twenty-two

A MAN ALONE

As the 1990 training camp began, Chuck was becoming an increasingly solitary figure. Dungy had been gone for a year, and Tom Moore left following the ’89 season, having taken the title assistant head coach/offensive coordinator in Minnesota, to work for his old coach, Jerry Burns, who’d recruited him to play at Iowa.

Both Dungy’s and Moore’s football credentials were solid—as would become even more apparent in later years. But the greatest loss to Chuck wasn’t merely strategic. He’d lost two allies but also two important liaisons to the players. Dungy was young (he’d been retired from playing for less than a decade) but preternaturally able to find common ground with players. Moore was in his fifties and had looked grizzled and worn for more than a decade. But he had served as a crucial conduit for Chuck to the offensive players, especially the quarterbacks.

The men who succeeded Dungy and Moore—Rod Rust (in 1989) and now Dave Brazil on defense, Joe Walton on offense—were capable. But they couldn’t match the rapport with the players or with Chuck that their predecessors possessed. Chuck had always been his own man. But he was becoming a man alone.

In the spring of 1990, Rust left to take the head coach’s job in New England, and Chuck moved Dave Brazil up to the defensive coordinator position. To replace Brazil at linebackers coach, Chuck went with the coach who’d been pressing hardest for an opportunity, a Cal-Berkeley assistant named Dennis Creehan, whom Chuck had considered for a special teams coaching position a year earlier. The face-to-face interview was short. Chuck flew him in, watched some film, and asked him to explain his defensive philosophies, then offered him the job.

The press release was sent out a day later.

It was Joe Gordon who’d first gotten word that something was amiss. Creehan had been at Cal the previous season, but since January he’d been the head coach at the Division II school San Francisco State, working on recruiting, installing a new offense, and meeting with boosters. He either never told Chuck that he’d taken the new job or, as Creehan later claimed, mentioned it in passing at a meeting with Chuck in January. He didn’t mention it in March when he interviewed with Chuck in Pittsburgh. And he didn’t mention it when he sent Chuck a note on Cal stationery a few weeks earlier. But those who knew Chuck best, and knew how much he disliked the interviewing process, correctly inferred that Chuck had never spoken to anyone at Cal to check Creehan’s references.

“He really didn’t like interviewing new guys,” said one of his assistants.

It was embarrassing for Chuck and the Steelers, who fired Creehan the next day, and of course to Creehan—“You’ve ruined my career and completely humiliated my family,” Creehan told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Ed Bouchette. But the reason for the misunderstanding, in the end, was that Chuck hadn’t done due diligence.

In the wake of Creehan’s quick exit, Chuck hired Pitt linebackers coach Bob Valesente.

There was a growing sense that Chuck was no longer invulnerable. Dan Rooney still supported him, but they didn’t dine every Sunday night as they once had. Maybe that had nothing to do with the increased amount of criticism of Chuck inside and outside Three Rivers, but the increased criticism came nonetheless.

“There was a lot of second-guessing that went on after the games,” said one assistant. “‘You should have done this,’ or ‘you should have done that,’ which there never was until then. There was pressure being applied from the outside; I don’t want to say it was [Dick] Haley and it was Tom Donahoe, whoever it was—there was pressure.”

That tension would define Chuck’s last years with the Steelers.

Training camp remained the same. Forty-five minutes of blocking and tackling. Approach, contact, fit, follow through. “I would see him go from position to position,” said the offensive line coach Jack Henry. “He would never take over a drill or anything. He wouldn’t demean the coaches that way, but he would say things that would be so intrinsic to what was being done that it was obvious that he had studied their playbook, he had been to the meetings, he had been a part of the decisions that have been made in terms of how we do things.”

By then, Chuck was more distant, more befitting an eminence, “The Emperor,” as Steelers’ radio broadcaster Myron Cope had dubbed him. The players knew him less intimately than the players in the ’70s had—there were more of them, more coaches between them, and more support staff throughout the game—but still enough to get a sense of his intellect.

