thirteen
WHATEVER IT TAKES
As they prepared for the 1974 draft in late January, Chuck and Art Rooney Jr. had been working together—sometimes testily—for five years. Chuck valued Artie’s input, but they were not temperamentally suited to one another. Artie was intimidated by Chuck’s demeanor and was also insecure and defensive, eager to prove to any doubters that he deserved the job he’d been given. Chuck was not going to provide Artie with the reassurance he wanted.
So they argued, and Artie sometimes became peevish; he felt that he should have more influence, perhaps even the final word, on the draft decisions for which he would ultimately take responsibility. On his better days, Chuck accepted the oppositional nature of the relationship. “The upper molars and lower molars grinding together makes the teeth stronger,” he once explained to Artie. “That’s what we do.”
But other times, the men could make each other furious. The first draft meeting after the 1973 playoff loss to Oakland began with a rhetorical slap. “I never thought I’d see a team of yours embarrassed like that,” Artie told Chuck as they sat down. Chuck remained stolid, focused, but his assistants could tell he was incensed.
For a team that had been to the playoffs for two straight years, the Steelers still had holes to fill. Center Ray Mansfield was aging, as was middle linebacker Henry Davis. While Ron Shanklin and Frank Lewis were good receivers, neither was a game breaker.
There were two wide receivers in the draft that both Chuck and the scouting department particularly admired. One was Lynn Swann, a key part of USC’s 1972 national champions, and a consensus All-American in 1973. Handsome, witty, a peacock with a gliding stride and a tough demeanor, he was generally regarded as the best receiver in the draft. But Chuck had become enamored of a lesser-known player, a strong, supple, 6-foot-4 receiver from Alabama A&M named John Stallworth. Stallworth’s 40-yard dash time was worryingly slow, but Bill Nunn emphasized that the times run by Stallworth, in inferior equipment, on the rougher surface and longer grass of the Alabama A&M field, would not directly compare with the times posted by other receivers on the manicured lawns of major universities.
Nunn had gotten a reel of Stallworth’s game film, the only one in the country, and Chuck had asked to watch it on numerous occasions. Nunn dawdled about returning the film to A&M in the weeks leading up to the draft.
With the twenty-first pick in the first round, the Steelers waited while several teams that might have taken wide receivers went for running backs or linebackers instead. It was common knowledge in personnel circles that the Cowboys, drafting right behind Pittsburgh at number 22, saw Swann as the best available player on the board. When the Steelers’ turn came, Chuck wavered; he preferred Stallworth, but both Rooney and Dick Haley argued he would be available later. Swann had to be taken right away.
Chuck was churlish about it, predicting that Stallworth wouldn’t be available in the fourth round (they had other positional needs in the second round, and had traded away their third-round pick to Oakland). But he agreed to select Swann.
In so doing, Chuck once again had acceded to the wishes of his scouting staff. The decision remained ultimately Chuck’s, and yet in this situation—as with the choice of Harris in the ’72 draft—he responded to the impassioned plea of his scouts. While the end result was usually in the best interests of the team, it could leave both Chuck and Artie feeling aggrieved.
“Chuck was pissed,” said Artie. “He was really pissed.”
In the second round, there was another close call between two linebackers, Iowa State’s Matt Blair, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound prototype linebacker and the worryingly slender Jack Lambert, from Kent State, who had impressed Artie and linebackers coach Woody Widenhofer with his unstinting drive. During the time allotted to make the selection, both the staff and the scouting department weighed in on the relative merits of the two players.
With less than a minute left to decide, Chuck turned to second-year linebackers coach Widenhofer. “Woody, how do you feel about this?,” he asked.
“I want Lambert.”
“Lambert it is.”
Then the Steelers waited, through the rest of the second round, and all of the third, in hopes that Stallworth would last until the fourth round. Pittsburgh had the Chicago Bears’ pick, the fourth pick in the fourth round. The San Diego Chargers, drafting directly in front of them, were also looking at a receiver.
The entire room sat in a hush until the Chargers’ pick was announced. They had gone for a receiver—but it was Harrison Davis out of Virginia. With that, Chuck’s face opened into a broad grin, and the Steelers chose Stallworth. Later, with their own pick in the fourth round, they selected the squat, slightly undersized Wisconsin center Mike Webster, who had impressed both scouts and coaches alike with his bulldog tenacity. By the time the draft ended the next day, Nunn was already on the road, signing a free agent defensive back named Donnie Shell from South Carolina State.
Before the staff was done with the second day of the draft, Lambert had phoned Woody Widenhofer.
“Coach, I’m taking some time off from school,” he said. “I want to be able to come down there and learn all of those defenses before we come in during the spring.”
Widenhofer—hoping for some time off after the grind of his first pro season and the overtime of draft preparation—asked Lambert when he wanted to come in, and Lambert told him he could come three days a week starting immediately. Rangy and lithe, Lambert also exhibited a distinctive playing style; his lateral movement was exceptional, and his missing front teeth gave him a look of menace. Artie’s scouting report had noted that Lambert needed to gain weight, but his statement of intent served notice to the staff that he was a serious football player.
Chuck and his assistants didn’t, and couldn’t, have known it as they were leaving Three Rivers following that 1974 draft. But finally, after five seasons, the pieces were in place.
As the new season approached, the industry that gave the Steelers their nickname was falling into seriously troubled times. Steel had been in heavy demand during the Second World War and the generation of widespread growth and expansion that followed it. But by the time of the 1973 oil crisis, with other nations developing the means of production, there were widespread layoffs, and many other mills were simply shutting down. The changes had come quickly and without prior warning. U.S. Steel had opened a new skyscraper, the sixty-four-story U.S. Steel Tower, in 1970. But after a generation of postwar boom, the American economy contracted. In 1974 alone, wages fell by 2.1 percent, and income shrunk by $1,500. Manufacturing jobs, which accounted for more than 30 percent of the American workforce in the years after the Second World War, would drop to 20 percent by the end of the seventies. And among all sectors of American society, the steel industry felt the contractions most acutely. Building was down, and union membership began to fall.
