The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s, and the Fight for America's Soul

by Chad Millman

While Dan and Art Sr. were anxious about the hiring of Noll for all the reasons bosses are usually nervous about a new hire—Will he do well? Will he embarrass us? Will we look like fools for handing him the job?—Art

4 of 6. Colts beat Cowboys in V and Chiefs won IV.

“We called him Dad or Mr. Rooney or Your Majesty or something.” The Chief was gone a lot when his boys were growing up. And he was harder on them than anyone in his orbit. Art Sr. provided all of his kids with jobs throughout his empire—but in exchange for this benefits package, they were his whipping boys. He called Art Jr. fatso and would ride him when he saw him chewing tobacco.

As their rankings changed, the names had to be rewritten in their new spot. It was mind-numbing work, easy to make mistakes. And it put Art Jr. on edge with his staff. If someone’s name was spelled incorrectly or put in the wrong spot, he grew more irate. “The first thing Noll will see when he walks into this room are those charts,” he yelled that night. “If he sees a lot of mistakes, our credibility will be shot.”

First choice in the first round . . . O. J. Simpson, running back from USC.” With the second pick Atlanta chose Notre Dame tackle George Kunz. And picking third the Eagles took Purdue running back Leroy Keyes. In the Steelers war room there was a hush. Art Jr. looked across the table at Noll and asked him, “Greene?” Noll said, “Let’s go for him.”

“In doing so we deviated from our plans,” wrote Art Jr. in his book. “He was not the best athlete available. We took him for one reason: pressure from our fans.”

Perhaps it's good the Giants don't do this.

Greene was, well, mean. So mean that the green-clad North Texas football team, historically called the Eagles, became known as the Mean Green during his tenure. The name stuck. For player and school. Greene had plenty of reasons to be angry growing up in Temple, Texas, a hundred miles south of Dallas.

People’s perception of him made him feel isolated, like an outcast, and imbued him with a sensitivity, a shyness, that would last a lifetime. Not even football spared him.

None of the fans in Pittsburgh knew these stories yet. They didn’t know that this big man burned hotter than molten steel. They didn’t know that he feared losing the way most people fear poverty. They didn’t know that he understood what every blue-collar mill worker felt every time he walked

into the foundry, because he’d stood there, too, just a guy punching a clock looking for a paycheck. And losing meant doing it again. He had no intention of doing that. That’s who Joe was.

Werblin saw it as the steely-eyed, blue-collar Johnny Unitas versus the metropolitan heartthrob Frank Gifford. There was a reason why viewers in Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, and every other state tuned in. It wasn’t because they cared about the cities represented or even the teams. It was the men on the field. The forty-five million people who watched the game comprised 25 percent of the U.S. population in 1960.

Perhaps it's good the Giants don't do this.

The NFL’s old-school football-as-civic-enterprise setup was ridiculous to Werblin. Football wasn’t about rivalries, or about keeping the hometown fans happy; it was entertainment. “A million dollar set [the Titans] is worthless if you put a $2,000 actor in the main role,” he once said.

The Jets still follow this strategy.

Werblin’s franchise wouldn’t be an homage to the NFL. The “Jets” would be fresh, modern, and cool—just like the jet-set owners of the league.

Football’s core audience didn’t like Joe as a person, but respected him as a player.

As New York Jets defensive lineman Gerry Philbin explained it, “There was one set of rules for the team and another for Joe.” 12 BY THE SPRING OF 1969, NOLL STILL HAD YET TO MEET WITH his team. And those he had met, like Pro Bowl linebacker Andy Russell, didn’t exactly get a warm embrace from the coach.

Charles and Donald, the oldest brothers, both spent time working in a rubber factory making tires. Hoak’s father worked in mills, too, making grenades and shells during the war and then picking up work wherever he could when it was over. After Dick’s senior year in high school, his father never found steady work again—the family got by with help from Dick’s brothers. Dick didn’t intend on doing hard labor; he wanted to teach and coach. He had the perfect temperament for it—never too impressed with his accomplishments; never too disappointed with failure. Even when he was drafted by the Steelers in 1961, it wasn’t cause for celebration. After talking it over with his parents he called the Pittsburgh scout and said, “Okay, I might as well try it.” All Hoak asked

was that the team help him finish school at Penn State, where he was six credits shy of graduating.

