The '63 Steelers (47 page)

“It was the biggest catch I ever made,” Gifford said. “All I was trying to do was bat the ball up in the air and it stuck in my hand.”
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Glass was close enough to Gifford that he had a handful of the flanker's jersey in his right hand while Gifford was still trying to gain control of the ball and grasp it with both hands. Glass dragged Gifford down at the Steeler 47—close to where Pittsburgh could have taken possession on an incompletion and a good punt return—for a gain of 30 yards. Tittle went right back to Gifford, this time for 25 yards to the 22. On the next play, as Gifford ran his post pattern again, Tittle hit Morrison out of the backfield, and he outran linebacker Myron Pottios to the end zone to make it 23–10 with 6:11 seconds gone in the third period.

There were still nearly twenty-four minutes of football left, time for the Steelers to score two touchdowns and pull off another comeback, but the sudden twist of fortune felt like a knockout blow. “You could feel everybody on the bench lift up with a now-we-got-'em emotional surge,” said the scout Tunnell.
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“Gifford turned the game around,” Parker said later. “If he doesn't hold that ball, we take over, and I think we would have won. Give the credit to Gifford. I thought we would win it with one of our late rallies until Gifford made that catch. It was a great play, the turning point.”
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“We were a team that could have our back broken,” Art Rooney Jr. said, “and that was the play that did it.”
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The Giants got the ball right back, after Barnes broke up a pass intended for Ballman on third-and-2 from the Steeler 35. Tittle hit Aaron Thomas with a 31-yard pass, and an unsportsmanlike conduct call on Pittsburgh advanced the ball to the visitors' 15. A 14-yard throw to Gifford put the Giants on the 1, and Morrison plunged in for his third touchdown to make it 30–10 with 5:50 left in the quarter but no magic left in the Steelers' season. There would be no Ballman kickoff return to save them, no bomb to Red Mack to rescue them, no Dick Haley interception to pull the game out.

The Steelers reached the Giant 25, but Barnes intercepted Brown. Pittsburgh
got the ball back, and with half a minute left in the quarter Brown hit Dial with a 40-yard TD pass to make it 30–17. Michaels and Chandler each missed field goal attempts in the fourth quarter, but Chandler connected from 41 yards with 2:25 left in the game to make the final Giants 33, Steelers 17. The Giants were headed to Wrigley Field to play the Bears for the NFL championship. The Steelers were about to tumble into fourth place at 7–4–3, with Cleveland in second place at 10–4, and St. Louis third at 9–5. It was an inglorious finish to a season that had sparkled with hints of destiny, a tease that Steeler history was about to be rewritten. And there were a few more insults to endure.