Generations of families that had grown up in and around the steel industry were finding their livelihoods suddenly extinguished. The industry was down to 521,000 jobs in 1974 (and would continue to contract dramatically in the coming years, falling to 204,000 jobs by 1990). The decline would hit even harder in Pittsburgh. U.S. Steel’s massive Homestead Works, which employed 15,000 workers during the Second World War, closed down forty years later. In the 1970s, one out of ten workers in Pittsburgh were employed in the steel industry. As that industry deteriorated, it played on the insecurity of the populace.
“People—including a good many in Pittsburgh—tend to look upon Pittsburgh as a Loser town,” wrote Blount. “Perhaps it is the ‘Pitts’ in the name, suggesting depression. Perhaps it is the immigrant millworker image of the population. Perhaps it is the fact that Pittsburgh has never been westerly enough to imply sophisticates, or middle enough to imply stolid prosperity.”
In the face of all that, there was the emergence of the Steelers, a longtime staple of the city, now newly robust and potent. The city had fallen in love with its football team. Steeler Fever was rampant, but it went beyond an identification with the team or even the four stalwarts on the defensive line, dubbed “The Steel Curtain.” Almost every player of consequence had developed his own rabid band of followers. Ham’s fans were the members of Dobre Shunka (Polish for “good ham”); placekicker Roy Gerela inspired a group of Ukrainians who called themselves Gerela’s Gorillas. In 1972, there was Franco’s Italian Army, in honor of the mixed heritage of the rookie star (Frank Sinatra even posed for a picture during the ’72 playoff run). Then came Preston’s Soul Patrol (Pearson), Wagner’s Wild Bunch (Wagner), Bruce’s Mooses (for Bruce “Moose” Van Dyke), Frenchy’s Friends (Fuqua), and Rocky’s Flying Squirrels (Bleier). Yet the one player whom the city hadn’t quite fully embraced was Bradshaw. It may have been in part because, while most of the team’s stars had moved to Pittsburgh, Bradshaw got out of town almost the moment each season was over.
So the city suffered, families split apart, factories closed down. Through it all, the bond between the people of Pittsburgh and the Steelers grew even stronger. The team was providing something that it hadn’t before: hope, at a time when that was a rare and precious commodity in the region.
By 1974, Chuck’s hair was worn longer, a relaxed departure from his well-trimmed crew cuts and flattops of the ’50s and the Brylcreemed, close-cropped haircuts of the ’60s. He’d even allowed his sideburns to grow a bit, down to even with the top of his earlobe. There were emerging flecks of gray developing, but he had grown distinguished looking in his forties, only the single mole on his right cheek blemishing his frequent expression of quiet self-assuredness. The stylistic flourishes of coat and tie on the sidelines had been abandoned after 1971, in favor of athletic shirts and coaches’ double-knit slacks. He frequently wore a windbreaker on the sidelines, even on cold days.
The mantra that he repeated most often was “Whatever it takes.” It was declarative and definitive. In Chuck’s version, it meant something far different than when the Raiders’ Al Davis used the same phrase. There were lines Chuck wouldn’t cross, and his use of the phrase was a subtle indication that he wouldn’t even think about crossing them. But it was meant as a counter thrust to excuses, injuries, distractions, internal debate. What do you do when your quarterback goes down? When the veterans are on strike? When the media is on your back.
Whatever it takes.
“We heard that so often we always said he had it embroidered on his shorts,” said Ray Mansfield.
They would hear it a lot in 1974.
The 1973 season had brought an end to the ongoing tension between Chuck and two of his assistants, Babe Parilli and Bob Fry. The latter was a football lifer, who’d played in the NFL and was the only coach on Chuck’s staff who’d had previous pro coaching experience. “He was sort of laid-back and disorganized,” said John Brown. “I wondered why Chuck hired him.”
The NFL rulebook in 1974 still prohibited offensive lineman from using their hands to ward off defenders. In keeping with that, Fry taught many of the old methods, instructing his linemen to keep their hands at the center of their chest. But Chuck was sharply attuned to the way the rules were evolving. More linemen were using their open hands to ward off the blows of the defender. That was the style Chuck wanted taught, and he and Fry would regularly argue about the fine points of blocking technique.
After Fry’s exit, Chuck rehired Dan Radakovich, who’d left after 1971 to be the defensive coordinator at Colorado. Radakovich returned as offensive line coach with an explicit mission, from Chuck, to be more aggressive than Fry and teach everything within (and perhaps on the edge of) the letter of the league rules.
“Elvin Bethea of Houston, he used to take a couple of knee pads, and he had this big thing taped to his hands, and he would bring that head slap and Boom!,” said Jon Kolb. “So if you’re keeping your hands in, you had no chance. So the thing we learned was that if I see that coming, I can hit you in the chin underneath your headgear and pop your neck back. Before you can do this, I can do that. And so Rad brought at that time radical offense, that punch thing. And a lot of that was when to pull the trigger. We just did so many reps. I can’t pull the trigger on you now because you are too far, and if I wait ’till you get up to me, then you’re too close.”
The coaching staff had developed into a blend of complementary styles. On offense, Radakovich’s eccentric exhortations and Lionel Taylor’s loud protestations were countered by the circumspect, low-key toughness of Chuck and running backs coach Dick Hoak. On defense, the often wild gesticulations and jocular nature of George Perles and Woody Widenhofer were tempered by the more subdued (though no less intense) Carson.
Perles’s weekly review of the defensive line, with grades, was one of the focal points of the week for Greene, Greenwood, Holmes, and White. “Plusses and minuses,” said Greene. “And, oh gee, ‘loaf.’ Loaf was a big one. He would say, ‘Number 78, loaf!’ Dwight would get so pissed. ‘Number 75, loaf!’ The way he would call the grade out. And you were sitting there looking at it on paper.”
While the Major League Baseball Players Association was fighting for free agency, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) was still trying to bargain for equitable pay for preseason games and some measure of guarantees on player contracts. As a former player, Chuck sympathized with players on some of these issues, but he was deeply distrustful of NFLPA leader Ed Garvey and the threatened ’74 strike. An earlier player walkout, in 1970, had fizzled after a couple of days. But in 1974, the players were more unified, and training camp opened with many of the Steelers veterans picketing the main entrance to St. Vincent.
