The '63 Steelers (2 page)

Ten years later, my college professor Dewey Ganzel would tell us in his course on Hemingway that there are two seminal events in a young person's life: when he realizes that other people die, and when he realizes that he himself will one day die. That spring of '63, I started to learn about death.

In the first week of May, my Uncle Shorty, a family doctor who treated us to root beer floats, took us for spins on his sailboat, and played taps on his old Army bugle at bedtime outside the family cabin in Minnesota, died of cancer. I wondered what kind of cruel disease could kill a man who lived his life with such gusto.

One week later, a story in the
Vindicator
reported that Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, the Steelers' mountain of a defensive tackle, had died from an overdose of heroin at age thirty-one, and I was left baffled by how a 290-pound man as quick as a cougar could be felled by a needle, the same instrument we faced every fall when given flu shots, the kind my deceased uncle had administered.

Yet another week later, news came that Ernie Davis, the marvel of a running back from Syracuse, a Heisman Trophy winner, and the first overall pick in the 1962 draft, had died from leukemia. How is it, I wondered, that an athlete so fast and powerful could outrun everything except this curious disease? We caught colds and suffered through scarlet fever and
strep throat and the mumps, but as lousy as we felt, these illnesses did not kill us. How awful could a disease be that it could kill a grown man who could dart through tacklers and leave them clawing at his jersey in vain?

One month later, my Uncle Rudy, the man I was named after, suffered a fatal heart attack in his home in Hibbing, Minnesota. I traveled with my mother and two brothers all night by train from Youngstown to St. Paul, Minnesota, and then by car another 150 miles north. On the morning of the funeral I rode in a car in a slow procession filled with men in military uniforms looking somber and pained, while a soldier beat an ominous rhythm on a drum throughout the entire route.

I cried for my uncles, but not for Big Daddy or Ernie Davis or the president. Yet they had the kind of impact on an eleven-year-old kid that would last a lifetime.

The morning after the Kennedy assassination brought a clear sky and unseasonably mild weather, allowing my friends and me to play tackle football in our yard. Life went on; I had learned that by gazing at my uncle's casket in a Minnesota cemetery. On any other Saturday afternoon in the fall my dad and I would watch college football, but on that day we watched Walter Cronkite and broadcasters with grim faces talking about a funeral and a murder suspect. My dad stared at the TV screen and said, “I wonder if they'll play the game.”

I glanced at him but kept silent. I wondered to myself, “How could they not play the game? The Chicago Bears are coming to Pittsburgh, and we have tickets.”

Years later, I would look back at my resolve to see that game, and I would not fault myself for being insensitive or immature. I was eleven, and a young boy lives his hopes and dreams through his favorite team, not through politicians or statesmen. And I was far from alone in my thinking. A total of 334,892 fans would show up for the seven games on the NFL schedule that Sunday, only four involving teams still in a race for a division title, as mine was. It wasn't until I grew older that I began to resent what I considered the self-righteous sermonizing by coaches who compared losing to death. Surely those coaches never realized that the ones most likely to agree with them were eleven-year-old football fans.

The Steelers were in fourth place in the Eastern Conference at 6–3–1 that weekend but mathematically, and improbably, still in the race with three other teams when my dad and I set off for what the
Chicago Tribune
called “dingy, antiquated Forbes Field.” “What a depressing place that is
for a football game,” Giants coach Allie Sherman had commented before meeting the Steelers at the cozier, cleaner, more attractive Pitt Stadium in the second week of the season.
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Forbes Field had once been a showcase for sports—about half a century earlier. In '63 it was like an antebellum mansion in desperate need of repair. But it had the character, if not the charm, of a true ballpark. It had a tall scoreboard in left like Fenway, ivy on the brick walls like Wrigley, an outfield as big as Montana—deep enough to stash the batting cage against the center field wall—and a right-field grandstand that reminded me of Tiger Stadium. It was dirty, stinky, worn down, and beat up, and the seats were crummy for watching football, but I adored Forbes Field like no other ballpark I have ever seen.

