The '63 Steelers (41 page)

As the season progressed, Atkinson worked his way into the starting lineup, but he was making other plans as well. UCLA helped him work out an arrangement, around his NFL commitment, to work on his MBA degree. When Atkinson showed up for training camp in '64, he loomed as the successor to Ernie Stautner, who was retiring as a player and becoming a full-time coach. The fourteen-year veteran offered qualified praise for Atkinson. “He improved quite a bit and I have reason to believe he will improve a lot more,” Stautner said. “He's a strong kid and he's still filling out. His will power will determine how far he goes. It all will depend on how much he wants to play.”
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Atkinson had his own timetable, but he figured on playing the '64 season. “I even told the Steelers the second year that this is my last year—sort of the gentlemanly thing to do so they could make plans accordingly,” he said. “They didn't like me very much after that. They released me—the night before the opener. If you're not on the squad at the start of the year, you're out of luck.”
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The Denver Broncos of the AFL obtained the rights to Atkinson, and he played for them that season. “That wasn't so much fun,” he said. “I was just waiting for it to get over. I found out how good the game got, and I found out I could play it. Once I was satisfied there, I wasn't quite as interested.”
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It was a great opportunity, like jumping on and off a freighter, as if he were an explorer riding the rails, but a career in finance was beckoning. Years later, Chuck Noll would arrive as coach, and he would advise players
that football was but a stopover before you “get on with your life's work.” Atkinson didn't need to be told that it was already time for him to get on with his and “ultimately went into the venture capital business in San Francisco before anyone had even heard of venture capitalists,” Russell said. Atkinson left football behind, with no regrets about leaving so soon, so abruptly. “Being a Steeler, I'm really proud of that, and it was really a wonderful experience,” he said. “But it was one of those things you wouldn't [trade for] a million bucks. … but you wouldn't necessarily want to do it again.”
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Atkinson's name was relegated to a line in the Steelers' all-time roster, one more entry in Parker's picked-apart carcasses of drafts. Atkinson had performed well enough as a rookie to crack the starting lineup of a coach who shunned rookies. Who knows how far he could have gone if he had devoted his life to football? Of course, Atkinson never had everlasting fame in mind when he signed with the Steelers. Two years after he left football, Atkinson's name popped up coincidentally in a Detroit sports column, whose author commented, “Atkinson's whereabouts today are unknown.”
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Move forward another ten years, and Atkinson's name was back in a Pittsburgh newspaper. “Remember Frank Atkinson?” the
Post-Gazette
's Al Abrams asked in a 1976 column, a month after the Steelers beat Dallas in Super Bowl X. “Of course, you don't.” Abrams had learned that over the previous two years Atkinson had flown from the Middle East to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to watch the Steelers' first two Super Bowl appearances through the satellite station that relayed the game to U.S. forces overseas.
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Evidently Atkinson's allegiance to his former team ran deeper than his love for the pro game.

Abrams reported that Atkinson, “a man of many distinctions,” had been living in Beirut but had relocated to Dusseldorf, Germany, in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War.
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No wonder his whereabouts were unknown. The tackle who had once lined up with Ernie Stautner, Joe Krupa, and Lou Michaels was a vice president for Triad International Marketing, a company run by Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, who would go on to become a key figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair. Khashoggi had attended Stanford University and was, presumably, a football fan. Atkinson was just getting started in business. He would go on to a variety of other positions, such as working with a private equity investment firm and a firm providing investment banking services to technology companies. A guy who hitchhiked around Asia by freighter wasn't likely to be pinned down in one spot forever.
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Parker was hoping for another unheralded gem like Frank Atkinson as the NFL draft got underway in Chicago the day after the 20–20 tie with
Philadelphia. The Steelers had hung onto their No. 1 selection, the tenth overall pick. The draft began at 10:05 a.m. and ended at 7:18 a.m. the next day, Tuesday. Parker, one of five coaches who did not attend, resisted the opportunity to pick Miami quarterback George Mira and instead selected hometown hero Paul Martha of the University of Pittsburgh, one spot ahead of Ohio State halfback Paul Warfield, who went to the Browns and would go on to the Hall of Fame. With Bob Ferguson's exit still a raw wound, Parker had evidently had his fill of Ohio State backs. In the second round, Parker selected Notre Dame end Jim Kelly.