“The Steelers looked like a consignment of rusted corrugated iron roofing in their big chance for their first sectional title,” Harold Rosenthal wrote for the
New York Herald Tribune
. “Their reputed hard noses were rubbed vigorously into the semifrozen turf, their vaunted ball control was a hollow mockery.”
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The truth was, the Steelers weren't manhandled. Even Rosenthal conceded that Johnson “was a terror in the rushing department,” totaling a game-high 104 yards. Tittle had a game worthy of an MVP, but the Steelers had sabotaged themselves. Michaels missed an early field goal, and a muffed hold cost Pittsburgh another attempt. Ballman's fumble cost the Steelers an opportunity. Pittsburgh could have gotten a field goal instead of running Sapp on fourth-and-1. Prime chances, no points. And, of course, there was Gifford, who had made the greatest one-handed catch in Yankee Stadium since Brooklyn's Sandy Amorós in the 1955 World Series. “Gifford was the guy who killed us,” Parker said.
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But the player who bore the role of goat was Ed Brown. As tough as Tittle was on the Steeler secondary, the Giant defensive backs got a big break because of Brown's scattershot throws. “Ballman would have had five touchdowns if Brown had been able to hit him,” Parker said.
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Parker would rue his decision to force the best field general he ever had into retirement. “I have no doubt we would have beaten the Giants with Layne at quarterback that day,” he reflected later. “Ed Brown was never the leader Layne was, and that's what we needed that day—a leader.”
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Ernie Stautner was so angry with Brown in the locker room that he was ready to take a poke at the quarterback. “I might have, except I was too tired,” he said.
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If ever a team needed to win just one game, Layne had earned the reputation as the guy who could do it. “I don't know if Bobby would have made that great a difference on the season as a whole, but once we got to
that final game, Layne would have been the difference between us winning and losing,” Art Rooney told Ray Didinger years later, after the Steelers won their first Super Bowl. “A game like that, with everything riding on one roll of the dice, was Bobby's meat,” Stautner reflected more than a decade later.
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Huff was right: The difference was Tittle. It wasn't just a case of Brown losing his touch; “many of his throws were so far off target as to appear ludicrous,” wrote Tex Maule.
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“I think maybe the pressure got to the guy more than anything else,” Art Rooney Jr. said. “Brown was a real good football player. He was not a great player. I don't think he had the confidence in himself.”
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The Giants didn't miss Webster, but the Steelers could have used Brady Keys. “When we played the Giants I could always hold Del Shofner,” Keys said. “He never scored on me. That was the difference in the game.”
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“That's a lucky football team,” Lou Michaels fumed in the locker room. “That's the story of their lives—L-U-C-K.”
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And, of course, it wasn't the story of the Steelers. Their lot was the saga of a snake bitten team. Four years earlier, Jack Butler, who would finish his career as a Steeler defensive back with fifty-two interceptions, sustained a career-ending knee injury late in the season. As he lay in his bed at Mercy Hospital, he reflected, “Buddy Parker says you have to be lucky in this league. He's so right.”
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The disappointment from that day would ease for some of the players who went on to play in championship games, but some of the dismay lingered over a lifetime. “I felt we were going to win the whole thing,” Red Mack said. “I truly did. After all these years, I look back and say, ‘I just can't imagine that we lost that game.'”
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There was plenty of room for analyzing and second-guessing. “You can hunt excuses,” Clendon Thomas said forty-five years later. “Here I am talking about it at my age and remembering. You can't help but what-if yourself. What if we'd brought our ice shoes. What if we'd not had Brady hurt.”
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Anyone could have gone back to the start of the season and started wondering. What if John Henry Johnson hadn't hurt his ankle and had been available to bust the Browns' goal line stands in Cleveland? What if the Steelers had been able to keep Charley Johnson from snatching away a victory in the final seconds in St. Louis? And if Lou Michaels hadn't hit a crooked upright on a point-after in the opener? If John Reger had been able to hang on to Bill Wade's mistake of a pass in the final minute, two days after the Kennedy assassination? And what if Gifford … ?

Buddy Parker had his own theory. He might have had regrets about not keeping Layne on the squad, but the team had gone into the season with a loss he felt was too hard to overcome. “One man cost us that championship. Big Daddy Lipscomb,” Parker said three years later. “With Lipscomb, there is no doubt we would have won another game or two.”
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Could the 1963 Steelers actually have gone 11–2–1 or 10–2–2 instead of 7–4–3? Or even 12–2? It would have taken a few breaks, but with a couple, Pittsburgh and Art Rooney wouldn't have had to wait another eleven seasons to get a shot at the franchise's first championship. But this was not the Steelers' day for even a tidbit of luck. Some aspects of the game can be defined with scientific precision, Timothy Gay demonstrates in
The Physics of Football
, but Gay is also well aware of one incontrovertible, inexplicable truth about football, which former Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant duly noted: “There are coaches who spend 18 hours a day coaching the perfect game and they lose because the ball is oval and they can't control the bounce.”
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After the final gun, there was little from which the Steelers could draw consolation. “I feel kinda crushed,” Dial told Rooney after the game. “I never felt so confident of winning a game in my life. I thought we had it.”

