The '63 Steelers (6 page)

In the mind of head coach Raymond “Buddy” Parker, 1962 was going to be the season the Pittsburgh Steelers put an end to a thirty-year stretch of futility, a hapless period of time during which the franchise had achieved only six winning seasons and never made it to a championship game. The forty-nine-year-old Parker was in his sixth season in Pittsburgh since coming over from Detroit, where he had won three conference titles and two world championships, and he had failed to fulfill his vow to bring owner Art Rooney a championship within five years. “I am coming to Pittsburgh with one objective, to give the Steelers a winner,” he said upon his appointment by Rooney in late August of 1957.
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The best he had done in five years was go 7–4–1 in '58, but even after two straight losing seasons, Parker felt that 1962 was going to be different. “This is the year,” Parker told Bobby Layne as the team flew to Detroit for the season opener. “I think we can win it.”
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Layne had spent his entire life defying the clock, whether he was ordering another round after closing time in a nightclub on the eve of a game or watching seconds tick off the stadium clock in the final minute of a game with his team down by a touchdown and 80 yards from the opponent's end zone. But now time was running out on Layne, the master of the two-minute drill, the invincible quarterback who had led the Lions to two championships and helped them reach two other title games. Three decades later,
Sports Illustrated
would put Layne, wearing his helmet without the face mask he had scorned throughout his career, on its cover in the fall of 1995 with the headline “The Toughest Quarterback Ever.” Layne needed one more touchdown pass to break Sammy Baugh's career record of 187, but he was
thirty-six, and fourteen seasons of injuries, a disdain for football equipment, and a passion for hearty living in bars and nightclubs had taken a toll. The opener turned into a disastrous homecoming for Parker and Layne. The Steelers were routed 45–7 and then floundered through the first half of the fourteen-game season, going 3–4.

Layne was playing in '62 with a debilitating hematoma—blood clotted from hemorrhaging—on the right side of his body. Art Rooney Jr., son of the Steelers' owner, remembered the clot being “like a watermelon.”
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Relying on tape and painkillers, Layne proved he still had not only the guts but also the magic in his arm as he led a game-winning drive against frisky second-year quarterback Fran Tarkenton and the Vikings in game 8.
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“What a desperate feeling to stand there and watch our defensive team try to hold Layne,” Tarkenton said afterward. “You hear Layne's arm is going dead. It didn't look like it today.”
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The Steelers then beat St. Louis, but against the Redskins Layne was blindsided and helped off the field to a chorus of boos at Forbes Field. It would not be the last time a Steeler quarterback destined for the Hall of Fame would be jeered while lurching off the field in agony. Ed Brown, obtained from Chicago in the off-season, took over as quarterback, rallied the Steelers to a 23–21 victory, and led them to three wins in the last four games to finish in second place at 9–5 and qualify for the short-lived Playoff Bowl, a consolation game for runner-up teams. Parker's estimation of the team hadn't been so far off after all. The '62 Steelers were a team that Bucko Kilroy, acknowledged as one of the toughest men ever to play in the NFL as well as one of its best scouts, dubbed “Destiny's Derelicts.”
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They were a team of rejects, drinkers, and brawlers, low on skill but high on pain tolerance, and no one ever questioned their guts or desire to win.

The '63 Steelers had the same blue-collar cast, with a couple of critical omissions. Layne, at the coercion of Parker, retired in the spring. Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle, was found dead in May.

