The '63 Steelers Read online

  Not even a proven history of success and a reputation for gutty play could spare a player from Parker’s impulsive moves, even when the affront was innocuous and entirely trivial. The Steelers were coming back from an exhibition loss to Cleveland in mid-August of ’64 when Lou Cordileone—one of the “Larrupin’ Lous” who’d proved unstoppable in the first Giant game the year before—made the unforgivable mistake of not showing proper contrition after a defeat, even if it was only the preseason. That was no excuse, even for a player who had rampaged against opposing offenses the previous season.

  “We’re on the plane going back and I’m sitting with [Myron] Pottios and he tells a joke, but it is so funny I started laughing and I can’t stop laughing,” Cordileone said. “One of the coaches came back and says to me, ‘Buddy wants to see you when we get back to camp.’ He cut me because of that. Yeah, because of that. I couldn’t believe it. And I had a pretty decent game against Cleveland. That’s how nuts this guy was. How do you get upset when you lose an exhibition game? Why the fuck do you get upset?”33 Despite the rash move, Cordileone still had respect for what Parker could do with a football team. “Buddy was a little nutty,” Cordileone said, “but he was a good coach. He was always on the chalkboard.”34

  The potent mix of defeat and liquor made Parker impulsive. Carpenter remembered a flight back to training camp after a preseason loss when the coach cast his menacing scowl at the players as he sauntered down the aisle. “Parker says, ‘OK, I’m gonna trade every one of you sons of bitches. I’m gonna trade all my best ballplayers. I’m gonna get out of here.’”35 On one occasion, as the story goes, Parker tried to put his entire team on waivers, but the commissioner’s office interceded and halted the move.

  Impetuous moves made out of spite were bound to backfire, and evidently Parker never learned from the blunder in personnel he made when he first took over as Steeler coach. In his effort to show the team who was boss, he cut the skilled halfback Lynn Chandnois, “just to prove no one was indispensable.”36 The Steelers couldn’t afford to lose any talent, and Parker’s track record for making shrewd moves would be tainted by reckless ones born of frustration and vindictiveness.

  “He could be a tyrant,” said Dan Rooney, who took over the running of daily operations during Parker’s reign, “especially when he was drinking.” But that wasn’t necessarily the core of the trouble. “When you’d lose, he would become a madman with the booze,” Art Rooney Jr. said. “Parker’s bigger problem was not booze. He had a psychological problem of deep depression, shyness and that stuff.”37

  The immediate effect on the team when Parker started housecleaning was the loss of talent. The long-term impact was that “his players never developed the closeness that is essential in a championship team,” a quality that Layne had tried so hard to instill in a bunch of outcasts on the cusp of success.38

  Parker’s knowledge of the game was never doubted, however. He studied game film painstakingly, frame by individual frame, sometimes taking two days to analyze one single quarter of play. Despite his conservative approach and commitment to fundamentals, he was an innovator. In ’63, the Chicago Bears were challenging the Packers for the Western Conference title under a young defensive coordinator named George Allen. Allen would rise to head coach in Los Angeles and Washington and would adapt Parker’s approach in trading for proven veterans, assembling the “Over-the-Hill Gang” with the Redskins and turning them into playoff contenders.39

  After the Redskins game, Pat Livingston wondered whether anyone had noticed the Steelers using a three-man line for one play. Years later, the 3–4 defense would become synonymous with the Pittsburgh defense. In 1964, Parker would find himself plagued again by injuries to linebackers for the game in Cleveland, an almost hopeless situation when facing Jimmy Brown. But Parker improvised—presumably with Buster Ramsey—using defensive back Clendon Thomas like a linebacker and lining him up at defensive end, “which was absolutely scary,” Thomas said. “We were running a 6–1 goal line all evening with some scary stunts.” The strategy worked, and the Steelers won, 23–7.40

  Parker also had the respect—and even admiration—of his peers. “Here’s one of the great strategists of pro football,” George Halas announced as Parker entered the Bears’ locker room later in the season. “He was truly a great coach,” Art Rooney Jr. said. “He was not a teacher; he was a strategy guy.”41

