The '63 Steelers (8 page)

“He didn't overdose,” said tight end Preston Carpenter. “Somebody killed
him. We know that.”
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Buddy Young, a friend of Lipscomb's as well as a former collegiate and NFL star, said, “I have never known Big Daddy to take any kind of dope. He wouldn't do it.”
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There weren't many happy times for Eugene Alan Lipscomb while he was growing up. He was eleven years old when a man came to the Detroit rooming house where Lipscomb lived and told him his mother was dead, stabbed forty-seven times by a boyfriend while waiting for a bus. Lipscomb never knew his father. After his mother's death, he was raised by his grandfather, whose idea of discipline was a good whipping.
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Big Daddy started working even before his mother was slain. “After she was killed, work was a matter of survival for me,” he said. “I had to buy my own clothes and pay room and board to my grandfather. I washed dishes in a café, loaded trucks for a construction gang and helped around a junkyard. One year I ran a lift in a steel mill from midnight until seven in the morning. Then I changed clothes and went to school.” Not even a man with the size and strength of Lipscomb could banish from his mind the memories of a childhood spent in purgatory. “I've been scared most of my life,” Lipscomb admitted. “You wouldn't think so to look at me.”
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Lipscomb joined the Marines after high school and learned football playing for a team at Camp Pendleton. The Los Angeles Rams signed him for $4,800, used him sporadically, and then waived him. Baltimore picked him up for $100. He bolstered a defense that helped the Colts win successive championships in 1958 and '59, was voted All-Pro both years, and then was traded to the Steelers before the start of the '61 season. Asked about the trade, Lipscomb told a Baltimore newspaperman, “It makes no difference where I go. I gives 'em hell wherever I play.”
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He was the kind of defensive player—just like Ernie Stautner—who could put fear into an opponent's offense and rattle any quarterback. He was exactly what the Pittsburgh Steelers needed, and he was the kind of battling underdog from a lousy life that Pittsburgh fans would admire and cheer.

Had he lived, Lipscomb was a player who could have pushed the Steelers to the top in 1963. “In my opinion, he was the best defensive lineman in the history of the game,” said Johnny Sample, a teammate of Lipscomb's in both Baltimore and Pittsburgh.
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Under that Rocky Mountain physique and intimidating scowl was a man with an impish sense of humor and a soft heart toward kids. “He had a heart of pure gold,” said former teammate John Nisby. And of all the athletes John F. Kennedy could choose from to form his National Sportsmen for Kennedy Committee in mid-October of 1960, Lipscomb was one who wound up in
the group alongside Johnny Unitas and Norm Van Brocklin. But Lipscomb definitely would not have approved of Kennedy, as president, inviting Nikita Khrushchev in September of '63 to consider a joint mission to the moon. No, Big Daddy had dreams that were all his own.
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“I'm not kidding. I want to be the first man on the moon,” Big Daddy said during training camp in August 1962. “I want to be an astronaut and I sure would like to land up there on the moon. Why, I'd look around, wave the American flag, declare the territory for America and pick up a little glory for Big Daddy, too. … You know you just can't send no midgets to the moon.”
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But if Lipscomb couldn't get his shot at the moon, he was confident he could lift the Steelers to a title, just as he had helped the Colts. Big Daddy, along with everyone else across the country in 1962, had every right to dream, and dream big. “Say, chum,” Lipscomb said as he looked at the sky that August day. “I wonder if those cats up there on the moon have a football team. If they do, Big Daddy would have himself a ball. And when those scientists look at the plan[e]t at night and see somebody making tackles all over the surface they'll be able to say, ‘There's the man in the moon and it's Big Daddy Lipscomb!'”
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As the Steelers prepared to open the '63 season without Lipscomb, one very special player in a different sport, a native of Donora, Pennsylvania, echoed the anxiety of every Steelers fan. Retiring after twenty-two years as a St. Louis Cardinals outfielder and making his final appearance at Forbes Field on Sunday, September 8, Stan “the Man” Musial wondered out loud, “The way the Steelers finished last season they should have something. How much will they miss Big Daddy Lipscomb?”
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A lot, the
Pittsburgh Courier
warned. “With Eugene Lipscomb gone, much of the teamwise swank and confidence of the past two seasons is going to be amiss,” the newspaper stated. “The big fellow exhuded [
sic
] ‘class,' both for himself and the team simply by striding on the field.”
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First Bobby Layne left the stage, and then Big Daddy. It was the kind of double whammy that no team seemed capable of overcoming, and certainly not one assembled with vagabonds and players who had no reputation as winners. “The loss of both Layne and Lipscomb, in a single year, shapes [up] as an excessive psychological impediment,” the
Courier
stated.
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Buddy Parker had a candidate, albeit an unlikely one, to fill Big Daddy's spot. A 1964 Steeler press guide noted that Lou Cordileone had spent “a rather nomadic life in the NFL,” an apt as well as poetic description, considering that when he was picked up by the Steelers in '62, the former
first-round draft choice of the Giants was playing for his fourth team in three years.