Preston Pearson, who’d been elected player rep, had called Chuck in July and asked if he could stop by and meet with him before training camp. The pair already had a tense relationship—Pearson felt Chuck didn’t give him enough playing time—and nothing that happened during the meeting would bridge that gap.
When Pearson entered his office and sat down, Chuck’s opening salvo was, “What are you doing with my football team?”
Pearson argued that he was doing everything he could to keep the team together, and that it was in the best interests of both men if the Steelers remain unified. But there was a complex series of forces pulling the team in different directions. The strike, officially declared July 1, was hard to ignore in a strong union town like Pittsburgh. On the other hand, many Steelers felt close to the paternal Art Rooney Sr. and the rest of the Rooney family.
The rookies reported on July 15, crossing picket lines. Two days later, on the morning that the veterans were to report, someone asked Chuck if he wished they would ignore the strike and cross the picket line. “That’s like asking if you’d rather die by machine gun or fire,” he said. “I just want this thing to get over with and see everyone in camp.”
Some players broke with the union stance. Joe Gilliam, still the third quarterback on the depth chart, crossed the picket lines in the first week of camp. NFL roster limits being what they were, he felt expendable and wanted to make his best case for his position on the roster. Perhaps it was because of the experience he’d gained the previous season, perhaps it was because there were few veterans around. But the occasional uncertainty and inconsistency that Gilliam had displayed the previous season had vanished; he possessed a slangy authority and exhibited a complete mastery of the playbook. Without Parilli as a buffer, Gilliam could more closely interact with Chuck. And Chuck liked the young quarterback’s mixture of confidence and deference. As the son of a coach, he understood and was comfortable with the teacher-student relationship—one that Bradshaw, with his history of adoration and his own insecurity, had trouble with.
As a rule, Gilliam was not lacking in self-assurance. But his excellent training camp gave him even more. Gilliam would joke with the rookies Swann and Stallworth when working on the particulars of delivering the ball on the break of pass routes: “How you want it there—laces up or laces down?” He had the ball boys—Chris Noll and Bill Nunn Jr.—running out patterns and could hit them in stride, throwing the ball 30 and 40 yards in the air behind his back.
The strike wasn’t called off until August 11, though several Steelers veterans had reported before then. Through training camp, as Gilliam, the 273rd player taken in the 1972 draft, was clearly outplaying Bradshaw, the first player selected in the 1970 draft, there was a growing sense of excitement around the team that Gilliam was making a strong case to be named the Steelers’ starting quarterback.
Chuck didn’t blink, announcing the week before the season that Gilliam had locked down the starting job.
Bradshaw, hurt, petulant, and angry over the decision—though he couldn’t argue with the consensus that Gilliam had looked the better, more effective, more confident quarterback in preseason—asked to be traded.
Chuck was calm but firm.
“You’re going to be a great quarterback someday,” he said. “It takes time.”
The decision reverberated. “The black guys were elated,” said J. T. Thomas. “That was a year that there was a lot of racial tension in the city here. The world is going upside down. So you look at that role again: The head coach and the quarterback have a father-son relationship. Suddenly, you know—Chuck Noll got a black child.”
The season opened with Gilliam looking sharp, dominating the Colts in a 30–0 win. Hanratty was tabbed for mop-up duty, over the sullen, disconsolate Bradshaw. Gilliam completed 17 of 31 passes for 257 yards and two touchdowns, throwing to a cast of receivers—Shanklin and Lewis in the first and third quarters, the rookies Swann and Stallworth in the second and fourth. The performance—and the milestone of a black quarterback starting for a playoff contender—landed Gilliam on the cover of Sports Illustrated, under the headline “Pittsburgh’s Black Quarterback.”
A week later, against Denver, Gilliam was in his element, throwing for 358 yards and rallying the Steelers from a 21–7 first-half deficit. But leading 35–28 with about eight minutes to play, and driving down near the Broncos’ goal line, he threw a costly interception, and Denver tied it at the end of regulation. In the first year of sudden-death overtime for regular-season games, the two teams played fifteen more minutes without scoring and the game finished at 35–35.
But Gilliam was dealing. The confidence was noticed by opponents and teammates alike.
The Steelers occasionally felt as though they were participating in Gilliam’s own stream-of-consciousness monologue. “Rock steady” was his mantra, an incantation spoken both in preparation, before kneeling in the huddle, and exclamation, as after a completed pass. The phrase was in the air—Aretha Franklin had enjoyed a hit single by that name, and it had later been co-opted by the basketball star and style maven Walt Frazier as the title of his book Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool. In Gilliam’s lexicon, the expression connoted not only the experience of “being in the zone” in athletics but also achieving that state with an accompanying sense of style.
As he was approaching the line of scrimmage before a play, Gilliam might see a player on the opposing team whom he’d played against in college and say, “I see you—you know what happened at Grambling.”
“Most quarterbacks are very studious, looking around, analyzing,” said J. T. Thomas. “Joe’d walk up there like one leg longer than the other, he’s got his pimp walk on, he’s cool. Looking around, talking smack, making audibles. Dwight White would say, ‘That sucker is bad!’ And Chuck was wondering what in the hell is Joe talking to. ‘Why is he talking to those people?’”
But the offense was completely flummoxed the next week, in a 17–0 loss to Oakland. Pittsburgh then won three straight games, a tense win at Houston, a shootout win over an aging Kansas City team, and a 20–16 home win over Cleveland in which the defense forced three turnovers.
On defense, Carson found that Lambert—who’d been named the starter at middle linebacker when Henry Davis was injured in the preseason—was the perfect complement to the Steel Curtain up front. Though he remained inordinately light for his position, the presence of the formidable line in front of him meant that he had to shed fewer blockers than most middle linebackers.
But the larger change that had been implemented in 1972 and was still being perfected in 1974 was Carson’s insistence that “we will always be in the right defense.” Other teams lined up in specific defenses, but when presented with pre-snap shifts and men in motion, would default into a more standard vanilla or “safety” zones.
“Most teams, if they see something they didn’t expect, they’d just shift out of it,” said Rocky Bleier. “But Bud goes, ‘Well, fuck no; if we got a man defense, we are not going to a safety.’ We will adapt and make sure the best defense is on the field.’ So that means you now have to study.”
