The '63 Steelers (27 page)

Compared to some of the ruthless play, John Henry Johnson's particular habits were ungentlemanly, but they were permissible—and even necessary—in the Wild West spirit of the time, and he gave defensive players something to worry about.

“Yeah, you worried about him,” Huff said. “You worried about him hitting you in the face with an elbow. You're talkin' about a cheap shot. He put a lot of guys out. He'd hit you with that elbow, he'd break your face mask. There was no rule against it then. It was legal. You didn't do it unless you really wanted to hurt somebody, but he did it all the time. Ho, man, that's the first thing they tell you: ‘You go in there, you better be careful, 'cause he's gonna hit you with that elbow.'” But, Huff conceded, “That's part of the game.”
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“Ol' John Henry's got the meanest elbows in football,” Layne once said.
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Johnson remembered a game when Lew Carpenter—Preston's brother and a halfback and kick returner with the Lions, Browns, and Packers—tried to grab John Henry's face mask. Johnson warned him, and Carpenter later came by on a punt. “I laid an elbow upside his head,” Johnson said. “He ain't seen me yet.”
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Maybe there was a reason, an explanation, and not just the case of a
mean disposition, that led John Henry Johnson to play so hard, so all-out. Maybe at some point when he was growing up, he got the same advice that Red Mack had received: “You don't have to be big, you don't have to be the fastest guy in the world, but you've got to be the toughest.”
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Brown, Taylor, Johnson, and other NFL runners were eventually targets of cheap shots. And the better the runner, the more inviting a target he became, especially when he was vulnerable and often defenseless in a pileup. The line between vicious and dirty play was often blurred. Taylor called Huff “a great one for piling on” after the Packers' 16–7 victory in the 1962 NFL title game but declined to call the linebacker a “dirty” player. During one pileup, Taylor said, “somebody was in there twisting my head.”
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Huff received so much hate mail and criticism that Giants management invited the media to view the game films, after which one reporter concluded, “Huff played no rougher than any other participant.”
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Brown said that during one drive in the Browns-Giants game on October 13, 1963, his opponents went for his eyes in pileups four or five times. Brown insisted, after confiding in a Cleveland sportswriter, that the latter not report about the incident, but the fullback acknowledged, “I felt they were trying to get me out.”
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No team, evidently, was innocent. The day after Pittsburgh upset Cleveland, 17–13, in 1961, Buddy Dial appeared at the weekly Curbstone Coaches luncheon, at which he told the audience that his team had sustained no serious injuries, “but John Henry Johnson had a few teeth marks on his legs.”
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There were dissenters against the violence, like Maule and Graham, but no drastic action was taken. “The war against roughness is a continuing war,” commissioner Pete Rozelle said. “And so it may be,” Gordon Cobbledick, sports editor of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, wrote, “but wouldn't you think that after all these years some progress would have been made toward winning it?”
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That war would last half a century. In the meantime, pro football players treated life on the field as an occupational hazard, like working in a mine. Athletes like Lou Michaels and Dick Haley were driven to escape a life of dangerous, backbreaking work by standing out in sports. Others, like John Henry Johnson, found motivation deep inside themselves. Maybe it wasn't demons that pushed Johnson, the way they danced inside Parker and tormented Big Daddy Lipscomb, but something stoked his pride and vision and made him soar to success, just like he cannonballed over defensive linemen to scratch out the yard that separated his team from the opponent's end zone.

Johnson was born in Waterproof, Louisiana, the son of a Pullman porter
who was killed in a railroad accident when John Henry was only three. When he was nine, his mother sent him along with his older brother and sister to Pittsburg, California. He studied yet struggled in high school because of a lack of sound elementary schooling in Louisiana, but he found his outlet in sports.

