Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chad Millman
Read between
May 11, 2015 - August 22, 2019
But the biggest innovation was the “Circle Suites,” the first NFL luxury boxes. They were marketed to wealthy football fans and placed at the very top of the stadium, offering the most complete view of the game as well as separation from the regular ticket buyers below. The brochure said it all, “Your personalized penthouse at Texas Stadium . . . the ultimate in spectacular luxury and comfort . . . similar to a second residence, like a lake home or a ranch.”
“I’d say we lost a whole group of fans in the $12,000 to $20,000 a year salary range who could afford season tickets at the Cotton Bowl but couldn’t afford to buy bonds,” Murchison said. “If we discriminated against them, we discriminated against them, but no more than all America discriminates against people who don’t have enough money to buy everything they want.”
And sadly this has gone on.
Professional football was once a game for guys who didn’t go to college. It gave them teams to identify with and root for as their own. The players on the field were much like they were, working hard for a decent wage to support their families. While the Cowboy players remained blue-collar, the Cowboy target market for the 1970s and beyond was decidedly white-collar.
Their neighbors were field hands, laborers, and domestic service workers, the future fans for Dallas’s expansion pro football teams.
Ten months after his death, Duane’s mother collapsed in front of her house with a massive heart attack. Her death pushed Thomas’s youngest sister over the edge and she suffered a debilitating mental breakdown. In his grief, Thomas drew inward. He pressed himself even harder on the field. In his senior year, he averaged 5.4 yards a carry and rushed for 1,054 yards. Throughout the season, pro scouts would come to check him out, so Thomas reached out to the only man left that he could trust, West Texas State head football coach Joe Kerbel, for professional advice. Kerbel recommended an agent from
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Sounds like running a big business.
To be a Cowboy was to be controlled.
TEXANS DIDN’T SPEND A LOT OF TIME DISCUSSING HOW COAL and steel barons from western Pennsylvania—Men like James Guffey and the Mellon family—financed the Lone Star State’s turn-of-the-century oil boom. In
Of course they didn't.
From 1955 to 1965, Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV Corp.) was the fastest-growing company in the United States, as Ling diversified into a multi-industry conglomerate. By the end of the 1960s, LTV Corp. had 29,000 employees and offered 15,000 different products—hamburgers, missiles, jets, and footballs among them. So many that Ling could no longer keep track. He created nothing himself, he simply owned. Ling joined a growing list of modern leaders driving the new American economy—Harold Geneen of International Telegraph and Telephone,
Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf and Western, Troy V. Post of Great America Corporation, and John and Clint Murchison Jr. of Murchison Brothers.
A season that he had spent trying to ignore his personal life so that he wouldn’t be distracted from his professional life had come to a head. His divorce was proceeding. The IRS claimed he owed $10,000 in back taxes. His agent cashed his checks and paid none of his bills. Now he had to fix his financial mess himself. The first time he met Gil Brandt—before he’d been signed—Thomas asked him how a man can make a good living playing professional football. Brandt had told him, “By producing.” No one produced like Duane Thomas had in 1970. The evidence was incontrovertible.
The Cowboys treated Thomas like OCC treated me. More evidence to me that if we ignored the absolute numbers involved we would see that athletes are no different from any other workers.
The NFL had twenty-six owners controlling the entire professional football market in 1971, and the option clauses in player contracts made sure wages stayed artificially low.
It effectively crushed the ability for a player post-AFL-NFL merger to attain his market value. Later called “the Rozelle Rule,” it required one team to compensate another for signing one of its former players. If the two clubs could not come to a mutually agreeable exchange, the commissioner was given the power to assign players, draft picks, or money to the franchise that lost the player.
Thomas spoke with the other players and learned the dark truth. “We had to keep winning to make any kind of money at all. Practice times had even been readjusted so we couldn’t work a second job in the evening and try to make some extra money. It wasn’t just the black players who were getting screwed, it was all of them, even great players like Jordan and Lilly.”
