The '63 Steelers (17 page)

Clendon Thomas would look back and remember Smith as one of the most talented receivers he faced during his career, but on this day the sixth-year safety mostly watched from the sideline. “Jackie Smith could run away from a lot of people,” Thomas said.
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After Childress went around left end for 5 yards, Smith got open, and Johnson hit him with a 55-yard touchdown pass to make it 23–17 with 3:48 left in the game. Smith would finish the day with nine catches for 212 yards—more yardage than he'd gained in his senior year in college.

Curiously, with the Steelers needing to run out the clock, Brown threw a pass to Dial on first down. It went incomplete. After Hoak picked up 2 yards, Brown threw a 13-yard pass to Mack for a first down on the 35. Ferguson gained 5 yards up the middle, but Mack drew a personal foul for running into a Cardinal defender after the whistle. Instead of having second-and-5 at the 40, the Steelers faced second-and-20 at their 25, and the clock stopped. Brown was sacked for a 6-yard loss, and Hoak, with 2:40 left, gained only 2 yards around right end.

Brown got off a 36-yard punt, giving the Cards the ball on their 43, but some of the 23,715 hometown fans started to leave when Lou Cordileone
dropped Johnson for an 18-yard loss, forcing the Cards to use their last time-out with 1:33 left.

With the Steeler goal line 75 yards away and no time-outs, what Wally Lemm needed wasn't more time. What he needed was Bobby Layne at quarterback, or Johnny Unitas. But a baby-faced PhD candidate? Johnson threw an incompletion, and then “the Texas towhead” showed why he was so highly regarded as a future star.
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“Pitiful as it was to Steeler fans, one had to admire the artistry of Charley Johnson … and the brilliance of his performance when the chips were on the line,” Pat Livingston wrote. “In a march that defied credulity, the 24-year-old youngster directed the greatest race against the clock football ever has seen.”
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Perhaps Livingston had forgotten about Layne's two-minute drills, like the one against the Browns in 1959, or the 80-yard drive, capped by Jim Doran's TD catch, that won the 1953 NFL title for Detroit. Maybe he had forgotten about Unitas moving the Colts into a tie in regulation before Baltimore beat the Giants in sudden death in the '58 title game. No matter. Never had a chemical engineer's performance looked quite so mesmerizing.

The difference between playing the two sides of the ball, Thomas, a former two-way star, explained before the first Cardinal game, is that on defense, “You can't afford a mistake. Make a mistake on defense … give up a touchdown, and there's no way you can get it back.” And when a passer like Charley Johnson was in a groove, there was no letup from the pressure. “There are times when you feel like you're in the back end of a shooting gallery when those quarterbacks start throwing,” Thomas said.
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That's the effect a young quarterback like Johnson could induce in a defensive secondary. If only Thomas had been healthy enough to play more than a handful of downs, the Cardinal quarterback might have had to change his strategy. Ramsey put the Steelers in a “prevent defense,” designed to give up yardage but use up the clock while discouraging long passes. A day later, Livingston would label it an “idiotic defense.”
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He had just written a feature on the assistant coach for the
Press
's Sunday magazine titled “The Volatile Mr. Ramsey.” Livingston described “the leather-lunged Tennessean” as “this great bull of a man, a shoulder-swaggering megaphone of instructions and warnings … as bouncy as a three-month old puppy and as violent as an explosion.”

Garrard “Buster” Ramsey handled the defense while Parker concentrated on the offense during the week. Ramsey had a penchant for heckling opponents, and he had a knack for unsettling them. One anonymous Giant
player suggested that the NFL ban the coach. “If they don't,” the player vowed, “I'm going to belt him good some day.”
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Ramsey took an ultra-conservative approach on defense. Asked before the season opener why the Steelers didn't more often “red-dog”—the term that became more popular as “blitz”—he replied, “I don't feel defense is the place to gamble on the football field.”
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He was not nearly as daring as Cardinal defensive coordinator Chuck Drulis, who was refining the safety blitz with Larry Wilson, perfecting the timing to rush in to sack the quarterback. It would take little imagination to envision the havoc that Clendon Thomas—or Brady Keys—could have wrought with some surprise blitzes.