“He was the smartest guy in the room,” said Tunch Ilkin. “No matter what you conversed about, you thought Chuck knew more about it than you did. He was a walking textbook. He loved to teach. We were getting ready to play the Raiders on Monday night, and I forgot exactly how the story went but it was something like, ‘The Spartans were so committed to victory that when they got to Corinth, they burned their own ships, so the only way they could return home was victorious, on Corinthian ships.’ And he said, ‘That’s how committed we have to be.’ I remember, we were all just sitting there. We had a guy, I forget his name, but he says, ‘Does that mean we’re going to blow up our plane when we get to Oakland?’”

Yet there were still moments when he dazzled the people around him.

In the preseason of 1990, dining at the William Penn Hotel before a home game, assistants Joe Greene and John Fox were talking about the new movie Total Recall, the futuristic thriller in which a special formula is invented that allows scientists to inject specific memories and impressions into the brain.

Greene and Fox were musing about the amazing possibilities of injecting into the mind an entirely new and different point of view. At which point Chuck, who’d seemed wholly oblivious to their conversation, leaned over toward them and said, “They’ve had that around for hundreds of years.”

Greene and Fox looked at each other and then back at Chuck.

“It’s called reading books.”

In Tom Moore’s place would come Joe Walton, the gruff, opinionated former head coach of the Jets, who was raised in Pittsburgh and whose father, Frank “Tiger” Walton, had played in the NFL for the Redskins. Joe Walton had ridden his success as offensive coordinator of the Redskins to a head-coaching job, and while he was fired after seven seasons coaching the Jets at the end of 1989, he still was regarded as one of the game’s bright offensive minds.

Chuck, embattled for his stodgy offense—even as the Steelers were employing the shotgun and moving to within one step of the AFC Championship Game, they gained fewer yards offensively than any team in the NFL—was willing to turn the reins over to Walton, in much the same way he’d turned the defense over to Carson, Perles, Widenhofer, and Dungy through the years.

This led to a difficult transition period for the offensive players. The Walton offensive playbook was a compendium of beautiful vectors and angles, a series of carefully drawn route trees and progressions. But while the photocopies were crisp and clean, the language was completely different, and the logic of the system was not intuitive.

In the modern nomenclature of football, the playbook featured an X receiver (the split end), a Y receiver (the tight end), and a Z receiver (the flanker). In Walton’s system, any pre-snap shift or motion that found one receiver crossing the other had the identity of the receivers changing.

“All of a sudden, you went from being the Z to being the Y, and you had to know what the Y was doing now, even though you were normally a Z,” said one assistant. “It was very confusing to them.”

“Listen, if he would call zoom motion, there is probably four or five guys that shit their pants in the huddle,” said Merril Hoge, “because that means that one guy starts on one side of the field and goes all the way across, so every time somebody crosses your face, you are changing, but now you also have got to know the other guy. It was too gosh dang complicated.”

“Joe Walton comes in and it is a totally different offense, and the players were not buying into it,” said Jack Henry. “Chuck was phenomenal. He was much more open to Joe’s system than what the players were, because they had known this system forever.”

Chuck’s offensive philosophy, distilled into one of his own mantras, was “wear down the opponent’s will to win by outhitting your opponent over the first three quarters, and in the fourth quarter, impose your will on the opponent.” Contrasting that elemental outlook, Walton relied on misdirection and complexity, then hoped to capitalize on a defense’s confusion. (In truth, the best offenses combined both physical play and misdirection, but Chuck’s view strongly tended toward the former, Walton’s the latter.)

There was a near mutiny in training camp, as the players resisted the entirely new nomenclature of the Walton system.

The Steelers did not score an offensive touchdown in any of their first four games in the regular season.

“The only thing our offense led the league in that year was delay of game penalties,” said one coach.

