The '63 Steelers (37 page)

Neither did Wade's coach. The pass “almost caused Coach George Halas to swoon on the sidelines.”
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It was probably too much of a shock to Reger as well. “The ball hit me on the right forearm,” he explained, “so I had no chance to intercept.”
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If Reger had caught the ball, he would have been a bigger hero than Ditka—and would have had about a quarter as far to run. “There was a clear field for Reger and page lines all over the sports world if he had nabbed the ball and scored,” Jack Sell wrote.
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Halas rushed in guard Roger Davis with instructions to kill the clock, and with two carries time ran out. A tie didn't hurt the Steelers—it kept them alive in the Eastern race, which saw the Giants, Browns, and Cardinals all tied for first place at 8–3 after St. Louis upset New York, 24–17, behind Charley Johnson's two TD passes, and Cleveland beat Dallas, 27–17. A tie not only let the Bears, at 9–1–1, hang onto first place in the Western Division, ahead of the 9–2 Packers but it also left Halas thankful for escaping defeat. “We'll settle for the tie,” the coach said.
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He had every reason to feel relief.
Chicago Tribune
sportswriter George Strickler said of Halas's team: “Today they were not what the advance notices had proclaimed. They were just lucky.” Or embarrassing. “We played like a bunch of jackasses,” Morris said.
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Parker showed no frustration, no bitterness over the tie, the officials' calls, or the breaks of the game. “You'd think we won,” he said with a laugh. “Well, it was almost like winning.”
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The angriest person in either locker room hadn't suited up that day; it was a Pittsburgh newspaperman upset over the officiating. “I do know the writer chased Halas and yelled, ‘You paid the officials,'” Ditka recalled years later. “A couple of us grabbed that guy and ran his ass out of there.”
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The writer, later identified by Myron Cope as one P. Murray Livingston, said the confrontation was overblown, and he returned to apologize, but the
Tribune
reported that he had threatened “to punch Halas in the nose.”
¹²⁹
There is no evidence that the writer had his hands taped as Parker did when he went after Big Daddy Lipscomb and John Henry Johnson in Dallas.

On their flight home, the Bears were still buzzing about Ditka's run. “I have never seen a play so great,” Pyle said years later.
¹³⁰

A day of mourning lay ahead for the nation. If fans leaving stadiums in the dusk could not deny or ignore how their world had changed so abruptly and irrevocably, some did find a brief distraction, a fleeting escape, at least in one city, before having to resume the task of groping for comfort or some peace of mind. Maybe it was, as Sandy Grady seethed, “a dismally farcical moment for child's games,” and maybe the most reverent, thoughtful, and decent thing for any citizen to do was to pause and bow his head for the day.
¹³¹
But for some, maybe the only response to tragedy was to find some kind of reminder of what makes a person feel alive and vital, and perhaps they found it at a football stadium.

As the fans filed out of Yankee Stadium, one man said to another, “I wonder if they should have played?”

“I don't know,” the second man replied. “I'm not God. Where else were they going to go today?”

“Or maybe they were looking for someplace to go.”
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By late afternoon, as people made their way home by subways, cars, buses, streetcars, or on foot, it was time to return to a national Götterdämmerung.

“In a way,” wrote Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
, “the fans at the Stadium yesterday could not have been blamed for letting their heavy hearts have a stimulating fillip for 2½ hours on a bright, brittle afternoon.”
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Two seasons earlier,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
sports editor Al Abrams had made his remarks about how the sports pages offered a “vicarious” relief amid the turbulence and violence of everyday life. On a grim Sunday four days before Thanksgiving, a real-life spectacle in seven cities across a dazed country put that notion to the test. “While the world rocked and reeled under the impact of weightier and more important happenings in Dallas the past few days,” Abrams wrote, “Pittsburgh district fans forgot assassinations and murders for a couple of hours to watch pro football. They saw it at its toughest best as two hard-bitten teams, battling for flag contention, clawed at each other from start to finish.”
¹³⁴