Faced with third-and-28 from his 25, Johnson started taking advantage of Ramsey's tactics, while looking as much like an artist as a genius. He hit Childress, coming out of the backfield, and the eighth-year back from Auburn came up less than a yard shy of the first down. The Cards finally converted a shot on fourth down when Johnson hit Conrad for 3 yards and the first down and then picked up 17 on a pass to Smith.

On first down at the Steeler 27, Johnson was dropped for a 2-yard loss and, with thirty seconds left, the Cards were penalized for being offside. Johnson hit Smith with a short pass, leaving the quarterback at the 28-yard line with the clock running out the last twenty seconds. Johnson, backpedaling after taking the snap, spotted Conrad running a post pattern across the 20-yard line, and he fired away.

After watching the films the next day, Buddy Parker explained how Conrad reacted after he caught the pass and found himself surrounded by three defensive backs: Willie Daniel, Dick Haley, and Jim Bradshaw. “They had him in a triangle, a sort of vise,” Parker said, “but he got off the hook. Daniel was only a yard behind Conrad but instead of trying to tackle him stuck his foot out and tried to trip him. Had he been knocked down, time would have run out and we'd have won.”
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Instead, after making the catch, Conrad feinted to his left, ran right, and “breezed into the corner of the end zone.”
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There were five seconds left on the clock. Jim Bakken kicked the point after, and the Cards were 24–23 winners. The lemmings had been successful in their long march and had not self-destructed. Johnson had racked up 428 yards by completing twenty of forty-one passes, the most important ones in the last ninety seconds.

The week after the Steeler loss, Green Bay used a different strategy in St. Louis. Packer defensive assistant coach Norb Hecker had his secondary play man to man. “Unquestionably, Bobby Joe Conrad and Sonny Randle are the two best receivers in the League simply because both men can beat
you on every pattern,” Hecker said. “On the very deep corners and posts they are in a class by themselves.”
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Maybe if Clendon Thomas had been healthy and able to play the whole game, he could have added to his league-high interception total of four and picked off Johnson on the final drive. Or maybe broken up a pass. Or at least he could have tackled Conrad short of the goal in the final seconds. Or maybe, as assistant coach Torgy Torgeson suggested when he spoke of the pass deflected to Smith for a “gift” touchdown, it just wasn't meant to be for the Steelers. Certainly not on this day, and maybe not this season.

Parker was in no mood to be philosophical. A tremendous defensive effort had been wasted. “There was [a] bitter smile on Coach Parker's face but he was boiling mad inside. It was obvious that an explosion pended, in the delayed fury of a time bomb.”
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This was no time to pick out any bright spots, as Parker had after the loss in Cleveland. Instead, he “tore through the locker room in an uncontrollable rage,” shouting, “It was a disgrace,” over and over. “You disgraced me. You disgraced yourselves.”
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This time, instead of the Cards, it was the Steelers who did the complaining. Keys protested and Parker screamed from the sidelines on the final drive that the officials stopped the clock for no apparent reason after the third-down reception by Childress, giving St. Louis an additional twenty seconds, at least. But there was no disguising the truth that the Steelers had let a certain victory slip out of their hands, just as pathetically and inexplicably as that end zone deflection went for a Cardinal touchdown.
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“Agreed that we got some lousy calls and we got some lousy timekeeping,” one unnamed player said, “but you can't blame the officials when you blow a 23–10 lead.” How do you account for a team whose defense faced first-and-goal situations from the 6-, 7-, and 10-yard lines, and another first-and-10 from the 11, and only gave up a touchdown on a fluke deflection and then yielded two touchdowns in less than four minutes? In Livingston's opinion, there was only one explanation: “They choked up.”
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The Browns and Bears remained unbeaten and were emerging as early favorites for a showdown in the championship game. Mike Ditka, a former teammate of Haley's at Pitt, caught four touchdown passes to lead Chicago to a 52–14 rout of the Rams in the Coliseum. Jim Brown, “in a fantastic display of power and speed,” scored three touchdowns, one on a 72-yard pass from Frank Ryan, as unbeaten Cleveland outmuscled the Giants, 35–24, at Yankee Stadium. Brown earned everything he gained.
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He called it “the roughest, hardest game” he had played in the NFL, and he earned admiration as much for his willingness to absorb a brutal beating
as for his ability to shred a defense.
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“They beat Jimmy like a dog and whipped him like a pup,” someone shouted in the Browns' locker room. “But he showed them.”
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Charley Johnson had shown them too, and now the Steelers had to wonder whether they were good enough to climb over three teams to win the Eastern Conference. Maybe the final ingredient was still lacking in the Steelers' makeup, some intangible that teams like the Browns and Bears had added. More than once Bobby Layne had noted during his stay in Pittsburgh, “There's just something missing, something we had at Detroit that we don't have here.”
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Nearing the halfway point of the season, the team had to wonder whether they had enough time left to find that missing ingredient.

