Dan Rooney (22 page)

That very night, a plane carrying Pirates' great Roberto Clemente, on a humanitarian mission to Managua, Nicaragua, crashed into the ocean. The next day, New Years Day 1973, the city of Pittsburgh mourned.

 

 

The 1973 season began with high expectations. Steelers fans bought season tickets in record numbers. In fact, the Steelers have sold out every home game since the Immaculate Reception in 1972. And it wasn't just Pittsburgh that was captivated by the Steelers story.
Sports Illustrated
commissioned award-winning writer Roy Blount Jr. to write a book about our team. While doing the research for
About
Three Bricks Shy of a Load,
Blount embedded himself with the team—he lived, ate, slept, and loafed with the players, in camp and on the road.

Noll didn't like this one bit. Blount would be a fox in the hen house, a threat to Noll's code of secrecy: don't reveal anything—player health, training techniques, football philosophy, or personnel problems—not to other teams, the press, or the fans. Any intelligence might be used by another team to gain an advantage. In this league, coaches believe even a slight edge can mean the difference between winning and losing.

I believed if we were careful and did not speak out of turn, Blount's presence might contribute to the team's closeness. This proved to be the case, as some veteran players later told me.

Feelings for the team ran so high that even pessimistic Pittsburghers allowed themselves to believe this could be the year the Steelers would go all the way to the Super Bowl.

But 1973 would not be our year.

Injuries and inconsistent quarterbacking plagued the team. Frenchy Fuqua injured his shoulder, and Joe Greene was hospitalized with a bad back. Wide receiver Frank Lewis, offensive tackle Gordon Gravelle, and guard/center Jim Clack were all out of action for a part of the season. Even more troubling was the quarterback situation. Bradshaw had proven himself in 1972 but threw too many interceptions. Noll worried Bradshaw wasn't taking his job seriously enough. His inattention drove Chuck crazy. Terry would say, “Just give me the ball and let's go play.” Then Bradshaw hurt his shoulder and was out four weeks. Noll turned to Hanratty and Joe Gilliam. Hanratty couldn't shake the stigma of his 1969 rookie season, when the team went 1-13. He was smart and seemed to understand what Noll wanted of him, but he was quickly eclipsed when Bradshaw came to Pittsburgh as the number-one draft pick in 1970. When Hanratty saw he wasn't going to play, he lost his focus and took to clowning around
in team meetings. Gilliam, from Tennessee State, came on board in 1972. Intense, focused, almost combative with Noll, he questioned everything.

Who would lead the team? Although Hanratty had a stellar career at Notre Dame—he'd been on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
and
Time
—the players just didn't rally around him. Gilliam, a gifted passer, wanted to throw every play, much to Noll's frustration. Bradshaw had tremendous talent. If he could mature and avoid making mistakes, the players would support him. While Noll tried to figure out which quarterback should have the job, Greene saw the potential in the athletic and affable Bradshaw. Greene's influence with the other players cannot be overestimated. He had emerged as a team leader, and when he took Bradshaw under his wing it seemed clear to everyone who our quarterback would be.

Outside the Steelers organization there was much speculation. Nothing, outside of the weather, concerned Pittsburghers more than the Steelers quarterback controversy. Heated debate could be overheard on every street corner wherever more than one Steelers fan congregated. The newspapers weighed in. The
Courier
touted Gilliam's strong arm. The
Pittsburgh Press
defended Bradshaw, the “Blond Bomber,” against charges that he was really the “Bayou Bumpkin” and too dumb to call plays and lead a team. Other papers lauded Hanratty's intelligence and ability.

The San Diego Chargers had the audacity to ask me whether we might like to trade for Johnny Unitas. Johnny, then forty years old, had been let go by the Colts and signed by the Chargers a year earlier. His arm was long gone and his knees were shot—a sad end to a brilliant career. With no disrespect to Johnny, I told them, “No thanks, we're happy with the guys we have.”

