The '63 Steelers (43 page)

Sapp was still getting requests for autographs and interviews fifty years after his game-winning touchdown against Georgia Tech. “There was more to my career than one play, you know,” Sapp reminded a sportswriter once.
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Indeed. Georgia's drought had lasted only eight years. The Steelers' had lasted three decades. Not only did the touchdown in the Cotton Bowl end up being the lone one of Sapp's '63 season, but it was the last of his pro career. But it was a dandy, and he had every right to be reminded of that once in a while.

The Cowboys still had 1:53 left, but on first down from their 19 Thomas
brought down Clarke after a catch at the 34 and then recovered the end's fumble. The Steelers killed the clock to preserve their 24–19 victory.

A familiar-sounding epitaph was being written that afternoon: “It started out like the National Football League success story of 1963 but it turned into a saga of frustration and heartbreak.”
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This time, it wasn't the Steelers but the Cleveland Browns whose obituary was written by United Press International. The Lions, in fourth place in the Western Conference, whipped the Browns, 38–10, denying Cleveland any shot at its first Eastern Division title since 1957 and handing the Browns their fourth defeat in the previous seven games, after a 6–0 start. The Steelers got the break they needed. The Browns and Cards were out. Pittsburgh would face the Giants the next week in a showdown for the Eastern Conference crown and a berth in the title game.

“This is for all the marbles,” Giants coach Allie Sherman said.
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“We beat 'em the last two.” Lou Cordileone said, pointing back to a 1962 victory before the shutout in week 2. “Now they gotta come get us.”
⁶³

Linebacker Sam Huff didn't sound impressed with the upstarts. “If the Steelers can beat us twice in the same season, they deserve the championship,” the linebacker said in the aftermath of New York's 44–14 rout of the Redskins. “If we can't beat Pittsburgh in one out of two games, we don't deserve the championship.” Teammate Jack Stroud added, “Yer [
sic
] absolutely right, Sam.”
⁶⁴

Now Parker's “ribald band of head-hunting youngsters” would face its greatest pressure test of all, and perhaps make NFL history.

Sitting in the rear of a jet while flying over New York City, playing cards with Bobby Layne, John Henry Johnson, and Ernie Stautner, Big Daddy Lipscomb looked out the window and mused, “New York, New York. Sum bitch is so big they had to name it twice.”
¹

Any time they played Cleveland in 84,000-seat Municipal Stadium, on the shore of stormy Lake Erie—no matter what the records or standings—the Steelers annually faced bigger crowds and more hostile fans than they did in New York, as well as a greater threat of wicked weather. But the teams from the West and the East coasts were the ones that drew the attention and spawned the glitz.

Los Angeles had stars like Tom Fears, Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, and Bob Waterfield, who was himself married to a star of equal stature, the movie actress Jane Russell. “The Rams have always been a flamboyant team, perfectly attuned to rabid fans accustomed to getting their showiness in wholesale lots,” wrote
New York Times
columnist Arthur Daley. “Maybe it's the Hollywood influence.”
²

New York had a half-dozen newspapers to publicize heroes like Kyle Rote, Sam Huff, and Rosey Grier, and a Hollywood image of its own in Frank Gifford, a native Californian who had his pick of work in TV, movies, and radio. Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit had soot, sweat, aching backs, and a Puritan work ethic—and don't forget the kielbasa—but little glamour.

Anytime a team went into New York, no matter how talented or successful, it could not deny that a radiance surrounded the city, as thick as smog. Some would resent it; others, at the least, might feel envy. With all
the glitter, anyone could feel unnerved by the spell the city cast. Manhattan had the lights of Broadway; Pittsburgh had the glow of the open-hearth furnaces. New York had the most historic sports arena in the world—outside of the Coliseum in Rome; Pittsburgh had that “ancient rookery,” Forbes Field, scorned by Giants coach Allie Sherman. “The place players wanted to go to was New York, where you got the ad money, and the television shows, and the extra income,” Clendon Thomas said.
³
As the Steelers began preparing for perhaps the biggest game in the franchise's history, it would only be natural to ponder the TV and Hollywood image of the city as well as its football team, and its effect on opponents.