All through ’72 and much of ’73, the Steelers’ defensive meetings often ended with players looking overwhelmed. But by 1974, with the Carson system heading into its third year, they were ready to assert themselves.
Yet even as the Steelers were getting off to a successful 4–1–1 start, there were inklings that something was amiss. By the time of the win over Cleveland, Gilliam had lost some of his swagger, completing just 5 of 18 passes for 78 yards.
He had been late for meetings, and more than one, during the previous weeks. Chuck’s players were rarely late, and the quarterbacks virtually never were. His teammates noticed.
“It wasn’t until the season started that I started to see some of Joe’s habits,” said John Stallworth, the rookie wide receiver who’d been Gilliam’s favorite target in the preseason. “Not that I was around him a whole lot, but enough to see that some of that was going on, and I honestly did not know what my place was in that. What should I be doing? I know that is not something that I personally wanted to be involved with, but as a player should I be doing something other than acknowledging that is not something I want to do?”
“So the stories were, people would find him in the Hill District, you know?,” said Bleier. “I mean, kids knew. They would see him up in the Hill District, and they knew he was buying coke as a football player. And the players knew that Joe was taking drugs. Even during that period of time when he was starting, he would come in feeling real good. You know, not crazy—but just feeling good, high. Not necessarily high off the charts, but . . . pumped up.”
With the Steelers standing at 4–1–1, Chuck began polling his assistants. Radakovich was strongly in favor of elevating Bradshaw to starter. Lionel Taylor preferred Gilliam for another start, for at least a quarter. On October 28, Chuck announced that Bradshaw would start. The reaction was mixed—some teammates were still loyal to Gilliam—but there was never any dissension around it.
“I don’t think any of us thought it was a racial thing,” said John Stallworth. “And I think it was because we knew Joe’s habits, but I think partly because we knew Chuck. I mean, I think it was a big move to even start Joe in the beginning, to put him in there.”
With Bradshaw, Pittsburgh beat Atlanta, 24–17. Another change in that game was also significant. After rotating five running backs for much of the season, Chuck put Harris and Bleier in the same backfield for the first time, and Pittsburgh ran for 235 yards on the Falcons.
Afterward, Chuck was typically oblique about the reasons he’d benched Gilliam for Bradshaw. “It was based on the facts,” he said. “I don’t always disclose those facts.”
A week later, Pittsburgh beat Philadelphia, but then Bradshaw looked mostly awful in a 17–10 loss to Cincinnati, completing 13 of 35 passes for 140 yards and an interception. It was always painful for Chuck to lose to Paul Brown, but it was particularly galling when Brown’s quarterback, Ken Anderson, went 20 for 22. Bradshaw seemed flummoxed after the game. “We’d have a receiver open and I’d miss him bad,” said Bradshaw. “That frustrates me. It has to.”
Amid speculation over who would start in the wake of another poor Bradshaw performance—Cleveland coach Nick Skorich said his team was preparing for both Bradshaw and Gilliam—Chuck instead tabbed Hanratty, the one quarterback who stayed out for the entire strike during the preseason. It was, at first, a popular choice in Pittsburgh. That week, 120,000 coal workers went on strike across the country, and U.S. Steel laid off 13,700 workers, nearly 3,000 of whom lived in the Pittsburgh area.
It was a daring ploy on Chuck’s part but also a severe miscalculation. The game itself was an agonizing exercise in ineptitude, with the Steelers’ offense turning the ball over six times. Hanratty went 2 of 15 for just 63 yards and three interceptions. Gilliam, brought in in the second half, completed just 1 of 4 passes.
But Cleveland was worse. The Steelers’ defense intercepted three passes and recovered four fumbles, one claimed by J. T. Thomas, who raced 14 yards with the go-ahead touchdown in a 26–16 win.
Pittsburgh was 7–2–1, but its quarterback situation was a shambles. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette began a readers’ poll that week, asking readers to rate their favorite Steelers’ quarterback. (The three quarterbacks, in turn, took out a small ad in the Post-Gazette asking readers to rate their favorite Post-Gazette sportswriter.)
Chuck refused to divulge what he’d decided to do, but another important vote came in that week. Joe Greene weighed in, to both Chuck and Dan Rooney, that he “liked Bradshaw and favored Bradshaw.”
With the team’s leader having made his wishes clear, Chuck’s decision making was further simplified. Hanratty’s arm was shot, and his spells in the lineup were ineffective. Gilliam had been erratic in games, often late to team meetings, and there were ominous rumors swirling around his off-field activities.
“If we are going to the Super Bowl,” Chuck concluded, “it is going to be Bradshaw to take us.” Later that day, he spoke to Bradshaw, and told him he’d start for the rest of the season.
To the press, Chuck continued to be maddeningly oblique. “I’ve made up my mind,” he said, though he declined to share his conclusions. “Have I told them who’s starting? Well, yes and no.” He said he’d told one player the news, but he declined to elaborate on the rest.
On Monday Night Football, in New Orleans, Bradshaw was unexceptional—8 of 18 passing for just 80 yards and two interceptions—but he also threw two touchdown passes and ran for 99 yards, as the Steelers rolled, 28–7.
While the quarterback situation was seemingly settled, things would get worse before they got better. On December 1, the Steelers played host to the Houston Oilers, coached by Sid Gillman. The Oilers’ stout 3–4 defense, anchored by All-Pro Curley Culp, gave Pittsburgh fits. Bradshaw was again mostly awful—completing 6 of 20 passes for 60 yards and throwing an interception, before being knocked out of the game in the third quarter with bruised ribs. Hanratty came in and was even worse, going 0 for 5. After Skip Butler’s field goal put the Oilers ahead, 13–10, with 2:32 left, Houston intercepted Hanratty twice before running out the clock. “They beat the hell out of our offense,” said Chuck after the game.
Dan Radakovich recalled “the defense was about ready to take all three quarterbacks on a long, long ride like the Mafia was known to do.”