“He was not a poor student,” said Bob Robinett, the general manager of the Calgary Stampeders, Johnson's first pro team, and a former guidance counselor in California. “But he wanted to
excel
. And finally, knowing that he could not excel in the classroom, he decided he would on the ball field. That's why he's always played so ruggedly.”
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Johnson enrolled at St. Mary's, a California college, but when the school dropped football, he transferred to Arizona State, where he started to gain national attention. For a game against Hardin-Simmons, his team traveled to El Paso, Texas, where the black players had to stay in a separate hotel. “That made me mad,” Johnson said, “so I took it out on the other team.”
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The Steelers drafted him in the second round in 1953, but he decided to play in Canada when Pittsburgh wouldn't up its offer from $12,000 to $15,000. The next year Johnson signed with the 49ers and finished second in the league in rushing to teammate Joe Perry. In the spring of '57, Parker brought Johnson to the Lions in a trade, but he wasn't around to coach him in the fall, having left for Pittsburgh. Parker traded for Johnson again in 1960, and the six-foot-two, 215-pound fullback averaged 5.3 yards a carry while rushing for 621 yards in his first year in Pittsburgh.

What distinguished Johnson from most backs—and particularly from Brown—was not just his willingness to block (and to hit) but his fondness for it. He also had good hands and was a threat as a receiver. For as much passion and energy as he put into the game, Johnson could not tolerate lackadaisical effort from a teammate. In a '62 game against the Giants, he felt that one teammate had loafed near the goal line and cost the Steelers a touchdown. “I ever see you do that again,” Johnson said, “I'll kill you with my bare hands.”
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While in Detroit during the '59 season, Johnson had been suspended by the team for one game, costing him about $1,200 in salary, for missing a team plane departing from San Francisco and also for “a so-called indifferent attitude toward football.”
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At the time Johnson missed the flight, his ex-wife, who lived in San Francisco with their five children, had a bench warrant issued for his arrest for $850 in back alimony.
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In his first game back, Johnson, “booed lustily” in pregame introductions, “left the Lions' doghouse and stole the show with his best performance in
two seasons.” He caught an 11-yard touchdown pass and “bolted through and around the Los Angeles defense” in Detroit's 23–17 victory.
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John Henry Johnson had a flair for rising to a big occasion, and he had an understanding of what it meant to be “in the doghouse.”

Racism in the early sixties was as inherent a problem in football as it was in the rest of society. Black players who were quarterbacks in college were not smart enough to play the position in the NFL, coaches thought. The notion of hiring a black head coach seemed as outlandish as having hydrofoils racing up and down the rivers of Pittsburgh. On the road, blacks roomed with blacks, whites with whites.

Through the '63 season, Jim Brown could recount only two instances in which he was the object of racial slurs on the field, but he recognized that those offenses were minor compared to bigger societal problems. In fact, “The acceptance of the Negro in sports is really an insignificant development. … The problem is a little bigger than a ball game,” Brown said. “Can anyone possibly think that it does my heart good to sign twenty autographs in a hotel lobby and then be turned out of the hotel dining room?”
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Brown gained fame and, for the period, made good money—an estimated $35,000.
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But that was not enough to compensate for the indignities he endured. “If anything,” he said, “I am more angry than the Negro who can't find work.”
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No doubt Brown would have taken interest in a story that ran in the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
three days before the Browns-Steelers game, about a report in which the executive director of the Mayor's Commission on Human Relations called Pittsburgh “a racial tinderbox.”
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But the playing field was the equalizer. Helmets, long-sleeve jerseys, and bulky equipment could practically conceal a person's color and render him anonymous. A moving target wasn't a human; it was just a number on the front and back. Once an opponent charged, you didn't worry about his color; you struck back for self-preservation.