The '63 squad also had talent—not nearly as much as the Steeler teams of the seventies would boast, but enough that the pack of vagabonds would find itself clawing for a berth in an NFL title game a decade before a dynasty would arise in Pittsburgh. The '63 Steelers had a player who writer Myron Cope mused “may be the toughest guy ever to have come down the NFL pike.” Ernie Stautner was from a different era and mind-set, one in which “going to war” meant firing rifles, not passes, in a critical showdown. Stautner had served in the Marines in World War II before attending college. He
was listed as six foot two, 230 pounds, but he played defensive end with a ferocity that distilled football to a Darwinian equation. “Toughest Steeler ever,” said Andy Russell, a rookie linebacker in '63. “One of the super-tough guys,” said Frank Atkinson, a rookie defensive tackle out of Stanford that year. “Ernie thought the game was all about beating the crap out of the guy across from you.”
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Stautner didn't have a reputation as a dirty player, but as a competitor he was out for blood. “You got to be a man who wants to hurt somebody,” Stautner told Cope. “You know where I'm going for? The quarterback's face. It hurts in the face. I want him to know I'm coming the next time. I want him to be scared. Those quarterbacks can't tell me they don't scare, because I've seen it in the corners of their eyes.” Said teammate Lou Cordileone, “Ernie Stautner was one determined sunuvabitch.”
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Pain and injury? If a roll of tape couldn't fix it, a strong will could. Russell would become a link to the glory years, but he was only a rookie when Stautner indoctrinated him to the concept of playing with pain—or playing with wounds.

“He comes into the huddle; his thumb's broken back,” Russell said.

He's not showing off. I just happened to see it. I was right across from him. The bone's sticking out. I wasn't used to seeing bones in the huddle. He's got a compound fracture. He takes his thumb and he jams it down. He says, “What's the defense?” Holy shit! This guy isn't going to leave the game for one friggin' play, and he's got a compound fracture? Finally we make 'em punt four or five plays later. We come off the field and I figure, now he's got to go to the hospital. This could get infected. He's got an open wound. He says, “More tape. Give me more.” That was Ernie Stautner. There's nobody that would do that—stay out there with a compound fracture.
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The Playoff Bowl, instituted in 1960, was a post-championship matchup of the second-place teams in the Eastern and Western conferences. It was a meaningless game, ridiculed by Vince Lombardi, who called it a “hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players.”
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Yet with nothing at stake but pride and an officially sanctioned opportunity to exact vengeance and cause a bit of mayhem, the initial games were played with a viciousness to rival any championship game—or street fight.

The Lions' victory over the Eagles in the Playoff Bowl following the '61 season left Philadelphia quarterback Sonny Jurgensen with a separated shoulder,
tackle J. D. Smith with a broken leg, fullback Ted Dean with a broken foot, and defensive end Leo Sugar with torn knee ligaments, a career-ending injury.

The Steeler-Lion matchup in Miami after the '62 season was just as savage. “It's a cinch that Fidel Castro heard the ruckus 90 miles away and mobilized his beach defenses,” wrote Sandy Grady of the
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
.
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Detroit escaped with a 17–10 win when the Lions held off Layne after he entered the game with seven minutes left and drove Pittsburgh from its own 20 to the Detroit 21. Steeler offensive tackle Dan James was originally thought to have chipped a bone in his ankle during the game, but X-rays showed it was “only” badly sprained. Defensive back Willie Daniel was hospitalized with a broken jaw and severe concussion after colliding with receiver Pat Studstill. John Henry Johnson needed eight stitches to close a cut above his eye and sustained a concussion after getting kicked in the face while fighting Wayne Walker. Johnson was so woozy after one play that he walked toward the Lions' huddle and had to be redirected the other way. “What a game that was. It was brutal,” Cordileone, a defensive tackle, said forty-five years later.
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“My, my, it sure was kinda rough out there for a while today,” Lipscomb said with a sigh in the locker room.
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What drove two teams to play a meaningless exhibition as if it were the fifteenth round of a heavyweight title fight? It wasn't the money, for sure. “In those days, I think we got $400 to play in that game,” Cordileone said. “The winners, I think, got $800.”
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There wasn't enough money in the NFL to inspire players of that era to sacrifice their bodies for victory. They had to work in the off-season to support their families or prepare for a vocation once their NFL career skidded to a halt. Offensive tackle Charlie Bradshaw attended law school. Quarterback Terry Nofsinger earned a master's degree in business. Defensive tackle Joe Krupa was a schoolteacher.