  Parker recognized the value of scouting college talent. Before he got to Detroit, the Lions spent $700 annually on scouting; under Parker, the amount went up to $20,000 a year. Drafting was still a somewhat crude process in the sixties, far from the refined science into which it evolved. Parker and representatives from the Lions and Eagles together came up with the idea for a scouting combine—first known as LESTO, then BLESTO—which tested players thoroughly and shared the information and expenses among several teams. The agency kept going strong, in different configurations, for five decades.42

  Apart from the tantrums and superstitions, sometimes Parker’s behavior could seem inexplicably odd—not just to his wife, but to the players as well. “Quite a character,” Andy Russell said. “I remember one time it was a brutally cold day at South Park—near zero and snow on the ground—and Parker drove his car down and pulled it up next to the huddle and sat in his car and rolled the window down and told us what plays to run. He had the heater on. He’s smoking a cigar, and smoke would billow out of the car. That wouldn’t happen today.”43

  Parker was not a motivational kind of coach. “He didn’t motivate anybody,” Carpenter said. But Carpenter was a self-starter, and some players needed a kick start. Football—and most grueling sports—requires players to push themselves to ungodly limits and demands a stringent self-discipline, which is why coaches are necessary to goad, prod, and inspire the athletes, besides teach them. Parker made the mistake of treating his players as adults and letting them take care of themselves both on and off the field. “Discipline was almost totally lacking. His training camp was a playground. Curfew was a joke. Stars got away with violations without even a reprimand,” said Joe Tucker, the former radio and TV voice of the Steelers.44

  “I think he felt you were grown men,” said Red Mack. “He didn’t have to prepare you for the game; you should prepare yourself. But everybody’s not like that.” Mack wound up playing for the Packers three years later, and he would earn a Super Bowl ring. The environment under Lombardi was a dramatic change from Pittsburgh. “I knew why they were always up there, why they were the team to beat, because of what they did every day at practice,” Mack said. “When you went on the field at Green Bay in ’66, I knew we were going to win. Because that was instilled in you for hours and hours and hours during the week. You prepared for it. And that’s what we didn’t have at Pittsburgh.”45

  The Steelers would go on to develop one of the shrewdest scouting departments in the league, with Art Rooney Jr. heading the operation and Dick Haley and Bill Nunn Jr. analyzing talent, and they would use the draft—not trades—to turn the franchise into a dynasty. But if there was one thing that agitated Parker nearly as much as a loss, one thing that came remotely close to scaring him as much as the number 13, it was the prospect of having to rely on a rookie. Toward the end of the ’57 season, in his first Steeler draft, Parker traded away six of his first nine picks, including the No. 1 selection. The next year Parker traded away his first seven draft picks. In the 1960 draft, the Steelers selected Jack Spikes No. 1 but traded the next five picks. In ’61, Parker dealt his No. 1 and four of the next five picks. In ’62, he selected Bob Ferguson No. 1 but swapped his next five picks. And if ever there was a personnel decision Parker regretted, surely it was not trading away the No. 1 pick he used on Ferguson.

  In the 1963 draft, the Steelers’ first seven choices were gone before they took Frank Atkinson, a tackle from Stanford, in the eighth round. Among the diverse group the Steelers plucked in the draft were Bill Nelsen, a quarterback from USC, in the tenth round; Roy Curry, a quarterback from J
ackson State, in the twelfth; Russell, a linebacker from Missouri, in the sixteenth; Jim Bradshaw, a running quarterback from Chattanooga, in the eighteenth; and Jim Traficant, a quarterback from Pitt, in the twentieth and final round. All would make the team, except for Traficant, who would go on to a different career, serving eighteen years in Congress before being expelled following a conviction on bribery and racketeering charges, for which he would serve seven years in prison.