The team Hoak joined was, by the barest definition, a pro team. It played in the NFL. He got paid. They had uniforms. But in so many ways, this was a minor-league outfit. Those uniforms? Well, sometimes the helmets were different colors. The team was essentially homeless, playing its home games at the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt Stadium, and at Forbes Field, where the Pirates roamed.

Ah, the glory days!

Years later, Russell would tell Rooney that was the day everything changed for the Steelers. That one drill. It established Greene as the meanest, maddest, baddest player on the team. After that, he’d rip into teammates he felt were giving less than full effort in practice. His disgust with losing, his fear of going back to Texas with nothing, didn’t infiltrate the Steelers. It swallowed them whole.

He emphasized the importance of knowing your opponent, and how proper technique, not brute strength, was the key to winning a game.

But Noll knew how far to push. He was there to make the Steelers better football players, not be their father. Gone were the petty rules players hated. No more dress codes. Being clean-shaven didn’t matter. Noll looked the other way when Mansfield snuck players out of the dorms for a late-night beer. He even let reporters stay in the dorms, partly so they’d talk to players instead of bothering him. Noll didn’t do these things to win hearts and minds; none of these rules helped improve performance.

The Steelers were showing all the growing pains of a young team learning a new system. They’d execute early, then fall back on bad habits when challenged by opponents. The team wasn’t good enough yet to win on skill alone. And the players could see in the box scores that they were at their best, they were winning, when they played the way Noll taught them to play.

Only once that season did Noll berate the team in the film room, and that was after the season-opening win over the Lions. Every loss was followed by instruction more than criticism. If a player made a mistake he would stop the projector and ask, “What did you see on that play? Tell me why you made the decision you made.” “He

He was fascinated by the men who could outwit their ignorant prey, trading their weak horse or calf for another man’s prize possessions. “If you have to get a calf’s price down to eight dollars so you can sell it at ten dollars . . . you learn about people,” Murchison once said.

The big initial Texas oil fortunes were won by outsiders, led by Pittsburgher James Guffey, who owned the lease for the Spindletop well. When he sold the rights to his well to the European oil company Royal Dutch Shell, it was touted by newspapers across the country as the deal of the century. Then, with a rep for prospecting and a streak of luck, Guffey earned the backing of one of Pittsburgh’s richest families, the Mellons, and moved south to the Gulf Coast field region.

The fallout left the big eastern companies with the work of oil (piping, refining, transporting, etc.) and the native Texans with the fun—leasing land with potential oil reserves, drilling, and then selling the leases to the big companies after the wells came in.

Their biggest deal, outdueling a Woolworth heir to take control of one of Wall Street’s most influential holding companies, landed them on the cover of Time magazine. At the time, the only other Texas businessman awarded such an honor had been their father. The rush of a business deal intoxicated Clint Jr., but once the transaction was done, he had little interest in the paperwork. He’d tire of the details until the next opportunity arose and the process would begin anew. His brother, John, would let off

steam by flying to a ski mountain that the brothers had bought in Vail, Colorado, but Clint Jr. didn’t want to relax. He wanted to be entertained. And there was one thing that would always keep his interest.

He was the son of a welder who loved football.

Seems to be a trend: blue collar workers love football.

So instead of LSU or Baylor or any of the showpiece football schools that recruited him, he settled on tiny, unheralded Louisiana Tech in Ruston, where his talents for sitting on the bench were more appreciated than his golden arm. For two years he backed up the starter, again waiting his turn, still believing he was a future NFL star. He sat until early in his junior season, when the number-one QB was knocked out of a game and Bradshaw finally got his shot. By the end of the season, little Louisiana Tech was 9-2 and Bradshaw, now 6’3” and 210 pounds, led the nation in combined rushing and passing yardage.

“He was a doubting Thomas, he had to see to believe,” wrote Rooney Jr. “Noll could be maddening.” As is still the tradition, NFL coaches took over each Senior Bowl squad, and Bradshaw’s was coached by Don Shula. “We’ll see how he picks up teaching,” Noll told his scouts before the trip. This was, of course, paramount to Noll. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe his scouts when they said that Bradshaw had otherworldly talent. He trusted their instincts on dozens of prospects he never saw. But this was his potential quarterback, his extension on the field.

