ten

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND (PITTSBURGH)

In 1933, the Pennsylvania state legislature relaxed their blue laws, effectively legalizing professional sports on Sundays. The news was greeted with delight by the sly, rumpled horseplayer named Art Rooney. The son of a saloon owner, Rooney bought an NFL franchise for $2,500 that summer and named his team the Pirates—there were, after all, New York Giants in both baseball and pro football. (After seven seasons of dismal results, he would change the team’s nickname to the Steelers.)

The franchise’s first home game was played on September 20, 1933, in front of a crowd estimated at 15,000 people, and the home team was routed, 23–2, by the New York football Giants. Rooney’s notation after the game was succinct and apt: “Our team looked terrible. Our fans didn’t get their money’s worth.” He could have used the same words to describe a lot of Sundays to follow.

By the time the Steelers completed the 1968 campaign with a 2–11–1 record, they had gone thirty-six consecutive seasons without so much as a division or conference title. In twenty-eight of those years, they’d had a losing record. The history of ignobility was ingrained at the outset. As early as 1941, when Rooney showed up to training camp with his team wearing new uniforms, he was asked what he thought of the team that year. “The only thing different is the uniforms,” he said. “It’s the same old Steelers.”

For the first quarter century of the league’s existence, most NFL teams were run with a kind of slangy collegiality, as though the owners couldn’t quite believe that they were expected to treat this game played by thick-legged hicks and hard-bitten factory workers as an actual business. That barnstorming spirit receded through the league by the ’50s and ’60s, but it lasted longer in Pittsburgh than anywhere else. Player-coach Johnny “Blood” McNally once showed up to watch a Green Bay game, unaware that his own team was playing elsewhere that same day.

The lovable loser lore built up around the Steelers in large part because Art Rooney, “The Chief,” was soft-hearted and impish, credulous and loyal to a fault.

During the manpower shortages of the Second World War—when more than six hundred NFL players were fighting overseas—the Steelers and Eagles merged for a season in 1943. “Had to do it,” explained Bert Bell, then owner of the Eagles. “Pittsburgh had no backs left, and Philadelphia had no linemen.” The “Steagles” went 5–4–1, and, a year later, with Philadelphia back on its own, the Steelers merged with the Chicago Cardinals. “Card-Pitt,” or the Carpets, as they became known throughout the league, went 0–10.

In 1946, the Steelers hired Pitt coaching legend Jock Sutherland, and a year later, they managed to tie for the 1947 Eastern Division title with the Philadelphia Eagles, only to lose the playoff, 21–0. Sutherland died the following spring on a scouting trip in Kentucky, and it would be eleven years before the Steelers won more than six games in any single season.

The team seemed perpetually behind the times. They were the last NFL team to move from the single-wing to the T formation, in 1951. To Chuck, playing in Paul Brown’s state-of-the-art system in Cleveland, the Steelers of the era looked like haphazard misfits. “They didn’t seem to wear the same helmets all the time,” he said.

The team’s first full-time scout was an undertaker. In 1955, with the very first pick in the NFL draft, the Steelers selected a defensive back from Colorado A&M named Gary Glick, based solely on a letter of recommendation sent to the Steelers’ head coach, Walt Kiesling.

Weeks later, after the young Dan Rooney had called the school and received a reel of film on Glick, he invited his father up to the Steelers’ scouting office to watch it. “But my father wouldn’t go,” said Dan. “He said, ‘I’m busy.’ So we go off to the eighth floor, where we’ve got our personnel office, and we put the film on. And it’s, like, the smallest college that you could imagine, dogs running out on the field. So we come back down into my dad’s office, and nobody says anything. And I remember my father saying, ‘He didn’t look very good, right?’”

Even when they found good players, they often didn’t know what to do with them. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Steelers would release or trade away five different quarterbacks—two of whom would later be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame—who would go on to start a total of twenty-one league championship games or Super Bowls over the following fifteen seasons. None was more famous than Pittsburgh’s own Johnny Unitas. Drafted in the ninth round of the ’55 draft (the Browns had been eyeing him as well, as a possible replacement to Otto Graham), he reported to the Steelers’ training camp in Olean, New York, and found that he was soon ostracized by the veterans (who started referring to him as “Clem,” in honor of comedian Red Skelton’s country rube Clem Kadiddlehopper). Though he looked sharp in practices, Walt Kiesling preferred veterans. In five exhibition games, Unitas never took a snap. He was released before the season.

“Unitas was totally ignored,” said Dan Rooney. “They never did anything with him. It wasn’t a question of misjudging him. They would have had to judge him first. But they never did a thing with him.” In February 1956, the Colts signed him. By 1958, Unitas and the Colts won the first of back-to-back NFL championships.