  Any draft pick must prove he belongs, but rookies under Parker were suspect before they even laced up their cleats.46 “He said, for every rookie that was on the team we would lose a ball game,” Bradshaw said. “He just wanted veterans.”47

  As injuries whittled down the thirty-seven-man roster in 1963, Parker had few options but to play rookies, unless he wanted to engage in some wholesale trading. The impressive play of first-year men Russell, Atkinson, and Bradshaw made Parker’s decision to stick with his own personnel less worrisome.

  Coming off the Dallas victory, the Steelers were pegged as ten-and-a-halfpoint underdogs against the Packers. Lombardi’s team had won two consecutive NFL championships and was tied with Chicago for first place in the Western Conference, but he felt the team was aging and growing vulnerable. The week after the Steelers lost in St. Louis, Green Bay whipped the Cards, 30–7, but Lombardi sounded almost dejected afterward. “They’re tougher and we’re older,” he said.48 Quarterback Bart Starr suffered a hairline fracture of his throwing hand in a sideline scuffle with defensive back Jimmy Hill, and Lombardi’s tank of a fullback seemed like only a replica of his former self.

  “This was the big test for Jim Taylor,” Lombardi said. “He only played a few minutes in previous games. He just has not been strong enough and I think he will never be the same as he once was. Too much has gone out of him.”49

  Starr was originally thought to be lost for six weeks, but on Monday word came that he might see action against Pittsburgh. That prospect dimmed the following day when the Packers added eight-year veteran quarterback Zeke Bratkowski to back up starter John Roach, in his sixth year out of SMU, Don Meredith’s school.

  Even though the Packers had played in three straight championship games (the first being a loss to the Eagles in ’60), they were not considered “a spectacular team.” Starr was mechanically sound and smart, and he had led the league in passing in ’62, but he was not grouped with the genius quarterbacks, or with the dashing new breed of QBs like Fran Tarkenton. The Packers didn’t have a breakaway threat like Bobby Mitchell, and they were without all-around halfback Paul Hornung, who had been suspended, along with the Lions’ Alex Karras, for gambling on pro football games. But their disciplined style of play, if not flashy, was brutally efficient. “They just don’t make mistakes—a Lombardi theorem of success.”50

  Parker had reached his goal of getting through the first half of the season with two losses. But to keep pace in the Eastern Conference, the Steelers had to be nearly perfect in the second half. “It was always in your mind, if you had three losses you were not going to get there,” Clendon Thomas said.51

  The Giants had won the Eastern Conference with a 12–2 record the year before and finished first in ’61 by going 10–3–1. With Cleveland 6–1, and New York and St. Louis tied at 5–2 halfway through 1963, Giants coach Allie Sherman was anticipating a bumper-cars finish. “It is not beyond reason to feel that in three or four weeks the whole division could be scrambled,” Sherman said. “Pittsburgh definitely is not out of it.”52

  Lombardi probably saw a lot of his own team’s ferocity and manual-labor attitude in his opponent. “Beware of the Pittsburgh Steelers,” he said. “They’ll fight you like a bunch of alley cats. If you’re not up for them, they’ll scratch you right out of the Western Division!”53

  Between two surging football teams—the Steelers and the Pitt Panthers—and a healthy economy, life was pretty good for residents of western Pennsylvania. U.S. Steel reported third-quarter earnings of $46.4 million, bringing profits for the first nine months to nearly $150 million.

  And the future looked even better, paved with prosperity and technological advances. After all, if the country’s leaders had the technology and ambition to reach the moon, how could anything limit a family’s aspirations? “City’s Future Painted in Glowing Colors,” read a headline in Tuesday’s Post-Gazette, “Pittsburgh of 1988 to Be Dreamland of Gracious Living.” Twenty-five years down the road, the average Pittsburgh man would make between $12,000 and $15,000 a year, his wife would be working, the level of education would be higher, and Pittsburgh residents would enjoy more leisure time, women from the United Jewish Foundation were told at an annual meeting. Local residents would be able to ride underground rapid transit trains and “giant aluminum hydrofoil crafts [that] flit up and down the river at 80 miles an hour.” Citizens could also expect an economic rebirth fueled by research organizations and new industries. But progress would also bring complications, such as “an increased threat to the stability of family life.54

  The Jetsons, the TV cartoon series about a family living in the twenty-first century, had gone on the air the year before, and it fed fantasies about futuristic life. But it wasn’t all fantasy. And even if these potential changes were years away, the repercussions they suggested produced some anxiety.