Thomas for being ungrateful and disloyal to the franchise, adding more fuel to the fire. Month after month, Thomas refused to live by the terms of his contract. Other Cowboys watched the drama. “A lot of players supported him but were afraid to come out publicly. It makes no difference what kind of ability you have. If an organization wants to rid itself of you, it can do it. We knew there were plenty of players out there who could have been playing the game but were denied the chance. The whole system is based on insecurity,” Rayfield Wright later commented. Just before the start of the 1971
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The media kept on him all the while, calling him militant, unappreciative, and cocky.
that he wasn’t going to speak and then attacking his employer made him look and sound almost as crazy as Schramm had characterized him to the press.
He was Pennsylvania-steel tough with an in-your-face disposition, although he never planned on being a football coach. “I was going to go to law school,” he says. But after getting into an argument with his Penn State coaches late in his senior year about how to play linebacker, they told him, “If you’re so good, you coach
it.”
Radakovich expanded their minds while expanding their games. He explained the nuances of coverage for the back seven defenders, which helped his young D-line understand the importance of getting to the passer quickly.
Mostly, they bonded over the fact they were young black men from the South who had been transplanted to the industrial North. They supported each other, pushed each other, protected each other, and taught each other. Greene and White would eventually share an apartment.
Franco was so lax that he was considered lazy by his college coaches, but he was so determined that he spent much of his childhood working odd jobs around Fort Dix, New Jersey, where his father was stationed after the war.
Abel’s biggest concerns were layoffs, foreign imports, and a decline in U.S. productivity. He was convinced that all three of these were occurring for one reason only—the threat of a USWA strike.
Harris never bought into the kill-or-be-killed mentality of football. He liked running, he liked eluding. When he watched films of opponents’ defenses he always found himself focusing on the running back instead of the linebackers, trying to imagine himself making the same moves he was watching on screen.
Harris not only made the offense more explosive, he made it more respected. No longer did the defense have to keep opponents out of the end zone and then pray the offense didn’t screw up. There was competitive balance on the team. Practices were more intense. And that elevated everyone.
It was the kind of win no one in Pittsburgh had ever dreamed could happen, perennial losers beating up one of the best teams in football. Even more remarkable, it was the fifth straight Steelers win.
AS BIG AS ANYTHING HARRIS OR GREENE DID ON THE FIELD, there was another phenomenon at Three Rivers in 1972. In support of it, people marched on the stadium, in groups eighty-strong. They wore green army helmets with the Italian flag painted on the side. They carried hollowed-out loaves of Italian bread, stuffed with bottles of red wine. There were plastic wineglasses with stems in their bags, along with enough meat and cheese to feed, well, an army. Which is what this group of fans called themselves.
“My season kept getting bigger and bigger and the fans really started to connect with us,” says Harris. “At that time the army kept telling its story, and it grew of such significance that people from around the country joined it, and people are calling out to me.”
No one in the league had a reputation for being as angry and competitive and belligerent as Davis. He took traffic personally. And he especially hated old-guard NFL families like the Rooneys.
Big names over rough and tumble teams.
He was at the pinnacle of football, leading a league that had stolen Joe Namath from the NFL, had high-flying offenses, and money to burn.
When the Raiders landed in Pittsburgh for that opening-round playoff game, not only was Davis, who returned to the Raiders as part owner in 1966, still fuming from that season-opening loss, he carried the baggage of the merger with him as well. “Davis still played by the old rules,” Rooney wrote. “Treating NFL teams like the enemy.”
Texas Southern
Strange connection between Texas and Pittsburgh.
The Steelers brought Holmes back and hid him on their practice squad, which was already full, asking him not to dress for the team picture so they didn’t get fined for carrying too many players.
