The '63 Steelers (18 page)

What the Steelers would need Sunday against another hotshot passer was a much better performance from their secondary. The game would have a bit of extra meaning for one member of that group. Dick Haley was going to be seeing his old teammates again.

Like a lot of kids who grew up around the steel mills of western Pennsylvania in the fifties, Haley had his mind set on escaping a life of drudgery, grimy jobs, and dangerous work. “Football was a way out for us,” said Haley, who grew up in Washington County, where he attended Midway
High School, about an hour south of downtown Pittsburgh. “That was how we were going to make it if we were going to make it.”
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Haley's father worked in the open hearth at National Steel in Weirton, West Virginia, for forty years. But thanks to his football ability, the son found a way out. After helping his high school win a WPIAL (Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League) title, Haley signed to attend Duke. The University of Pittsburgh was determined to change his mind, however, so not only did he get regular visits from an assistant football coach, but the staff got him a summer job at Jessop Steel in nearby Washington, Pennsylvania. Just a couple of months of work there was enough to remind him of what he had been trying to avoid all along. “I decided I didn't want to do that on a full-time basis,” Haley said. He had a little extra motivation to succeed in football, as well as additional encouragement to stay close to his roots.
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“At that time, when you signed [letters of intent], they weren't binding, so I changed my mind in July or August and decided I was going to stay home.” Pitt didn't have to look much farther than its own backyard to stock the squad. “Half of the guys had signed to go other places,” Haley said. “The last couple of weeks, Pitt just stayed after them. At the end, everybody said, ‘I'm staying home.'”
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No wonder Pitt was so keen to keep Haley home. In the first week of October in his junior year, 1957, Haley intercepted a pass to set up the winning score in a 20–14 victory over Southern Cal. On October 19, against Army, “With Dick Haley as their spearhead, the Panthers ran the ball strong out of [a] split T formation.” He scored a 53-yard touchdown on “a dazzling catch,” but Army prevailed, 29–13.
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On November 2, Pitt engaged Syracuse in “a pulsating struggle calculated to make blood pressures climb.” Haley scored the first touchdown for the Panthers, a 64-yard run “during which he slipped through the fingers of three Syracuse downfield tacklers.” Pitt lost, 24–21, on a field goal, the first one Ben Schwartzwalder had called for in nine years as head coach at Syracuse.
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In '58, Haley's senior year, he made a 9-yard touchdown run in a 22–8 loss to Michigan State in mid-October, caught the winning TD pass in a 15–8 victory over West Virginia, and scored on the two-point conversion to enable Pitt to tie Army, the nation's top-rated team, 14–14, in “a bruising contest” in the final week of October.
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On November 1 he scored on a 14-yard run in a 16–13 loss to Syracuse, and one week later he had two TDs in a 29–26 win over Notre Dame. Haley had a 35-yard catch for a TD in a 14–6 loss to Nebraska as the Panthers slipped to 5–3–1.

Pitt floundered in Haley's senior year, but his talents were recognized with invitations to all-star games. He ran back a kickoff 84 yards for a touchdown in the East's 26–14 victory in the Shrine Game. Along with Nick Pietrosante and Lee Grosscup, two future pros, he was part of the starting backfield in the College All-Star Game, a squad that had a sure-handed receiver from Rice named Buddy Dial at end.

The Washington Redskins drafted Haley in January in the ninth round, the hundredth overall pick, which would have made him an early fourth-round selection after the merger with the AFL and expansion years later. He played two years with the Redskins, returning kickoffs and punts, running, and catching passes besides playing some defense in his rookie year. Then his career hit a snag.