By mid-October, the mild, dry fall that Pittsburgh had been enjoying had become too much of a good thing, transforming temperate weather into a genuine drought. The day after the Cardinal loss marked the thirty-second day the region had gone without any appreciable precipitation—not since three days before the opener in Philadelphia.

On Monday, the state of Pennsylvania banned fires and smoking in forests and woodlands because of the dry conditions. On Wednesday, Governor William Scranton issued an emergency proclamation closing all woodlands to the public because of the danger of forest fires. The next day, seven other states closed woodlands. Pennsylvania was one of a handful of states that banned hunting and fishing.

Probably no one was hurting more from the lack of rain than Pittsburgh's so-called Umbrella Man, Sam Cohen, who had a small shop in the Pick-Roosevelt Hotel. Cohen had been selling and repairing umbrellas for fifty years, but it wasn't just the dry spell that was to blame for a lack of business; it was a shift in lifestyles. “Sam's villain is the automobile,” a story in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
reported. “That's what took the umbrella business away,” Cohen said. “People drive into their garages. They don't walk to church anymore.”
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The drought extended from Maine to Texas, and by the end of the week, it would only grow worse, with little hope of relief. Hundreds of fires broke out. County health authorities worried about a buildup of heavy smog. It appeared to be the worst drought in Ohio in eighty years. The dry spell in Pittsburgh was called the worst in thirty-five years—and even longer than the championship drought endured by the Steelers.

Buddy Parker had come to Pittsburgh with a pledge to bring the city a championship within five years. Parker had become available to the Steelers when he abruptly quit the Lions as coach in 1957, and he had turned threats of quitting the Steelers into a nearly annual (or even biannual) rite. Two days after the fiasco at Busch Stadium, Al Abrams led his
Post-Gazette
column with a dig at the coach: “This is about the time of year, isn't it, that Buddy Parker announces he's going to quit the Steelers?”
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If Parker gave the newspapers just a glance, it would have been hard for him to miss a series of front-page stories “showing ways to win your own personal war of nerves” that ran the week before the opener. Some pressure can work to a person's advantage, “But there is a critical difference between helpful tension and the tension which destroys,” according to one article. “A rope drawn taut is a working rope,” but one whose fibers begin to fray “under an overload is a rope nearing its breaking point.”
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Parker had not reached that point—yet. His rage had subsided and his mood had improved considerably by the day after the Cardinal loss, as frustrating as it was, and he expressed confidence that the season wasn't lost. “We blew it,” he said. “But, hell, the season's not over yet. It's far from over. We've got a chance to get back in the race. Just wait and see.”
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Two days later, Parker vowed that his 2–2–1 Steelers would stay in the race if they could win the next two games, against Washington and Dallas. “The first and second half are two different seasons,” he said. “If we can get through the first half with only two losses, we'll be in the fight all the way.”
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For the second straight week, the Steelers were facing one of “the bright young men of pro football's movement toward daring and reckless quarterbacking,” the Redskins' Norm Snead, a twenty-four-year-old in his third year “who can impale the point of the football on a needle at medium range.”
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Snead had been booed in a 37–24 loss to the Eagles the day Pittsburgh beat St. Louis, but head coach Bill McPeak, a former Steelers assistant coach, insisted, “For my money, he has the potential of being the best quarterback in the National Football League.”
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