The '63 Steelers (3 page)

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

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

As the start of the '63 regular season drew near, the players were voicing the kind of confidence their coach had expressed the year before. “This is it, buddy. This is the year we're going to win the championship for Art Rooney,” middle linebacker Myron Pottios declared the Tuesday before the opener at a welcome-home clambake for the team at Allegheny Elks No. 339.
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“We all have that feeling we're going to win,” Michaels said. “If we don't get jammed up with injuries again, we should cop the Eastern Division title.”
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Michaels played at Kentucky in the fifties under Blanton Collier, who succeeded Paul Brown as head coach of the Cleveland Browns after the '62 season and would guide them to the 1964 championship. Collier called Michaels “the toughest, most durable player I've ever coached.”
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That toughness was cultivated in Michaels's hometown of Swoyersville, Pennsylvania, a speck of a town between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, an area once rich in anthracite coal. Michaels grew up the youngest in a family
of seven boys and one girl. “We struggled at first,” he said. “If it wasn't for football, I have no idea what I'd have done.”
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Work in the mines, no doubt, like his father, Walter Majka, who came to America from Poland when he was nineteen and, according to legend, was so strong he could lift a loading car in the mines and carry it from one track to another. Lou's two oldest brothers also worked in the mines. Another son, Eddie, joined the Marines and was killed at Guadalcanal.
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A job in the mines was the inevitable destiny awaiting many of the young men in the region, and so a lifetime of working underground beckoned another resident of the coal country, Vladimir Palahniuk, the third of five children of Ukrainian immigrants raised in the Lattimer Mines section of Hazel Township. But the middle child had attributes other than a strong back, and he would use them to his advantage to escape the mines. “The deadliness of his deep-set stare, the shine of his high cheekbones and the honest witness of his dipsy-doodled nose, his tousled, lusterless black hair and belligerent muscular stance give him the edge on virtually all movie villains.”
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Vladimir tried working in the mines, dropped out of college, changed his name, and by 1954 was making $150,000 a year as Jack Palance.

Michaels's father died at age fifty-four, after working thirty-five years in the mines. Lou, bearing the Anglicized form of his father's surname, was eleven at the time. The son's best talents lay in tackling and blocking, but he performed well in the classroom as well, and after two years at the local high school, he enrolled in Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, where he became the school's first four-sport letterman. But there was no doubt where he was determined to go. “If I thought I could have made pro ball without going to college, I'd have signed with the pros right away,” he said.
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In 1954 he began his college career at Kentucky, where opponents “found it virtually useless to run plays at him.” The brother whom Lou revered, Walt Jr., then a linebacker with the Cleveland Browns, encouraged his younger sibling to expand his skills, so Lou developed into a punter with a 40-yard-plus average, a deep kickoff man, and “virtually an automatic machine on conversions.”
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Michaels became a two-time first-team All-America. “There's no question that Michaels must be regarded as one of the greatest football players to ever play in the Southeastern Conference,” wrote Baltimore columnist John Steadman.
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The Los Angeles Rams took Michaels in the first round, the fourth overall player selected, in the 1958 draft. In the second round they took Clendon Thomas, an All-America running back from Oklahoma. Rams management
grew disenchanted with Michaels because of his “playboy proclivities,” and once they drafted punter/kicker Danny Villanueva after the 1959 season,

Michaels's value to them declined. They traded him to Pittsburgh for offensive tackle Frank Varrichione, a former first-round pick, before the '61 season. “I was fascinated by the Hollywood atmosphere and I wanted to see and do everything so I could tell the people back home all about it,” Michaels said. “I was a pro football star and a marked man for bad publicity. It got so nothing I did was right.”
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Michaels resumed his dual role of playing defensive end and kicking in Pittsburgh, making fifteen of twenty-six field goals his first year before his record season in '62. And he fit right in with the long-standing tradition of Steelers players who savored their beer and whiskey and who would no sooner shy away from a fistfight than a Wild West sheriff would back off from a gun duel. He had a couple of scrapes in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, and in October 1964, after being traded to the Baltimore Colts, he drove his car into a telephone pole late one night. It wasn't quite as colorful an accident as Bobby Layne's legendary escapade driving into a parked street car, but it made big enough headlines.

The Steelers finished the 1963 preseason with a 3–2 record, including a 22–7 victory over Detroit in the penultimate game, the difference coming on five field goals by Michaels, and they concluded the exhibition season with a satisfying 16–7 win over archrival Cleveland, a team the
Post-Gazette
dismissed as “the once-powerful Browns.” The game was played in Canton, Ohio, the day after the Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted seventeen charter members into the new shrine. Michaels was good on three field goals, which made him nine of seventeen in preseason, with three of the misses coming from 50 yards. Two days later, in a staged photo typical of the newspaper era, the
Post-Gazette
ran a shot of Michaels kicking, with one member of the Steelerettes, the short-lived cheerleading crew, kneeling to hold the ball and three other Steelerettes behind the kicker. It wasn't Hollywood, but for Pittsburgh, it was good fun.
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There was growing reason for optimism both for Steelers fans and for Pittsburgh citizens. At the time, Pittsburgh could boast about being “the operating headquarters of the world's biggest steel maker,” and residents could take heart in a surge in economic activity in the tristate area during the year.
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People were working, and jobs seemed secure.