  “Planners sit up nights worrying about what the cities of the year 2000 are going to look like,” Post-Gazette editor Andrew Bernhard wrote in his column the day after the Steelers’ win over the Cowboys. “All you need to understand what is happening is to drive out into the suburbs of Pittsburgh. The urban areas are exploding.”55

  People still relied on newspapers for information. The Post-Gazette was the morning paper, the Pittsburgh Press the afternoon paper. Each cost seven cents. The Pittsburgh Courier was a weekly directed toward the black population. The tendency for many workers in the industry was not to look ahead much further than the next edition. But a few forward thinkers started to feel that newspapers were destined to change too, although some ideas might have seemed as if they came straight out of a Jetsons episode.

  Tucked inside the Press the day after the rout of the Giants in September was an account of the convention of the Interstate Circulation Managers Association held in Pittsburgh. Edward Bennett, circulation director of the Record of New Jersey, told his peers that papers must adjust to “the rapidly advancing age around us. … The newspaper of the future may well be produced right in the reader’s home, according to Mr. Bennett. An electronic device similar to a television set, which would produce page likenesses in the home, could get the paper directly from the press into the reader’s hands, Mr. Bennett said.”56

  For the moment, when it came to making changes in the community, old-fashioned newsprint was enough to make an impression on voters. Life in Pittsburgh wasn’t all that sunny to some observers in the press, and more than George Tarasovic’s political career was at stake in the following week’s elections. In a front-page editorial, the Post-Gazette warned that Pittsburgh was descending into a reincarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah: “Vice and gambling rampant with the knowledge and consent of key public officials. … Democratic party leaders grown lax and complacent because they think the voters will put up with anything … That is the current portrait of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.”57

  The grandstands that filled with frustrated Steeler fans weren’t the only places where tempers erupted. On the Friday night before the game in Green Bay, a political rally on the North Side “threatened to explode into a full-blown riot” among the political foes in the campaign, the city firemen, and the Teamsters. The riot squad and members of the K9 Corps were brought in, but chaos was avoided when Joe Marrone’s band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “and the battlers pulled their punches and snapped to attention.” As the confrontations simmered, the band began playing “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Nobody, evidently, was tossed off a bridge and into the river.58

  Football, on all levels, continued to provide an escape. P
itt was 4–1, having lost only to Roger Staubach and Navy. Crowds of 7,500 to 10,000 were common at high school games and, at least a dozen times, had exceeded 10,000. “The strong hold scholastic football has on fans of this area has never been better exemplified than during the present season,” wrote a Post-Gazette reporter.59

  If anything had Buddy Parker sitting up at night worrying, it wasn’t population expansion; it was the Packers. He made a point during the week to praise his offensive line: left tackle Dan James, left guard Mike Sandusky, center Buzz Nutter, right guard Ray Lemek, and six-foot-six, 260-pound right tackle Charlie Bradshaw, who attended law school in the off-season. “But we will need more than a good offense to win,” the coach said. “Our whole team will have to give its best to bring about a win and keep us in the running for the Eastern title.”60

  Lombardi’s approach to football was a lot like Parker’s. “The Packers win by the simple process of running over people,” writer Bill Wise explained. Leading the charge on the offensive line were center Jim Ringo; left guard Fred “Fuzzy” Thurston, who was dropped by three teams before he found a home in Green Bay; right guard Jerry Kramer; left tackles Bob Skoronski and Norm Masters; and right tackle Forrest Gregg. When it came to offensive lines, “Only the Green Bay Packers can claim a better blocking compact tha[n] the Steelers have,” the Pittsburgh Courier observed. “It is a pounding, punishing compact.”61