The '63 Steelers (13 page)

Layne insisted that the only thing about him that was exaggerated more than his nighttime carousing was his reputation for losing his temper and chewing out his own receivers. “I have never once in my life got on a ballplayer for dropping a pass like a lot of people think,” he told Myron Cope in an interview. Yet in an article Layne coauthored with Murray Olderman
four years earlier, the quarterback recalled how he reacted to rookie end Jimmy Orr, out of the University of Georgia, dropping a long pass in a 17–6 loss to the Giants. “When he came back to the huddle I told him, ‘If you drop another pass on me, you Georgia so-and-so, I'll kill you with my own hands.'” Layne added, “I was only speaking figuratively, of course. Jimmy's too good to do away with and he's one of my best friends.”
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Orr took no offense. “Bobby and I hit it along pretty good,” Orr said. “If you went out with him at night, he threw to you during the day.”
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For Layne, the only thing that could compare to beating the clock with a game-winning drive was drinking the night away with a bunch of teammates at a hot nightspot with a swinging band. He would round up players, vets and rookies alike, blacks and whites, to make the party more fun and build camaraderie.

“Bobby was our man,” Cordileone said.

We used to get together and play poker every Thursday night at Bobby's house. He and Ernie rented a house. We used to go over there—me, Bobby, John Henry Johnson, Charlie Bradshaw, once in a while Ernie would play. We'd have five or six guys and we'd sit there all night, till practice the next morning, and play. We used to order food from Dante's, and you couldn't imagine the food that came in there. It was unbelievable. We used to sit and eat and then we'd leave in the morning to go to practice, because the next day—the Friday practice—was very easy. It was just like forty-five minutes, and then we'd go home and that was it. That was the end of it until the game Sunday.
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Except for Bobby Layne. For Layne, the week was just beginning.

And when the QB from Lubbock spoke, on the field or off it, players listened. “When Bobby said block, you blocked. When Bobby said drink, you drank,” former Lions teammate Yale Lary said.
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Layne built his reputation on delivering in the clutch, and teammates and coaches knew he was good for his word. “He'd get in a huddle, he'd get down on his knee, he'd say, ‘If you sunuvabitches block, we got a touchdown on this play.' And you believed it,” said Preston Carpenter, who played tight end for the Steelers from 1960 to 1963. “He was a leader on the field and off the field.”
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With a little over two minutes left in the 1953 championship game, two days after Christmas, Layne huddled his Detroit teammates with the ball on the Cleveland 33 and the Browns leading, 16–10. He asked receiver Jim Doran if he could beat his man and then called the play. “Okay, men.
Let's run a Nine Up … and block them sons of bitches for me.” Layne lobbed one of his characteristically wobbly passes to Doran for a 33-yard touchdown pass that gave Detroit a 17–16 win and coach Buddy Parker his second consecutive NFL title.
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Brown could not compete with Layne in terms of personality, and he couldn't match the Texan's cachet on the playing field. Layne had led the Lions to two straight championships, lost a third, and pointed Detroit to another title before sustaining a season-ending injury. Brown had led the Bears to the title game in 1956, when they got whipped by the Giants, 47–7. Steeler teammates knew he had talent, but not everyone was convinced he had the intangibles Layne possessed.