He wasn’t the only one. Jack Kemp, who would play in five championship games in the AFL, was released in the preseason of 1959. Future Hall of Famer Len Dawson, who would become one of the most accurate passers in league history, was drafted first overall in 1957, but he never really got a chance to prove himself. It was Parker’s first year, and he traded instead for veteran Earl Morrall.

“I got very little work,” said Dawson. “I would work like as a receiver and that because there weren’t that many bodies out there.”

In 1958, the Steelers lost their first two games behind Morrall.

“You guys are too tight,” Parker told his players. “Go out and get drunk and come back in here on Tuesday. We will have this problem solved.”

That Tuesday, at the weekly quarterback meeting to watch game films, Morrall was gone. Shortly into the meeting, in the dark, someone walked into the meeting room and sat down next to Dawson.

“Hi, partner—how ya’ doing?,” he asked.

It was Bobby Layne. Parker had traded Morrall and two draft choices (a number two in 1959, and a number four in 1960) for Layne, a legendary carouser—“I want to run out of money and breath at the same time,” he once said—whose lifestyle was not conducive to the finer points of football. Layne’s family didn’t move to Pittsburgh during the seasons, so he would often convene to Parker’s home after games.

There were further problems with Parker’s reign. But the biggest may have been his fondness for veterans at the expense of draft choices. Under Parker in 1959, the Steelers traded away their top seven choice; in 1960, they drafted Jack Spikes of TCU in the first round (but lost him to the Dallas Texans of the AFL) and traded away their next six choices. In both 1961 and 1962, they traded five of their first six draft choices. In 1963, they dealt each of their first seven choices. “That was his downfall,” said Steelers’ running back Dick Hoak. “What he did, he traded all of our draft choices. I mean, if you were from Texas, he was going to trade for you.”

Parker’s last season was 1964, but he’d already dealt Pittsburgh’s first rounder in the 1965 draft, which the Chicago Bears used to select Hall of Famer Dick Butkus. By that time, Dan Rooney was taking a more active role in the management of the Steelers. He revered his father, but he also had a business background and a strong desire not to be part of any more Runyonesque tales of buffoonery on the part of lovable losers.

Inevitably, he would clash with Parker. “I just felt we had to have structure that was sound, and you had to know what you are doing,” Dan Rooney said. “A lot of people thought that Buddy was just a plain drunk, but that is not true. Buddy only really drank to excess on two occasions. One, after a game, win, lose, or draw, he drank. Two, if he was making a speech, which was the worst time, because now he is going to get up. He was so nervous making a speech, he would end up drinking and then get up and maybe say something crazy or be slurring and things like that. But, I mean, that was unfortunate because he did get that reputation and it wasn’t really factual.”

Rooney made clear to Parker that he had to consult with him before making a trade. One night, on the eve of the 1965 season, disgusted with his quarterbacking play, Parker set up a deal to send defensive end Ben McGee to the Philadelphia Eagles for King Hill.

“No trades tonight,” said Dan.

The next morning, Parker resigned and was replaced by assistant coach Mike Nixon, who went 2–12 and was fired at the end of his one season.

“This time,” Dan Rooney suggested to his father, “what if we hire somebody we don’t know?”

They made the rounds at the league meetings, and Art Rooney’s good friend, Vince Lombardi, gave a glowing recommendation for his own assistant, Bill Austin.

That was all the Chief needed to hear. “Call him back,” said Art. “We’ll take him right now.”

“I said to wait,” said Dan. “Let’s get him home and we can talk to him again. But once Vince said what he said, it was too late.” Austin was introduced as the next coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. This seemed to make perfect sense at the time. Lombardi had just won his third NFL title in five years, with two Super Bowls to immediately follow. Austin had been operating in Lombardi’s shadow as the offensive line coach for six seasons in Green Bay (before serving on the Rams staff a single year before the hire). “He wanted to be Vince Lombardi, and he wasn’t Vince Lombardi,” said Dan Rooney. The Steelers players went even further. “Bill Austin wanted to be Vince Lombardi and Steve McQueen rolled into one,” said John Brown, who came to the Steelers in 1967.

Austin’s attempts to instill toughness came through a series of punishing grass drills—the timeworn custom of having players run in place, then jump onto their bellies on the ground, then leap up and run in place again, almost literally ad nauseam. “We would come out there at the beginning of practice, and we would do all of these up-and-downs, up-and-downs,” said Dick Hoak. “[After those,] you couldn’t stand up, you couldn’t practice! You were worn out by the time you started to practice. And then, if somebody did something wrong, you’ve got to roll 20 yards on the ground and get up and sprint back, and stuff like that.”