Although the Steelers finished with a 10-4 record, we came in second in our division. That qualified us for a wild-card game against the Western Division champion Raiders, who we had beaten earlier in
the regular season. In that game—played without Terry Bradshaw—Oakland hammered us statistically, but with toughness and big plays by the defense we found a way to win, 17-9. Mike Wagner recovered a fumble, and Mel Blount, Glen Edwards, and Dwight White combined for four interceptions. But the playoff game was a different story. The Raiders embarrassed us in Oakland, 33-14, and ended our Super Bowl hopes for 1973.

 

 

The 1974 draft made history. Since the draft was first instituted in 1936, never has one team drafted so many Hall of Famers. That year the Steelers picked Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth, and Mike Webster. My brother Art, Bill Nunn, and Dick Haley, along with Chuck Noll, had done their homework. They knew which players they wanted and had developed a strategy to get them. But I'll be the first to admit, a little bit of luck figured in our success.

We took Lynn Swann in the first round, an amazing, acrobatic wide receiver from the University of Southern California. We believed Swann could outrun or outjump any defensive back matched up against him—just the kind of talented individual who could help complete our passing attack. We had the throwers, now we needed the catchers.

Noll wanted John Stallworth for his second-round pick. Bill Nunn had brought back excellent reports on this Alabama A&M wide receiver. But he convinced Noll that we could wait until the fourth round to get him because no other team had scouted him as thoroughly as we had. As was the custom back then, Nunn had traveled with the BLESTO scouts on their swing through the South, but the practice track was wet on the rainy day they timed Stallworth in the 40-yard dash. Nunn's intuition told him there was something special about this young man. The next day Nunn faked a bout of the flu and
told the other BLESTO scouts to go on without him. When they left, he didn't waste a minute. He got Stallworth on a dry track, put him through his paces, and got good times on him, much better than those recorded by the BLESTO guys the day before.

Later, when the BLESTO game film of Stallworth arrived at the Steelers office, it somehow got lost and never made it to the other clubs. I can't explain to this day whether this was deliberate or just a fortunate foul-up. We also got a break at the Senior Bowl—the college all-star game that's attended by droves of NFL scouts—when the coaches there played Stallworth at defensive back instead of wide receiver.

Noll was concerned about missing out on Stallworth, but he trusted Nunn's judgment. We'd wait on Stallworth until our next pick in round four (we had traded away our third-round choice to Oakland) and take Jack Lambert as our second-round pick. Lambert appeared too tall and thin to be a linebacker, but our scouts chanced to see him at Kent State. Art watched a practice that had been moved from a muddy field to a gravel parking lot. He saw this guy tackling full speed on the gravel, then calmly picking rock chips out of his knees and elbows as he hustled back to the huddle. He didn't have much meat on his bones but he used everything he had. We got Lambert as the forty-sixth pick of the draft.

Much to Noll's relief, we got Stallworth with one of our two picks in the fourth round—UCLA cornerback Jim Allen was the other—just as Nunn had predicted.

In the fifth round, we got a guy who proved to be the key to our offensive line, Mike Webster, a great, quick center from Wisconsin. He wasn't the biggest center around, but he was impossible to intimidate and knew how to utilize leverage to stop in their tracks guys fifty pounds heavier.

At first, not everyone saw the brilliance of this draft. The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
offered this opinion:

 

I guess sportswriters often know their stuff and sometimes get it right. This time they didn't understand our needs and didn't appreciate our draft strategy. Working together—the coaches and the scouts—we hit the jackpot in 1974.