No one was more frustrated than the immensely prideful Greene. The next night, the two-time defending world champion Dolphins trounced the Cincinnati Bengals on Monday Night Football. Greene, sitting at home with Agnes, grew increasingly irate while watching the game, seeing the Dolphins’ offense gain yardage with brutal efficiency, and the defense—not as talented as the Steelers but every bit as disciplined—rendering helpless Cincinnati’s short passing game.
The frustration had been building in Greene all season, and after the meeting with Bud Carson and George Perles the next morning, it crested. Greene grabbed his things from his locker and walked out to his car. “I could have mumbled something,” he said. “I just wasn’t one to hide my emotions very well. If I didn’t say anything, I might have voiced it really well in my body language.”
Word traveled fast among the coaching staff.
“The first thing I thought,” said Lionel Taylor, “was, Oh shit!—if Joe walks out, we are all fired. That is for damn sure, because that is our ballplayer.”
Taylor hurried out to the car and sat with Greene for a while, patiently discussing his frustration and his options. “I couldn’t tell him not to go home,” said Taylor. Eventually, Greene relented and returned. “I was really, really happy that Lionel came out to the car,” he said.
“He said, ‘I’m going home and I’m not coming back,’” said Andy Russell. “And we had to convince him. We’ve got another game next week. But he was so upset with our offense. My point was, Coach Noll really handled him differently than he would have handled, I think, almost anybody else on that team.”
The crucial moment often seems obvious only in retrospect. But that moment would remain fixed in the mind of many Steelers. “I remember Joe went to tripping,” said Glen Edwards. “But we got it together after that. See, Joe was the spokesman. I don’t know who made him the spokesman, but he was the spokesman. Any problem that occurred, Joe would go in and address it and stuff.”
The stuff had been addressed—and as all this was happening, Blount’s superb book, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, was published to rapturous reviews. Chuck didn’t read it, though Marianne, of course, did.
The next week, the Steelers faced the New England Patriots. After falling behind 7–0, Bradshaw steadied himself and completed 10 of 16 passes (though for just 86 yards) in a 21–17 win. True to his word, Chuck stuck with him. The following week, at Three Rivers, in front of a crowd of just 42,878, the Steelers dominated Cincinnati, and Bradshaw had one of his best statistical days of the year, completing 8 of 13 passes for 132 yards and two touchdowns. Pittsburgh wound up 10–3–1 on the year, and clinched its third straight playoff trip, this time as Central Division champions. They were not viewed as a popular favorite going into the postseason—in Sports Illustrated, Dan Jenkins joked that the Steelers were “the only team to reach the playoffs without a quarterback.”
But something had come together during the season. Some would feel that the team had finally internalized Chuck’s messages. Others would cite subtler nuances. Bleier remembered the point that Chuck had made after the win over the Chiefs. In the team meeting, Chuck had told the team that Kansas City lost to Pittsburgh largely because the Chiefs’ perennial All-Pro tackle Ed Budde had slipped in his technique, cheating back in the second and third quarters to prepare for the rush.
Chuck spent some time zeroing in on the deficiency. “When you practice against Buck Buchanan every day, it’s easy to tell yourself, ‘I’ll let you go through. It’s not gonna happen in the game, but I will let you go through.’”
“For me, that was my buy-in,” said Bleier. “I go, ‘Oh, fuck.’ If he can take this, everything we did and everything we accomplished and boil it down to the lack of preparation or lack of habits by one good player in one position, and the reasons why, because you didn’t do things in practice that you need to do consistently, I’m going, ‘Ugh—he knows his stuff.’”
Realizing how erratic the quarterbacks could be, and recognizing that the strength of the team was in the running game, Chuck leaned heavily on the offensive line and the new backfield pairing of Harris and Bleier. The staple for short-yardage was a play called “15 Lead C,” which found the center blocking back on the opposing tackle, while the guard next to him folded behind and into the vacated space to pick up the middle linebacker. Pittsburgh would run it, again and again and again, in the weeks ahead.
The playoffs began in Pittsburgh on Sunday, December 23, 1974, when the Steelers played host to O. J. Simpson and the Buffalo Bills. Simpson was a year past his electrifying 2,003-yard season. But he was still the engine of the Bills’ run-dominated offense.
What Pittsburgh unveiled on the day was a slight wrinkle that would play an increasingly large role as the playoffs wore on. It was a variation on the 4–3 defense which the team called the “Stunt 4–3,” an alignment in which Joe Greene took a different stance, cocked diagonally on the nose of the center from his left tackle position. In the geometric jujitsu of line play, a force like Greene at that point in the line play could wreak havoc. Ernie Holmes was lined up shaded inside the other guard. If the Bills’ center moved to block Holmes, Greene had a clear path to the quarterback. If the center double-teamed Greene with the right guard, Holmes was in perfect position to demolish the play. Simpson was held to 49 yards rushing. “It started out as a pass technique,” Chuck later explained, “but we found it really screws up the offensive blocking. It’s an aggressive defensive play because our front four isn’t sitting and reading the offense. Instead, they’re the ones making things happen.”
From one perspective, installing a new base defensive alignment at the start of the playoffs was folly. But then, so was changing your starting quarterback three times during the regular season. It was that kind of season.
Pittsburgh scored 26 points in the second quarter en route to a 32–14 win. It was Bradshaw’s best performance of the season (12 of 19 passing for 203 yards and no interceptions, plus 48 yards rushing on 5 carries).
With the Raiders knocking off the two-time defending champion Dolphins the day before, Pittsburgh would go on the road, back to Oakland, for the 1974 AFC title game.
“We’re happy to have the opportunity to play them again,” said Chuck. He also announced that the team wouldn’t spend the week in Palm Springs, as they had before the playoff game in 1973. Bradshaw, for one, was happy: “It’s too warm out there,” he said. “We get too soft.”
By Monday morning, Chuck was well aware of Raider coach John Madden’s quote, amid the postgame jubilation after Oakland knocked off the two-time defending champion Dolphins, “When the two best teams in football get together, anything can happen.”
The two best teams. Chuck cared very little about pregame talks, but the assumption grated. He said nothing to his assistant coaches that day, nor to Dan, nor to the PR man Joe Gordon.
But Tuesday morning, Chuck strode in to the team meeting—held at the large conference room in Three Rivers Stadium—and did something he had rarely done before. He quoted Madden again, in full, and raised his voice slightly for the first part of the quote—When the two best teams in football get together—before slowing down, an octave lower, to complete it. Anything can happen.