One day at the Steelers’ training camp, Austin conducted a full-contact goal-line drill, and numerous players were injured. “About six guys got hurt, some serious,” said Dan Rooney. “They didn’t make the season. So that sort of set the tone for the rest of the players.” By the end of the 1968 training camp, Austin was already a gaunt figure, barking loudly to his assistants and his players, carrying a haunted look when he would come down to equipment manager Tony Parisi’s area during the unit meetings to inhale a couple of cigarettes.

The team was a shambles. John Brown, who’d played under Paul Brown and his model of professionalism at Cleveland, came to Pittsburgh and remembered an assistant coach asking him to borrow money.

Nowhere was the second-class perception felt more acutely than at the Steelers’ practice facilities, South Park. “When we came out of training camp, I had never seen South Park,” said Ralph Berlin, who began as the team’s trainer in 1968. “When I got there I couldn’t believe it was this little house. And on one side was the coaches’ dressing room, and it had nails in the wall where they hung their stuff up, and the other side was the office, there was a telephone there. And then in the back there was one Universal gym setup. That was the weight training—a Universal gym machine. Off of that was a smaller room, and that was the training room supposedly. Upstairs there were two large bedrooms, and that became the offensive meeting room and the defensive meeting room. Then down in the basement was the locker room, and there were stalls but they had nails on the wall. They didn’t have hangers or anything. They just had nails where they hung their stuff up. The shower was atrocious.”

One day, upstairs at the little house in South Park, the offense emerged from their meeting room only to hear a persistent sound coming from the other room. “We’re leaving our meeting and the defense is still in the other room,” said Dick Hoak. “And you could hear this flip flip flip. Their game film was flipping around. Everybody in there was asleep: Players, coaches, everybody. What we used to do a lot of times was practice in the morning and then go out to lunch, and the only place to go to lunch, there were two bars, so the guys would go there—they’d drink a beer and eat a sandwich.”

By 1968, Bill Austin’s facade of Lombardi-esque control was crumbling, and he himself was losing his bearings. “He had no control of the team; he had no respect from the players,” said Rocky Bleier, who played his rookie year under Austin in 1968, before being drafted into the Army. “Bill had arguments with players questioning him, not doing what they wanted to. Roy Jefferson was a guy like that, but it only takes one, and then it just gives everybody else the ability to either question or talk back.”

Jefferson, the fluid, powerful wide receiver from Utah, was clearly the Steelers’ best player during Austin’s years, an All-Pro caliber performer who served as the Steelers’ lone true offensive weapon. He was also part of a wave of African American athletes who were growing more outspoken about racism in both society and pro football. The ’68 season had been a watershed anyway, galvanized by Sports Illustrated’s five-part series that summer on “The Black Athlete,” which included a section entirely dedicated to the patriarchal mind-set of many professional football coaches. This was a particular problem in Pittsburgh, where many of the black players—and some of their white teammates—felt that Austin was prejudiced against the black athletes.

Bill Nunn, the highly respected columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, which still had a national audience in the black community, had been recruited by Dan to help the Steelers scout the historically black colleges and universities of the South. In his dealings with Austin, Nunn saw what the players saw. “That was one of the things that I had learned from the gal that was going with Bill Austin,” said Nunn. “She was a nurse. A white lady who had been around blacks, and it just so happened that I knew her. And the way I found out about it was, I went into a restaurant one time and they were together. So [later] I said, ‘Find out what he thinks about blacks.’ And she did it for me and she came back and said, ‘He can deal with them, but he has a tough time.’”

As the losses mounted, Austin grew more tense, and the players grew bolder in their dissent. “Roy was doing everything he could to screw the thing up,” said trainer Ralph Berlin. “Bill was still trying to be Lombardi, and he wasn’t going to be Lombardi, and the fact that we were losing and weren’t getting any better. I think maybe if we had won, but we weren’t going to win because Jefferson had turned the team against him.”

During one meeting in ’68, watching game film, Austin upbraided Jefferson for running a wrong route. Jefferson, taking umbrage at the pettiness of the critique, glared back at his head coach and slowly bellowed, “You’re about a dumb motherfucker.” It escalated from there. The two men nearly came to blows.

Pittsburgh lost its first six games in 1968, won two, tied one, then lost five more to end the season. As the season deteriorated, Austin grew more irritable and more nervous. When stressed, he had a nervous tic of scratching his chest.

“It was like he was repeating Lombardi’s speeches,” said Andy Russell, “and it wasn’t necessarily true to what his own nature was. He couldn’t really pull it off because he wasn’t Lombardi, and we knew that. Guys who had been traded from Green Bay said, ‘That’s the exact same speech Lombardi gave.’ So we got cynical, in a way.”