“I felt sorry for Joe,” said Brister.

After a play called by Walton and relayed by Louis Lipps was garbled upon reaching Brister in the huddle, the confusion prompted Brister’s immortal line: “By the time it got from Joe, to Louie, to me down on the field, it was just a damn lie.”

“Players were literally reciting the alphabet as they were going in motion,” said Mularkey, as they tried to keep their assignments straight. Chuck defended Walton and his methods, and the team did eventually integrate the elements of Walton’s system (although the terminology and the playbook were simplified by the end of the season).

At times, Brister would get so frustrated in the huddle, he’d just tell his teammates, “Screw it—let’s call a Tom Moore play.”

Against New Orleans in December, Brister called a play that Merril Hoge didn’t immediately recognize. As they were coming up to the line of scrimmage, Hoge asked for his assignment. Brister, in his cajun drawl, ordered him into the slot.

Tim Worley, taking a step up from behind Brister, said, “Hey, Bub—what’s it on?”

Brister turned around and loudly proclaimed, “It’s two, motherfucker!”

As the Saints All-Pro linebacker trio of Sam Mills, Pat Swilling, and Rickey Jackson looked on in wonder, Hoge improvised a play where he ran out into the flat. Brister found him for a 22-yard gain.

Two days later, when the Steelers’ offense reported to watch the game films, they came to the play, and Walton barked, “Turn the lights on.”

Someone turned on the lights.

“What the hell is this?,” said Walton. “This isn’t my offense! What are you guys doing out there?”

Later on, with running back coach Dick Hoak, Hoge protested, “Dick, that was the best play of the game.”

“Just ignore him,” said Hoak. “Forget it.”

For all the dissension, the Steelers wound up improving slightly (from twenty-fourth to twentieth in scoring, and from twenty-eighth to twenty-fourth in total yards), and Brister had arguably his best season, throwing a career-high twenty touchdown passes.

Pittsburgh was 9–6 and still alive for a playoff berth heading into the final game at Houston, but this time the magic couldn’t be summoned, and they couldn’t contain Moon and the Oilers’ receivers. After the 34–14 loss, Chuck was very matter-of-fact.

“Guys,” he said to a quiet locker room. “It ends very quickly, and that is what we are all feeling right now. It’s over.”

In the following months, little in the way of specifics about his coaching future was discussed between Chuck and Marianne. Nothing was formally decided. But sometimes, couples reach an understanding wordlessly. At some point in the 1991 off-season, Marianne allowed herself to hope that this might be the last combine, the last draft, the last minicamp, the last training camp.

The off-season was marked by a project that Chuck had first explored during the 1990 season, after Brister was sidelined with a concussion. Chuck spoke to the Steelers’ staff neurosurgeon, Dr. Joe Maroon, a diminutive, wiry triathlete who’d played football at Indiana, and who advised him that Brister should sit out two weeks.

Chuck was nonplussed, but also curious, to know the rationale for the two-week recovery period. It was from a set of guidelines devised by a panel of experts, Maroon among them.

“He looks good to me,” said Chuck. “He knows his plays. He’s very active and has no complaints. If you want me to keep an athlete from playing football, you have to give me objective data, not your opinion or some specious guidelines.”

The conversation would stick with Maroon, who subsequently asked a colleague to find the objective data that Chuck was seeking, only to discover that hardly any such data existed. Little formal research had been done on the recovery time of football players suffering concussions.

Maroon told Chuck—and Dan Rooney—that if they wanted to have objective data, they needed to spend time doing baseline tests for all the players. Chuck spent part of the off-season in meetings with Maroon, devising the baseline protocol for head injuries. (Later, Maroon and his colleague, Dr. Michael Lovell, would develop the IMPACT—Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing—protocol for head injuries, which would become standard operating procedure throughout professional and collegiate football.)

