Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chad Millman
Read between
May 11, 2015 - August 22, 2019
I believe the game is designed to reward the ones who hit the hardest. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t play. JACK LAMBERT
The reason for having such games, these Super Bowls, is so that once in a long while the impossible can happen . . . if it could
never happen, the great talent of Joe Willie Namath would be pumping gas in Beaver Falls without rhyme or reason.
Yes, that is the glory of the Super Bowl.
Namath was the exact opposite of what Rozelle wanted from his league and his players—he was a bigger story than the game itself.
These men loved professional football because most of them had played the game once upon a time themselves and found it to be an apt metaphor for the hard and honest lives they lived.
The power flowed from owner to general manager to coaches. And on the bottom were the players. They kept their
mouths shut and sacrificed for the good of the team.
In the late 1940s, Rooney moved the Steelers home base to the fourth floor of a respectable office building. But that location didn’t last. One of his top players was afraid he’d forget he was so high up and, after a too-late night spent chatting with Rooney, accidentally walk out the window. So Rooney moved to the Roosevelt, at the corner of Sixth Street and Penn Avenue. The office was on the ground floor, but it didn’t have any windows. Everyone would have to leave through the ornately designed English Tudor lobby.
Rooney breathed the working-class ethos that defined his town; no matter how influential he became, he still lived like a real burgher, like the son of a saloonkeeper he had always been.
He and his wife, Kathleen, raised their boys in the two-story, redbrick Victorian house on the rapidly deteriorating north side of town where he grew up. Even in the late 1960s, as increasing television revenue lined the pockets of NFL owners, Rooney still walked to work almost every day.
“My grandfather had a brewery with a lot of fat guys, and they would dress these guys and put ’em on the sideline. But no one had any intention of playing them.” Still, Rooney Sr. ran his team as if it were a city trust, not something he owned outright. The Steelers were Pittsburgh, the nickname chosen by fans in a contest. The team practiced in South Park, an Allegheny County-owned field normally used for fairs and stock shows, where anyone could watch.
For the thirty-seven-year-old Noll, the beauty of the game was in its precision and detail. He didn’t play it to get famous, but to study it. And he didn’t coach it for the glory of winning, but for the mental challenge of perfecting it. Sunday was for the players, their final exam. Monday through Friday was for him.
He did his own accounting of candidates, speaking with other assistants and scouring the college ranks for potential head coaching gems. He’d end up interviewing ten coaches. But he kept in contact with Noll on the phone.
“When I first talked to Noll after the Super Bowl game, I thought he was young for the job. But when we brought him to Pittsburgh he sold himself to us . . . we have some good personnel and expect to draft a few more good prospects. We just need someone who can put it together.” It had all the grand expectations that come with a team’s rebirth. Only one thing was missing: the new coach.
But when the war ended, the real dirty work began. Just across from Fort Pitt was a thousand-foot peak the locals called “Coal Hill.” It proved to be an entry into a massive coal seam that ran from Maryland, through West Virginia, and into western Pennsylvania. With coal across the river, Fort Pitt and the borough’s early settlers had easy access to fuel. Laborers who mined the hills poured into the city by the thousands. By the early nineteenth century, as the American economy began its long ascent to prominence, Pittsburgh, with locally manufactured goods that could readily move north,
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Its been vital to Pennsylvania from the beginning.
Scots)—social status was skill dependent. You either worked at the “back” or the “front” of the mill. While the puddlers were at the front and maintained a level of autonomy, the back workers were a dime a dozen. They did the work that mules or horses would have done, but no animals would get anywhere near a blast furnace. Top fillers shoveled loads of iron ore and coke into wheelbarrows. Then they pushed them up a steep incline to the feeder hole at the top of the furnace. With a wind shift, the exhaust from the molten furnace below blew noxious fumes (including odorless but deadly carbon
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Every shift that a steelworker worked increased his odds of dying at the mill.
It was typical Noll. He always had a plan, an if-then strategy tucked in his back pocket for easy reference. His ideas were never fanciful, never full of dreamy prose; no one would ever make one great and glorious leap to the moon listening to him talk. But they’d know the first step they needed to take, and the next and the next, until, suddenly, they were floating amongst the stars. He could make the most complicated journey seem as simple as a walk to the store, if you followed his rules. And the first lesson was always the same: work hard, work right. He’d learned that playing high school
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He lived his life the way he approached football: Knowledge was the ultimate prize.
In those moments, they weren’t expert tacticians steeped in the theories of Paul Brown. They weren’t boss and employee. They were just a couple of football-obsessed kids from Cleveland having a spirited debate.
“Bloody Monday,” “Ballown,” and “Old Division Football,” all of which derived from Mob Football. The injuries sustained and the brutality of the contests brought bans from Yale and Harvard in the 1860s. But not before the game had migrated into the eastern prep schools, where “townies” were brought in as last-minute ringers. Variations of the game evolved, and
standardized rules came with them as interest grew.
Ten years of successful barnstorming teams later, a new professional football league emerged. The original National Football League was made up of just three teams, two from Philadelphia and one from Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Stars won the first NFL championship and a team sponsored by the Franklin Athletic Club in Philadelphia made up of both cities’ finest players won the second, but the league folded after only two seasons.
New York’s Tim Mara was a brilliant bookmaker who, in 1925, had the vision to see that the bedrock of one of the largest cities in the world was the factory workers and longshoreman who would embrace a rough game.
In Philadelphia, Bert Bell formed the Eagles with a couple of college football teammates from the University of Pennsylvania. He’d become the NFL’s second commissioner.