Austin and Dan Rooney had Monday morning postmortems over breakfast at a small deli next to the Roosevelt. The meetings were often curt and combative, with Austin taking a defensive stance while a frustrated Dan at times lost his temper. “I was actually out of line, because I would be yelling at him,” said Rooney. “And I did it every week. Finally, the restaurant was getting wise to it, and people were coming in, so we ended up going in the hotel.”

Dan Rooney’s wife, Pat, had seen her husband struggle to reconcile his respect for his father with the revulsion at how shabbily the Steelers had been run during much of their history. “I think Dan could see that he had a whole different vision of how he wanted the Steelers to go,” she said. “He wanted a better kind of office structure, and wanted to change the way things worked in each department. And, of course, football wise—he would never say an awful lot, but he was clearly not pleased with the direction that things were going.”

“Definitely, the third year,” said Dan, “I knew he was gone. I was nice to him, and things like that. But I knew he was gone.”

Dan was always stoic in the face of Sunday defeats, but his late-night calls with his closest confidantes sounded graver and graver. Before the season was over, he got off the phone one night and confided in Pat, “Something’s got to happen.”

By the time Dan Rooney called Chuck for the first time, he’d already been turned down by the Penn State coach Joe Paterno, who’d just led the Nittany Lions to their first unbeaten and untied season in school history. Paterno had been intrigued with the job, had visited Dan and Pat Rooney in Pittsburgh, but ultimately turned it down.

That had prompted Dan Rooney to call Chuck, after soliciting a recommendation from Don Shula (and receiving an unsolicited one from Upton Bell). So on that Monday morning, January 13, 1969, Chuck and Dan met in Rooney’s suite in Miami Beach to talk. Over the next two hours, Chuck remained composed, reasonable, and—what intrigued Dan the most—extremely knowledgeable about the Steelers’ personnel and their shortcomings. Save for the veteran end McGee, he saw a lack of quality along the defensive line. He recognized Jefferson’s superior skills, as well as the fact that Pittsburgh didn’t really have a quarterback good enough to consistently get him the ball.

Chuck and Dan had different personalities but compatible sensibilities. They were both young for their line of work, bright, respectful, and impatient. Chuck balked at the casual racism of many of his coaching peers and at the indiscriminate expression of testosterone—the maniacal yelling and the furious love of hitting that he felt bordered on sadism. Dan Rooney revered his father, but he’d seen too often how Art’s casual oversight and presumption of competence on the part of all those who worked for him had gotten the Steelers in trouble. Dan was ready to try another way.

The Rooneys had brought in both Chuck and the Browns’ assistant Nick Skorich for second interviews and to meet the rest of the staff. But while Art Sr. was still the nominal man in charge, and was consulted, it was, ultimately, Dan’s decision. On the morning of January 27, 1969, Dan woke up at 7 a.m., clear that Chuck was the choice. He called him up in Baltimore.

“We want you to be our coach,” said Dan.

“I want that, too,” said Chuck. He got on the next plane to Pittsburgh, and the Steelers scheduled a midday press conference.

The press conference at the Roosevelt had the air of an inquisition. Chuck would be the Steelers’ fourth coach in six years. One reporter asked him how he felt coming to a city of losers.

“A city of losers?” said Chuck. “That’s a lot of nonsense. Geography has nothing to do with winning. Winning is a product of work and attitude.”

Later that day, Sid Gillman sent a telegram to Art Rooney, which read, “Congratulations on your choice of Chuck Noll stop He’s the future coach of the year.”

There was initially a question about whether Shula would release Noll in time to take part in the NFL Draft, which began a day later. Fifteen years earlier, Paul Brown had effectively prevented longtime assistant Weeb Ewbank from communicating with the team that just hired him, not letting him join the Baltimore Colts until the draft was completed. But Shula relented.

With the draft twenty-four hours away, there was little time for formalities. Marianne was left to sort out the selling of one house and buying of another. Chris would be taken out of one school and enroll in Pittsburgh as soon as possible.

Chuck would handle the draft without a coaching staff; he hadn’t had time to even interview anyone yet. He got a room at the Roosevelt and huddled with Dan, Art, Dan’s brother, Art Rooney Jr.—known throughout the family and organization as “Artie”—and Bill Nunn, who by now was working as a full-time scout in the Steelers’ organization.

Nunn, hoping to avoid a repeat of the prejudice of Bill Austin, was pleased when he asked around about Chuck. “They said he was an upfront guy, intellectual, but a straightforward guy who believed in The Best Man Wins,” said Nunn.

