The '63 Steelers (7 page)

They had an undersized, slow-of-foot running back, Dick Hoak, who would retire after ten years as the team's No. 2 all-time rushing leader and then spend another thirty-five years as coach of the Steelers running backs. They had a hometown defensive back, Dick Haley, who would play one more season with the team before going on to a stellar career in player personnel, helping to shape the Steelers into a dynasty in the seventies. And they had a defensive tackle, Cordileone, who had been traded straight up for a future Hall of Fame quarterback and, in his fourth year in the NFL, was with his fourth team. He was a New Jersey guy who had hopes of going into business as a mortician after his football career was over.

Jim Brown called them the “Gashouse Gang.” They had a reputation for playing all-out on the field, and partying all-out off it. Word was, according to Brown, that the coach loaded up the team bus with beer. “Now I'm not saying that the Steelers are necessarily headed for hell when they die,” Brown allowed, but it didn't look as if they were on the road to salvation either.
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Clendon Thomas, an All-America at Oklahoma before being drafted by the Rams, wanted to be traded from Los Angeles, but the last place he wanted to go was Pittsburgh. He had heard “all kinds of bad things about the Steelers—that they were a bunch of drunks and rabble-rousers.” After the trade, he discovered that the stories had been “embellished to the ridiculous.”
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But enough of the stories were true to maintain the Steelers' reputation as a team that was good to the last drop, whether it was booze or blood.

The '63 Steelers were the Animal House of the NFL.

The Steelers had players no one else wanted or believed in—certainly not enough to think that these men could carry a team to an NFL championship. At least one preseason poll of newspapermen picked the Steelers to finish fourth in the Eastern Conference in '63.
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Sports Illustrated
predicted a third-place finish.
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Veteran sportswriter Joe Falls of the
Detroit Free Press
predicted a fourth-place finish.
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But by the final weekend of the '63 season, a curious mix of overachievers, castoffs, veterans, and raw young players with more heart than natural talent had put itself on the brink of something special, summed up in one headline in the
New York Times:
“Steelers: A Lot of Discards Seeking a Jackpot.”
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The race down the stretch between four teams in the Eastern Conference was so crazy a free-for-all that it looked as if the jumble might create “the worst snarl” in NFL history, necessitating a playoff. After the twelfth week, the Giants and Browns were tied for first, at 9–3, a winning percentage of .750. The Steelers, following their third tie of the season, were 6–3–3, a winning percentage of .667, the same as the 8–4 Cardinals. Because the NFL's practice in computing the standings had been to disregard tie games, the Steelers could still win the conference with the best winning percentage if Cleveland lost once and Pittsburgh won its last two games, against Dallas and New York. Frank Ryan, the Browns' quarterback as well as “a mental giant pursuing a doctorate in mathematics,” had been asked not long before to calculate the possible finishes and came up with “a stunning total of more than 7,000,”
New York Times
columnist Arthur Daley wrote.
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No matter the math, no one in the NFL had to be told that against the longest odds of all, the most unlikely scenario was that Parker's band of renegades would be fighting for the right to play in the NFL championship game on the last day of the regular season.

As 1963 began, Americans weren't exactly naive about their place in the world. Castro and Khrushchev were as much household names as Ed Sullivan and J. Edgar Hoover, and people were learning to locate Vietnam on a map. Americans had a steady, trusted routine.
Dondi, Pogo
, and
Joe Palooka
appeared daily in the
Pittsburgh Press
comics. André Previn and
Polka, Polka, Polka
records alike—“Hi-Fi or Stereo”—were on sale for eighty-seven cents at Gimbels. Acme markets had T-bone steaks for ninety-five cents a pound. Kellogg's introduced a new cereal called Froot Loops, and
The Fugitive
and
Petticoat Junction
would make their debuts on TV in the fall. The new Corvette Stingrays were zipping down streets. All in all, not only was life pretty cheery in 1963, but “the American people
ha[d] never before had it so good,”
U.S. News & World Report
concluded from a nationwide survey. People in general were well off. They had good housing and a healthy amount of time for leisure and vacations. Incomes were at “a record level,” and there were “gadgets of all kinds for the home.”
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But with all the trappings of prosperity and the veneer of success, were people actually happy? Many were not, the magazine said. “Millions keep on the move each year in search of something they don't seem to find.”
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There were problems and trends that could be documented with statistics. The divorce rate was high. Crime in big cities was on the rise. Despite the flush times, plenty of people were in debt. But there was also something that didn't add up, something missing, but it was an elusive worry that was hard to identify, quantify, or articulate.