Chuck’s jaw was set, and he’d clenched his fists at his side, the telltale sign that he was agitated. “I’ll tell you what anything is,” Chuck said. “Anything is that Oakland isn’t getting to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is three weeks from now. And the best team in football is right here in this room.”
It was the closest thing to a full-fledged inspirational speech that Chuck’s team would ever receive, and it was greeted with more than the usual affirmations. Greene launched out of his college desk chair, and several other players whooped in affirmation.
“It wasn’t long,” said Jack Ham of the talk. “It wasn’t one of these running speeches kind of thing and, to a man, I’ve got to admit, this one hit a nerve. It hit a nerve for me, and whether we were going to play that way no matter what, maybe we would have, but that did set a tone for the intensity of the week. Not that you needed much. You are playing an AFC Championship Game. You are playing the Raiders. But Chuck set the tone of what this was going to be about.”
On Christmas Day, the Tuesday prior to the game, Marianne and Chris joined Chuck in the basement. She had decorated Chuck’s film projector with a wreath and a red ribbon and surrounded the area with red and green candles. With holiday decorations in place, Chris and Marianne sat down with Chuck while he watched game films of the Raiders.
In the build-up to the game, Chuck was asked about the spotty weather forecast for the game, and how it might affect the Raiders’ often-sloppy field. He said the league office had promised to put a tarpaulin on the field. “I can’t do anything about it,” he added. “Al Davis is in charge of the weather.”
He was even more deadpan when a reporter for the New York Times mentioned the Raiders’ Davis-coined motto, “Pride and Poise,” and asked if the Steelers had pride and poise as well. Chuck’s answer: “Not on our stationery.”
That Sunday afternoon, in Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the Steelers played the game in an angry state. Before the Raiders’ first play from scrimmage, Ernie Holmes was bellowing to the Raiders’ Gene Upshaw that Pittsburgh was “going to kick your ass!” In football terms, that’s what they did. The stunt 4–3 proved particularly lethal as it matched up Greene and Holmes on Oakland’s aging, bruised, undersized veteran center Jim Otto. After the first series—which Greene concluded by beating a double-team block to sack Ken Stabler—the Raiders’ offensive line was on the sidelines with a chalkboard, trying to draw up a suitable response. It never came; the Raiders ran for just 29 yards on the day.
Oakland went ahead in the third quarter, when Cliff Branch beat Mel Blount on a 38-yard touchdown pass from Stabler. The Steelers still trailed 10–3 heading into the fourth quarter, when Harris ran for the game-tying touchdown. From there, the Steelers took over. Two interceptions in the fourth quarter—one by Ham and another by J. T. Thomas—helped put the game away, and Pittsburgh won, 24–13.
“They beat our butts,” said Madden after the game.
The reception at the Pittsburgh International Airport was unprecedented and chaotic, even for the Steelers faithful. As the plane touched down, at 12:56 a.m., more than ten thousand Steelers supporters had crowded into the terminal to greet the team.
The challenge awaiting Chuck the next morning was what, if anything, he wanted to do differently than the Colts had done after the 1968 season. When the team gathered Tuesday, he did not tell any cautionary tales about Super Bowl III or the nightmare of recriminations that followed it. But he did warn his players to not invest the game with more importance than it already carried. It was another football game, and the Steelers would treat it as such.
When the Steelers flew to chilly New Orleans on Sunday a week before the game, Chuck brought the players into a banquet room at the Fontainebleu Hotel.
“So the meeting goes, ‘Here is the schedule for the week,’” said Bleier. “There is no curfew tonight or tomorrow night, and Tuesday is media day. We will go to our normal week’s practice as we have done all season long, then we will have Wednesday offense, Thursday defense, combination on Friday as we have done. Nothing will be different. This game isn’t any more important than last week’s game or the game before that. It is just another game.’”
The team reveled in the lack of a curfew that Sunday and Monday night—Andy Russell somehow managed to lose a rental car somewhere in Fat City. Joe Greene didn’t even unpack, just dropped his luggage in the room and headed out with his line mates, L. C. Greenwood, Dwight White, and Fats Holmes. They wound up sitting by the sidewalk in an open-air restaurant along Bourbon Street. “We had you-peel-it shrimp,” said Greene. “And we drank Heineken until they had no more.” The night left Dwight White with a case of food poisoning and, eventually, admitted to the hospital with pneumonia, which seemed certain to rule him out of the game. Everyone but White reported for meetings Tuesday morning and prepared as usual.
There was a sense that freedom on the first nights in New Orleans, along with the innate confidence that the team had gained, left them looser for the game itself. That week, Radakovich showed the offensive line old game footage of him playing for Penn State against Jim Brown and Syracuse in the ’50s. Chuck even allowed the players’ wives to stay with them the night before the game.
On the eve of the Super Bowl, Chuck and Marianne and Dan and Pat Rooney dined at a Mexican restaurant in the French Quarter. That Saturday night meal was marked by an impassioned conversation, Chuck evincing annoyance with all the league-mandated activities that took him, the staff, and the Steelers out of their weekly routines. “Chuck and I got into this big discussion, ‘What’s more important: the package or the product?,’” said Pat Rooney. “The league handled everything. You didn’t have much say about it. But you know, just back and forth.”
Bud Grant’s Vikings had been mauled twice—in Super Bowl IV against Kansas City and in Super Bowl VIII against Miami—but they returned to New Orleans intent on running the football against as formidable a defense as they’d ever faced.
It poured down rain in the gray New Orleans morning, and the wind chill made it feel like it was in the low 20s. Prior to the game, equipment manager Tony Parisi was fitting the players for new shoes that he’d gotten from Canada, with spiral cleats. When Dwight White barged into the door of the locker room, his Steelers teammates let out a rousing cheer. He’d lost nearly twenty pounds in the hospital, but he was determined to play.
The players weren’t expecting a rousing speech from their coach, and they didn’t get one. “Play the way you’ve been coached,” Chuck said. “You’re going to have a good time.” After the build-up and the preparation, he had the team’s attention and could have said more. But there was nothing left to say, so he turned and the Steelers headed out for the field.