Just when things seemed to be going well, the 1974 season began to unravel almost before it started. On July 3, 1974, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), founded in 1956, called a strike. With a list of fifty-seven grievances, about a quarter of the veteran players across the league refused to report to summer camp. The main issue seemed to be free agency. When a player's contract expired and he wanted to go to another team, the “Rozelle Rule,” in effect since 1963, mandated compensation—either in draft picks or cash—to the original club. This made free agency practically meaningless in the NFL. Few, if any, clubs wanted to pick up a veteran who might cost them draft picks. Between 1963 and 1974, only four players successfully moved to other clubs. The players' union wanted the league to allow “free agents” to sign with new teams without compensation to the original club. Most owners objected to doing business this way, fearing it would encourage raiding and ruin the competitive balance of the league, which we had achieved through the draft.

At St. Vincent on the first day of camp, we found a picket line. Bradshaw and other veterans would not cross the line. Our rookies
reported and so did some of our older players, who feared missing their opportunity to play in the National Football League. Joe Gilliam was in this latter category.

Now, when I say picket line I don't mean shouting people armed with clubs and bricks. This wasn't the Homestead Strike of 1892. No Pinkertons this time, just a bunch of athletes, some of them with signs, most of them with long hair and mustaches—this was the 1970s after all—loafing, talking, and not at all threatening. I asked the Steelers player representative, Rocky Bleier, to check with the union and see if I might talk to the team. Rocky said it was okay and that he would stand beside me. Together, we'd answer any questions the players might have. I think talking to them did some good.

Certainly, there were no hard feelings on either side. In some ways, it brought our team closer together. Joe Greene took a special interest in Terry Bradshaw during the strike, letting the other players know that as far as he was concerned, strike or no strike, Terry was the team's number-one quarterback. Greene also made sure Terry didn't get caught up in union politics and protected him from the media, which seemed determined to make a controversy out of the Steelers quarterback situation. Greene knew these distractions would hurt not only Terry but the team as well.

The strike continued well into August. On my first visit to the picket line I struck up a conversation with Joe Gilliam, who was about to cross. He said, “Mr. Rooney, I have to cross. It's my only chance to make this team. If I don't cross, I know I'm gone. This is my shot.”

I said, “You've got to do what you think is right.”

I talked to the other guys about some of the issues. The list kept growing (by the end of the strike it had grown to ninety-three grievances). I wanted them to know I respected their right to organize and negotiate for what they thought was fair. I didn't promise we could agree right now on everything, but I told them we'd make every effort to work things out.

By the time of our first preseason game, we had enough players to field a team. All our talented rookies—Swann, Lambert, Stallworth, Webster, and a free agent named Donnie Shell—were there, as was Joe Gilliam. Gilliam got in a lot of time throwing passes to Swann and Stallworth, and running plays with the first team. Usually, these guys wouldn't have gotten the full attention of the coaching staff, and certainly they wouldn't have gotten in much playing time. Lambert had been making weekly trips from his home in Ohio to Pittsburgh to study films and learn the playbook. He and the other rookies were highly motivated. In a way, the strike gave the rookies—and Gilliam—a real leg up on the players who stayed out. Gilliam had a very good preseason, and played a big role in our perfect 6-0 record. So when we started the season for real, Noll gave him the nod as quarterback, even though Bradshaw and the other veterans had ended their holdout.

 

 

On September 15, 1974, we played Baltimore in our season opener. Gilliam led us to a 30-0 victory, completing 17 of 31 passes for 257 yards, including a 54-yard touchdown bomb to Lynn Swann. Noll, of course, allowed his quarterbacks to call their own plays, but he wasn't pleased with Gilliam's reliance on the pass. But who could argue with a 30-0 win? For Noll the real story was the defense. This was the first shutout we'd had since December 1972, and our defense dominated the Colts, sacking the Baltimore quarterbacks six times.

Next we went to Mile High Stadium in Denver and battled the Broncos to a grueling 35-35 overtime tie—the first overtime tie in NFL history, because the league had just instituted the rule to play one 15-minute sudden-death overtime period in any regular season game that was tied after four quarters. The game lasted 3 hours 49 minutes with 160 plays. Unbelievably, Gilliam threw 50 passes, completing 31 for 348 yards and one touchdown.