The '63 Steelers Read online

  Ditka shook off and bowled over tacklers, and suddenly the only thing between Ditka and the end zone, and the end of the Steelers’ hopes—and my dreams—was the damp, chilly air of a late November afternoon as the tight end lumbered into Pittsburgh territory with safety Clendon Thomas in desperate pursuit, trailed by teammate Willie Daniel.

  “The big Bear drove forward and broke clear as the late afternoon light piercing the Forbes Field stands dramatically spotlighted this monumental image,” photojournalist Robert Riger wrote.8 In those suspended seconds, I squirmed next to my dad and felt as if I were in one of those dreams where your feet are stuck in slow motion and your scream is muted and distorted like a 45 rpm record played at a lower speed. Two days after the president was shot, stopping Ditka and clinging to the hope of a championship was all I cared about, and years later I forgave myself for thinking and behaving like an eleven-year-old that day.

  What I remember most about watching the funeral the next day, with school canceled, was not the sight of world leaders and grieving citizens. No, it was the sight of the kid along the procession route saluting as the hearse and horses passed, with soldiers marching and a drum thumping, just like at my uncle’s funeral, but this time echoing the sound of an entire nation’s heart pounding in pain. What I thought at that instant was, “That kid lost his father. His dad is dead.” Then it all became clear to me. Then I understood.

  It took years, but slowly I came to realize the difference between losing a game and losing a loved one, between victory inside chalked lines on a scuffed up green field and what really matters in life.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One of the most gratifying experiences in life is finding a person who grasps your vision, no matter what kind of dreams, aspirations, or goals you have. My hope in constructing this book was to pay tribute to a football team that gave a kid a season of thrills whose memories would reverberate into adulthood.

  The saga of the 1963 Pittsburgh Steelers is not your typical storybook sports tale that concludes with cheers and championship banners, so without the encouragement of Richard “Pete” Peterson, the odds of this book being published would have been even longer than those of the ’63 Steelers becoming NFL champs.

  Pete Peterson is as gritty as a steelworker in an open-hearth furnace, but he has an appreciation of adversity and empathy for the underdog befitting a kid who grew up on the South Side of Pittsburgh rooting for the woeful Pirates and Steelers of the 1950s. When I presented my project to Peterson, then editor of the Writing Sports Series for the Kent State University Press, he envisioned my book as a prequel to Roy Blount Jr.’s masterful “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load: A Highly Irregular Lowdown on the Year the Pittsburgh Steelers Were Super but Missed the Bowl.” Peterson’s conceptualization was both inspiring and intimidating. Linking me to a writer of Blount’s gifts, however tangentially, was a bit like inserting Johnny Unitas’s name into the same sentence with a fledgling quarterback prospect.

  I am grateful to the gracious staff at Kent State University Press for embracing the project and giving it a rigorous examination, and I thank them—notably Joyce Harrison, Mary Young, Susan Cash, Will Underwood, and Christine Brooks—for their continuous help and support. Without their adventurous spirit and bold thinking, there might not be a place for idiosyncratic books that take risks and explore neglected territory.

  Among the team that makes the author look good, no one is more critical to the success of the finished product than the copy editor. Copy editors are a bit like offensive linemen in football. Linemen do the dirty work, often in anonymity, if not obscurity, but their contributions are indispensable. They are typically thoughtful and insightful, and they make the person who gets the recognition look good. I am most fortunate to have Sonia Fulop apply meticulous, painstaking attention and care to the structure, style, accuracy, and coherence of my manuscript, and fashion it into a polished book. To indulge in one more sports analogy, she is truly All-Pro as a copy editor.

  I would like to offer special thanks to Frank Atkinson, Judi Ballman, Jim Bradshaw, Preston Carpenter, Lou Cordileone, Willie and Ruth Daniel, Ed Fay, Dick Haley, Sam Huff, Brady Keys, Red Mack, Tommy McDonald, Lou Michaels, Art Rooney Jr., Andy Russell, George Tarasovic, Clendon Thomas, Y. A. Tittle, and Joe Walton for sharing their time and memories of a time when pro football was, in truth, a different game.