The 1991 preseason began with plenty of ugliness. Terry Long, the stalwart offensive lineman, tested positive for steroids. Upset with the revelation, he later attempted suicide. Tim Worley, the first-round draft choice who was viewed by some in Pittsburgh as the second coming of Franco Harris, tested positive for cocaine and, like Long, was suspended by the NFL.

The season itself was a cascade of injuries and disappointment. Brister could only start eight games (Pittsburgh won five of them), due to injury, with second-year quarterback Neil O’Donnell starting the other eight.

As the losses mounted, the criticism intensified. With the team standing at 3–6, Donahoe, newly named Director of Football Operations, said, “This is not a team with mediocre talent,” a comment that could only be read as a criticism of the coaching.

At home, Chuck seemed increasingly alienated. Not by the players’ dress or manner or effort but by their priorities. “He said he couldn’t motivate them,” said Joanne. “Their reasons for being there were different than what he could handle.”

One gray October evening in the midst of the losing streak, Chuck came home earlier than usual, and walked up the stairs into the kitchen. Marianne was cooking, but dinner was not quite ready. Chuck put his briefcase down. There, sitting in the kitchen, in a quiet, level voice, he told her, “We have a Super Bowl team. I’m just too tired.”

They had broached the topic before. He knew exactly how much Marianne wanted him to leave it behind. And she knew it was going to have to be his idea. The new deal, signed after the ’88 season, called for a lifetime contract with the Steelers, so the financial security that he’d always wanted was there. Nothing more was said. But from that point, Marianne felt certain that Chuck was coaching his last season.

In the final months of the ’91 season, there were noticeably fewer “back to basics” speeches, and fewer instances of Chuck dropping into position meetings to deliver a coaching point. “You know, maybe those were signs that he was getting tired and losing some of his energy, or maybe he found out the assistant coaches didn’t like it,” said Joe Greene. “I don’t know. But he always seemed so within himself. He was always, to me, the same. He would tell a joke that you couldn’t find the punch line. But he was famous for that.”

Some of the younger players—used to coaches who were less remote, more involved—found Chuck not only intimidating but also at times unfeeling. They had to adjust to all the hitting during regular-season practices. By the early ’90s, most teams tapered off their physical practices through the course of the season. But the Steelers still practiced in full pads three days a week throughout the season.

“He seemed distant to me because, the guys in the locker room, we felt like Chuck didn’t care for us because we felt like he was just a businessman,” said second-year running back Barry Foster. “There was a lot of talk about Chuck not caring about the players.”

Dick Hoak had played for Chuck for one season and coached for him for twenty-one seasons. The quiet, loyal assistant wasn’t particularly close to Chuck—they’d never been out alone socially. But he saw Chuck’s demeanor changing. Hoak left Three Rivers one night, made the long drive to his home in Greenburg, and told his wife, Lynn, “He’s not coming back next year.”

“He wasn’t paying attention,” said Hoak. “He wasn’t getting upset over things he used to get upset over. Like somebody making a mistake. At one time, he would have been, ‘Why did this happen?’ But by then, you might start telling him and he’d just go, ‘Ah, okay.’ He still recognized it, but he wasn’t as strict about what you do about it. He just let some of it go, whereas when we were doing all of this, none of that was let go, you know.”

By December, some of the veterans got a sense that Chuck was different in a different way.

“I can’t tell you that there was anything that actually happened,” said Merril Hoge. “I could sense it in his body language with things. How he walked down the hall, the things he used to say. Or he would come in and see somebody doing something, and Chuck would look at them, and then they would start working. And those things stopped.”

There were rumors heading into the final game of the season—at home against the Browns—that Chuck was retiring, but nothing solid to go on.

On the big scoreboard screen above the Three Rivers Field, the Steelers had been flashing Christmas greetings from players and team personnel. Early in the fourth quarter, a picture of Chuck and Marianne appeared, with the message, “Happy Holidays from Chuck and Marianne Noll.”

