The '63 Steelers (30 page)

Two dozen rookies opened training camp ahead of the veterans in the third week of July 1962, and it took only about ten days for Ballman to establish himself as “star of the early drills.” Those early workouts, however, came without the pressure and intimidation that veterans would bring to a practice, when jobs, pride, and reputation were on the line. One visitor to the rookie camp was Jack “Goose” McClairen, a gifted offensive end whose six-year career with the Steelers was undermined by knee injuries. McClairen knew how different the climate would become once vets like Myron Pottios and Johnny Sample arrived to go head to head with the twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-olds. “Those kids out there catch a pass and dance and prance like they are performing for a photographer,” Mc-Clairen said. “One forearm shiver from a defensive back and that dancin' and prancin' will be done!”
⁸

Ballman performed well in the club's intrasquad scrimmage with the veterans and was called an “outstanding flanker back prospect.”
⁹
Sample, a master of intimidation and a harsh critic of even the best receivers in the league, was asked who among the rookies had impressed him. “That kid from Michigan State,” Sample replied. “He looks like a good one. He has all the moves and a lot of speed.”
¹⁰

Ballman wasn't the kind to back down or let himself be intimidated. “He survived because he thrived on personal challenge,” one writer wrote
in the twilight of Ballman's career.
¹¹
Halfway through the 1962 regular season, Sample was cut, and after being signed by Washington, he would try to taunt Ballman—as he did every receiver—by threatening to hit his ex-teammate late or pile on him. “You do that, Sample, and I'll punch you right in the mouth,” Ballman replied.
¹²

Yet for all the good impressions Ballman was making in camp, he was destined to be a spectator on game days, relegated to the “taxi squad.” The taxi squad was yet another of Paul Brown's contributions to pro football. Arthur B. “Mickey” McBride, founder of the Cleveland Browns, had made his fortune partly through his taxi cab companies in Cleveland and other cities. To keep players who didn't make the Cleveland roster from joining other teams, Brown arranged for McBride to put them temporarily on his payroll as taxi drivers. The system eventually was regulated by the NFL and allowed players to practice with the team but not dress for games unless formally activated.

But even as Ballman worked out on “the twilight unit of football players,” Parker envisioned a star in the making. “Ballman's going to be a real ballplayer,” Parker said in the fall of '62. “I wouldn't trade him for a first draft choice.”
¹³

As '63 opened, Ballman was on the roster but seldom on the field. Yet, on a team that Parker felt had a tendency to tense up under pressure, Ballman set himself apart as much by his brash, confident attitude as by his catching and running with a football. He was unshakable.

“Cool, Daddy,” Lou Cordileone said. “He's so cool he burps icicles.”
¹⁴

He was also tough and self-assured enough to make a friend out of gruff Mike Ditka when the two later became teammates in Philadelphia. They were roommates and drinking buddies, and they chafed under the unimaginative offense of the inflexible head coach Joe Kuharich, who had coached Ed Brown's unbeaten college team. In his first four seasons in Philadelphia after being traded by Pittsburgh following two Pro Bowl seasons, Ballman averaged thirty-six receptions a year, playing also as a tight end. But halfway through the '63 season, Ballman was still waiting for a chance to duplicate the big plays he had made in college, and he started with his 93-yard kickoff return against Green Bay. “It's a special vision,” his widow, Judi, said in 2008, four years after Ballman's death from a massive heart attack at age sixty-three. “He used to say he felt like he had a special insight as to what was happening around him on the field. Just pick a spot and go. He used to say things like, ‘I don't know how I caught that pass but I think I willed the ball into my hands.' I guess there would be something to that. He just wanted to win so bad. He was highly competitive.”
¹⁵

Even after that year on the taxi squad, it took Parker half a season to work Ballman into the lineup. “He had a lot to learn,” Parker said, without a trace of regret.
¹⁶

Ballman worked out as a halfback and flanker before Parker settled on him as a split end. There was nothing Ballman could do but wait for an opportunity. “There's no question last year helped me a lot,” he said of his year on the taxi squad, “but it was a disappointment not to make the team. Of course, it was a disappointment making the team and spending all my time on the bench, too.”
¹⁷