“Bobby Layne was like Bart Starr,” said wide receiver Red Mack, who played with both. “When he came in the huddle he could call a quarterback sneak on third down-and-15; nobody would question it. But if Ed Brown called it, you'd be saying, ‘Wait a minute. We can't run that play.' You knew when Bobby Layne got up to the line of scrimmage that he was going to come up with something that was going to get us 15 yards. You knew that.”
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Mack got a harsh lesson from Layne one time about following orders from the quarterback. Layne called the play, and once the defense shifted, so did Mack. “They moved into a zone coverage, so I broke the pattern off,” he said. “I got back to the huddle, and Bobby Layne chewed my butt out. He told me, ‘I don't care if you've got to run all the way to the shithouse. Complete the pattern.' He was the kind of guy that knew it was going to be zone [coverage]. He was going to throw the ball to somebody else. He wasn't going to throw it to me. We didn't have that kind of confidence in Brown. At least I didn't.”
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Neither did defensive back Brady Keys. “He was not a leader,” Keys said. “You could never win with Ed Brown. He wasn't smart—couldn't read defenses, couldn't call audibles. Bobby Layne, he would call audibles and win the game for you. He could read the defense and do those things.”
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No situation seemed to daunt Layne. He came into games well prepared both from film study and from work on the practice field. Art Rooney Jr. was amazed at how Layne showed up early for practice and stayed late, working with his receivers. If he ever felt pressure, he kept it well hidden. And his confidence was unshakable. “He's always loved a challenge,” said former college roommate Rooster Andrews. “And he's just as competitive playing golf or on a fishing trip as he was when he was quarterbacking. Hell, he goes grocery shopping, and he thinks he's the best damned shopper in Safeway.”
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“He was the baddest-best pro football player of my time,” said Alex
Karras, who was a rookie out of Iowa in 1958 when he met Layne at the Lions' training camp. “He feared nobody.”
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When Layne went out on the town, his free spirit flowed as easily as the liquor. During his career, he enjoyed a reputation as the doggone best party-goer in the NFL, hands down. And when Bobby Layne was hosting the festivities, everyone was invited. “He'd go into a place and say, ‘I don't want anybody to buy any drinks while I'm in here,'” Carpenter recalled. “Nobody could buy a drink, even if he didn't know him.”
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Not long after linebacker Joe Schmidt was drafted by the Lions, Layne found out that the front office had hired a man to investigate the quarterback's nocturnal ramblings. “Bobby came bursting into the room, all aglow,” Schmidt recalled at a Touchdown Club gathering.

“Hey, Joe,” he said. “We've got a live one. Let's lead him [on] a chase.”

I felt sorry for the man who had to follow Bobby around. Afterward, I learned that he had been a survivor of the Bataan death march. He followed Bobby from bar to bar until he was worn to a nub. Then he made his report to Eddie Anderson, the president of the football team.

