn’t make any difference if the guy was big or little, you still had to defend yourself, because if you backed down, you’re not going to be able to be No. 1. You’re not going to be able to achieve your goal.”4

  But there was one confrontation, one endless argument, that Mack could do nothing to settle—not with his fists, not with his wits. His parents split up when he was around eleven, leaving him and his two brothers and two sisters in limbo. “They got divorced, and neither one of them wanted us,” he said. “So I was a ward of the court for about four, five months. My grandmother convinced the court that they didn’t want to separate us. So they put us all in St. Paul’s Orphanage. The funny part about it is, I’m Catholic and my grandparents are Mormon. But she kept us together.”5

  Mack spent four years in the orphanage. “I’ve been asked this question a thousand times over the years,” he said during a high school reunion in 2008. “It was a blessing because I didn’t have the turmoil that a lot of kids have with divorces where the mother is against the dad, the dad’s against the mother. I didn’t have that. So when I went into the orphanage, my mother and dad really weren’t part of my life anymore. They came on Sunday once a month to visit. One year, I think the second year I was there, I told [the orphanage], ‘I’m not going to visitation with my parents.’ They said, ‘You have to.’ I said, ‘I am not going. All they do is argue and fight.’ So they made it so that my mother came one month and my dad came the other month. I didn’t have to put up with that.”6

  Mack attended Hampton High School in his freshman year, and it was on the football field where he learned that he would have to keep fighting for everything he had been fighting for in his youth if he wanted to become a success. “Ed Fay was the line coach,” Mack said. “He pulled me out of practice one day and he said, ‘If you ever want to amount to anything or you ever want to go anywhere in football, you’re going to have to work at that every day of your life.’”7

  Mack weighed around 110 pounds the first time he put on a football uniform. When he left for Notre Dame after spending a year at the Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland, he had put on some weight but, more important, he had learned a valuable lesson: “You don’t have to be big, you don’t have to be the fastest guy in the world, but you’ve got to be the toughest.”8

  Mack wasn’t dreaming about an NFL career in college. He played running back at around 170, 175 pounds at South Bend, and he hurt his left knee in his junior year and his right one in his senior year, which limited his playing time. But in his sophomore year he showed the talent that would lead Sports Illustrated to list him as a preseason All-America candidate the next year, and he would also serve as an example of the hazards of getting hit by players thirty or fifty pounds heavier.9 In mid-October of 1958, Mack ran for 106 yards—and had a 64-yard touchdown run called back because of a holding penalty—in a 9–7 victory over Duke. Two weeks later he ran 9 yards for a touchdown and returned a punt 65 yards for another to help Notre Dame beat Navy, 40–20. The next week, at Pitt Stadium, Mack showed what a threat he could pose as a receiver. He caught a 72-yard pass from future pro George Izo to set up a go-ahead touchdown, and after Pitt took a 29–26 lead with eleven seconds left, Mack put a scare in the Panthers by catching a 47-yard pass that put the Irish on the Pitt 15 as the final gun sounded. A week later, Mack ran for two TDs in a 34–24 win over North Carolina. On November 29, however, in a 20–13 victory over USC, he had to leave the game with an injury.

  Mack averaged more than 6 yards a carry in Notre Dame’s 6–4 season, but he began his junior year on crutches, the result of a torn muscle in his right calf. By the end of the year, the first under Joe Kuharich, there would be thirteen cases of knee surgeries, including Mack and teammate Myron Pottios. The only thing that could keep Mack from stardom, it seemed, was his health. “With a good knee this fireball will make a lot of people forget a lot of heroes of the past,” one preseason magazine predicted.10 Back in action on October 1, 1960, against Purdue, Mack injured his leg while defending a pass against six-foot-five Manzie Winters and had to be taken off the field on a stretcher, lost for the season. Mack had proved he could run and catch a football, and no one would dare dispute his toughness.

  Undergoing two knee operations while playing on 5–5 and 2–8 teams in his final two college seasons didn’t do much for Mack’s prospects as a pro. With six of their first nine picks traded away in the 1961 draft, including No. 1, the Steelers picked Pottios in the second round, Penn State’s Dick Hoak in the seventh, and Mack in the tenth round. “Later on in the season, I found out Art Rooney got [to make] one draft choice every year,” Mack said, “and I was his draft choice.” As Ed Fay heard it, Rooney said, “I want that skinny kid from Notre Dame from Nor’ Side.”11

  It didn’t take long for the skinny kid to be tested. Rooney was a former boxer himself—and a good one—and no one knew better what kids from the North Side were like. The players didn’t know how much the rookie could take, and they probably didn’t know that Mack had boxed with the club team at Notre Dame and was good enough to become light-heavyweight champ. “A little bit of that street fighting on the North Side helped out,” Mack said.12

  Fred Williamson—who later dubbed himself “the Hammer”—“was a wide receiver my rookie year in training camp,” Mack recalled. “A week or so into training camp, they moved him over to defense. Of course, he didn’t like that. We were running pass patterns one day—all we had on was shoulder pads—and man, he knocked me down—he just flattened me. I got up off the ground, I hit him upside the head, knocked him out colder than hell. I think I made the roster that day.”13

  If there was any doubt about whether Mack would stick, Bobby Layne let his feelings be known to Buddy Parker. “My roommate at Notre Dame was Myron Pottios,” Mack said. “Myron Pottios told me, ‘I heard Layne tell Buddy Parker, Buddy, you’ve gotta keep that sonuvabitch around here because you don’t know what’s gonna happen with him.’”14

  Fay remembered another defensive back who took his best shot at Mack. “His first year as a rookie they were practicing up at Slippery Rock,” Fay said.