It was easy to indulge in platitudes and sanctimonious pronouncements about John F. Kennedy's beliefs and “what he would have wanted” in this raw situation. Most likely, what he would have loved to do on a Sunday afternoon in late November would be to watch the Redskins on TV, then round up eight or ten people, grab a football, and pick up sides on a patch of green lawn. Dave Hackett, a family friend, once wrote a tongue-in-cheek set of “Rules for Visiting the Kennedys,” and it included one obligatory activity the family insisted on: “It's touch football but it's murder. The only way I know of to get out of playing is not to come at all, or to come with a broken leg.”
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It sounded as if Ditka would have fit right in at a Kennedy pickup game. He had played with a fury to match the passion of the Steelers. It was not a day to have fun at a kid's game, or to savor athletic achievement. But Ditka was a professional, and he played like one, and he tried to express the right sentiment for his president. “I think everyone felt something,” Ditka said. “Not having known the man, however, I think he would not have wanted it postponed. So we go out on the field—and it's business to us—and after the first kickoff, all you think about is the Steelers.”
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In Milwaukee, where the Packers beat the 49ers, 28–10, Vince Lombardi was asked if he was troubled that they were playing “on this day of world gloom.”

“If this had been designated the day of national mourning, instead of tomorrow, I'm certain it would not have been played,” he replied. “Really, tho, [
sic
] there was no reason for postponing today's game. Knowing how Mr. Kennedy's thoughts were on sport, I believe that he would have been the last one in the world to ask the game be called off.”
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But no one, Lombardi said, was immune to the despair that hung over the nation. “If you have any kind of feeling,” he said, “you have to be affected.”
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In two weeks, the Steelers would travel to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas to face the Cowboys. But first, they would have a rematch with the Philadelphia Eagles.

On Tuesday, the Steelers would still be off, but stores, schools, and government offices would reopen, and people would try to get back to their regular routines, even though they would have “to explore the unknown and test the uncertain,” as Kennedy had said the day before his death. And on Tuesday, the
New York Daily News
ran a front-page photo of Jacqueline Kennedy; her daughter, Caroline; and son, John-John, saluting, with the headline “
WE CARRY ON
.”

Among the rejects and snubbed players Buddy Parker had assembled, no one burned with more passion to prove himself than Gilbert Leroy “Buddy” Dial, born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and raised in Magnolia, Texas.

As an end at Rice, he caught passes from future pros King Hill and Frank Ryan, was named sophomore lineman of the year in the Southwest Conference, averaged 24 yards a catch as a junior, and was a consensus All-America as a senior, when he was cocaptain and most valuable player for the Owls. The Giants took him in the second round of the 1959 draft with expectations of greatness. Dial was glib, likable, irreverent, and as down home as a slice of cornbread—a person with deep religious faith, and talented enough as a musician and singer to record an album of gospel songs. He also had an uncanny ability to catch a football—so good, in fact, that he drew the envy of Jimmy Brown.

“If I had Aladdin's lamp,” Brown said, “I would ask the jinni to give me Buddy Dial's hands, Bobby Mitchell's moves, Lenny Moore's change of pace.”
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Erich Barnes, the Giants' All-Pro defensive back, insisted, “Dial has better moves than Mitchell.”
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The combination of skills made Dial about as good a receiver as there was in the NFL in 1963—and good enough to compete in just about any era.

But no one would ever dare barter with the devil and make a deal for that talent if he had any inkling of the fate that was to befall Buddy Dial, a husband, father, and two-time Pro Bowler who would go on to be elected to the College Football Hall of Fame.

A life as cursed would have killed most men, a former teammate said.
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Halfway into the '63 schedule, Dial was off to the best start of his five-year career, ranking second in catches behind Bobby Joe Conrad but first in receiving yardage, ahead of Mitchell. Even though his thirty-six receptions left him trailing Conrad by eight, Dial loomed as a threat to win the NFL receiving title.