The crowd was a sellout of 36,465 fans, but it was subdued for the 2:05 p.m. kickoff, with temperatures near 40 and a clear sky that would turn gloomy and cloudy. “It was the most eerie game,” said Art Rooney Jr., son of the founder and owner of the Steelers. Gradually, the crowd came alive as the Steelers battled 9–1 Chicago to a standstill and then took a 17–14 lead 6:25 into the fourth quarter.
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The Steelers' shot at an upset looked even better after a penalty and a sack left the Bears with second-and-36 at their own 22-yard line with five-and-a-half minutes to go in the settling dusk. But then came a play that would forever remain vivid in my mind. Quarterback Bill Wade hit former Pitt All-America Mike Ditka, described by one reporter as “an earthquake of a man,” and for a few seconds it seemed as if worlds had collided and the field trembled and the rickety wooden stands we sat in shook.
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“Mike grabbed it with those big paws of his and was immediately pounced on by a half dozen Steelers,” wrote
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
columnist Al Abrams. “He must have had eight guys on his back,” said Lou Cordileone, the Steelers' right defensive tackle. “He should have been stopped five times,” defensive end and kicker Lou Michaels said. Steelers defensive back Dick Haley said of the scene: “It looked like a bunch of kids trying to flag down a runaway truck.”
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Ditka shook off and bowled over tacklers, and suddenly the only thing between Ditka and the end zone, and the end of the Steelers' hopes—and my dreams—was the damp, chilly air of a late November afternoon as the tight end lumbered into Pittsburgh territory with safety Clendon Thomas in desperate pursuit, trailed by teammate Willie Daniel.

“The big Bear drove forward and broke clear as the late afternoon light piercing the Forbes Field stands dramatically spotlighted this monumental image,” photojournalist Robert Riger
wrote.
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In those suspended seconds, I squirmed next to my dad and felt as if I were in one of those dreams where your feet are stuck in slow motion and your scream is muted and distorted like a 45 rpm record played at a lower speed. Two days after the president was shot, stopping Ditka and clinging to the hope of a championship was all I cared about, and years later I forgave myself for thinking and behaving like an eleven-year-old that day.

What I remember most about watching the funeral the next day, with school canceled, was not the sight of world leaders and grieving citizens. No, it was the sight of the kid along the procession route saluting as the hearse and horses passed, with soldiers marching and a drum thumping, just like at my uncle's funeral, but this time echoing the sound of an entire nation's heart pounding in pain. What I thought at that instant was, “That kid lost his father. His dad is dead.” Then it all became clear to me. Then I understood.

It took years, but slowly I came to realize the difference between losing a game and losing a loved one, between victory inside chalked lines on a scuffed up green field and what really matters in life.

One of the most gratifying experiences in life is finding a person who grasps your vision, no matter what kind of dreams, aspirations, or goals you have. My hope in constructing this book was to pay tribute to a football team that gave a kid a season of thrills whose memories would reverberate into adulthood.

The saga of the 1963 Pittsburgh Steelers is not your typical storybook sports tale that concludes with cheers and championship banners, so without the encouragement of Richard “Pete” Peterson, the odds of this book being published would have been even longer than those of the '63 Steelers becoming NFL champs.

Pete Peterson is as gritty as a steelworker in an open-hearth furnace, but he has an appreciation of adversity and empathy for the underdog befitting a kid who grew up on the South Side of Pittsburgh rooting for the woeful Pirates and Steelers of the 1950s. When I presented my project to Peterson, then editor of the Writing Sports Series for the Kent State University Press, he envisioned my book as a prequel to Roy Blount Jr.'s masterful “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load: A Highly Irregular Lowdown on the Year the Pittsburgh Steelers Were Super but Missed the Bowl.” Peterson's conceptualization was both inspiring and intimidating. Linking me to a writer of Blount's gifts, however tangentially, was a bit like inserting Johnny Unitas's name into the same sentence with a fledgling quarterback prospect.

I am grateful to the gracious staff at Kent State University Press for embracing the project and giving it a rigorous examination, and I thank
them—notably Joyce Harrison, Mary Young, Susan Cash, Will Underwood, and Christine Brooks—for their continuous help and support. Without their adventurous spirit and bold thinking, there might not be a place for idiosyncratic books that take risks and explore neglected territory.