The cheering started slowly, among the 47,070 in attendance, then built to a standing ovation and a crescendo of noise. Chuck glanced up at the scoreboard and must have understood what the roars meant, but he didn’t acknowledge it—just another distraction from the game.

After the 17–10 win on December 22, Ilkin met with the other co-captains, Bryan Hinkle and David Little. “I am going to give this one to Chuck,” Ilkin said.

Raising the football in the middle of the locker room, Ilkin said, “This one is for our coach.”

Chuck had suggested giving it to Ricky Shelton, who’d returned an interception for a touchdown. But Ilkin and the players were adamant.

“Thank you,” said Chuck at last. “It means a lot.” There was sustained applause in the locker room, but no word on Chuck’s plans.

The following days took on a surreal tone at the Noll household. Chuck had not said the words out loud, but Marianne, Chris and Linda, Joanne and Glenn all expected him to retire. They were all wearing their Steelers gear over the holidays, but there was a pregnant silence over his pending decision.

Finally, on Thursday morning, December 26, he got up and headed to Three Rivers. Chuck went in that morning and sat down with Dan Rooney.

“I think it’s time,” he said, “for me to get on with my life’s work.”

Rooney had been preparing to discuss staff changes with Chuck. But now, faced with the news, he could only express sorrow and gratitude. There was little reminiscing, only a quick discussion of the logistics, mutual thank yous, and a handshake.

Chuck went back to his office, and called Pam Morocco, his secretary, at home, to give her the news. Chuck placed calls to the members of his coaching staff, each of them short and direct.

Interviewed later that day by the Post-Gazette’s columnist Ron Cook, Morocco said, “You don’t have any idea how hard this is for him. People seem to think he’s some cold piece of stone with no feelings. But he cares. He’s a very emotional man. He has feelings. Believe me, he has feelings.”

Composing himself after sharing the news with Morocco, the pressure seemed to break. As he walked out to inform the rest of his colleagues, he was calmer. He went to the trainer’s room. Ralph Berlin started to brief him on injured tight end Bennie Cunningham’s condition, but Chuck looked at him, then walked up and put his arm around Berlin. “I am going to retire,” he said. “Thank you.”

There was nothing else. “He turned around,” said Berlin, “and walked out and had the press conference and he retired. That was as close I had to having a conversation with him.”

In the minutes before the press conference, Chuck walked down the hallway again, past the receptionist, over to the administrative side to get a cup of coffee. The veteran writer Ed Bouchette of the Post-Gazette was there, along with Bob Labriola of the house organ Steelers Digest, the wizened exec Buff Boston, maybe one or two others. They discussed holiday plans and the likely outcome of the upcoming New Hampshire primary, by then just five weeks away. Finally, after a few minutes, Joe Gordon emerged in the hallway.

“Chuck,” he said. “It’s time.”

Dan Rooney, looking stricken, opened the press conference by relating his wife’s statement that if they ever needed someone to raise their children, they’d choose Chuck Noll.

Surrounded by the sentimentality of the occasion, Chuck strained to remain matter of fact. Asked how he wanted to be remembered, he quoted Emerson: “Your actions speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” Then he added, “And I’d like to keep it that way.”

As the word filtered in—phone calls, radio broadcasts, all of Pittsburgh’s TV stations cutting into the press conference—the players and the city absorbed the news. “It wasn’t a surprise, yet it was a shock, if that makes any sense,” said Ilkin.

Chuck had just completed his thirty-ninth consecutive fall in professional football. Many had tried to leave and been dragged back, a few others crawled back. But when Chuck packed up his few belongings from his office at Three Rivers, he knew that his work was done.

He wasn’t simply retiring. He was ready to get away from it all. Thirty-five years into his marriage, he was finally going to enjoy an extended spell with his wife, the timing of which would not be defined by the rhythms of the football season. Marianne, calm and reserved through the final weeks of the season, had been beaming by Christmas. The hard part was over.

Or so it seemed.