“I seem to recall a bit of intimidation going into Yankee Stadium,” Frank Atkinson said. “I had the impression the guys on the Steelers really thought the Giants were lucky as hell. They're in New York City, they're in the media center. Everyone wanted to be a Ram or a Giant for the endorsements and ads and stuff like that, and they felt kind of screwed being in Pittsburgh. And I think that manifested itself somehow in a little intimidation factor going into Yankee Stadium.”
⁴

“That might have been him and me because we were rookies,” Andy Russell said with a smile. “I don't think those old guys that played in the fifties like Ernie Stautner were intimidated by anyone.”
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The Steelers had every right to feel confident about facing the Giants. Pittsburgh had monopolized the ball in week 2 with a meat-grinder running game that kept the Giants' offense on the sidelines. Even if Y. A. Tittle hadn't sat out the game, how much difference could he have made? “Tittle doesn't play defense, does he?” Ernie Stautner growled. “Well, we scored 31 points on New York the first time out. We'll do it again.”
⁶

Still, these were the New York Football Giants. From their names, they sounded like workers at a western Pennsylvania steel mill—Katcavage … Robustelli … Modzelewski—and the defense was “the envy of every defensive platoon in the league, not so much for its talent, but for the unique regard in which it is held by the New York fans.”
⁷
In sports, when you mentioned New York, you always thought of the Yankees, the most successful, most glamorous team of all, and the one that shared the stadium with the Giants. Fame stoked the city, and stars from every industry rubbed shoulders with each other and fed off one another. “That's a showdown town,” linebacker Sam Huff said. “They don't have to tell you it's showtime, because you live in New York, and it's Broadway. It's showtime.”
⁸

In New York, a soft-spoken, unassuming guy from Marshall, Texas, by the name of Yelberton Abraham Tittle could become a celebrity, even if he
had about as much hair as Yul Brynner. Tittle posed in a two-page ad for a shirt manufacturer in
Sports Illustrated
, looking as tough as Ray Nitschke, even if he was wearing a crisp white shirt and tie. Dick Lynch posed in an ad for Vitalis, shunning “that greasy kid stuff.” Alex Webster, with his son Jimmy, appeared in an ad, modeling suits. Charlie Conerly not only became the face of “the Marlboro Man” but endorsed a word game produced by
Sports Illustrated
. Huff endorsed an aftershave, and
Time
put him on a 1959 cover. CBS made a documentary titled
The Violent World of Sam Huff
, narrated by Walter Cronkite, the newsman who gave viewers the evening news and who had announced the death of President Kennedy to the nation. Channel 11 in Pittsburgh would carry the documentary
The Making of a Pro
, featuring Giant quarterback Glynn Griffing—only a rookie—on Sunday evening, hours after the Steelers-Giants game ended.

Maybe “intimidation” wasn't the right word. Maybe it was more a case of a bunch of outsiders not just having to beat a successful team, but having to prove to the sports world that they really belonged on the same field. Opponents of teams like Notre Dame, the Boston Celtics, and the Yankees battled preternatural forces as well as uniformed men. Winners exude a feeling of self-confidence and live for the opportunity to come through in the clutch, Layne said, and that kind of attitude could make unproven opponents who couldn't handle the pressure wilt. “It's kinda like the New York Yankees,” he said. “Those guys win about 30% of their games because they got those pinstripe suits on.”
⁹

Ruth Daniel, the wife of defensive back Willie Daniel, had the same impression as Atkinson when recalling the Steelers' mind-set. “I remember that they were confident,” she said, “but the fact that they were going to New York was a bit daunting, as the Giants enjoyed quite an aura in those days.”
¹⁰

Any team that felt a sense of entitlement just because it wore a certain uniform and was carrying on a tradition was vulnerable to a backlash of resentment. It wasn't necessarily envy that drove players, nor was it an inferiority complex. What fired them up was pride, a craving for respect.

But the Giants, undeniably, had a distinguished history. They were a lot more than flash and glimmer. They had put the pelts on the wall. They had not won an NFL championship since 1956, but they had made it to the title game four times in the previous five years, even if they lost all four games—twice to Johnny Unitas and the Colts, and in the past two years to Lombardi's Packers. The Giants hadn't won it all in a while, but they knew how to get to the championship game. And all their opponents knew it.