Ballman had an influential party lobbying on his behalf. “Ed Brown convinced Buddy Parker to play this kid,” Cordileone said. “Parker wasn't too ‘hep' on this kid. But Ed Brown kept saying that this kid's a helluva receiver. ‘You gotta play him.' And he finally started playing him.”
¹⁸

Ballman's biggest fan had been with him since college. Gary and Judi Ballman got married in East Lansing. He was twenty-one; she was eighteen. “I was probably the youngest wife in the NFL for several years,” she said several decades later. “He was a wonderful husband—loving, caring, deeply religious. What you saw is what you got. He was just a really swell guy.”
¹⁹

Fortunately for Ballman, he had a veteran leader looking out for him, too. “Bobby Layne kind of took Gary under his wing,” Judi Ballman said. “I think that made life a little easier for Gary than it would for the average rookie because Bobby was always there—No. 1, to get him in trouble with me, but No. 2, [to] kind of really watch over him.”
²⁰

Such was life on the Steelers that players could find nearly as much trouble off the field as on it. Jim Bradshaw, who had been a quarterback at Chattanooga, was trying to make the team as a defensive back in the summer of '63. After a mid-August exhibition victory over the Eagles in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Bradshaw was one of a half-dozen players who went out to a bar after the game and hung around until about 3 a.m. Charlie Bradshaw (no relation), a native of Texas who studied to be a lawyer during the off-season, presented one of his teammates with a souvenir.

“Charlie Bradshaw brought Lou Michaels a ten-gallon Texas hat,” Jim Bradshaw recalled, “and gave it to Lou after the game.”

There were five or six of us. George Tarasovic and Bobby [Layne], and I think Ray Lemek was there. The guy that owned the place wanted to leave. Of course, Bobby didn't want to leave. We got up to leave. Lou had put his hat in a coatroom. And the hat was gone. Lou went back and told the bartender, “I want the hat.” Bartender says, “I don't know
anything about your damn hat.” Lou says, “I want that hat and I want it now, and somebody better go get my hat.” And the bartender says, “I don't know anything about the hat.”

So they just ripped the bar apart. Just destroyed it. I'd never seen anything like it. Broke glasses and broke the bottles behind the bar. Then off to jail we went. About six-thirty, 7 o'clock, the team was coming back to Pittsburgh, and then to West Liberty [West Virginia, site of the training camp]. Fran Fogarty [the Steelers' business manager] came down and got everybody out.

I'm a rookie; I'm scared to death. You want to keep your nose clean. I said, “Oh, man, I'm never going to make this ball club.” But Buddy Parker understood. That's the way Buddy was. No problem. That was the last I ever heard of it.
²¹

Bradshaw had been selected on the eighteenth round by Pittsburgh and had also been drafted by the Boston Patriots of the old AFL. He was offered $9,000 by the Steelers and called back several days later, requesting a $500 bonus. A scout replied, “I think we can work that out.”
²²

Bradshaw ran an option offense in college, and he knew that if he was going to earn a spot on the Steelers, it would have to be on defense. Bill Nelsen, a quarterback at USC, had been drafted on the tenth round and would compete for the No. 3 spot behind Ed Brown and Terry Nofsinger, a third-year man out of Utah.

Bradshaw became a close friend of defensive back Willie Daniel, who was in his third year, out of Mississippi State. In the Eastern Conference, there was never a letup in the quality of star receivers they faced: the Giants' Del Shofner, “a jet-propelled menace to every defensive back in the NFL”; the Cowboys' Billy Howton, who entered '63 on track to break Don Hutson's all-time records for receptions and yards gained; Washington's Bobby Mitchell, who led the league in catches in '62; Philadelphia's Tommy McDonald; and Bobby Joe Conrad of St. Louis.
²³

Eventually, every defensive back got burned, and the growth of television helped expose their mistakes to the entire sports world. “I'm not sure when this happened,” Willie Daniel's wife, Ruth, said.

Willie had looked bad on television the week before, and Jim had really had some good games—lots of publicity. The defense was lined up in the tunnel waiting to be introduced, and Willie knew he would be met with a shower of boos.