“So did I,” Rooney replied. “So did I.”
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Two days later, George Halas, “a stubborn old codger,” was named coach of the year by United Press International, drawing twenty-five of the forty-two votes cast. Parker and Wally Lemm of the Cardinals each got six votes. Halas's Bears and the Packers each placed six players on the first team of the '63 all-NFL selections, offense and defense, as voted by UPI and AP. The Giants had five players named to the squad; the Cardinals had two. The Steelers had none. What they had were a seldom-used halfback picked up in midseason, a rookie starting at linebacker and another playing regularly at defensive tackle, a cornerback who went undrafted and made the team after asking for a tryout, a defensive tackle unloaded by three other teams, and a bunch of other players nobody wanted and nobody believed in—a group that Parker assembled like a mad scientist and had battling for a berth in the NFL Championship Game right up until the final period on the final Sunday of the regular season.
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The Browns earned a berth in the Runner-Up Bowl against the 11–2–1 Packers, who finished second to the 11–1–2 Bears in the Western Conference. That was probably best for the Steelers. Another postseason exhibition would do nothing to ease the crush of falling short of the championship game—again. In a final bit of irony and a nod to the quirks of the system, the Cardinals,
at 9–5, with one more loss than Pittsburgh, finished in third place by a few percentage points: .643 to .636. It's doubtful any Steelers noticed, let alone complained, the way some New York observers did when the Steelers were a threat to win the conference with fewer victories than the Giants.

The atmosphere on the flight back from New York to Pittsburgh was appropriately funereal. All flights are somber after a loss, but on this one, something really had died: the dream of a championship. Rooney sat slouched in a front seat. “We could have won it,” he said repeatedly.
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A sequence of four photos on the front page of Monday morning's
Post-Gazette
showed the Giants' Barnes recovering the fumble Ballman lost in the end zone, then eluding Carpenter on the return. “You know Gary never forgot that?” Carpenter said forty-four years later.
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Surely only historians and the most diehard of fans would remember years later—or for merely weeks afterward. Any casual fan glancing through a press guide or a record book in the future would look at the 1963 standings and never imagine that this fourth-place team had stuffed Jimmy Brown in the end zone; come from behind to beat the Cardinals, Redskins, and Cowboys; slugged out a standstill with the eventual world champion Bears; and then let a conference title slip away, just like the ball that squirted out of Ballman's arms. The names on the Steeler roster may not have gotten the publicity that the Giant players enjoyed, but it could boast “an oldster or two who needed only to have the light turned his way to make people realize he had been a star for a long time”—players like Joe Krupa, Preston Carpenter, and Buzz Nutter.
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On Monday morning, the
Post-Gazette
's banner headline, in all caps, read: “
GIANTS END STEELER HOPES
, 33–17.” The italicized banner head at the very top of the page, above the
Post-Gazette
's flag, was directed at another page 1 story. The headline read: “2 Below Zero Is Predicted for Today.”

It looked as though it was going to be a long, cold winter in Pittsburgh.

The two teams that had battled for a berth in the NFL title game on the last Sunday of the '63 regular season seemed destined for another showdown the following year. Indeed, it came to pass, and in Yankee Stadium again. Only this time the game that took place on the first anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and the battle between the Steelers and Giants, wasn't for first place in the Eastern Conference—it was to avoid last place.

The Giants were in the cellar, with a 2–6–2 record and, with a win, could drop the 3–7 Steelers into last place. Pittsburgh romped, 44–17. They had beaten the Giants, 27–24, in the second week, a game that produced an iconic photo in NFL history. Defensive end John Baker barreled into Y. A. Tittle, leaving him kneeling, dazed, and bloodied in the end zone. Yat's helmet was knocked off, and he was lucky his head wasn't, too. The image was immortalized by
Post-Gazette
photographer Morris Berman. Tittle retired at the end of the season. Big John Baker played his last season with the Steelers in 1967 and then spent a year with the Lions before returning to his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, where he served as sheriff for twenty-four years. He died at age seventy-two on October 31, 2007.

Buddy Parker's team was on its way to a 5–9 record with a new cast. The highlight of their year came in Cleveland on October 10, a Saturday night, when John Henry Johnson jitterbugged for 200 yards in a 23–7 win over the eventual NFL champs. It must have turned into another sad night for the “Gang at Sophie's Café.” The victory gave Pittsburgh a 3–2 record, but the Steelers went on to lose their next five games, during which their proud defense gave up at least thirty points each week, before the rout of the Giants.