In Pittsburgh, among the loyal and informed football fans, there was a clear sentimental favorite for the Steelers’ first-round draft choice. Quarterback Terry Hanratty, who’d led Notre Dame to a share of a national championship as a sophomore in 1966, was from nearby Butler, Pennsylvania. He was seen as the hometown boy who could lead the Steelers to greatness, and a surer thing than either of the two “project” quarterbacks, the University of Cincinnati’s Greg Cook and Marty Domres, who’d played Ivy League football at Columbia.

O. J. Simpson was the foregone conclusion as the first pick, as the Heisman Trophy winner from USC was snatched by the Buffalo Bills. Atlanta took Notre Dame tackle George Kunz, and Philadelphia drafted the Purdue running back Leroy Keyes. Pittsburgh was up next, with the fourth pick.

In the draft room, on the second floor of the old Roosevelt Hotel, where Artie had written a list of the top players at each position on chalkboards that spanned one wall, Chuck walked in that day and said, “I know who I am drafting.” Artie asked him who, and Chuck pointed to the name of Joe Greene, the raw, gifted defensive tackle from North Texas State.

“Joe was rated high, don’t get me wrong,” said Bill Nunn. “But the way Chuck insisted on taking Joe is a day I’ll always remember.”

The Steelers were a favored member of the BLESTO (Bears, Lions, Eagles, and Steelers Talent Organization) scouting group, which had as its leader the former Steelers standout defensive back Jack Butler. Artie Rooney would remember that the Steelers’ and BLESTO scouts had other players rated more highly. “But there was no argument.” (And the Steelers still got the hometown favorite Hanratty in the second round.)

Pitt coach Carl DePasqua had made a scouting trip for the Steelers the previous spring, and his report on Joe Greene was glowing: “Great skill. Best kid I saw on my tour. Has quickness, strength, and speed.” That same spring, Chuck himself had also been down to Denton, Texas, to scout Greene in his work for the Colts. What Chuck saw was a football player with a rare blend of speed and strength and a deep wellspring of competitiveness. Greene was physically massive (6-foot-3, 275 pounds) but also fast. He had modeled his game on the Cowboys’ Bob Lilly and had developed an absurdly quick first step to control opposing linemen.

Greene, prideful and motivated, was distressed when he got the news he’d been drafted. “My heart sank,” he said. He knew much about the Steelers’ history but nothing of Chuck Noll.

After the draft, when Marianne and Chris got to Pittsburgh, they started looking for a home. They went to several places but settled on the first house they looked at, a handsome brown two-story on 81 Warwick Drive in suburban Upper St. Clair, about a half hour south of the city and slightly to the west, off of Route 19. After the purchase, Chuck and Marianne brought Chris to see their new home. From the front yard, the three looked at it, and Chuck and Marianne mused on what color they wanted to paint it. Finally they settled on a shade of gold with black trim.

Chris looked up at them and beamed. “That’s so cool!,” he said. “Steelers’ colors!”

Chuck and Marianne looked at each other, aghast. The connection hadn’t even occurred to them.

They wound up painting the house green.

Across the street was Eisenhower Elementary, where Chris would attend school. The junior high, Fort Couch Middle School, was less than a half mile up the road. At the bottom of the hill, across Route 19, was a big new shopping mall, South Hills Village, anchored by a Gimbels department store.

With the head-coaching job secured and the house acquired, Chuck agreed to two previously elusive luxuries. Marianne could now schedule a regular visit to the beauty parlor (previously, Chuck had cut her hair himself). And he told her she could now hire someone to mow the lawn while he was away to training camp.

Marianne was sold immediately. Coming into town, she had the same reaction as all first-timers: the overwhelmingly gorgeous vista upon emerging from the Fort Pitt tunnel and coming across the bridge and into the city. That night, the Rooneys took the Nolls out to dinner at the tony LeMont Restaurant on Mount Washington. Suitably impressed, enjoying the company, Marianne looked out the window to the city lights below and allowed herself to wish: “I hope this is forever,” she said. And the Rooneys and Nolls drank to that.

Back in Cleveland, Kate Noll was thrilled that her son had finally gotten a head-coaching job but even more so that Chuck and Marianne would be closer (Pittsburgh was only a two-hour drive from Cleveland).

Saturday evenings, she and William would turn on the console and listen to Mass on the Catholic radio station. The grandkids would come up and sit with them while they said the Rosary.

When Marianne spoke to her mother-in-law on the phone on March 15, just days before a planned visit, Kate seemed noticeably happy to talk with her and content.

