The '63 Steelers Read online

  The worst place for the Steelers to lose was on the road, because the disappointment of failure was compounded by Parker’s anger and frustration, and a plane flight could feel like a prison stay. Players on a jet headed home would never know whether a pilot’s caution about “experiencing a little turbulence” was referring to the weather conditions or the coach’s condition after a loss. Liquor was likely to heal some emotional and physical wounds among the players, but it only fueled Parker’s petulance and angst. He made a lot of threats after a defeat, and sometimes he followed up on them. “You wanted to stay out of his way after a game if you lost,” Dick Haley said, “because you could be on the next boat [out]. If you didn’t win, he was going to get himself pretty well oiled up, and so you wouldn’t want to be in his vision on the airplane.”6

  Any coach who’s ever scratched plays on a chalkboard suffers after a defeat, but for Parker, losing was an agony that “often led to unstable behavior,” a torture as unrelenting as a migraine headache, one that led to a wanton search for consolation. “One common procedure was to lock himself in a room and commune with the spirits,” wrote New York Times columnist Arthur Daley. “Usually they were as mischievous as leprechauns.”7

  They were more like monsters and goblins. There was a ritual to losing, a ceremonial attempt to exorcise the torment that haunted Parker almost like grief over the loss of a loved one. His distress suggested a need to almost punish himself, as if mentally he were making himself run extra laps, the way coaches disciplined players after a poor practice or game. It was a procedure that Parker had to endure much too often.

  “When the team loses, Buddy has a routine that never varies,” Parker’s wife, Jane, explained in a 1954 article aptly titled “He Dies for Detroit Every Week.” “He flops on an ottoman in the living room and pulls out a pocketknife he’s been carrying for thirty years. He raises the knife to his throat slowly and cuts his tie at the knot. Until I hear the material rip, I’m never sure it’s the tie, not his throat, that he’s cutting. He bends down and slashes his shoelaces with two quick strokes. Then he literally tears his shirt off his back without unbuttoning it.” A stillness would pervade the house until Tuesday. The only sound Parker could stand was music, his wife explained, but that provided only a temporary, mindless respite. Friends stayed away. Only one remedy could ease the pain. “Nothing brings him out of his black mood until he wins one,” Jane Parker said.8

  The Los Angeles Times characterized Parker in his March 24, 1982, obituary as “often quixotic, rarely colorless, and yet a sound gridiron strategist.” He was “ridden with monumental superstitions,” and his triskaidekaphobia—fear of the number 13—was so extreme that he shunned any combination of numbers that added up to 13, numbers such as 103, and even the letter C, the third in the alphabet, in combination with the numeral 1. One time during a visit his wife rented a room with the number 319, and Parker refused to go see her. “Do you want to ruin me?” he yelled over the phone. “Three and one and nine equal thirteen. Move out or I’ll sleep in the park.” Parker collected hairpins and howled if his wife touched them. If anyone threw a hat on a bed, he would dwell on the transgression for months, blaming it for any bad turn of events.9

  “Maybe I’m saying too much,” his wife added, “but he should act like a rational person if he doesn’t want me to talk about him.”10 As luck—or bad luck—would have it, the issue of the Saturday Evening Post in which the feature on Parker ran was published on November 13.

  Parker was a player with the Detroit Lions and Jane was a sixteen-yearold in high school when they began dating. They were both from Kemp, Texas, a town of less than two square miles south of Dallas, with a population of 881, according to the 1950 census. Parker was so shy he sent his sister, Peepsie, to ask Jane for a date. She saw him infrequently, but one day in late May of 1940 she was sitting in front of the drugstore in Kemp, barefoot and in curlers, when Parker came up unannounced, dropped a small box in her lap, and told her he would see her that evening. The box contained a diamond engagement ring.11

  Parker played three sports in high school, attended a junior college, and then earned a scholarship from Centenary College in Louisiana. Centenary lost only two games during Parker’s three seasons and beat Texas in 1934, his senior year. Parker wasn’t flashy—although the Associated Press described him as a “slashing Centenary halfback” in the upset over unbeaten Texas that he won with a field goal with forty-five seconds left—but he was tough enough as a blocker and linebacker to win a spot on the Lions.12