Among the team that makes the author look good, no one is more critical to the success of the finished product than the copy editor. Copy editors are a bit like offensive linemen in football. Linemen do the dirty work, often in anonymity, if not obscurity, but their contributions are indispensable. They are typically thoughtful and insightful, and they make the person who gets the recognition look good. I am most fortunate to have Sonia Fulop apply meticulous, painstaking attention and care to the structure, style, accuracy, and coherence of my manuscript, and fashion it into a polished book. To indulge in one more sports analogy, she is truly All-Pro as a copy editor.

I would like to offer special thanks to Frank Atkinson, Judi Ballman, Jim Bradshaw, Preston Carpenter, Lou Cordileone, Willie and Ruth Daniel, Ed Fay, Dick Haley, Sam Huff, Brady Keys, Red Mack, Tommy McDonald, Lou Michaels, Art Rooney Jr., Andy Russell, George Tarasovic, Clendon Thomas, Y. A. Tittle, and Joe Walton for sharing their time and memories of a time when pro football was, in truth, a different game.

Thanks also to Saleem Choudhry and Jon Kendle of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Lynne Molyneaux of the Steelers, Gil Pietrzak of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh—Main, Jeff Kallin of Clemson University, David Seals of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, the University of Pittsburgh Athletic Department, Brenda Wright of the Paley Library at Temple University, Chris Willis of NFL Films, Bryan Winfrey of Arizona State University, Roy McHugh, Lee Kim, Carl Kidwiler, George Gaadt, and Andrew O'Toole. Plus, a big cheer to personnel at libraries from Dallas to Philadelphia who provided microfilm from 1963 or copies of game stories.

Finally, I want to salute all the newspapermen who chronicled a unique season in history—in particular, Pat Livingston, Al Abrams, Jack Sell, and Jimmy Miller, all of whom covered the Steelers. Any reader cannot help but be impressed by the high quality of journalism of the era: the storytelling of Myron Cope, McHugh, and Arthur Daley; the passionate essays of Sandy Grady and Red Smith; and the reportage of Milton Gross, William N. Wallace, and Alvin Rosensweet, just to name a few of the newspapermen from the time who distinguished themselves.

I relied on the official play-by-play accounts from individual games, along with descriptions in game stories from as many different newspapers and wire services available, in reconstructing the Steeler games from the 1963 season. I found a couple occasions where there appeared to be a discrepancy of a single yard in citing yardage gained or lost, or the yard line where a ball was spotted, but these situations were isolated.

In his book
The Physics of Football
, Timothy Gay provides some scientific explanations for how and why a football moves the way it does when kicked or thrown. Gay played football at the California Institute of Technology and earned his PhD in atomic physics from the University of Chicago. He uses scientific terms like “launch speed,” “air drag,” and “angular momentum” to illustrate the flight of an oblong-shaped ball.
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When it comes to explaining how a football travels when the toe of a placekicker connects with the ball, Lou Michaels has a more basic explanation. His education came from four years at the University of Kentucky, where he was a two-time All-America lineman and a fourth-place finisher in the Heisman Trophy voting, and from a thirteen-year career in the NFL, where he was a left-footed kicker and defensive end with the Los Angeles Rams, Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Colts, and Green Bay Packers.

In 1962, his second season with the Steelers, Michaels set an NFL record by making twenty-six field goals, helping Pittsburgh to a second-place finish in the Eastern Conference, twice kicking four field goals in a game, and twice kicking field goals in the final thirty seconds to put the Steelers in front. “Mr. Michaels has been nothing short of being the Steelers' Mr. Wonderful this year,”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
sports editor and columnist Al Abrams gushed. But the path of any kick, Michaels knew, can be as unpredictable as any of the bounces a football takes. His explanation may not be very scientific, but it's as true to this day as it was when Jim Thorpe was drop-kicking footballs from the 50-yard line and players were wearing
leather helmets. “You kick a field goal,” Michaels said, and “it can hit the crossbar, it can go through the bar, or it can go away from the bar.”
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