He also knew that Jim was busy talking, as usual, and wasn't paying attention to the names being called. So when the announcer called Willie's name, Willie turned to Jim and said, “Go, they just called your name.” So Jim goes running out onto the field to that chorus of boos. He says he'll never forget or forgive! We have gotten many laughs with Jim about that through the years.
²⁴

If Bradshaw was a long shot to make the Steelers, Daniel was the most unlikely candidate of all to earn a roster spot. He grew up in Macon, Mississippi, close to the Alabama line and just south of Mississippi State, which he attended. After completing his college career in 1959, Daniel went undrafted by the NFL. The AFL, desperate for players as it prepared for its inaugural season, ignored him as well. “How unwanted can a guy get?” asked
New York Times
columnist Arthur Daley.
²⁵

Snubbed by pro football, and married with one child, Daniel took a job as a high school football coach in the town of Cleveland, on the western border of Mississippi. While he was absorbed in the action during a game, so the story goes, Daniel felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around. “Wham! Out of nowhere came a punch, smack on the button.”
²⁶
Once Daniel recovered, he asked his assailant, “Who the hell are you? And what was that all about?”

“I won't stand for you keeping my kid on the bench all night,” said the offended father. “Next time this happens, you'll get the same thing.”
²⁷

The story became good copy for newspapers. “The actual event wasn't nearly as dramatic as the articles indicate!” Ruth Daniel said. “The ‘mad dad' had some inner liquid strength and came onto the field looking for the head coach. Willie stopped him and they had words, and maybe a slight nudge or two. Anyway, it made [for] a good story and was picked up by all the major newspapers in the cities where the Steelers played.”
²⁸

In any event, if anyone was going to be throwing punches, whether it was Stretch Elliott, Lou Michaels, or an angry dad, Daniel evidently figured the NFL couldn't be much more hazardous than the sidelines of a high school field, so he sought out one of his old college coaches for an NFL contact. The coach called Art “Pappy” Lewis, an ex-pro and former head coach at West Virginia who worked as a scout for the Steelers, to arrange a tryout. Daniel reported for training camp at Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, but flopped in the team's first scrimmage. Discouraged and homesick, Daniel was ready to quit, but Jack Butler talked him out of it.

Butler was coach of the defensive backs. A former seminary student, he made the Pro Bowl four times and had fifty-two interceptions during his
nine-year career as a defensive back with the Steelers. “This kid reminds me of me,” Butler said of Daniel. “He comes up and hits guys.” Any comparisons to Butler constituted powerful testimony that Daniel had come to the right team.
New York Times
columnist Arthur Daley characterized Butler as “a ruthless desperado” on the field. “Nice guys get nowhere in this sport,” Butler said. “The best ones have a mean streak in them. … You have to hit hard and keep hitting hard even if you have to take a 15-yard penalty.”
²⁹

Daniel also had speed to rival the fastest of receivers. He resisted the urge to leave camp, and at practice he chased down Preston Carpenter even though the tight end had a 10-yard lead. Parker took notice. Daniel was as fast as his teammate in the secondary, Sample, who himself was a match for his ex-teammate Lenny Moore, the Colts' running back. “That's the ultimate,” wrote Daley.
³⁰

Daniel survived training camp and opened the season at right cornerback. But it wasn't his speed or his toughness that saved him from Parker's wrath on the way home from a loss. “Willie had a less than stellar game—don't remember which one or what year,” Ruth Daniel said, “and Buddy was on the warpath with Willie as his target. Willie hid by laying under one of the seats on the plane with some of the guys covering him with their feet. Buddy never found him so he didn't get cut!”
³¹

Football interest in Pittsburgh was at a giddy pitch in the second week of November '63. Along with the Steelers' victory over the Browns, the University of Pittsburgh had run its record to 6–1 the day before by beating Notre Dame, and Penn State had defeated Ohio State. Pitt was ranked fifth in the nation—one spot behind Duffy Daugherty's Michigan State Spartans, who several months before had been dismissed as non-contenders. Evidently the collective IQs on the squad and coaching staff amounted to a lot more than some scouts thought.