  He was traded to the Chicago Cardinals in 1937 and spent seven seasons there before retiring and becoming an assistant coach with the team, and then, in an unconventional arrangement, a co-coach. In 1950, he took a position as assistant with the Lions and was named head coach at season’s end. Detroit finished tied for second in 1951 and then won the NFL title the following two years, beating Cleveland each time. The two teams battled in the championship game for the third consecutive season in ’54, but this time the Browns won in a romp, 56–10. The Lions dropped into the cellar the next year but challenged for the 1956 Western Conference crown before losing a showdown with Chicago, quarterbacked by Ed Brown, in the final regular-season game.

  The Lions’ reputation as winners was matched only by their notoriety for late-night merrymaking. On a team led by Bobby Layne, what else in the world would anyone expect? The problem, of course, was that no one had Layne’s ability to ring in every Saturday night as if it were New Year’s Eve yet come out the next morning and even play an exhibition as if it were a championship game. The night before Detroit got skunked by Cleveland in the title game, one Lion said, “at midnight there weren’t a dozen of our guys in the hotel.”13

  In mid-August of 1957, 600 people showed up for the Lions’ annual booster banquet, eager to hear Parker assess his team’s chances. What they heard left them speechless. “I can’t handle this football team,” Parker said. “I’m through with football in Detroit.” It was a hasty decision that Parker would later regret.14

  It didn’t take long for Art Rooney to snap Parker up. On August 27, with the season opener drawing near, the Steelers owner gave Parker a five-year contract. The Post-Gazette reported that the deal was worth $100,000, a drop-off from the $33,000 annual salary he reportedly would have made with the Lions.15 But Parker had a lot more coming to him than twenty grand a year. Art Rooney was the target of a lot of gibes and snickers for what some fans interpreted as a halfhearted approach to building a winner, but he put his money where his mouth was—clamped down on a cigar. Why else would the Steelers owner shell out a base salary of $80,000 a year for Buddy Parker, if not in the belief that this was an investment that could finally deliver a winner to Pittsburgh?

  It was not until long after Parker had left that Art Rooney Jr. learned from a financial adviser to his father that the irascible coach commanded a salary far above the $30,000 Rooney Jr. assumed was the actual figure. The sum of eighty grand was not just “top dollar,” as Rooney said; it was more like colossal, considering that Jim Brown—arguably the best player in the game—was making about $35,000. On top of that, Rooney Jr. learned, Parker got a percentage of the profits and racetrack and stock market earnings. Ultimately for Parker, however, there was no way to put a figure on the financial rewards that would appease the torture of a succession of losing Sunday afternoons.16

  Rebuilding the Steelers posed no modest challenge, even with Parker’s reputation as a sharp mind and strategist. It had been ten years since the Steelers had made their one and only postseason appearance, and in that time they had experienced only one winning season. And if Parker couldn’t handle the Lions, how could he control the rowdy, hard-core Steelers? Parker was bound to make a big run on a haberdashery’s stock of neckties and suffer through some silent, gloomy days before his squad emerged from mediocrity.

  In that era, heavy drinking among football players was no more frowned upon than lighting up a cigarette, but alcohol only heightened whateve
r anxieties were festering in Parker’s head, and one time in Dallas his drinking led to an ugly confrontation that could have turned violent. Former defensive back Johnny Sample and Art Rooney Jr. both wrote about their memories of the incident, although they recalled different principles.