Martha played six seasons with the Steelers, but he lasted as a safety, not as the heir to Buddy Dial's position. Martha had six receptions in his rookie year. Like Atkinson, he would play an additional year with Denver and find his true calling as a high-powered attorney and executive, notably with the 49ers and Pittsburgh Penguins of the NHL.

Parker had little time to enjoy what he envisioned as a draft bonanza; his team was still clinging to an outside shot at a division title, but it couldn't afford a loss or even a tie against the Cowboys. Despite all the heady expectations, Dallas “never got out of its cleat prints” in '63 and dropped to 3–9 after blowing a 27–14 lead against New York and falling, 34–27, as Y. A. Tittle broke Bobby Layne's career record for touchdown passes.
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After losing at Forbes Field in late October, the Cowboys had gone 2–3 but, tellingly, had given up twenty points in both wins and twenty-seven points or more in all three losses. Landry had fallen way short in his goal of shoring up his defense.

Still, after scrambling for a tie against a last-place team riddled with dissension, Parker was wary of a team that had nothing to lose. “That's about all they have left, knocking us out [of] the race,” the coach said. “It hasn't been a very happy season for those fellows, you know. They've had their bad moments and darn few good ones, but they have the personnel to explode anytime they go out on the field. I hope they don't pick this weekend to do it.”
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A year earlier, Don Meredith had made as bold a prediction as Landry had about the future greatness of the team. “In the next couple of years, maybe sooner, the Cowboys are going to be right at the top year after year. [Landry]'s pretty close right now to what he wants. When he gets it, the Cowboys and the Packers will be playing for the championship.”
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That scenario was still a few years away. The Dallas defense was spotty in '62, but the offense ranked second in the league in scoring and yardage. They had two powerful backs in fullback Amos Marsh and halfback Don Perkins, who, “with disregard for life and limb, used his 200 pounds like a
human projectile.”
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Perkins ranked sixth among rushers, with 612 yards. Billy Howton was in his last days as a receiver, but Frank Clarke—“one of the most dangerous runners in football”—was coming off a year in which he caught fourteen TD passes.
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Meredith may have been “the most promising young thrower in pro football,” but in no way was he about to be hailed as a brainy counterpart to Charley Johnson or Frank Ryan.
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“What worries his colleagues is his blithe spirit,”
Sports Illustrated
reported. Meredith clearly had more in common with Layne on a football field than he did with any quarterback working on a PhD. In the huddle during one 1961 game, he reportedly told a receiver, “Just run downfield, I'll find you.”
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He was the kind of brash, gunslinging Texas kid Parker knew all too well, and he had nothing to lose in the final two weeks.

The Cowboys had the kind of explosive attack that unnerved Steeler center Buzz Nutter. “They've got a great offensive team, the kind of team that gives us trouble,” he said. “Frankly, I'd rather be playing either Chicago or Green Bay than these guys.”
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Said team president Art Rooney: “They're good enough to knock us out of the box Sunday unless we play up to par.”
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That week the Pittsburgh Opera was preparing for performances of
Aida
, featuring three members of the Metropolitan Opera, to be held at the Syria Mosque. On Sunday morning, Pat Livingston warned Steeler fans, “It could be a tragic showdown” in Dallas. Although the four-year-old Cowboy franchise had endured “a campaign of horror,” Pittsburgh “can point to a long history of similar frustrations and heartbreak.”
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The game had all the makings of melodrama for the Steeler franchise.

Most disturbing, Livingston wrote in echoing Parker's lament, was “the Steelers' inexplicable capacity for freezing up in the games they have to win. This appears to be a team that tightens up when the chips are on the line, a team that fails to play to its potential when it has to win.”
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That was not truly accurate. The Steelers had blown a game in St. Louis, and maybe, indeed, they had choked against Green Bay. But they had not lost since the debacle in Milwaukee, and they had staged two comebacks besides stuffing Cleveland and beating Chicago everywhere but on the scoreboard.