  Bobby Layne was the quarterback, and he called this pass pattern for Red. When he made his cut, Brady Keys leveled him. It took three or four minutes to bring him around. They got him on the sideline and got him ready again.

  When he went [back] out, he told Bobby Layne, “Call that same
pattern again.” Layne said, “We don’t want to lose you.” Red said, “Call that same pattern again.” So he does. Instead of breaking on the route, he went right at Keys and he leveled him like you would not believe. Then they carried Keys off the field. He wouldn’t back down for anybody.15

  Mack got into another scrap, this time with defensive back Billy Butler, after colliding on a pass play in early August. They were practicing at Slippery Rock, but for Mack, it must have felt just like being back on the North Side. Mack was unpolished as a receiver, but he had speed and he had Ed Fay’s advice: If he was going to succeed, he would have to work at it every day.

  It took only a couple of practices for the rookie to make a big impression on Parker, and three weeks later he got the chance to show Steeler fans that he was something special.

  The Steelers held a controlled scrimmage on Alumni Day, the first Saturday in August 1961, drawing 5,000 fans. Defense dominated the scrimmage, but when it was over, “the name of William (Red) Mack … was on the lips of everyone.”16 Mack scored twice on 80-yard receptions. The first time, he got behind the secondary; on the second, guarded tightly by rookie Overton Curtis, Mack “managed to make a spectacular leaping steal of the pigskin right out of the defender’s mitts, then slipped along the white stripe into payoff territory.” One news account described him as “a fleet, fancy dan halfback from Notre Dame,” which must have come as a surprise to the man without any privilege who’d looked after his siblings in an orphanage and had to face off against bigger kids most of his life.17

  There had been “phenoms” in camp before—like C. R. “Cash Register” Roberts and James “Jetstream” Smith—and other teams had them too, like Cleveland “Pussyfoot” Jones, a five-foot-four, 147-pound receiver with the Cowboys.18 But Mack, along with Hoak and Keys, was a genuine NFL player. The main concern about Mack was whether his knees could hold up to the demands of an NFL season. “Mack can run like a gale and has that change of gait that will paralyze a potential tackler,” wrote Press sports editor Chester L. Smith. “If he can stand up under what’s ahead of him, he just may prove to be one of the best targets Bobby Layne ever had.”19

  Mack eventually became a different kind of target for Layne. Three years after entering the league, Mack had the distinction of making an all-star team of sorts compiled by Layne: “Pro Football’s 11 Meanest Men.” Listed among guys with reputations for being the roughest players in the league—Sam Huff, Alex Karras, and Mike Ditka—was the 185-pound kid with great hands and two bad knees. Wideouts—or “spread” receivers, as they were known then—earned reputations as the fastest or most dangerous in the league, but rarely if ever were they put in the same category as show-no-mercy tacklers such as Dick “Night Train” Lane.

  “He’s the meanest spread receiver I’ve ever known,” Layne said of Mack. The problem, the retired quarterback explained, was that too much intensity could distract a player from his assignments and draw penalties. But Mack wasn’t always the instigator, Layne conceded. “It’s possible he may not go looking for unnecessary fights,” Layne said, “but somehow he still seems to find them—or maybe they find him.”20

  Mack wasn’t looking for a fight when he ran patterns in practice against Williamson and Keys, and he wasn’t looking for one when he and several teammates, members of the Steelers’ basketball team that played in the off-season, made a stop after a game in winter. “Red had bought a new car,” his old coach Ed Fay recalled, “and on the way back they stopped in a saloon, and they were having some beers.” The Steeler players began playing one of the electronic bar games, sliding a hockey puck at bowling pins. “Lou Michaels was on Red’s end of the table, and he was hunching all the time over the line, shooting the puck. Red said, ‘Hey, Lou, stay behind the line, you’re cheating.’ And [Michaels] said, ‘Don’t talk to me like that, you little redheaded’—and used an expletive, you know? And Red said, ‘Well, I’m going to tell you, you go over the next time, I’m going to knock you on your ass.’ So he does it: Michaels goes over. Red confronts him and knocks him right smack on his ass.”21

  The six-foot-two Michaels was one of the players who had been riding in Mack’s car, along with halfback Charlie Scales. Mack announced, “Anybody in my car, let’s go, I’m going home,” Fay said. “So they all walk out to get in the car. Here comes Michaels out of the saloon and he says, ‘Get out of that car or I’ll kick that door in.’ Red said, ‘Don’t touch that car. I never had one till now. Don’t touch it.’ So [Michaels] acted like he was going to kick it in, and Red opened the door, got out,” Fay said. “And,” said Mack, “I decked him.” Then, Fay recalled, Mack said, “Let’s go. If you want to go with me, in now. [Michaels] is not getting in my car.”22