  Thanks also to Saleem Choudhry and Jon Kendle of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Lynne Molyneaux of the Steelers, Gil Pietrzak of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh—Main, Jeff Kallin of Clemson University, David Seals of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, the University of Pittsburgh Athletic Department, Brenda Wright of the Paley Library at Temple University, Chris Willis of NFL Films, Bryan Winfrey of Arizona State University, Roy McHugh, Lee Kim, Carl Kidwiler, George Gaadt, and Andrew O’Toole. Plus, a big cheer to personnel at libraries from Dallas to Philadelphia who provided microfilm from 1963 or copies of game stories.

  Finally, I want to salute all the newspapermen who chronicled a unique season in history—in particular, Pat Livingston, Al Abrams, Jack Sell, and Jimmy Miller, all of whom covered the Steelers. Any reader cannot help but be impressed by the high quality of journalism of the era: the storytelling of Myron Cope, McHugh, and Arthur Daley; the passionate essays of Sandy Grady and Red Smith; and the reportage of Milton Gross, William N. Wallace, and Alvin Rosensweet, just to name a few of the newspapermen from the time who distinguished themselves.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I relied on the official play-by-play accounts from individual games, along with descriptions in game stories from as many different newspapers and wire services available, in reconstructing the Steeler games from the 1963 season. I found a couple occasions where there appeared to be a discrepancy of a single yard in citing yardage gained or lost, or the yard line where a ball was spotted, but these situations were isolated.

  GAME 1

  VERSUS PHILADELPHIA EAGLES

  AT FRANKLIN FIELD

  SEPTEMBER 15

  In his book The Physics of Football, Timothy Gay provides some scientific explanations for how and why a football moves the way it does when kicked or thrown. Gay played football at the California Institute of Technology and earned his PhD in atomic physics from the University of Chicago. He uses scientific terms like “launch speed,” “air drag,” and “angular momentum” to illustrate the flight of an oblong-shaped ball.1

  When it comes to explaining how a football travels when the toe of a placekicker connects with the ball, Lou Michaels has a more basic explanation. His education came from four years at the University of Kentucky, where he was a two-time All-America lineman and a fourth-place finisher in the Heisman Trophy voting, and from a thirteen-year career in the NFL, where he was a left-footed kicker and defensive end with the Los Angeles Rams, Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Colts, and Green Bay Packers.

  In 1962, his second season with the Steelers, Michaels set an NFL record by making twenty-six field goals, helping Pittsburgh to a second-place finish in the Eastern Conference, twice kicking four field goals in a game, and twice kicking field goals in the final thirty seconds to put the Steelers in front. “Mr. Michaels has been nothing short of being the Steelers’ Mr. Wonderful this year,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports editor and columnist Al Abrams gushed. But the path of any kick, Michaels knew, can be as unpredictable as any of the bounces a football takes. His explanation may not be very scientific, but it’s as true to this day as it was when Jim Thorpe was drop-kicking footballs from the 50-yard line and players were wearing leather helmets. “You kick a field goal,” Michaels said, and “it can hit the crossbar, it can go through the bar, or it can go away from the bar.”2

  In 1963, Michaels would get one less attempt at a field goal, and he would make five fewer kicks. He would miss all five attempts in a single game—and yet the Steelers would win that afternoon. He made no excuses, but he was “fighting a placekicking jinx all season,” one Steelers beat writer wrote.3 Mic
haels was also the starting left defensive end, playing every down when healthy, but no one—least of all his opponents—ever took pity because he never had the luxury of kicking with fresh legs, and he never sought any sympathy.

  The path of a football team over a season can come to resemble the unpredictable arc of a football. The ’63 Steelers would run parallel to Michaels’s season as a kicker. They would be right in sync in some games, and they would veer off course in others. They would misfire and wait for another chance to redeem themselves, like a kicker who blows an easy attempt. They would keep the crowd in suspense in the final minutes, the fans holding their breath on each play from scrimmage the way they might as a 50-yard field goal attempt floated toward the goalposts. The ’63 Steelers would serve as a prime example of how narrow a difference there can be between victory and defeat—like a football clanging off the crossbar, just inches from the mark—and how cruel the bounces can be, as if fate were conspiring to mock all the calculations, theories, equations, and other scientific arguments about launch speed. Thirty years and not one appearance in a championship game by the Steelers wasn’t a jinx; it was a curse.