Cordileone was a high school star at St. Michael's in Union City, New Jersey, where, as a fullback, he scored five touchdowns and three extra points in a 40–0 win over Ferris in 1955 and went on to set a season scoring record for Hudson County with 128 points. But Cordileone was not cut out for a regimented lifestyle. Years before he became coach and managing general partner of the Oakland Raiders, Al Davis, a Brooklyn native, was offensive line coach at the Citadel, and he tried to recruit Cordileone. The Jersey guy wasn't exactly suited for the military life. “Let me tell you something, coach,” Cordileone told Davis. “I'm not going to college to dress in a fuckin' uniform every day. I want to go to college to have fun.”
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Cordileone did go south, but he chose Clemson, where he became an All-America lineman. When he was selected twelfth overall by the Giants in the 1960 draft, Cordileone envisioned a ten-year career in the NFL, after which he figured he'd go into business, “perhaps as a mortician with his uncle,” he explained on the eve of Lou Cordileone Day in Jersey City, February 2, 1960.
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But his career veered off course and took a couple of detours, including one that linked him in NFL history to one of the league's greats. A year after getting the keys to his hometown, Cordileone was dealt by the Giants to San Francisco for Y. A. Tittle. Cordileone's reaction to the trade was: “Me for Tittle? Just me?”
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Tittle was no less surprised—or appalled. “I was a little bit resentful,” the quarterback admitted several decades later. “He may have been a good guard, but I thought I was worth more than a guard that had never even played. I was irritated at the 49ers. I had been to the Pro Bowl four times with the 49ers. I was hurt.” The question was, at age thirty-four, could Tittle lead a team to the top? “That's what I had to prove,” he said.
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For a lineman who had “all the equipment to become one of the best in league history,” Cordileone wouldn't wind up with much glory, but he got in plenty of licks on the field and had more than his share of fun off it, according to both him and a few critics.
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“A little too much sometimes,” he admitted, “except on Sunday. But they don't count Sunday, they count what happens during the week a lot, and that's where I used to get in trouble. I was always there on Sunday. I never had a problem on Sunday.”
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On other days, trouble had a way of finding him, even with no provocation. It didn't take long at the 49ers' training camp for Cordileone to learn that playing for their coach was going to be no fun at all. “I never got along
with Red Hickey. He was an asshole,” Cordileone said. “He didn't like me, I didn't like him.” One night at camp, Cordileone left his room to go to the bathroom ten minutes before bed check and returned twenty minutes later. The next day, Hickey asked Cordileone where he had been at 11 p.m. Hearing the explanation, Hickey replied, “From now on, you shit on your own time, and not on mine.”
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Cordileone was traded to the Rams after the season, but that stay ended after only a few games. “I got in a beef with [Rams coach Bob] Waterfield,” Cordileone said.
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(If Hickey wasn't much fun to be around, Waterfield was no barrel of laughs either. He earned the nickname “Great Stoneface” for his communication skills with players.
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)