“I'd had some medical problems,” Haley said, “and the Redskins were questioning whether they were going to let me play because I had had rheumatic fever when I was nine or ten years old, and that always leaves you with a heart murmur of some type. I took a medical for the Army, and they turned me down because of the heart murmur.” The Redskins put Haley on the expansion list for the new Minnesota Vikings franchise, which began play in 1961. “If you wanted to play,” Haley said, “you probably could get to play, and I wanted to play.” It wasn't until 2005 that Haley underwent heart surgery. “I waited forty-four years to have it, so I thought I made the right decision,” he said.
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Haley was with the Vikings for four games in the '61 season before Buddy Parker picked him up, along with receiver Bob Schnelker. It took only a few weeks for the pair to become heroes in a win against the second-place Browns in Cleveland. With the Steelers down 13–10 with 3:51 left in the game, Haley picked up a kickoff bobbled by a teammate and returned it 50 yards to the Browns' 38. Two plays later, Schnelker caught a 26-yard touchdown pass from Rudy Bukich. “Castoffs Spark Steelers to Upset, 17–13,” read the headline in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
. It was a headline that could have been recycled over and over in 1963.

The five-foot-ten, 185-pound Haley was soft-spoken and looked “more lik[e] a choir boy than a professional football player.” His son Todd, who would work his way up the ranks to become a head coach in the NFL, said he never heard his father utter a swear word. “Around this business, that's hard to do,” the son said.
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Haley also revealed a meditative, analytical side that would likely help him in his future career evaluating college players but was uncommon in a profession that discourages any recognition of vulnerability or failure. After a preseason loss against the Browns in August of 1962, Haley was “a
somber study in despair,” blaming himself for making wrong guesses that resulted in two Cleveland touchdowns. “Have I been cut yet?” he asked two hours after the game.
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With Buddy Parker, you never could tell. “I was never 100 percent sure of the job,” Haley said years later. “You had to play with your head or you weren't going to stay around the league.”
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Maybe part of his worry was finding a new employer, or maybe it was just an inquisitive football mind fretting about the experience he had failed to use to finish a task. It was a trait that didn't hurt him at all when he joined Art Rooney Jr. in the scouting department and began judging talent. “He's very introspective,” Rooney said. “He loved it. He had a real passion.”
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Playing football was a means of escaping a lifetime of working in the mines or the mills, but it didn't mean striking it rich—not by a long shot in the sixties. But you could do OK for yourself. Haley estimated he made $16,000 in 1964, his last season as a player. “I thought I was pretty well off,” he said. “You didn't make a lot of money, but nobody made a lot of money.
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Another guy who found a way out grew up only a few miles from Haley: Stanley Robert Vintula Jr., the son of a bandleader. He became known as Bobby Vinton, and, like Perry Como, he was from Canonsburg. In a feature story the week before the Redskins game, Vinton said he once considered coal mining as a career. He had attended Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and graduated at the age of twenty with a degree in music and a goal of becoming first oboist with the Pittsburgh Symphony. But then he tried out his singing voice and worked with dance bands that backed visiting musicians like Sammy Davis Jr. and Fabian. Two years after graduation he earned $6,000, but in mid-October of '63, with “Blue Velvet” No. 1 on the record charts, the twenty-four-year-old singer's income was expected to exceed $250,000.
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Some of the residents of western Pennsylvania who couldn't sing or catch a football resorted to more creative measures in hopes of getting rich or just getting by—or just to amuse themselves. Four days before the Redskins game, squads of state police and IRS agents teamed up with city police to conduct raids in Pittsburgh and other parts of the county that resulted in the arrests of thirty-one people on gambling charges. The raids boosted the total conducted by state police in Allegheny County for the year to forty-five. Among the items seized at Domenic's Confectionery in Pitcairn were sixty football sheets for betting. Western Pennsylvania football fans might not have had the physical ability of Haley, but they did show an analytical side of their own.
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The night after the Cardinal loss, the McKeesport Tigers Booster Club traveled a few miles to downtown Pittsburgh to honor Browns defensive
back Ross Fichtner, another hometown kid who'd found his escape out of town. During the evening's festivities he saluted teammate Jim Brown as “the greatest running back of all time.”