  As the start of the ’63 regular season drew near, the players were voicing the kind of confidence their coach had expressed the year before. “This is it, buddy. This is the year we’re going to win the championship for Art Rooney,” middle linebacker Myron Pottios declared the Tuesday before the opener at a welcome-home clambake for the team at Allegheny Elks No. 339.4

  “We all have that feeling we’re going to win,” Michaels said. “If we don’t get jammed up with injuries again, we should cop the Eastern Division title.”5 Michaels played at Kentucky in the fifties under Blanton Collier, who succeeded Paul Brown as head coach of the Cleveland Browns after the ’62 season and would guide them to the 1964 championship. Collier called Michaels “the toughest, most durable player I’ve ever coached.”6

  That toughness was cultivated in Michaels’s hometown of Swoyersville, Pennsylvania, a speck of a town between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, an area once rich in anthracite coal. Michaels grew up the youngest in a family of seven boys and one girl. “We struggled at first,” he said. “If it wasn’t for football, I have no idea what I’d have done.”7

  Work in the mines, no doubt, like his father, Walter Majka, who came to America from Poland when he was nineteen and, according to legend, was so strong he could lift a loading car in the mines and carry it from one track to another. Lou’s two oldest brothers also worked in the mines. Another son, Eddie, joined the Marines and was killed at Guadalcanal.8

  A job in the mines was the inevitable destiny awaiting many of the young men in the region, and so a lifetime of working underground beckoned another resident of the coal country, Vladimir Palahniuk, the third of five children of Ukrainian immigrants raised in the Lattimer Mines section of Hazel Township. But the middle child had attributes other than a strong back, and he would use them to his advantage to escape the mines. “The deadliness of his deep-set stare, the shine of his high cheekbones and the honest witness of his dipsy-doodled nose, his tousled, lusterless black hair and belligerent muscular stance give him the edge on virtually all movie villains.”9 Vladimir tried working in the mines, dropped out of college, changed his name, and by 1954 was making $150,000 a year as Jack Palance.

  Michaels’s father died at age fifty-four, after working thirty-five years in the mines. Lou, bearing the Anglicized form of his father’s surname, was eleven at the time. The son’s best talents lay in tackling and blocking, but he performed well in the classroom as well, and after two years at the local high school, he enrolled in Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, where he became the school’s first four-sport letterman. But there was no doubt where he was determined to go. “If I thought I could have made pro ball without going to college, I’d have signed with the pros right away,” he said.10 In 1954 he began his college career at Kentucky, where opponents “found it virtually useless to run plays at him.” The brother whom Lou revered, Walt Jr., then a linebacker with the Cleveland Browns, encouraged his younger sibling to expand his skills, so Lou developed into a punter with a 40-yard-plus average, a deep kickoff man, and “virtually an automatic machine on conversions.”11 Michaels became a two-time first-team All-America. “There’s no question that Michaels must be regarded as one of the greatest football players to ever play in the Southeastern Conference,” wrote Baltimore columnist John Steadman.12

  The Los Angeles Rams took Michaels in the first round, the fourth overall player selected, in the 1958 draft. In the second round they took Clendon Thomas, an All-America running back from Oklahoma. Rams management grew disenchanted with Michaels because of his “playboy proclivities,” and once they drafted punter/kicker Danny Villanueva after the 1959 season,

  Michaels’s value to them declined. They traded him to Pittsburgh for offensive tackle Frank Varrichione, a former first-round pick, before the ’61 season. “I was fascinated by the Hollywood atmosphere and I wanted to see and do everything so I could tell the people back home all about it,” Michaels said. “I was a pro football star and a marked man for bad publicity. It got so nothing I did was right.”13

  Michaels resumed his dual role of playing defensive end and kicking in Pittsburgh, making fifteen of twenty-six field goals his first year before his record season in ’62. And he fit right in with the long-standing tradition of Steelers players who savored their beer and whiskey and who would no sooner shy away from a fistfight than a Wild West sheriff would back off from a gun duel. He had a couple of scrapes in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, and in October 1964, after being traded to the Baltimore Colts, he drove his car into a telephone pole late one night. It wasn’t quite as colorful an accident as Bobby Layne’s legendary escapade driving into a parked street car, but it made big enough headlines.