A million-dollar arm didn’t mean anything if the guy using it had a ten-cent head.

When asked how he felt, he replied, “Thrilled. I wanted to go with a loser.” He got his wish.

With four down linemen engaging the offensive line, the unblocked middle linebacker would scan the offensive backfield and meet the running back at the line of scrimmage. With Landry’s innovation, the Giants had the best defense in the NFL in both 1958 and 1959. With the Cowboys, Schramm was giving Landry the chance to mold a champion in his own image.

After watching an IBM computer tabulate and update the results of the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Schramm contacted IBM to do something similar for the Cowboys’ scouting problem. They put him in touch with a lead scientist at one of their subsidiaries, Service Bureau Corporation in Palo Alto, California. Indian-born Salam Quereishi, who would today be called a software programmer, answered the call. Despite serious language barriers—with accompanying red-faced Schramm exasperation, Quereishi and Schramm devised a brilliant evaluation process to find the best prospects for the Cowboy system. Fifteen different categories defined each player. He would be given a numeric grade between 1 and 9, with 3 being average.

The Cowboy uniform also evolved. The helmets went from white, which had a tendency to get scuffed and dirty, to silver. The lone star became more clearly defined with an additional border detail. The pants morphed from traditional white to better-stain-hiding metallic blue. And their home uniforms, instead of featuring a signature color, were white. The silver sheen of their helmets reflected class and wealth, and the purity of their uniform reinforced the image.

First, Rozelle secured informal approval from Congress that the merger wouldn’t violate any antitrust laws (he promised Louisiana Senator Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs a New Orleans expansion franchise). Then Schramm was tasked with working it out with Hunt.

The Cowboys joined the Detroit Lions as hosts of an annual Thanksgiving game, and he successfully lobbied for preferential scheduling and in-depth coverage on NFL pregame shows.

On the field, the cobbled-together 1960 Cowboys had an ignominious start, going winless in their opening

season. In fact, it wasn’t until they faced the feckless

Steelers in the first game of the 1961 season that they got i...

The rivalry started early.

a philosophy that demands player adherence to game plans, not game plans devised to accommodate player strengths and weaknesses—the

Since the 1959 strike, the USWA had drafted iron miners, copper smelters and refiners, aluminum workers, can-factory and metal-fabricating-plant employees, and even some police and Chock full o’Nuts coffee-shop waitresses. Having a broader base of dues-paying members buttressed the union when one or the other of its labor divisions had to go on strike. There were individual collective-bargaining agreements for each industry, so having several groups under one roof meant stability for the greater union. Even if every steelworker walked off the job, there would be 700,000 others paying dues monthly.

Sounds like running a big business.

They think they get benefits like we have and holidays, vacations, medical insurance, and all that because employers want to

give that.”

No pressure. The weekend of Bradshaw’s first rookie minicamp in Pittsburgh, Russell arranged to have a barbecue at his house. But when he called the Steelers facility to find the rookie, he wasn’t there. Bradshaw, Russell was told, had gone to pray at a local church.

They always had jobs during the off-season and had never made enough for the game to be anything but fun. Just like for the fans, football was an escape from reality. And, really, they liked to party, and they liked the rookies to party with them.

He’d grown up comfortable and loved by a big family. To him football was a game he was passionate to play, more than anything, sure, but he wasn’t desperate to win. The game was just fun and because of that, the wins followed.

It was the difference between checkers and chess.

So did the fact that, on his first play from scrimmage in place of Bradshaw, local hero Terry Hanratty threw a touchdown. After the game, Bradshaw sat in his car in the Three Rivers parking lot and cried. The Steelers lost their first three games that season, with Noll shuffling his quarterbacks practically every quarter. It got so bad for Bradshaw that his mom came to stay with him.

Because the majority of the Cowboy fan base was blue collar and located in South Dallas, near the Cotton Bowl, a new stadium in Irving would be no small move. But the consummate dealmaker Murchison deeded the land to the city in exchange for approval from the Irving City Council for a bond issue to fund the construction.