“We all thought,” says Art Rooney Jr., “he needed mercy.”
lot of the players had come of age on college campuses in the late 1960s. They had been raised on rebellion and freedom of expression. Rozelle’s rules, while harmless, were stifling. At least L. C. Greenwood thought so. For that Browns game he protested by debuting a pair of gold cleats. “We all live to be different or our own selves,” he said. The Steelers were fined by the league, but Noll’s response when asked about the shoes by reporters after the game was typical of his it-doesn’t-bother-me-if-it-doesn’t-bother-the-team approach: “What shoes?” he asked. “The gold shoes,” he was told. “I
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But it worked because of our corners. They had to be able to jam the receiver, read the play, and then funnel the receivers all within seconds. And if it was a run, they had to support, because they were bigger than the safeties.” In much the same way Noll counteracted league trends by preferring smaller, quicker offensive linemen, he went after bigger physical corners, like Mel Blount, whom he drafted in the third round out of Southern University in 1970. He was just playing the rules in the book.
The euphoria that came with winning that first division title had ceded to expectations—from fans and from players. And despite the wins, Noll saw constant mistakes, especially at quarterback. In a way he never did with Greene or the defense, Noll refused to cut his quarterback any slack. Every mistake by Bradshaw, every missed read or wrong call, resulted in an eruption. “Noll was more focused on what the offense was doing during games,” says Russell. “He wanted Terry to make the checks the way they had talked about during the week. If Terry didn’t audible what he told him to audible to,
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He was the local kid backing up the mercurial superstar.
Steelers resisting the push to remain completely local and homegrown.
“We are a team in danger. We are in danger of living on potential, and no one can do that. You are powerless with potential.”
“You go in there, and after a while you start relating to the mahogany more than you do to the guy out in the mill.”
The peril of Big Labor.
Sadlowski thought I. W. Abel and his bureaucrats dressed in their Saks Fifth Avenue best were shafting the rank and file. To Sadlowski and his followers, Abel had gotten into bed with big steel and was complicit in men losing their jobs.
At 6’3” and a hair under 300 pounds, Coyne could fill out a suit, but he wasn’t very good at keeping his hands in his pockets. He had side-stepped the mill himself as a football star at Pittsburgh’s Central Catholic High School and went to N.Y.U. on a scholarship. But when the university cancelled the football program, he was back in Pittsburgh for
good.
Football connections help.
By January 1976 Pittsburgh was in a deep recession. While Sadlowski railed against the union bosses, Coyne was getting calls in the middle of the night from desperate workers threatening to take their lives.
“At first, all we did was look at each other,” Rooney says. “I was thinking, this black guy is getting a free job and he was thinking I’m just a rich white kid who couldn’t get a job anywhere else.”
Civil rights background.
Nunn paid immediate dividends after joining the team full-time in 1969. He helped the Steelers find Blount, who was playing at Southern University, in 1970, and Ernie Holmes the next year and Joe Gilliam from Tennessee State in 1972. “I wasn’t just a black college players scout,” says Nunn. But the credibility he had with black college football coaches was now the Steelers’ credibility.
Swann’s mom had wanted a girl, thus the name, and she enrolled her son in ballet lessons, thus the twisting mid-air pirouettes he executed while catching a ball. Like Stallworth, scouts had clocked Swann in the 40 and been disappointed with his times.
No wonder he had to play football!
One Iron City steel magnate—and dedicated churchgoer—named B. F. Jones Jr., who ran the Jones and Laughlin mills, had difficulty facing fellow worshipers at Sunday service. J&L’s South Side works hugged the Monongahela, and the shanties that climbed up nearby Mount Washington were deplorable. With such a small plot of land convenient to the mill, landowners gouged their tenants, making grown men and families share tiny rooms in unsanitary conditions. To make ends meet, a typical man and wife with at least one child would share a two-room apartment with up to twelve other “boarders.” Each
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Vices would be forbidden, and with the ties the company had to the county’s Republican political machine, law and order would be sponsored and controlled by J&L. He had great faith that steel corporations would not only build the country’s railroads and high-rises, they would build the next generation of hearty, healthy, law-abiding American laborers. Capitalism would make the new American man.
For the Aliquippa workers, though, economic dependency was much more effective than physical threats.
Anthony cowered in fear of his father’s belt. He was a mama’s boy comfortable in the kitchen at the hem of his mother’s skirt and by her side at the Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church. His big eyes continually scanning his environment for dangers, his father coined him “Hawk.”
Cross between Sims and Dorsett.