Two days later, on St. Patrick’s Day, Kate Noll died of a heart attack. Bill Deininger had come home from school during lunch and heard his grandfather calling his name from upstairs. He rushed up to find his grandmother slumped in the bathroom, dead. William had been on the couch, unable to get up and move.

The death came only months after Marianne had lost her own mother to cancer after a long illness. That following weekend, they drove to the funeral in Cleveland, Chuck mostly mute about his mother, Chris scared in the backseat. Holy Trinity was nearly full for Kate Noll’s ceremony, and Chuck struggled to get through it without succumbing to tears.

By now, William Noll was an invalid. His tremors were worse than ever. Even getting downstairs for the nightly supper could be an ordeal. His preference was to sit and watch the television. At the end of the weekend, Chuck and Marianne sat down with Rita. “We will take Dad,” Chuck said, “and you sell the house.”

Cleveland Trust, the bank where Rita had worked for much of the ’40s, would not give her a loan (“They said they wouldn’t give loans to widows with dependent children,” said Rita) to buy a bigger house, so she and Chuck cosigned for the loan, then put the whole house in his name, and he and Marianne made the down payment on the new home.

Rita found a home in Lakewood, on the west side of Cleveland, a new enclave of white flight out of the city. The same week that the Deiningers were moving to Lakewood, Chuck hugged Chris and kissed Marianne goodbye and drove the forty miles east, amid the hills of rural Pennsylvania, to St. Vincent College. The Steelers’ training camp site was a new place that felt curiously familiar to Chuck. St. Vincent had been the first Benedictine monastery in the United States.

Coaching pro football in the 1960s was a little like medicine before the invention of the microscope. Statistical analysis was rudimentary. The practitioners of the craft clung to what they’d observed or experimented with hunches.

Lombardi, who’d come out of retirement to coach the Washington Redskins, remained the defining coach of the era. Every other coach in the NFL seemed to be imitating him or responding in contrast. But even those who chose different methods—the hyperemotional George Allen, the imperious Tom Landry—still hewed to one of the central assumptions. Football coaching in the ’60s seemed infused by a cult of personality.

Lombardi’s approach was autocratic, but at its heart was the belief that football mattered above all else. In the course of a pregame speech, he would even draw on biblical themes, once invoking St. Paul’s epistles as proof that teams needed to run to win. “Vince has a knack for making all the saints sound like they would have been great football coaches,” said Jerry Kramer.

Chuck pointedly avoided the Lombardi ethos, both the notion that he was responsible for the players’ motivation or that repeated physical punishment would toughen them. Chuck rejected these assumptions.

Many made note of his impeccable coaching influences—the inveterate horse player Art Rooney said around the time of the hire, “His pedigree is super: He was by Paul Brown, out of Sid Gillman, by Don Shula.” He naturally drew from the influences of all three men, but he also consciously avoided some of each man’s style. In sum, Chuck’s sensibilities were decidedly more rational and less grandiose than Lombardi. This became apparent to the Steelers very early in that first training camp.

Before that first team meeting, some of the veterans—who’d become accustomed to their own collective discontent—joked among themselves that they had been here before the new coach arrived and would be here after he left. They’d watched Bill Austin lose control of the team and seen him flounder over the final months of the awful 1968 season. Over time, the team had grown somewhat resigned to its own futility, not comfortable in defeat, exactly, but used to it.

But now, as the new man walked before them, the low murmur in the room evaporated into an attentive stillness. Chuck did not look distinct or particularly commanding. There would be no yelling on this day, virtually no profanity, nothing to get a real grip on. Unlike so many of his peers at the time, he wasn’t projecting anything. He appeared confident, though not arrogant; calm but hardly meek; wholly sure of himself and his message.

He would never get entirely comfortable with public speaking. But talking to a football team in private had become second nature. In front of eighty football players, he introduced himself and calmly explained to the Pittsburgh Steelers players why they hadn’t been successful. “I’ve watched the game films,” he said, “and I can tell you guys why you’ve been losing. It’s not because you’re not trying hard enough. This isn’t a good football team, and most of you aren’t going to be here when this is a good football team.”

The players were struck by the indisputable facts of the rational argument he presented. He went on to explain that winning was about mastering the right techniques and then having the discipline to carry those out in a game. It was a long way from “Win One for the Gipper,” and it left them off-balance, unsure of what would come next.

An hour later that morning, out on the field at St. Vincent College, as a bus drove away with four players cut before the first practice, the holdovers gathered around and commenced with the ritual, obligatory whoops and yells that marked the beginning of every football practice everywhere.

And then the whistle blew, and Chuck raised his voice slightly.

“Quiet,” he snapped. “You don’t win football games with noise—cut the false chatter.”