So why the hatred and brutality? Why would two teams fight so desperately and throw their bodies around so recklessly with nothing at stake and only a meager payoff? What drove them to compete and excel, and merely to survive, was something that ran deep inside their souls, and it flowed as easily as the blood that ran like rainwater from their faces and hands. Cordileone pointed back to the opener, the Lions' 45–7 rout. “They kicked our ass,” he said. “That's why we were so fuckin' pissed off. That's why we went after them.”
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Packers offensive tackle Forrest Gregg, praised by his coach, Lombardi, as “a picture ballplayer,” remembered a game early in his career when he faced Lipscomb. Gregg had been advised by his line coach, Lou Rymkus, that the only way a lineman could make it in the NFL was to hold. Gregg tried
that tactic on Lipscomb on every play until the then-Colts tackle approached him between plays and said, “Hey, Forrest, I've got a deal for you. If you quit holding me, then I won't kill you.” At that time, Gregg said, “Not many players were earning fortunes, but they took their football seriously.”
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Of course, it wasn't all that unusual for the Steelers to interrupt their games for a bit of brawling and bare-knuckle fighting. At a December 3, 1961, game at Forbes Field, the Steelers were going down, 35–24, to the defending world champion, the Eagles, when the amateur gladiators took center stage. Two players from each team would wind up being sent to the hospital: Pittsburgh's Charlie Bradshaw and Philly's offensive guard Stan Campbell, with dislocated shoulders; the Steelers' end and linebacker George Tarasovic, with torn ligaments in his right knee; and Eagles defensive back Irv Cross, with a concussion.
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A player from each team was ejected: Lipscomb, for punching center Howard Keys in the jaw in the final minute, and J. D. Smith for taking a swing at Big Daddy. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh's 185-pound defensive back Brady Keys was “socking” 235-pound linebacker Bob Pellegrini, and Krupa was wrestling with Eagles defensive tackle Jess Richardson.
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What was at stake for the Eagles was possession of first place in the Eastern Conference, against the Giants. The Steelers, who would finish 6–8, were scrapping to reach .500, but mostly they were battling, as usual, just for pride and respect and to retain their honor as the clock ticked off another defeat. Some players may have dreaded playing the Steelers, but teams didn't respect them. “I remember as a player with Cleveland we used to make fun of Pittsburgh,” Chuck Noll said with a laugh when he was introduced as head coach of the Steelers at the end of the decade. “They'd wear different colored helmets sometimes.”
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Players did indeed need the meager money available in the NFL at the time, and they had to fight for it—as well as for their pride. Winning players in the January 1959 Pro Bowl got $300 apiece, and Big Daddy Lipscomb had to settle for a smaller loser's share when five-foot-seven quarterback Eddie LeBaron threw a touchdown pass to beat the West squad, which Lipscomb played on as a member of the Colts. When Lipscomb emerged from the locker room and spotted LeBaron after the game, the six-foot-six, 290-pound lineman snarled, “You little SOB. I'll get you next year.”
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“Next year” never seemed to arrive for the Steelers, just as it seemed unattainable for baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers. “This is a club that has been heir to misfortune ever since it entered the league,” sportswriter Tex Maule commented about Pittsburgh. The Steelers had a losing tradition dating back to their inaugural season of 1933, but an unflinching toughness was
just as much a part of their heritage. They might not beat you, but they were a sure bet to beat you up. “If we lose,” said Russell, “we're going to hurt you.” Two members of the '63 team made Layne's list of “Pro Football's 11 Meanest Men”: John Henry Johnson and wide receiver Red Mack. If Layne had made a list of twenty-two, surely Johnson and Mack would have had company from the Steelers' roster.
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It was a motley mix of individuals, composed like a hot rod from salvaged junkyard parts. Pittsburgh had Daniel, an undrafted speedy cornerback from Mississippi State who made the unlikeliest leap of all to a Buddy Parker team by leaving his high school coaching job and earning a roster spot on the Steelers with a tryout.

The Steelers had an eighth-round draft choice—Atkinson, who played defensive tackle in the pros for two years before walking away from pro football forever for a career in finance—and a sixteenth-round draft pick—Russell, who didn't want to play pro football but would take over a starting spot, leave for two years in the Army, return to Pittsburgh to endure six straight losing seasons, and then conclude his NFL career with two Super Bowl rings.