  On the afternoon before the Dallas game, the Steelers checked into the airport hotel, which was not segregated, and then had dinner. Some of the Steelers went out to visit with Cowboy players, Sample said. Rooney recalled that some of the black players had gone to a blacks-only nightclub and were late getting back to the hotel. When Parker came out of his room, it was evident he had been drinking, Sample said, “because the smell of whiskey was all over him.” Buster Ramsey, an assistant and Parker’s “chief henchman,” in Sample’s words, was “egging Parker on,” trainer Doc Sweeney said.17

  In an era in which straight-laced disciplinarians like Vince Lombardi, George Halas, Howard Wayne “Red” Hickey, and Paul Brown set all the rules, Parker gave his players free rein, as long as they performed on Sunday. Parker didn’t exactly make a point of performing bed checks with his players. “I’d say about two times in fifteen years,” Bobby Layne drawled. “We never had a curfew,” Dick Haley said. “When Bobby was playing, he wasn’t staying in, so Parker never had a curfew because he would have had to do something to Bobby Layne.”18

  Sample, who roomed with Brady Keys, returned at midnight, past the 11 p.m. curfew, and was almost asleep when Parker burst into the room, in his shirtsleeves, his hands taped by Sweeney like a boxer’s. Ramsey was right behind him. “I came in here to see where you’ve been,” Parker said. “I also came in here just in case you wanted to fight, because I know I’m going to have some trouble from both of you. Now what do you want to do?” Sample figured the best course of action was to calm the coach down. “I want to go to sleep and that’s just about what I was doing until you came busting in here like that.”19

  Parker left without saying another word. According to Sweeney, Rooney recalled, Parker and Ramsey blamed Johnson and Lipscomb for keeping the black players out late at the nightclub. Parker was walking up and down the hallway, yelling, “I’m going to punch out that Big Daddy and John Henry, right in the face.” Parker ranted for twenty minutes before his hands went numb because Sweeney had deliberately taped them too tightly, and the coach asked the trainer to cut the tape off.20 If Parker had met up with Lipscomb and Johnson, they might have used the same diplomacy as Sample to mollify Parker. If that didn’t work, it’s reasonable to conjecture that the coach could have ended up looking a lot like Y. A. Tittle in the classic photo taken at Pitt Stadium in ’64, when the Giants quarterback was left kneeling in the end zone, dazed and bloodied, after being drilled by defensive lineman John Baker.

  It’s entirely likely that both accounts are accurate, and that Parker went stalking several players. But it seems that anyone seeking a fight with, first, Big Daddy Lipscomb and, second, John Henry Johnson, would qualify as downright suicidal.

  The playing fields of professional football apparently did little to cultivate a sense of equality in Parker. Lipscomb, Johnson, Sample, and Keys were “gamers,” and Parker respected them as athletes. But clearly, Parker was not going to be any kind of spokesman for the civil rights movement that was locked in gear.

  “He didn’t like black people, which was sad,” said Preston Carpenter, who was born in Hayti, Missouri, later moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and attended the University of Arkansas. “He hated them. He loved John Henry, but he didn’t like black people. It was no big deal for me. I liked all the ballplayers. Jimmy Brown was one of my best friends.”21

  “He could be abusive toward all of his players,” Art Rooney Jr. said of Parker, “but abusive toward blacks in a way that was shockingly racial.”22

  Of course, Parker wasn’t alone in his feelings. Laws and long-standing discriminatory practices were mired in tradition and resistant to change. But the objections to second-class treatment of minorities that were spreading in the nation were beginning to resonate more in sports too. A chapter of the NAACP tried to get black players (the term “Negro” was used then) from the Steelers and Colts to boycott an exhibition game in Roanoke, Virginia, in mid-August of 1961 because of the segregated-seating policy at Victory Stadium. A weak truce was worked out, and the game went on without a boycott, which would have involved up to twelve black players on the Steelers and as many as seven on the Colts.23 The Steelers did not encounter opposition to their demand that all their players stay at the same hotel for the game, but two weeks later, when they faced the St. Louis Cardinals in Jacksonville, Florida, the Steelers decided not to risk any chances of encountering a protest against segregated housing.24 They circumvented the issue by taking a flight to Jacksonville on the morning of the game and returning as soon as it ended, making their temporary quarters at an air base.25

  At the same time, secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall threatened to bar the Washington Redskins from the new government-owned Municipal Stadium unless the team began using black players. The Redskins were the only team in the NFL that had no black players on its roster, which led to one gibe that the team colors were “burgundy, gold and Caucasian.”26 Redskins owner George Preston Marshall pledged that he would use the team’s first two picks in the draft on Negro players, making Ernie Davis the No. 1 selection.27 Marshall then traded Davis to the Browns for Bobby Mitchell. Ron Hatcher, a teammate of Gary Ballman’s at Michigan State, was picked in the eighth round and became the first African American player signed by the Redskins.