Some veterans exchanged sidelong glances, but they responded, and soon enough, as he began the painstaking process of rebuilding each of them from the most fundamental elements—stance, spacing, alignment, and the form to be used for the most basic elements in the sport, blocking and tackling—the professionals of the Pittsburgh Steelers began to learn the game all over again. In the process, the empty bravado of the Austin years—and the cynicism that accompanied it—instantly disappeared.

“There was no being late,” said the veteran running back Dick Hoak. “If the meeting was at 9 o’clock, the door closed at 9 o’clock and you couldn’t come in. I mean, that stuff was all done. And that is what a lot of those guys were used to, all of this kind of lax things going on. And then there was just none of that anymore.”

It was more than a week before the prized rookie, Joe Greene, showed up. He’d held out, finally signed his contact, and arrived, still out of shape, struggling to run the sideline-to-sideline gassers with which the Steelers began their conditioning drills.

Chuck introduced him to the team that evening, and then Greene looked around and uttered a brief “Hi, fellas,” his voice cracking as he said the words, in what he would recall as “a tenor higher than I had been hoping for.”

But that wasn’t what stuck with Greene that week. Chuck’s speeches to the team during the evenings at Bonaventure Hall were not long, but they were very clear. One night, he explained to the club that “our ultimate goal is simple: to win the Super Bowl.” From the back of the room, the third-year running back Don Shy let forth with an audible laugh.

“I remember Don Shy laughing,” Greene said. “And I also remember, a couple of days later, Don Shy was gone.” He had been traded to New Orleans, for a player and two draft choices.

Greene soon realized something else. The veterans, whom he’d been so anxious about, had lost some of their cocksure arrogance. It was as though everyone in camp was a rookie. No one seemed sure of themselves, no one seemed comfortable under Chuck’s watch. Many of the conventions they’d grown up with had changed. He didn’t yell at them, he reasoned with them. “I’d had good coaching,” said the veteran All-Pro linebacker Andy Russell. “But I’d never seen anyone like Chuck.”

“I knew what you had to do to win,” Chuck would say later. “Number one, you had to not lose. And that means you have to play good defense. And you wanted an offense that didn’t get your defense in trouble. That was our first thought, we had to improve our defense. We have to play good defense and we have to not make mistakes on offense—even if we have to run the ball on every down and punt. Don’t get turnovers. Don’t get yourself in trouble giving the ball up at the 20-yard line where they need only 20 yards to score or they’re in field-goal range already. You don’t want to do that. That’s a prescription to lose.”

The team was as bad as advertised. Neither quarterback, Dick Shiner or Kent Nix, had the arm or the leadership skills to be consistent winners in the NFL. Beyond Jefferson, the offense was populated with aging overachievers, like the tenacious running back Hoak, who’d extended his career through smarts and grit.

Before the end of July, Chuck traded the veteran linebacker Bill Saul, a team leader and popular player, to the Dallas Cowboys. Saul, the first player ever to wear a live microphone during a game (for an NFL Films segment), was one of the team’s best-known players. But Chuck was convinced he lacked either the instincts or intelligence necessary for a middle linebacker. He showed Dan Rooney footage of Saul playing in 1968, making tackles 10 and 15 yards down the field, because he was overpursuing and taking poor angles to the ball carrier.

Among the players, there was curiosity to see if Jefferson, notoriously divisive during his time under Austin, would change with Chuck. They got their answer during the team’s preseason game in Montreal, when Jefferson—listening to a jazz combo in a downtown club—missed curfew by hours rather than minutes.

When Jefferson finally arrived at the team hotel, Chuck called Dan Rooney.

“Roy was not a carousing guy that was out all night,” said Dan. “But he was a tester. He was testing Chuck Noll to see what was going to happen. So Chuck calls me on the phone and says, ‘Could you come down here? I’ve gotta talk to you and we’ve gotta do something.’”

When Rooney arrived, Chuck presented the situation.

“Jefferson missed curfew,” said Chuck.

“Okay.”

“I can’t let that happen.”

“Okay. What are you going to do?”

“I want to send him home and not play him.”

“All right.”

Next, Chuck called Jefferson down to his room. When Jefferson walked in, he saw Dan and smiled. “He sees me,” said Dan, “and he thinks he’s gonna win this one.”

Jefferson apologized to Chuck, but Chuck explained that he was sending him home. Shocked, Jefferson protested, first to Chuck then to Dan, who remained firm. Before the discussion was over, Jeffeson was in tears and Rooney said, “We’re gonna do what Chuck said.”

“Go home,” Chuck told Jefferson. “We will talk about it on Monday.”