Cordileone got a phone call from his mom informing him that she'd heard on TV that Vince Lombardi had picked him up. “I said, ‘I hate to disappoint you, Mom, but I'm going to Pittsburgh,'” Cordileone explained. “What I come to find out from somebody in the office at Pittsburgh [was that] when Buddy Parker saw that Vince Lombardi was picking me up, he said, ‘There's gotta be something this kid's got that nobody knows about yet, because Lombardi wouldn't pick him up if he wasn't a good ballplayer.' And he had the last choice. That's how I wound up in Pittsburgh.”
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Cordileone looked to be as challenging a reclamation project as Parker had faced, but the defensive tackle had landed in the right environment. The Steelers played and partied with his kind of gusto, and Parker didn't worry about bed checks. Cordileone had played on kicking teams in '62, but with Lipscomb gone and the aging Ernie Stautner limited in his playing time as the '63 camp began, the Steelers were desperate for another playmaker on defense, and the budding mortician was looking good. Halfway through the exhibition season, Rooney observed, “That new guy is doing a real good job at tackle. The coaches say he's been playing as well as Lipscomb did.”
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The Steelers were going to need a grizzly bear of a lineman to cope with the Giants in game 2. Three of New York's backs—Frank Gifford, Hugh McElhenny, and Alex Webster—had a combined career total of 13,090 yards rushing, 9,901 yards receiving, and 174 touchdowns entering the season. Parker had lost Myron Pottios for the '62 season because of a fractured arm, and now he was going to be without his middle linebacker, John Reger, who was still in a Philadelphia hospital, recovering from his collision. Michaels, who had kicked two field goals in a 20–17 victory in New York in '62, was still brooding over his placekicking failures in Philly. (Asked what he was doing to forget his troubles, Michaels explained, “Well, I've got some of the boys out to the house to eat some of my mom's Kolbussi. Win, lose or tie, you gotta eat, you know?”
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)

The Giants had their own injury problems. Tittle, now thirty-six, had hit sixteen of twenty-three passes for 243 yards in the comeback win in Baltimore in the opener, but his hip, chest, and ribs were badly bruised when he was hit by defensive backs Lenny Lyles and Jim Welch while diving into the end zone. The Giants' physician, Francis J. Sweeney, ordered an ambulance to meet the train the team traveled on upon its return to New York and take Tittle and rookie back Charlie Killett to the hospital.

“I don't want to go to the hospital,” Tittle said, “and I certainly won't ride there in an ambulance.”

“Sit up front with the driver,” owner John Mara suggested. “It will be the same as a taxicab. It'll be just like riding shotgun on a stagecoach.” Tittle spent two nights in the hospital.
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Tittle had the skills that would eventually earn him a spot in the Hall of Fame, but he was driven to keep proving himself year after year. “I never thought I was that good,” Tittle said, “and I always felt if I didn't play up to my maximum, there was always somebody on that bench [who] would take my job. I always had pressure. I always had good quarterbacks who were substitutes, and if I didn't watch it …”
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Tittle had been facing intense competition just to get on the field ever since he began his pro career with Baltimore. He competed against All-America quarterbacks Charles “Chuckin' Charlie” O'Rourke of Boston College and Adrian Burk of Baylor. In San Francisco, he played behind a quarterback, Frankie Albert, who starred not only on the field but in a movie about a glamorous football player. “I got the job finally,” Tittle said. “I kept winning the jobs.”
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The Texas native had been brought to the Giants because Charlie Conerly, who'd played at Ole Miss, turned forty as the '61 season began. As the '63 season opened, backing up Tittle were Ralph Guglielmi of Notre Dame and rookie Glynn Griffing, christened by the Associated Press (AP) “perhaps the greatest in a long line of fine Mississippi quarterbacks” in the aftermath of the Rebels' 17–13 Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas. Losing coach Frank Broyles declared the six-foot-one 200-pounder from Culkin, Mississippi, “the best college passer I've ever seen.”
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The Giants signed Griffing, whom they had selected as a “future” in the fourth round of the 1962 draft, immediately after the game.
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“Now the New York Giants will be looking for Griffing to accomplish similar feats,” the Associated Press's Ben Thomas wrote. By season's end, NBC would air a documentary on Griffing's rookie experiences, titled
The Making of a Pro
.
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