In the tunnel, before pregame introductions—starters on the Vikings’ offense and the Steelers’ defense were being introduced individually—Glen Edwards spied his old Florida A&M teammate, Vikings’ tackle Charles Goodrum, and shouted a greeting. Goodrum looked nervously over to Edwards and didn’t respond. Finally Edwards went over to slap hands and wish Goodrum good luck. But Vikings’ coach Bud Grant had forbade his players to even speak to the Steelers. Agitated and emboldened, Edwards said, loud enough for everyone in the tunnel to hear, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. Y’all better strap it on, motherfuckers, ’cause you’re about to get your asses whipped!” Once again, the Steelers’ defense would deliver on a guarantee from a member of their defense.
The Vikings had gained 164 yards on the ground against the Rams in the NFC Championship Game, and they’d seen the film of the Steelers using the Stunt 4–3 against Oakland. But as in the earlier Super Bowls, they never adapted. Aging center Mick Tinglehoff was overmatched against Greene to begin with, but he had no chance with Greene tilted at an angle, knifing forward at the snap. “The way [Greene] played, he basically charged into the ‘V’ in the neck of the center in such manner so the center could not reach him if it was a strong-side play,” said Bud Carson. “If you weren’t prepared for it, it made the guard totally ineffective.”
The first half had a stultifying feel, to match the cold. The Steelers drove across the 50 twice, close enough for two field-goal attempts, but the elfin Gerela pulled one field goal wide, and then Walden, his holder, bobbled the snap on another attempt. When Fran Tarkenton mishandled a handoff to the Vikings Dave Osborn, the ball squirted free, was accidentally kicked back toward the end zone, where the Vikings’ quarterback scrambled on top of it, just in time to be touched down for a safety.
In the final two minutes of the half, Pittsburgh leading 2–0, Edwards’ pregame words would prove prophetic. The Vikings were driving, nearing the end zone, when Tarkenton threw to John Gilliam, coming across the middle. Edwards hit Gilliam high with a nasty shot—a pair of forearms to Gilliam’s facemask—sending the Vikings’ receiver backward and the football squirting back into the air, where Blount made the interception. The teams got to halftime with the score still 2–0.
Bradshaw was unabashed at halftime. “We’re whipping their asses off and still ain’t got but two points!,” he said. Mansfield allowed that two points just might be enough. Chuck spoke to Bradshaw about finding tight end Larry Brown more often.
The second half began with more special teams calamities, Gerela slipping on the wet turf during the kickoff, which squibbed in and out of the hands of the Vikings’ fullback Bill Brown, before the Steelers’ Marv Kellum recovered. Harris’s outside run to the left, behind a stellar block from pulling right guard Gerry Mullins, put the Steelers up 9–0.
The Vikings were completely toothless, their vanilla offensive schemes easily stifled by the defense. Russell had studied their tendencies so well—and could see that they were stubbornly sticking with them—that he would yell up to Holmes and White, “Hey, it’s gonna be 17 straight! Play it . . . left hand, left shoulder, Fats.”
That’s where the score stayed until another special teams miscue, Minnesota’s Matt Blair breaking free to block Walden’s punt, resulting in the Vikings’ Terry Brown recovering in the end zone to make the score 9–6 (though the Vikings then failed to convert the extra point). With ten minutes left in the fourth quarter, and the entire season on the line, the ball was in the hands of the Steelers and Terry Bradshaw.
He’d grown a bristly playoff beard, and the facial hair gave him an aspect of maturity. Five years of playing under Chuck had given him a toughness; if he was not quite assured, he possessed a deeper understanding of his role. Now, he expertly mixed the runs to Harris and Bleier with key passes—including third-down throws to Larry Brown for 30 yards and a 6-yard toss to Bleier on third-and-five. On third and goal from the 4, the Steelers called time out. A touchdown would nearly seal the game. Being held to a field goal would leave Pittsburgh vulnerable to a late Vikings’ drive.
On the sidelines, Bradshaw deferred to his coach. “What do you want to run?,” he asked.
“Goal line three thirty-three,” said Chuck. It was a run-pass option, meant to give Bradshaw time to make his decision and punish the Vikings if they bunched up for another inside run.
Chuck watched quietly as Bradshaw returned to the field, called the play, rolled out to elude the rush, and found Larry Brown open in the end zone. The pass was sharp and accurate and gave the Steelers a 10-point lead that, with the way the defense was playing, seemed insurmountable. Wagner intercepted Fran Tarkenton on the Vikings’ next play, and the celebration on the sidelines soon began.
Joe Greene had dominated the game, made an interception and recovered a fumble, but Franco Harris won the MVP for his then-record 158 rushing yards. Now Greene and Harris lifted Chuck up in their arms—not quite to their shoulders—and carried him off the field. Roy Blount Jr. had returned to spend time with the Steelers for the game and later wrote about “the winning smile on Noll’s face. I had never seen Noll’s mouth so wide open. It was as though the Dragon Lady had gone all soft around the eyes and said, ‘Oh, baby.’”
In the commotion of the locker room after the game, the team and the commissioner celebrated Art Rooney, as the Chief—his ever-present cigar lodged firmly in his jaw—accepted the Super Bowl trophy. Chuck mostly stayed out of camera range. “Chuck never wanted to be in the front row,” said Jack Ham.
Then came the congratulations, the press interviews, the return to the hotel room, and the handshake with Marianne.
All through the scenes of celebration, Chuck’s smile was genuine. Only the words were forced. Even that night, at the Steelers’ victory party, he was still not able to articulate the emotional weight of the accomplishment. “I remember going into his room that night,” said Andy Russell. “I don’t know if a number of us decided to congratulate him. And he was like, ‘Okay, guys. This is why we work. This is why we pay the price, blah, blah, blah.’ He wasn’t one of those guys who was gonna run around the hallways, all excited.”
“It was one of my early lessons,” said Chris Noll. “My father liked a good party, a small one, at home. But Super Bowls, he was always kind of . . . he cares about the doing and once the doing is over it is a huge letdown. Even though you won.”
Chuck wasn’t totally oblivious to the emotion. Of the last drive, he said of his team, “You could see it in their eyes; we were going to be number one.”