  Mack played special teams in his rookie year and caught only eight passes, two for touchdowns, but he showed enough promise that the 1962 Steeler press guide said he could turn into “the perfect replacement for former Steeler end Jim Orr,” who had been traded away in the Big Daddy Lipscomb deal.23 Mack only matched his totals for receptions and touchdowns in ’62, but he showcased his big-play potential by averaging 25.4 yards a catch, nearly 6 yards better than Dial’s average that season.

  In the fifth week of the ’63 season, the loss to St. Louis, Mack had shown both his game-breaking skills and the reckless play for which Layne faulted him. Mack had caught an 83-yard touchdown pass, eluding Jimmy Hill, but he had also hampered Pittsburgh’s chances of running out the clock in the final minutes when he was called for a 15-yard personal foul, sticking the Steelers in a second-and-20 hole.

  It was a case of Mack trying to live up to a standard set back in high school—measuring himself against the best, whether it was Southern Cal, the Cleveland Browns, or whomever he was playing that week. Years later, Mack explained, “I always wanted to be better than that guy or that team. And the only way to achieve that, you had to demonstrate that. Sometimes you were better than they were, and sometimes you got in trouble because they were better than you. You still had to defend yourself.”24

  That day in St. Louis, he was tussling with Pat Fischer, a cornerback whom Mack would later rank as one of the toughest defensive backs he’d played against. “I gave him the shoulder real good, and he got me probably with a knee,” Mack explained at the Curbstone Coaches luncheon the day after the loss. “Then when I blocked him near the finish of the game the official ruled a foul.”25

  The following week, Mack caught five passes for 69 yards in the win over the Redskins. After taking Monday off, the Steelers began preparing for the Cowboys, who had been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s pro football preview issue, with the heady forecast that a revamped defense made Dallas the favorite to unseat the Giants in the Eastern Conference. Before the season began, coach Tom Landry had boldly predicted in a bylined piece for a football magazine, “I think this is going to be the next great team in pro football.”26 Landry wasn’t far off in his estimation, but he was a bit premature. The 1963 Cowboys had gotten off to a 1–5 start that dropped them into last place, and they were coming off a 37–21 loss to the Giants.

  The year before, the Cowboys had used a curious combination of quarterbacks that took Paul Brown’s shuttling guard system one step further— rotating quarterbacks Eddie LeBaron, the recipient of Lipscomb’s threat after the Pro Bowl game, and Don Meredith on alternating plays. It was a system devised by someone Meredith called “a living IBM machine”—the former Giants assistant Landry.27

  Had the five-foot-seven LeBaron stood six two, he “might have been the greatest quarterback in history.”28 And had he been paired with six-foot-seven rookie quarterback Sonny Gibbs, he might have gone down in NFL history as a costar in the Mutt-and-Jeff offense. Instead, he shared command with Meredith, a two-time All-America at Southern Methodist University who set an NCAA record with a three-year completion record of 60.6 percent.

  In 1963, Landry was still juggling quarterbacks, sometimes quarter by quarter, but by the end of the week leading up to the Ste
elers game, he’d committed himself to Meredith.

  Pittsburgh was entering its thirty-ninth day without any appreciable precipitation. On Tuesday, “two fair maidens made obeisance to the God of the Heavens” in a ceremony in a downtown Chinese temple, lighting incense and offering prayers for relief from the drought.29 The weather was unsettling, but the economy was thriving. Unemployment was at 6.6 percent, the lowest since November of 1957. The steel industry was enjoying “glowing profit reports,” with the highest earnings over the first nine months of the year since 1957, but the federal government was making an inquiry into steel pricing practices.30

  Pittsburgh was a sports town—besides football and baseball, it had the Hornets, a minor league hockey team; the short-lived Pittsburgh Rens of the American Basketball League; and big-time college basketball—but the city was also drawing a variety of top-shelf entertainers, and audiences were showing their appreciation. Comedians were cracking all sorts of jokes, but Pittsburgh was no longer the butt of them. Milton Berle opened his run at the Holiday House on the eve of the Cowboys game to a rave review. “I have never heard such response to any entertainer in any club anywhere,” Lee McInerney wrote in the Post-Gazette.31 The Pittsburgh Opera was celebrating its twenty-fifth season. A young actress named Joey Heatherton appeared in town to promote her first film and enthused about the city’s beauty.32

  The Steelers opened as an eight-point favorite over the Cowboys, and their outlook improved when John Henry Johnson, after sitting out three games, looked fit at practice. Buddy Parker said there had been no urgency to use him against Washington because Theron Sapp was running so well, and the coach said he might not know until game day who would start against Dallas. Dick Hoak remained the ironman, trailing only Jim Brown and Jim Taylor among the rushing leaders.33