“The Giants have that attitude,” Steeler offensive lineman Ron Stehouwer
explained after the shutout of New York. “They act and think like champs. They overwhelm a lot of teams in this league with their buoyancy.”
¹¹

Of all the players on Parker's squad, no one—aside from Stautner—was more immune to intimidation than Buzz Nutter. No one knew better than the tenth-year center what it took to play in a championship game, and no one knew better than him what it took to play the Giants on football's biggest stage—and beat them. Ed Brown and John Henry Johnson had played in title games, and Parker, as coach, had won three division titles and two championships with Detroit. But Nutter had played in what would come to be known as the greatest game ever played. Other players got a feel for greatness by playing with outstanding players. Nutter knew what it was like to line up with immortals. He had hiked the ball to Johnny Unitas, blocked for Lenny Moore, and held off red-dogging linebackers while Ray Berry caught passes.

Nutter grew up in Huntington, West Virginia; played at Virginia Tech; and was drafted by the Washington Redskins on the twelfth round. He was cut, so he spent a year working in a West Virginia steel mill and then won a spot with the Colts in 1954. He was the Colts' center on the afternoon of December 28, 1958, when Baltimore beat the Giants at Yankee Stadium in sudden death. “Nutter was the most outstanding offensive player on the field. He was playing like a man possessed,” former Colts defensive tackle Art Donovan said when Nutter passed away in April 2008.
¹²
The Colts beat the Giants in Baltimore in a return match in '59. Two years later, Nutter came to Pittsburgh along with Big Daddy Lipscomb in a trade for Jimmy Orr.

So, when praise for the Giants blew into town as fiercely as the gusts at the Cotton Bowl days before, Nutter, for one, wasn't about to feel overwhelmed. “How in the world are a bunch of pore ol' mountaineers like us going to beat a team like that?” he said in a voice glazed with his West Virginia roots and packed with sarcasm. “They're the greatest team in the world, aren't they? They have the greatest quarterback, the greatest offensive line, the greatest defensive line, the greatest linebackers, the greatest receivers, the greatest secondary, the greatest kicker, the greatest coach.”
¹³

Those who had helped create and nurture the Giants' mystique were grousing about the possibility of an upstart 7–3–3 team unseating the 10–3 Giants with fewer victories than the defending Eastern Conference champs. If the Giants lost, they would finish 10–4 (.714), with two more wins than Pittsburgh, yet the Steelers would finish first, with a better winning percentage at 8–3–3 (.727), because ties were not counted in figuring won-lost percentages; they were simply tossed out. (The Browns and Cards, officially eliminated, could
both finish at 10–4 with a victory.) “The entire controversy revolves around the attitude of many New York sports writers,” wrote Pat Livingston of the
Press
in midweek.
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On Monday before the showdown, commissioner Pete Rozelle nimbly sidestepped the issue. He said that the method of computing the NFL standings could be brought up at the January league meetings “if any club is enough concerned to feel that it merits discussion.”
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Rozelle himself hadn't given the issue “any thought,” Livingston quoted the commissioner as saying. Rozelle added, “None of the owners have brought up or discussed such a change. It's been in use for 30 years and we've had similar situations twice before.”
¹⁶

In 1935, the Lions, with a rookie fullback on the team named Buddy Parker, won the Western Division with a 7–3–2 record, while the Packers went 8–4. In 1949, the Rams won the division with an 8–2–2 record compared to the Bears' 9–3 mark. “Nobody acted to change the rule after those years,” Rozelle said.
¹⁷

Jack Sell of the
Post-Gazette
pointed out that in 1932, the last year the NFL was composed of a single division, the Bears won the title with a 7–1–6 record and a winning percentage of .875, and the Packers finished second at 10–3–1.
¹⁸
(Chicago and the Portsmouth Spartans finished the regular season tied for first, each with a winning percentage of .857; the Bears at 6–1–6 and the Spartans at 6–1–4. The Bears beat Portsmouth in a playoff game.)