  In the November 1963 issue of Ebony, whose cover story gave an account of the August march on Washington in support of economic and civil rights for black Americans, the magazine ran an NFL preview in which it counted 146 Negro players in pro football in the United States: 100 in the NFL, 46 in the upstart AFL. The Pittsburgh Courier faulted some Negro athletes for not speaking out about the civil rights movement, but the newspaper was optimistic about progress in sports. “Future of Negro in Sports World Appears to Be Brighter than Ever,” read the headline on Wendell Smith’s column in the August 17 issue, eleven days before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech to approximately a quarter-million people in the nation’s capital. “Within the next 25 years, there probably will be a Negro managing a major league baseball team,” Smith wrote. “There is also the possibility that a Negro will coach a top professional football team.”

  Black players had to fight for every inch of progress and, for Sample, that meant literally. After the ’61 season ended, Sample hit an impasse in salary negotiations. He wanted a raise of $8,000 from his salary of $14,000 but, he said, Art Rooney balked and offered only $1,500. Several weeks into the ’62 training camp, Parker called Sample into his office to persuade him to lower his demands. “I know you had a great year, Sample,” the defensive back quoted Parker as saying. “But black athletes just don’t deserve that kind of money and I won’t pay it.”28

  The two shouted and traded obscenities, but no punches were thrown, and Sample left. Sample eventually got a raise of $6,000, he said, but his career with Parker was doomed, and in midseason of ’62 he was released. He wound up with—of all the NFL teams—the Washington Redskins.

  Superstition led Parker to employ Wallace “Boots” Lewis as an “assistant,” a polite term for an aging black man who was a combination gofer and mascot. Parker had been losing a card game during college, so the story went, when he beckoned Lewis, a custodian, and rubbed his head for good luck. Parker won. While coaching for the Cardinals, he ran into Lewis before a big game in Los Angeles and brought him onto the bench for the game. The Cardinals rallied for a dramatic win, so Parker kept Lewis around and brought him to Pittsburgh after being named Steelers coach. Lewis remained dedicated to Parker right to the end; when Parker left Pittsburgh, so did Boots, despite the Steelers’ offer to keep him on.29

  When it came to getting rid of a player or venting his wrath, Parker didn’t discriminate. Once he detected what
he felt was the slightest trace of disrespect, disloyalty, or simply failure to produce, Parker would spare no one, rendering the player expendable—immediately.

  George Tarasovic had been drafted by the Steelers in the second round out of LSU in 1952. His father, an immigrant like Lou Michaels’s dad, had worked in a slate quarry in Czechoslovakia. At six foot four, 245 pounds, Tarasovic was one of the biggest players on the team, and he was strong and nimble enough to switch between linebacker and defensive end. He married a Pittsburgh girl, and they made their home in the community where she’d grown up, about fifteen minutes south of downtown. “I was living in Dormont, and everybody there wanted me to run for justice of the peace,” Tarasovic said. “They put me up to run, and I guess Buddy Parker figured I was going to quit at the end of the season. I didn’t win, and after Election Day he told me that was it. He figured I was ready to retire, but I wasn’t even thinking about that. I wasn’t even thinking about winning [the election].”30

  Tarasovic had been playing while hurt. He went the entire first game against the Cards despite suffering a sprained arch on the first play and then played “practically on one foot” in the loss in Cleveland.31 Tarasovic had a reputation as a rugged player, but that wasn’t enough to save him. He was cut the day after the election, along with Parker crony and ex-Lion Tom Tracy—which showed that sentiment only went so far with the coach. The Post-Gazette wrote that the double setbacks made it “a dark day” for Tarasovic and then misspelled his name (“Tarasovich”) in the headline.32 Tarasovic was promptly picked up by Philadelphia, which had a rematch with the Steelers scheduled in week 12.