Each of the moves—disciplining Jefferson and trading Shy and then Saul—was defensible in purely football terms, but taken together, they set the tone for what was to follow. It was Chuck’s team now. And they would play his way.

A day or two before the first preseason game, Chuck drove home to the new house on Warwick Drive. Chris and some friends were out playing basketball in the driveway. Marianne was tending to the garden.

He seemed atypically grim when he got out of the car. “Come inside for a minute,” he told her.

When she was inside, Chuck gave her notice: “We have a very bad football team. It’s going to be a long season. Just be prepared.”

For another year, until the gleaming new bowl that was Three Rivers Stadium—to be shared by the Steelers and Pirates—opened in 1970, the Steelers would play their games at Pitt Stadium, would have their offices at the Roosevelt, and would practice at South Park. Collectively, they had the worst facilities in the NFL.

“The offices were in a rundown hotel,” said Chuck. “They were just horrible. The practice facilities were bad. But the Steelers were going to move into Three Rivers Stadium the next year, so it was a situation that was going to be corrected. These things are important. You can’t win a championship from a rundown office. Not these days anyway.”

The Steelers won their opener, a 16–13 win over what would turn out to be a good Detroit Lions team. An ebullient Chris cheered his father’s new team on to victory. “We were elated,” Chris said. “I thought, ‘This is going to be easy.’ The next thirteen, it was not so easy.”

Chuck’s training camp analysis had been correct. The Steelers simply didn’t have enough good football players, and in the course of those next thirteen games—all losses—that fact would be exposed, in numerous ways. The year was perhaps remembered most vividly for the time that Joe Greene, in a fit of competitive rage during a 52–14 blowout loss to the Minnesota Vikings, grabbed a pair of scissors from Tony Parisi’s trunk on the sidelines and went after the Vikings Carl Eller and Alan Page in the bench area at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, where both teams’ benches were on the same side of the field.

Russell, one of the most respected veterans on the team by ’69, would remember that Chuck never lost the team. He would come in each week and explain what they’d done wrong and then strive to get better.

Against the Cardinals, when Russell guessed wrong on a play and gave up a touchdown, Chuck was waiting for him on the sidelines. He neither screamed nor cursed but evenly asked, “What were you thinking there?”

Russell had studied the Cardinals’ tendencies and knew that they rarely passed from the formation he’d seen. It had been an educated guess.

“Stop guessing,” said Chuck.

The key, in many players’ estimation, was that Chuck kept the team focused. “I think you lose people when you start blaming everyone,” Chuck said. “Instead of coming in and saying, ‘This is your fault, it’s your fault, it’s your fault,’ we came in and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to do to get better.’ And that was the approach. And ‘We have to learn how to do this better. It’s we, not you.’ You got that message across and made progress, and you found the players who couldn’t or didn’t want to, all they were interested in was collecting a paycheck. Those were the guys we would get rid of.”

The Steelers’ 1–13 record tied the Bears for the worst in the league—and the Bears routed Pittsburgh when the two teams played head to head.

At the end-of-the-season press conference, Chuck raised a vigorous defense in the press. “We made progress, although it doesn’t reflect in the win-loss column,” he said. “It was progress in areas that are not convertible to win-loss. Our ultimate goal is the championship. There is talk, ‘If we can just be respectable,’ but we’ll not be satisfied with that. Our goal is the championship, but I don’t know when we’ll realize it. It’s hard to put a time schedule on it.”

At home, he remained taciturn, even-tempered. For Chris Noll, the season was marked by a fan’s anguish. “I remember the stress that we had lost so many in a row, were we ever going to win again,” he said. “I had a lot of the same emotions as a typical fan did. And part of it I think is because he never brought that stuff home. It wasn’t like he came home and we talked about it. He come home and it was home. I lived through the papers—I learned more from the papers than I did from him.”

The afternoon of the season-ending press conference, Dan Rooney came to Chuck’s office in the Roosevelt and put an envelope on his desk.

“What’s this?,” asked Chuck.

“It’s a bonus. For a job well done.”

Chuck blanched. “We’re 1–13. You can’t give me a bonus for that.” They went back and forth, and Chuck finally accepted the envelope. He put it in his desk.

He told Marianne about it that evening. “How much was it for?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” he said, “because you’ll tell me we should take it.”

The check was for $10,000. It remained in his desk drawer for weeks before Dan returned. He’d heard from bookkeeping that it had never been cashed.

“Chuck,” Dan said. “My father will be hurt if you don’t accept the check.”

Chuck eventually relented, bringing the check home to Marianne and placing it on the kitchen counter.

“Put it in a separate account,” he told her. “We’re not going to touch it until we’ve earned it.”