On NBC’s Super Bowl postgame broadcast, Curt Gowdy was attempting to put the win in perspective. “They’re still a very young team,” said Gowdy. “I would say their best years are still ahead of them. A team that may not have reached its peak, and their future opponents are going to have some trouble.”
With several decades of hindsight, the chaotic circumstances in which the Steelers won the Super Bowl in the 1974 season remain unprecedented. There have been a scattered few instances in which a future Super Bowl champ changed quarterbacks during the season (Washington in 1987; Baltimore in 2000). For the state of constant flux, the closest analog may have been the 1969 Kansas City Chiefs, who began the year with Len Dawson, replaced him with Jacky Lee when he was injured, replaced him with Mike Livingston when Lee was injured, then went back to Dawson—then Livingston again after Dawson was reinjured—then back to Dawson for the end of the regular season and the playoffs. But that shuffling was all based on the future Hall of Famer Dawson’s gimpy knee. The ’74 Steelers were in a different realm with three different quarterbacks starting, and all three being benched for poor performance at one time or another during the season. The tinkering, if it had ended in anything other than a Super Bowl title, would have left Chuck exposed to charges of indecisiveness or over-coaching.
Perhaps the re-jiggering really did scar Bradshaw for the rest of his career, as he would argue in later years. But it’s equally likely that the insistence on accountability—that no quarterback would keep the job if he didn’t perform—revealed the true character of each quarterback. Hanratty, though well-liked by his teammates, didn’t have the arm for the job. Gilliam, brilliant, mercurial, in a difficult role with unseen pressures, ultimately buckled (and may have started to buckle before he lost the starting job). Bradshaw—the eternal insecure child, the headstrong, naive country boy who’d spent too many Sundays after awful performances with his head on the steering wheel of his car in the parking lot, sobbing in frustration—kept with it, kept trying, kept studying. He worked to become the quarterback Chuck wanted him to be. Eventually, in 1974, he found the form to lead the Steelers to the title.
The day after the game, back in Pittsburgh, 120,000 revelers gathered in the Golden Triangle despite 26-degree temperatures and twelve-mile-per-hour winds—to toast the champions. In the glow of their victory, it was the team leader Greene who made the definitive statement about the Steelers’ collective mind-set going into the game. “The Man handled it so perfectly, just like he always does,” he said of Chuck. “He told us to stay cool and enjoy it. Almost everybody took the whole week in just that mood, and we had a great time.”
A few weeks after the Super Bowl, the phone rang at the Noll home. After Marianne answered, Chuck said, “Hi!” Rather than his usual businesslike tone on the phone, he sounded playful, mischievous.
She knew instantly something was afoot.
“Lord . . . what have you done?”
“If I buy this plane, this man says he’ll teach me how to fly it.”
It was a Beechcraft Bonanza, known colloquially in the flying community as “The Doctor-Killer,” due to its unusual controls (doctors had the means to afford the plane but often not the time to learn how to handle its peculiar flying style).
Chuck loved it. He started building up hours in the midst of the miserable winter weather of 1975. (“Some people fly only when it’s nice,” said Marianne. “But then you never learn how to deal with difficulties.”) Soon he was taking Marianne and Chris out for touch-and-goes and practiced stalls. Others were more circumspect. Lionel Taylor soon refused to ride with Chuck (“No small planes for me,” he said; “if I’m going down, I want it to be on TWA”).
Chuck had rewarded himself and spent that off-season—and several to follow—lost in his new passion. Flying was both a practical and an artistic pursuit. But on a more pragmatic level, it was one of the dwindling few places where he could truly get away.
The month of June became the getaway, the re-set. At their condo on Sanibel Island, the Nolls would unwind, usually with one or more of the Deininger nephews.
It was also when Chuck spent the most time with Chris. They would snorkel off the coast of Sanibel, but soon Chuck took Chris and Kenny down to the Florida Keys for scuba diving, going eighty feet down to augment Chris’s seashell collection.
“He did a lot of scuba diving when I was in high school, but that was my passion and he just did it to be with us,” said Chris. “We all learned and became certified. He would fly me down in his plane just because I loved it. He got excited by it, too. Diving, birds, those were all kind of family things that weren’t his passion, but was a way for the family to do things.”
That summer, on vacation in Florida, the Nolls were walking into a morning Mass when a stranger walked up and said, “Chuck, you look great, you lost some weight!”
Marianne’s thin smile matched Chuck’s, while the seventeen-year-old Chris stood in shock.
“I was just kind of like, Oh, God,” Chris said. “I remember thinking, ‘We are public now.’ I was offended, but at the same time stunned. And then you started seeing how people recognized him all the time. It was harder to go to the store. But in terms of him and what we did—it didn’t change anything.”
Or perhaps it did. Even the most rudimentary errands—trips to the barbershop and to fill the car with gas—were now obstacle courses of adoring fans. People remained polite, but they were more invasive, more insistent, and there were a lot more of them.
For his part, Chuck strived to stay out of the public eye. He hadn’t done a TV show in years, and for the most part avoided any endorsement offers. “He did one, for Pittsburgh National Bank,” said Chris. “He did it as a personal favor for a guy. The ad said, ‘Save $500, get this free shirt, and you’ll look good, too.’ It showed him wearing the shirt, smiling, with his arms folded in front of a blackboard that had C-15T diagramed on it, a tackle trap. He thought it was going to be a one-shot deal, a newspaper ad, but they put it on billboards all over town, one of them just as you enter the Fort Pitt tunnel. He had to see it every day when he drove to work, and every time he passed it he groaned.”
Even going out became a problem. “In the first couple of years, there wasn’t an issue there,” said Marianne. “People weren’t that interested in the Steelers. And then it got crazy. But the funny thing is, everybody will know he is in the room or at the airport or something. But nobody comes over until one person does. Then you are descended upon.” Chuck was unvaryingly gracious, but uncomfortable, with the constant public attention.
“Pittsburgh has this mentality of ownership,” said Pat Rooney. “You’re the head coach and you won and now you’re ours. I think they enjoyed it but I think they were a very reserved, very quiet couple. I think up to a point it was okay. But they sure were not prepared for it.”