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

Politics, business, and entertainment rarely mixed with the world of sports in that era, so the newspaper series did not address the role of athletes in the black community. Art Rooney, owner of the Steelers franchise, in the quiet but unwavering fashion in which he conducted business, had been assimilating black players literally since the beginning of the franchise, and he championed their rights and worked to ensure their welfare. Ray Kemp, a black player who had grown up in the town of Cecil, Pennsylvania, worked in the mines, and starred at Duquesne University, accepted an invitation from Rooney to become a member of the Rooney franchise's first team, then called the Pirates, in 1933. There was only one other black player in the NFL at the time.
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In 1956, a former All-America at Michigan joined the Steelers after fulfilling a service commitment and began electrifying fans as a receiver and return man but fractured his pelvis and dislocated a hip in the sixth game, which would end his career. Rooney visited Lowell Perry during his thirteen-week hospital stay and told the rookie, “Lowell, as long as I own the Pittsburgh Steelers, you have a job in my organization.” Perry became the receivers coach the next year, then left to complete studies for his law degree. He became the first black to work as an NFL broadcaster, served as a lawyer with the National Labor Relations Board, and became a leading executive with Chrysler.
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Perry had also witnessed Rooney's resolve to stand up against inequality. When the Steelers traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, for an exhibition with the Bears in 1956, black players were excluded from a parade for the team and forced to stay at a segregated hotel. When Rooney arrived on a later flight, he addressed the black players and vowed, “I promise you, this will
never happen to one of my teams again.”
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When Rooney discovered that the team's black players were likely to be segregated the next year for an exhibition game in Atlanta, he canceled the game.

Kemp would go on to a four-decade career as coach and athletic director. When he visited Pittsburgh in late August 1963, he scolded the
Pittsburgh Courier
for failing to give proper recognition to Rooney “as a pioneer in the fight to integrate professional sports,” praise the newspaper routinely bestowed on baseball executive Branch Rickey and Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown.
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Buddy Parker, on the other hand, was no candidate to become a leader in the civil rights movement. However, he believed in team unity because it could foster winning. He encouraged the players to get together after games, and his fellow Texan Bobby Layne had laid a foundation for camaraderie. He was a drinking partner of Lipscomb (for whom Layne would buy an entire bottle of V.O. for a single evening) and a friend of John Henry Johnson, and he made a point to include rookies in his entourage. Layne and Big Daddy were gone by '63, but players continued their regular evening get-togethers at a drinking spot in Brentwood called Dante's.

In 1963 Parker was entering his seventh year as coach of the Steelers, with a cumulative 39–34–3 record, and the best he could show for his rebuilding efforts was a second-place finish. It was time to see results from his brash shuffling and dealing.

Parker's threats to quit had become an annual rite, dating back to his time in Detroit. It took only one regular-season game in 1961, a last-second loss in Dallas in the opener, for Parker to threaten to quit at season's end if the Steelers didn't win the Eastern Conference. They finished fifth, with a 6–8 record, but Parker came back for the 1962 season. He was “disgusted” after a 35–14 loss in Cleveland in the eleventh week of the '62 season, and a victory over the Cards the next Sunday did little, if anything, to encourage him.
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“I don't think I'll be back in 1963,” he said the day after the 19–7 victory, decided by four field goals by Michaels, who missed three others and had one blocked.
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Parker's contract expired at the end of the season, and speculation that he would quit intensified as the Steelers prepared for the Playoff Bowl.

The 17–10 postseason loss to the Lions appeared to be the closing argument against Parker's return, but the day after the game, he told Al Abrams, “I'm not going to quit. This team, as it is now, is my best since I came to Pittsburgh. We should have beaten Detroit. I think we can win it all next season.”
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Three days later, Parker met with Art Rooney and they agreed on an
indefinite year-to-year extension. It is unknown whether a game-to-game extension was ever discussed, but Parker seemed revived and confident that his team could win it all. “I think we're at the point now where we can play with anybody in the league,” he said.
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The players shared that confidence as they prepared for the '63 season opener, and they weren't shy about expressing their optimism. “I know we've disappointed the fans over the years, but this one will be different,” vowed defensive end and linebacker George Tarasovic, who had been drafted by the Steelers eleven years earlier and had been there for all of Parker's tenure. “I've never seen better spirit on this club. These fellows are fighting mad and they've got the stuff to go all the way. Few experts are giving us a chance. That's all right. We'll fool them.”
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