“We're such an affluent society, we have so much,” a newspaperman in Escanaba, Michigan, said, “that what is there left?” An insurance agent in Vermilion, South Dakota, mused, “There is too much money, times are too good. We are losing our basic values.” A secretary in Los Angeles felt people lacked spirit and animation, and she faulted the age of automation. “There are too many products: life's too complicated,” she said. “We drift. It's a depressing atmosphere.” The nation was in a state of flux, and no one seemed to know what to do or think about it. “The national attitude, it seems, is one of some uncertainty rather than one of full confidence,” the magazine reported.
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Young people across the country were restless and inquisitive. Sex and drinking were becoming more widespread, and parents fretted that kids were getting married too soon. A school official in Jamestown, North Dakota, wondered if kids were growing up too fast. The new generation was starting to assert itself. “Our young people are more insistent on answers to troubling questions,” said a Protestant minister in Columbia, South Carolina. “They no longer are quiet, no longer willing to just accept what we older folk tell them.”
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People brooded about everything from jobs and unions to church membership, and now civil rights had become a big issue, but what to do about the controversy was a dilemma. “We are 100 per cent for integration, of course,” said a Jamestown, North Dakota, lawyer, “but 99½ per cent of us don't understand the problem at all.” There was a lot of talk about it, the editor of a newspaper in Whitesburg, Kentucky, said, and even if they couldn't grasp what the problem was, people let their worries run unchecked. “The fear here is of mixed marriages,” the editor said. “People worry, too, about Negroes demanding jobs downtown.”
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Not many seemed confident that politicians comprehended the issue either—or that they had the ability to solve any of the other problems plaguing the nation. “I have a feeling that nobody cares whether a Republican or Democrat is elected the next President,” said a railroad executive in Chicago. “Both parties eat out of the same bowl.”
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Football fans were beginning to learn that the sports world was not immune to the temptations and problems of real life. Green Bay's Paul Hornung and Detroit's Alex Karras had been suspended for gambling on NFL games. That punishment was designed as a deterrent to players, of course, not to regular citizens. On the weekend of the 1963 NFL openers, thirty-six state police officers in seventeen cars “swooped down” and made eighteen gambling-related arrests at thirteen establishments in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. “We just scratched the surface,” one officer commented. Six more arrests took place outside Uniontown.
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The sports world had provided a refuge for diversion and entertainment, but violence, death, and grief were muscling in on the national consciousness. Long before sports viewing became widely popular and accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the daily newspaper provided fans with a reliable escape from the onslaught of depressing news. “Agree with me or not,” wrote
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
sports editor Al Abrams in a December 1961 column, “I say sports pages today offer a vicarious, if not welcome relief, in these days of uncertainty, restlessness, turbulence, violence or any other disturbing factor one can name.” The places and problems seizing the public's attention at the time, he noted, included Katanga, West Berlin, graft, murder, automation “and even the twist craze.”
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Most people would have agreed with Abrams. Two years later, Katanga and the twist had faded from the public consciousness, but graft, murder, and automation were as much in vogue as ever. Different spots on the globe were twitching with war, and new social issues were cresting. Barely an hour before NFL games kicked off on the opening Sunday of the '63 season, down in Birmingham, Alabama, a bomb that police estimated had the power of at least fifteen sticks of dynamite went off in a Negro church, killing four girls and inciting riots in which two boys would be shot to death. The four girls had just heard their Sunday school lesson for the day: “The Love that Forgives.” The bombing came five days after the desegregation of three of the city's all-white schools.
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There were many other incidents of racial intolerance, of course, ranging from the humiliating to the tragic, only there wasn't enough room to squeeze them all into a daily newspaper—at least not on page 1. On the same day
that the bombings in Alabama made front-page news, buried on page 8 of the
Post-Gazette
under a one-column headline was an account of an incident that had culminated in the deaths of three Hill District men from an accident believed to have been sparked by a racial insult. The unidentified driver of a passing car yelled a slur at four men in a station wagon, and as the station wagon gave chase, the vehicle collided with an oncoming car on the two-lane Thirty-First Street Bridge. The station wagon caught on fire, and three of the passengers were burned to death.
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The world was steadily revealing itself to be more dangerous, more deadly, than people had imagined. Residents of Youngstown, Ohio, were all too familiar with organized crime, but it wasn't until the court testimony of Joe Valachi, “the kindly looking killer with the henna rinse haircut,” in late September of '63 that the rest of the nation got its introduction to the Mafia. “Two months ago the world at large had never heard of Cosa Nostra,” a wire service reported during the proceedings. “Now Cosa Nostra is a household word.”
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Two dozen crime families would arise from coast to coast in the United States, as well as Canada. New York and Chicago had the most notorious families, but Cleveland and Pittsburgh could boast major league crime franchises, too. However, when it came to organized crime, Pittsburgh evidently was a bit different from, say, Youngstown—more upper crust. A former associate of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, speaking in Italy, explained that once the Mafia needed someone to perform a task in Pittsburgh but could find no one to do the job “because the Mafiosi in that city were all well-to-do.”
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Almost imperceptibly, lifestyles were shifting, traditions fading. The day after the Steelers beat Detroit in an exhibition game, 22–7, on the night the Lions retired Bobby Layne's uniform, the No. 56 trolley from McKeesport to Pittsburgh ended a run that had started in 1895. A week later, the first air-conditioned bus in the area was put into local service.

The world was swirling and seething with changes, day by day, and amid the shadows of calm and strife, the '63 Steelers were aiming to create their own place in history.

Two weeks after the Packers beat the Giants, 16–7, in the 1962 NFL title game before 64,892 fans at Yankee Stadium, the East beat the West, 30–20, in the Pro Bowl in front of a Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum crowd of 61,374. Big Daddy Lipscomb, having completed his second season with the Steelers, was named the outstanding lineman of the game, despite playing on the losing team. “Big Daddy's a happy man,” Lipscomb said afterward. “I say it was one of my best games of the year.”
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Lipscomb was only thirty-one, and every one of the stars on the field that day undoubtedly believed that Big Daddy had plenty of good games—even great games—ahead of him. But it was the last time Big Daddy Lipscomb, six foot six, 290 pounds or more, would terrorize NFL quarterbacks and intimidate offensive tackles. Four months later, on May 10, Lipscomb was found dead in a friend's West Baltimore apartment. The chief medical examiner ruled the cause of death to be an overdose of heroin, but teammates, relatives, and friends considered it preposterous to believe that a man who was terrified to get a shot from a doctor would willingly stick a needle in his own arm. It was widely known among Steelers players and management that Lipscomb would run from a syringe as fast as quarterbacks ran from him. “We had to take tetanus shots, vitamin shots if you wanted 'em,” said former teammate Clendon Thomas. “They couldn't get him down to give him his tetanus shots. It would have taken fifteen of us to get him down on the floor, and I'm not sure we could have done it. You couldn't touch him with a needle.”
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