“I hit the colored guy as hard as I hit the white guy, and I don't think about color when I'm playing,” Johnson said. “But,” he added, “it might be a subconscious thing. I've always felt I was as good as anyone else, that's for sure.”
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More likely, Johnson was “always conscious of his second-class citizenship.” In 1968, two years after he retired from football, he said, “You don't get the endorsements, advertisements and job preferences like white athletes do. I love football and I had aspirations to coach, but I couldn't get a job.”
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A week before the debacle in Milwaukee, Parker pulled Johnson after
just four carries against the Cowboys. Theron Sapp came in to energize the running game with 45 yards rushing, and his production, it was speculated, could relegate Johnson to the bench.
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The Browns game was the last of the season scheduled for Pitt Stadium, home of the University of Pittsburgh Panthers, and a crowd of 54,490 was expected, the first sellout for the Steelers since they began playing at “the DeSoto Street saucer” in 1958. The event was being billed as “the greatest day in local pro football history,” with the game telecast nationally and the thirty-seven-year-old Pete Rozelle, in his fourth year as commissioner, scheduled to attend.
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The pride of nearby Jeanette, Pennsylvania, Dick Hoak, was to be honored at halftime. Four New York papers requested credentials to cover the game. Leo “Horse” Czarnecki, custodian of the field, spread a tarp on it at the end of the week to make sure the grass was protected and would be in top shape. “It's all building up to a terrible tussle,” the
Post-Gazette
's Jack Sell wrote.
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It was the perfect stage for John Henry Johnson. “His best games came against the Browns and the Giants, because of Jim Brown, and he hated the Giants,” Lou Cordileone said. “You could always bet he was going to have a helluva game against those two clubs. He always did.”
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The year before, Brown had 93 yards in Cleveland's 41–14 victory; Johnson ran for 94. In '61, Brown had 110 yards in Pittsburgh's 17–13 win; Johnson finished with 105. In '60, Brown ran for 86 yards in a 14–10 Steeler upset; Johnson had 73.

But the big bash in the stadium atop “Heart Attack Hill” didn't seem to be the right time for Johnson to stage a big revival. Who could tell how healthy his ankle was, and who could tell how confident Parker felt about using him? But oh, what a sight it was to see Johnson run when he was fit and fired up.

Some of the most fluid runners in NFL history ran wild in the fifties and early sixties. Backs like Hugh “the King” McElhenny, Willie Galimore and Lenny Moore, with his black high-top cleats taped like spats, zigzagged across the field the way Olympic skaters glided across ice. “In his prime The King had the prettiest moves, the most beautiful high step, the smoothest change of pace that you would ever hope to see,” Brown said.
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Taylor, Alex Webster, and John David Crow, however, relied on raw power. Johnson had a style all his own.

Johnson described his moves as “a combination of jitterbug, twist and Charleston, with a little rumba thrown in.”
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Every joint in his body swiveled
as he galloped through defenders, herky jerky, like a man scampering barefoot across a bed of red-hot coals. “He was pigeon-toed and knock-kneed,” Cordileone said. “You see him running from behind, you'd laugh your ass off, the way he ran. [But] he was tough.”
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Carrying the ball “like a cake of wet soap,” Johnson “starts fast in a half-crouch, moves at a stuttering pace, twisting and turning while he uses head and shoulder fakes, hurdles tacklers, shuffles sideways, straight arms an eager defender and then cuts loose.”
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A press box observer once commented, “He runs like he's swimming the Australian crawl.”
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Brown was among the viewers who enjoyed Johnson's performances. “But the best entertainment,” he said, “sometimes happens when John Henry hits smack into the center of the line. Those defensive men stack in there to meet him like mad dogs, every one of them wanting a piece of him. So what happens, sometimes, is that you see John Henry charge head-first into that wild mess of beef, and the next second you see him running backwards right out of it. Watching this, I get the feeling I'm viewing a film that's being run back.”
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The morning after the loss to Green Bay, the violin-playing comedian Jack Benny had a “hilarious” rehearsal before a Monday night benefit performance with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at the Syria Mosque, an event designed as “a satire on being a great violinist.” Benny, with a grin, said, “Actually, I do play as well as I can. The trouble is that it just isn't good enough.”
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The Steelers could have said the same about themselves. In the aftermath of the season's most disheartening loss, pro football's most temperamental coach made a curious move: He gave the players an extra day off on Tuesday. “This is a funny team,” Parker said. “Man, I've never seen a team like this. It's the only team I ever saw that didn't improve with pressure.” The players had been wound up too tight, he concluded. “We were gigging them all week, but it didn't do any good. It seems that any time the pressure's on, they fold up. They choke. Not everybody, of course. Just enough of the guys to wreck the rest of the team. We'll just throw out the ball and let them go on their own. Maybe they'll play up to their capacity if they're loose and relaxed.”
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