In the sixties, insensitivity to people of different origins was both flagrant and subtle. Stereotypes flourished. Black quarterbacks weren't considered smart enough to make it in the NFL. Latin baseball players were subjected to the condescending, quaint approach sportswriters took in mimicking athletes' speech patterns. But a small-town white, too, could end up looking cartoonish. Any story quoting Dial—or virtually anyone with a trace of a southern accent—was liable to make him sound like a talking tumbleweed. “Dadgum if ah wouldn't like to win that title,” Dial was quoted as saying “in his cheerful Texas drawl” on the eve of the Packer game. “But ah also want to play on a championship team and we have the chance this year. Ah don't know which one I want more. Maybe ah can have both.”
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Four games later, in the aftermath of the tie with Chicago, both goals looked like long shots. The Steelers needed each of the three teams tied for first place—New York, Cleveland, and St. Louis—to lose a game. After catching five passes against Chicago on a day when Ed Brown hit only ten of twenty-five attempts, Dial was in a fourth-place tie for receptions with Detroit's Terry Barr, with fifty-one catches. Conrad was in first with fifty-eight, followed by the Giants' Del Shofner with fifty-three and Mitchell with fifty-two. But only Mitchell, with 1,088 yards in receptions, and Dial, with 1,033, had reached the 1,000-yard mark among receivers. The young man from Magnolia, Texas, was in elite company.

Dial, like Tommy McDonald, brought the giddy spirit of a kid to the job of playing professional football. No matter how hard you hit him, you couldn't knock the smile off his face. Opponents not only respected him, but they couldn't help but like him. Cardinal cornerback Jimmy Hill patterned his game after the Lions' Dick “Night Train” Lane, earning a reputation for the kind of tackling that was “worthy of a Pier Six brawl.”
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But with his jocular manner, penchant for pranks, and disarming grin of a child at heart, Dial had the ability to defuse a volatile confrontation with the fiercest opponents.

“You know,” Hill said, “that is one guy I couldn't get angry with even if he clipped me from behind.” Hill was at Forbes Field the afternoon Dial caught seven passes for 186 yards in a December 1962 victory over the Cards. As
Dial ran a square-in pattern, Hill dashed at him, ready to swipe “a scythelike forearm” at the Steeler end's head.
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Dial made an 18-yard reception and was tackled by another defensive back as Hill swung and missed.

“Some guys get real mad and are ready to fight after I do that,” Hill said, “but not Buddy. He jumps up, smiles at me and says, ‘Jimmy, you just took five years off my life.' Now, how can you dislike a guy like that?”
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The one thing that did make Dial mad—fighting mad, for years—was getting cut after being drafted by the Giants, which gave him little time to validate his status as the twenty-second overall selection in the 1959 draft. The Giants were more impressed in training camp with a twenty-seventhround draft pick, an end from Richmond named Joe Biscaha—the 323rd overall selection—than they were with the All-America from Rice. When Giants coach Jim Lee Howell delivered the bad news to Dial two days before the 1959 opener, the rookie replied, “Someday, I'm going to make you look bad.”
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Dial became another of Parker's salvage projects, on the eve of the '59 season opener, a discard ripe with potential and a ravenous appetite to prove his doubters wrong.

In mid-December of '63, Dial was about to get another crack at the Giants. Three days before the regular-season finale in New York, and two weeks before Christmas, the
Pittsburgh Press
ran a photo of a smiling Dial surrounded by his family: his wife, Janice, beside him in their Brentwood home, with three-year-old Darren wearing a football helmet, perched on his father's lap, and one-year-old Kevin sitting in his mother's lap, reaching out to touch his brother's helmet. It would have made the perfect photo to accompany any of the newspaper or magazine ads of the time extolling a happy home life, or it could have been fashioned into a Hallmark Christmas card.

Coaches, players, and amateur sociologists have forever philosophized about how the game of football is just like life. You face adversity. You get knocked down, you get back up. Practice and prepare to do your best. Work hard enough, and the breaks will fall your way. Ultimately, you will be a winner.

It would be convenient if any individual could devise a strategy for facing life every week the way teams prepare game plans for an opponent. It would be reassuring to know that you could map out your route in everyday life and follow it the way Buddy Dial ran his square-in pattern to catch an 18-yard pass against Jimmy Hill. But if there is one valid comparison between football and life, it is that the ball can take the craziest, most unpredictable of bounces, and not even someone with the sure hands of Buddy Dial has any certainty of controlling it, on or off the field.