Now they needed help. Either Detroit or Washington had to upset Cleveland, but the Steelers could find some hope in the resurgence by the Lions. Winners of only four games, the Lions had turned from the biggest flops of the NFL to “the bogeyman of both conference races” after tying the Packers on Thanksgiving Day.
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There was even a chance, as unlikely as it was, that the Steelers could vault into first place in the Eastern Conference on Sunday if both the Giants and Browns lost. The Steelers would be 7–3–3 (.700), and New York and Cleveland would be 9–4–0 (.692)—and so would St. Louis, with a victory, thus creating a three-way tie for second. “It's all very confusing,” Jack Sell wrote.
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Not entirely. The Steelers knew one thing for sure: They had to beat the Cowboys. Parker's team could not afford another tie.

On Saturday morning, Pearl Harbor Day, as the Steelers took a flight to Dallas, the
Post-Gazette
ran a story headlined “Gloom Shrouds Night Life in Dallas.” The “kicker” on the head read: “Horror of Assassination Still Hangs Heavily.” An editorial in the paper commented, “It is a monstrous injustice to blame the millions of patriotic and law abiding citizens of Dallas, of Texas, of the whole United States for complicity in the death of the President.”

But no one could escape the fact that Dallas was the site where John F. Kennedy was slain. “The bus driver took us on a tour past Dealey Plaza and the whole deal, coming back from the Cotton Bowl after a brief workout,” Atkinson recalled. “Eerie.”
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Art Rooney Jr., along with his father and Fran Fogarty, the business manager, were given a tour around the city by an acquaintance. “People were milling about; it was just quiet,” Art Rooney Jr. said. “I was a young adult, and I found it really spooky.” The elder Rooney had met Kennedy and was “terribly hurt” by the assassination, his son said. From then on, Art Jr. said, his father would make any excuse not to travel to Dallas unless a trip was unavoidable.
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The surreal atmosphere continued. Atkinson remembered the night before the game when the Steelers had their team dinner at the hotel. “In comes Bobby Layne with Mickey Mantle. Mickey Mantle was so drunk he couldn't get his chin off his chest. Talk about seeing an icon crumble before your eyes—boy, that was sad. That was his downfall.”
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In three weeks, 75,504 fans would jam the Cotton Bowl to watch the No. 1 Texas Longhorns take on Roger Staubach and Navy on New Year's Day in the postseason game that the University of Pittsburgh felt worthy of an invitation. But for the Cowboys' home finale, only 24,136 fans showed up on a sunny but blustery afternoon, with 25 mph winds. The gusts quickly became a factor and would influence strategy, especially a critical decision in the final minutes.

Landry had abandoned the QB shuttle and committed himself to Meredith, but in deference to LeBaron's final home game, the eleven-year veteran was given the start. He hit Pettis Norman with a 32-yard pass to move into
Steeler territory on the Cowboys' first possession, but a holding penalty negated a 24-yard screen pass to Marsh and pushed Dallas back into its own territory. Marsh gained 12 yards on a delay, but an incompletion left Dallas with fourth-and-11 at the Steeler 46. Sam Baker, with the wind at his back, drilled a 53-yard field goal, the third-longest in NFL history at the time.

The Steelers started from their 20, with Johnson and Sapp picking up big chunks of yardage, but Ed Brown fumbled and defensive end George Andrie recovered on the Dallas 37. Meredith took over for LeBaron and, after an incompletion, threw a swing pass to Marsh for 35 yards before Bob Schmitz caught him at the Steeler 24. Bullocks carried four straight times, hammering the middle of the defense, to move Dallas to the 1. Meredith recovered his own fumble on first-and-goal, losing a yard, and after Bullocks was stopped at the line, the quarterback muscled his way over right tackle for the touchdown. LeBaron mishandled the snap on the point after, making it 9–0, Dallas, with 1:01 left in the quarter.

With the aid of the wind, Baker's kickoff sailed out of the end zone for the second straight time, denying Ballman a shot at a long return. The Steelers were starting to bring a trace of validation to Livingston's assessment of them as “a ribald band of head-hunting youngsters who can't play a lick under pressure.”
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If that wasn't entirely true, it was fair to suggest that the Steelers often resembled a boxer who hasn't warmed up properly before entering the ring and quickly finds himself in trouble.