  The Steelers finished the 1963 preseason with a 3–2 record, including a 22–7 victory over Detroit in the penultimate game, the difference coming on five field goals by Michaels, and they concluded the exhibition season with a satisfying 16–7 win over archrival Cleveland, a team the Post-Gazette dismissed as “the once-powerful Browns.” The game was played in Canton, Ohio, the day after the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted seventeen charter members into the new shrine. Michaels was good on three field goals, which made him nine of seventeen in preseason, with three of the misses coming from 50 yards. Two days later, in a staged photo typical of the newspaper era, the Post-Gazette ran a shot of Michaels kicking, with one member of the Steelerettes, the short-lived cheerleading crew, kneeling to hold the ball and three other Steelerettes behind the kicker. It wasn’t Hollywood, but for Pittsburgh, it was good fun.14

  There was growing reason for optimism both for Steelers fans and for Pittsburgh citizens. At the time, Pittsburgh could boast about being “the operating headquarters of the world’s biggest steel maker,” and residents could take heart in a surge in economic activity in the tristate area during the year.15 People were working, and jobs seemed secure.

  But beneath the glow of prosperity lay a quiver of unrest. On September 9, 1963, the day before the photo of Michaels ran, the Post-Gazette started an eight-part series titled “The Negro in Pittsburgh.” The front-page headline read: “Racial Ferment Here Mounting Beneath Surface.” Reporter Alvin Rosensweet wrote of “a growing dissatisfaction: with government, with a lack of jobs and housing, and a failure to be accepted as part of the community.” The Hill District had been a melting pot of immigrants and blacks, the home of Negro League baseball and the Crawford Grill, where Sarah Vaughan, Mary Lou Williams, Erroll Garner, and Dizzy Gillespie played and where Steelers defensive back Johnny Sample would meet his future wife while having lunch with Big Daddy Lipscomb.16 The Hurricane Lounge was another popular spot that Bobby Layne was said to visit to enjoy jazz and drink. But in the fall of ’63, the Hill District was “a place the city forgot,” Rosensweet observed.

  Politics, business, and entertainment rarely mixed with the world of sports
in that era, so the newspaper series did not address the role of athletes in the black community. Art Rooney, owner of the Steelers franchise, in the quiet but unwavering fashion in which he conducted business, had been assimilating black players literally since the beginning of the franchise, and he championed their rights and worked to ensure their welfare. Ray Kemp, a black player who had grown up in the town of Cecil, Pennsylvania, worked in the mines, and starred at Duquesne University, accepted an invitation from Rooney to become a member of the Rooney franchise’s first team, then called the Pirates, in 1933. There was only one other black player in the NFL at the time.17

  In 1956, a former All-America at Michigan joined the Steelers after fulfilling a service commitment and began electrifying fans as a receiver and return man but fractured his pelvis and dislocated a hip in the sixth game, which would end his career. Rooney visited Lowell Perry during his thirteen-week hospital stay and told the rookie, “Lowell, as long as I own the Pittsburgh Steelers, you have a job in my organization.” Perry became the receivers coach the next year, then left to complete studies for his law degree. He became the first black to work as an NFL broadcaster, served as a lawyer with the National Labor Relations Board, and became a leading executive with Chrysler.18

  Perry had also witnessed Rooney’s resolve to stand up against inequality. When the Steelers traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, for an exhibition with the Bears in 1956, black players were excluded from a parade for the team and forced to stay at a segregated hotel. When Rooney arrived on a later flight, he addressed the black players and vowed, “I promise you, this will never happen to one of my teams again.”19 When Rooney discovered that the team’s black players were likely to be segregated the next year for an exhibition game in Atlanta, he canceled the game.