In 1934, George Richards, who had built Detroit’s most popular radio station, took over the Lions and bankrolled his team through economic hardship. Lambeau, Halas, Richards, Rooney, Bell, and Mara defined themselves as citizens of their respective cities, and in the first thirty years of the league they fielded teams more out of responsibility than for a return on their investment. In 1952, the revenues for the entire NFL were $8,327,000, with a net profit for all the teams of $236,000, a meager 2.84 percent margin. The thought of folding a team, however, was anathema. A good year was
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“We’ll change history,” Noll said. “Losing has nothing to do with geography.” Noll was hired just ten days before the NFL draft, and the Steelers, winners of two games and in need of a roster overhaul, had the fourth overall pick.
He had sold the Rooneys on a theory that the only way to build a team was through the prudent choosing of young talent.
Rookies are raw, they make mistakes, they lose you games. Veterans know how to win—that’s how the axiom had always gone. And coaches don’t want to risk their futures by training some green player so he can be better for the next guy roaming the sidelines.
“He pointed out that the Steelers had traded away their future,” Dan Rooney wrote. “He thought the way to build a championship team was through the draft. Get young, raw talent, then teach them the fundamentals of the game. Above all he counseled patience. He knew it would take some time to rebuild the team and instill in the players a winning attitude.” It was a plan that seemed
so logical, so simple, that if they allowed him to follow it, they’d all one day see the football equivalent of a man strolling on the moon—the Steelers would be respectable. Maybe they’d even win.
They thought of themselves as part of a higher class than
the blast-furnace and rolling-mill workers, and they came together to formalize their prejudices. What set them above the laborers was their knowledge of how long it took to heat and squeeze pig iron into steel. It gave them power.
Puddlers now manned the hellish kettles, their expertise superfluous. The Sons of Vulcan scrambled to merge with the blast-furnace and rolling-mill laborers to form the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union.
For the next forty years, the Amalgamated struggled. Calls for national steel strikes in 1901, 1919, and 1936 failed. Strikers were beaten and some killed. Big Steel would not negotiate an across-the-board contract for every worker on its payroll, nor would it improve working conditions or work hours.
The lone dissent was Art Rooney, who believed that Baltimore was a better home for the team. With three African-American players on the Yanks, Rooney suspected that the South’s deeply ingrained racism would keep fans from Dallas’s Cotton Bowl on Sunday.
Texans, and the Baltimore Colts began play in 1953. At the end of the decade, Rosenbloom’s Colts would win the 1958 NFL Championship against the New York Giants. Considered the “Greatest Game Ever Played”—more for the impact made by NBC’s live coverage of the sudden-death overtime victory than the level of play—the Colts’ championship proved to be spectacular entertainment for homebound husbands on Sunday afternoon.
The Pittsburgh kid who wasn’t good enough for the Steelers—no matter how much the Chief’s youngest boys tried to tell their father otherwise—was the greatest clutch quarterback of a generation.
They’d go on to assemble the winners of four of the first five Super Bowls (Lombardi’s Packers, Ewbank’s Jets, Landry’s Cowboys) and coach players who defined football as physical (Green Bay’s power sweep), emotional (Broadway Joe’s guarantee), and precise (the Cowboys Flex defense).
4 of 6. Colts beat Cowboys in V and Chiefs won IV.
Seeing Unitas’s surgical aerial assault on the tired Giants defense convinced Hunt that not only was professional football the future of American sports, it was the future of American entertainment. He later recalled thinking, “Well, that’s it. This sport really has everything. And it televises well.”
He even heard about another guy in Dallas who had been trying to get a franchise for years. Get in line. Young Hunt wasn’t interested in waiting his turn. He knew what he wanted and he had the money to buy it. On the American Airlines flight home, he asked a stewardess for some stationery.
Hunt flew south, ate a steak with him, and shook hands. When he left Houston, he had Adams’s commitment to join the new league.
While Hunt approached all of the other jilted wannabe NFL owners around the country, starting with those who had been interested in the Cardinals, NFL commissioner Bert Bell was dealing with the fallout from threats by U.S. Senate reformer Estes Kefauver. Kefauver, famous for his investigations into organized crime, wanted legislation to ensure that the major sports leagues were treated under the same antitrust laws as the oil and steel industries. NFL violations were numerous, its draft of college players being the most obvious transgression.
If Bell could prove that another league was soon to start up, then he could argue that college players would have more than one employment opportunity and could therefore leverage one league against another in order to get their fair market price.
By announcing the league Bell gave it immediate legitimacy. Hunt now had not only the leverage to get his American Football League off the ground at the local stadium box office level, but even more critically he would have it later on with Madison Avenue. The buzz began to reach NFL players. Cleveland head coach Paul Brown tried to cut off any curiosity. At his 1959 training camp he told his players, “There’s a new league starting. Don’t pay any attention to it. It’s not going to succeed. It’s a bunch of sons of rich guys who don’t know anything about football.”
The subtext was anything but subtle. Beware of spoiled rich kids tampering with the blue-collar game.
A good defense was steadfast and strong and straightforward, dominating in a physical and merciless way. Offense could be messy and tricky, full of mistakes that made the ball tumble to and fro, taking the coach’s stomach for a ride along with
it.
“I knew what you had to do to win. Number one, you had to not lose,” Noll said. “That means you have to play good defense. And you wanted an offense that didn’t get your defense in trouble. We have to play good defense and not make mistakes on offense—even if we have to run the ball on every down and punt.”
Their scouting reports on Greene read like this: “Puts on weight, tendency to loaf.” “Physically he has it all, mentally he is disappointing . . . will need a heavy hand but he can play.” “I would question taking him in the first round as he could turn out to be a big dog.”