“I quit, Mr. Anderson,” he said. “Layne is too tough for me. I can't take it. I'd rather go back to Bataan.”
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Layne's exploits, both in two-minute drills and at after-hours nightclubs, became legendary. Some were embellished and refined into myth. Paul Hornung recalled one rumor that he and Layne were picked up drunk in a doorway in downtown Green Bay, singing together, at 5:30 in the morning. “I didn't know Bobby then,” Hornung said, “and if I did, you can bet your life we wouldn't have been picked up in a doorway.”
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No one had the superhuman recuperative powers of Layne. Asked how he could recover and play a game with not much more than a catnap for rest, Layne replied, “I sleep fast!”
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“Unbelievable,” Cordileone said. “The only guy I've seen in my life to get completely shit faced, lay down, and get up a half hour later like he never had a drink. I mean, he was unbelievable. Booze never bothered him.”
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At least not enough to keep him from winning football games. On the eve of the Steelers' last game of 1958, a Saturday matinee against the Cardinals in Pittsburgh, Layne was preparing in his usual fashion, so the story goes, with a night on the town. Friday night extended into Saturday morning, and Layne was supposedly spotted leading the band at a private club around 9 a.m. Wherever he'd been, Layne made his way to Pitt Stadium,
suited up, trotted gingerly onto an icy field, and hit twenty-three of forty-nine passes for 409 yards and two touchdowns. He also ran for a 17-yard touchdown, and the Steelers finished 7–4–1 with a 38–21 victory. The only thing he did not do on the field that day, evidently, was lead the band at halftime.
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The most infamous and oft-told tale about Layne took place off the field in 1961. It didn't happen on the eve of a game, as legend had it; it happened on a Monday night, the day after Layne threw four touchdown passes—tying Baugh's career record—in leading the Steelers to a 30–14 victory in Washington. The front-page headline of Tuesday afternoon's
Press
read, “Trolley Intercepts Bobby Layne's Pass.” Years later, Layne would laugh as he recounted how he ran into “that parked swerving streetcar” but, of course, it was No. 22 who, while driving teammate Tom Tracy's car, swerved into a No. 85 Bedford trolley, stopped at Sixth and Wylie, around 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. The operator was not hurt, but Layne sustained a cut over his left eyebrow and was taken to the hospital for X-rays. Clearly, he would have been better off with Alex Karras driving.
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The incident became an everlasting funny story in the arsenal of Layne anecdotes, but it could have turned out badly. Three days later, a man and woman were killed instantly when their automobile collided head on with a trolley in Wilkinsburg.
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Almost a year to the day later, a teenager commandeered a trolley in Philadelphia on a Sunday and drove it five miles across town without any mishap, clanging the bell and stopping to take on riders, informing them, “I'm not charging any fares tonight, so get aboard.”
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The entire football world knew of Bobby Layne the legend, but just what Layne was like as a person wasn't clear. “I didn't know him too well as a man,” Karras said. “Maybe nobody did.”
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Layne could throw a baseball nearly as well as he could a football. He loved to drink Cutty Sark and he loved to sing the American traditional song “Ida Red,” according to Karras. Layne made a habit of befriending rookie players and, like Karras, they would drink with the quarterback and drive him to bars and nightclubs. One night while Karras was behind the wheel, Layne, “in a drunken stupor,” told the lineman about his father's death. According to Layne's biographer, Layne, his parents, and his two sisters had squeezed into their tiny coupe for a short trip, when Layne's father slumped back after apparently suffering a heart attack. Layne, who was sitting in the back seat behind his father, was pinned in the rear of the car. “I'm not sure he ever got over being trapped like that when his father died,” said Layne's wife, Carol.
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Layne turned silent as Karras drove. “Then he suddenly said he didn't like the dark,” Karras said. “He was too scared to sleep, he said.” No wonder Layne liked to hang around with Big Daddy Lipscomb and buy scotch for the ferocious lineman with the soft heart.
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Brown, by comparison, was more of a loner, although he hung out with his teammates at Dante's and roomed with Lou Cordileone, and then with Dick Haley. “He was really subdued,” said Haley. “He was a funny guy,” said Mack, who averaged 24.7 yards on his twenty-five receptions during the '63 season. “You couldn't get close to him.”
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The son of a jeweler and watchmaker, Ed Brown earned the nickname “All-Around Brown” while playing quarterback and kicking and punting for the University of San Francisco. In his senior year he led the Dons to a 9–0 record, but the team was denied a bowl invitation because it refused to drop two black players, Ollie Matson and Burl Toler, from the team for the postseason game, which was a customary concession at the time. Nine players from that team had NFL careers, including Toler and Matson, and three became Hall of Famers: Matson, Gino Marchetti, and Bob St. Clair.

With his thick black hair, cleft chin, and sober gaze, Brown bore a resemblance to the actor Clint Walker, and the bachelor quarterback had a reputation for being popular with women. Any quarterback who succeeded Layne was bound to pale in comparison with the charismatic Texan, but Brown wasn't about to change his style. He knew himself, and he made no apologies for his temperament.

Halfway through the '63 season, days after turning thirty-four, Brown was asked why he wasn't more demonstrative on the field. “There's more to this game of football than showing a lot of fire and fight,” Brown replied.

I'm not built like some guys, I guess. I do my job the quiet way.

When you're around as long as I have [been], you learn to take things in stride. Maybe I am too phlegmatic out there. Maybe I don't get mad enough. What good is it to be that way? My job is to run the team the best I know how and to help win games.
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As if it weren't daunting enough to succeed a quarterback with Hall of Fame credentials, Brown soon found Layne watching over his shoulder—literally. Three days after the win over the Giants, the Steelers announced that Layne would work in the scouting booth—“the coop atop the roof” of Forbes Field—where he would phone in suggestions to the bench. In the second period of the St. Louis game, he phoned in his observations on the Cardinals'
defense. “They're jumping into the gap. Maybe he [Brown] better work on a long count,” Layne drawled. Not long after, he phoned Mike Nixon, the backfield coach, and barked, “Tell Brown to get rid of the ball a little faster. He's giving their backs time to move and cover our receivers.” Near the end of the quarter, with Buddy Dial speeding into the end zone, Brown hesitated, and safety Larry Wilson recovered in time to make the interception.
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