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The next day, Buddy Parker finally gave up on a player who, as a star collegian, had seemed destined to earn some comparisons to Brown one day. It was a concession that had to reinforce Parker's distrust of draft choices—even a Heisman runner-up—and his preference for bargain castoffs like Haley. Fullback Bob Ferguson, the Steelers' No. 1 draft pick the year before, was waived and, after clearing waivers, traded to the Minnesota Vikings. Ferguson, who had been serenaded with chants of “We want Ferguson!” by the Forbes Field crowd the previous December, was officially a bust, all the more disappointing because he had shown flashes of promise in preseason and in the first Cardinals game when he subbed for John Henry Johnson. If ever Parker had a right to think he was snakebitten, it was while saying goodbye to a two-time All-America who had averaged 5.1 yards rushing for Woody Hayes but couldn't find his way in the NFL.
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“I felt that this boy never lived up to my expectations as a top fullback in pro football,” Parker said. “He made mistakes and couldn't seem to rectify them. Maybe a change will be good for him.”
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With Johnson hobbling, Parker's decision to go with Theron Sapp as his lone fullback constituted his riskiest move since he opened the '62 season with only one spare offensive lineman. But Parker was keen on Sapp. “He has a lot of speed and a lot of spirit,” the coach said. “A fullback can go a long way with those.”
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The immediate challenge Sapp faced was finding a hole in the Washington defense, which had given up only thirty-seven first downs and 719 yards rushing in five games. The Redskins were scuffling at 2–3, but they had arguably the finest defensive line in the league, composed of ends John Paluck and Andy Stynchula, and tackles Bob Toneff and Joe Rutgens. “If there is a brace of more violent creatures in the land, it is not employed on one line,” wrote Pat Livingston. Toneff, an eleven-year vet, was a gladiator in the Ernie Stautner mold. Rutgens was only twenty-four but was already earning praise as one of the best tackles in the NFL. A magazine feature on him before his senior year at Illinois was titled “Big Daddy of the Big Ten” and called him “a notable smearer of passers.” Paluck was just plain scary, even to someone who had a reputation for being a brutal defensive player himself. “‘Mean John,' we called him,” said Sam Huff, who became a teammate after being traded from the Giants in '64. “He played tough. In fact, he's one of the few guys I played with I actually was scared of. No one ever messed with Mean John.”
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But for opponents, the scariest player the Redskins had was Bobby Mitchell, a 9.7 sprinter with more moves than a belly dancer. Mitchell had played in the same backfield with Jim Brown in Cleveland but had been converted to flanker and also returned kickoffs. He had good hands and was a threat to turn a 12-yard catch into a 60-yard touchdown at any time. Even Jim Brown marveled at Mitchell's skills in the open field. “As a long-gain threat I am not even in the same class with Bobby Mitchell,” Brown stated. “To my mind he is the greatest breakaway threat in football.”
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While the Steelers worked out at South Park on Wednesday, John Henry Johnson spent his day at Divine Providence Hospital, undergoing tests with the team physician, John Best, but it appeared doubtful that he would return to action against the Redskins. Days later, Parker would deny that he had “banished” John Henry from practice until the fullback made up his mind to play. “I just told him to go and get some treatment on his leg and not to come back until he was able to run,” Parker said.
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The night before Johnson's trip to the hospital, the
New York Mirror
, the tabloid that had been started by William Randolph Hearst and ranked second in circulation in the nation to the
New York News
, “published its own obituary.” The
Mirror
ceased publication because of circumstances that “have necessitated the discontinuance of so many other good newspapers all over the country.”
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Radio and television, along with dramatic growth in the suburbs, had changed readership in the sixties. Twelve big cities, including Pittsburgh, had cut back to two daily newspapers since World War II, and circulation had dipped, while the number of suburban dailies in fifteen major metropolitan areas rose slightly and their circulation jumped 87 percent.
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Even though news of the
Mirror
's demise made front-page news in the
Post-Gazette
, the death of the paper would have little or no immediate impact on the daily lives of Pittsburghers. But one item in the
Mirror
's final edition had the potential to do to the Steelers what a spark could do to the parched woods in the countryside.

The
Mirror
reported that John Henry Johnson was in Parker's doghouse, a charge to which the coach replied, “This is news to me. All I know is that Johnson hurt his ankle in the St. Louis game in Forbes Field several weeks ago and hasn't run since then. John Henry, and I've known him a long time, is the slowest healing person I've ever seen. He just doesn't bounce back like some players. But if he is in my doghouse, as that paper says, he better let me know. The nights are getting cold out our way.”
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