ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 28, 1996 TAG: 9601300019
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-7 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PITTSBURGH
SOURCE: Dallas Morning News
Green Bay, in its boozy affection for the hometown Packers, has been called a drinking town with a football problem.
Same thing with shot-and-a-beer Pittsburgh.
The affection Pittsburghers hold for their Steelers seems to alternately border on the religious, the obscene, the sublime and the ridiculous. But what's not to like about a team that was bought for $2,500 in horse-race winnings?
What's not to like about a team that once employed head coaches named Blood and Greasy? A team that has passed up or given away the likes of Dan Marino, Johnny Unitas, Sid Luckman and Jim Brown? A team that waited 40 years for a division title, then won four Super Bowls in six years? A team that was the last in the NFL to abandon the single-wing offense? A team that has had players who have shot at passing cars and helicopters, another player who sued the head coach and another who put live goldfish into the Plexiglas heels of his platform shoes?
What a long, strange trip it has been for the Steelers, purchased in 1933 by Art Rooney after he made a big score one weekend at Yonkers and Saratoga. Legend has it Rooney, a feisty middleweight who made the 1920 U.S. Olympic boxing team and played some semipro football in his time, parlayed one small wager into a quarter-million dollars. His original tip is said to have come courtesy of Tim Mara, a well-connected bookie and owner of the New York Giants.
The early Steelers truly were awful and didn't make much money, even though Rooney had named them the Pirates to capitalize on the name association with the city's baseball team.
In 1938, with one John ``Blood'' McNally as coach, the Steelers made a grab for some flash and headlines. They signed Colorado's All-America halfback, Byron ``Whizzer'' White, for the ungodly sum of $15,800. The experiment was only partly a success - White had a great season, but he left the following year to take a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford. He went on to serve more than 30 years on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rooney sold the team in 1940, then thought better of the sale and got the team back. For the '41 season, there was a new coach, new players, new uniforms - and a new nickname. The Steelers.
The team was average at best, usually worse, but from the beginning the Steelers had a reputation for tough, physical play. A Giants defensive back of the day, Tom Landry, recalled most NFL clubs ``would rather play Cleveland twice than Pittsburgh once ... The Steelers would make you ache all week.''
The hidebound Steelers were the last NFL team to give up the antique single-wing in favor the modern T-formation, and when they did, they got former Tulsa star Jim Finks to play quarterback in their new offense. Still the team sputtered, so Ted Marchibroda and Johnny Unitas were brought to training camp in 1955 as possible backups and successors to Finks.
Unitas rode the bench through the preseason before the Steelers' staff blithely released him. Unitas, the future Pro Football Hall of Famer, played that 1955 season for a semipro team in Pittsburgh, his hometown, for $6 per game and meal money.
Buddy Parker had coached the rival Detroit Lions to two world titles when Rooney hired him in 1957 to get the Steelers going. Parker, who would run the team through '64, became notorious for giving away draft picks as if they were government cheese. In an attempt to win quickly, he raffled off some 50 draft choices, including five first-rounders.
Part of his dismal legacy was the 1957 draft. Pittsburgh had won a coin flip with Cleveland to get the first choice in the draft that year, then chose Len Dawson over Jim Brown. That blunder ranked with the Steelers' waiving Unitas, passing up Marino, trading the rights to Luckman, cutting Jack Kemp, picking one Gary Glick over Lenny Moore and missing out on Dick Butkus.
Parker did have some success, however, as the Steelers acquired marquee players such as Bobby Layne and wide receiver Buddy Dial. The early '60s were promising, but ultimately unsuccessful. Layne often was injured, Ernie Stautner and Big Daddy Lipscomb were slowing and Parker complained quarterback Ed Brown ``couldn't hit the ground with his hat.''
Marion Motley, the great Cleveland Browns running back, once said ``running against the Steelers is like running downhill.''
With the start of the 1965 season just two weeks away, Parker resigned as Pittsburgh's coach, saying, ``I can't win with this bunch of stiffs.''
The Steelers limped along until 1969, when Rooney hired Chuck Noll as head coach. Noll had been a guard and linebacker for Cleveland, then served as an assistant under Don Shula with Baltimore. When Noll went 1-13 in his first season and 12-30 in his first three, it looked as if the Steelers never would get straightened out.
But when Noll came aboard, he had convinced Rooney the team should be built through the draft, player by player, and they immediately embarked on a series of remarkable drafts that would carry the team through the '70s.
It all started in 1969 with the selection of Joe Greene of North Texas State. Then, after winning a coin flip with Chicago for the first choice in the 1970 draft, Noll took Terry Bradshaw, the gifted and irrepressible quarterback from Louisiana Tech. Mel Blount came along that year, followed in '71 by Jack Ham, Gerry Mullins and Dwight White, then Franco Harris in '72.
There was strong sentiment on the Steelers' staff for Houston's Robert Newhouse, and Art Rooney Jr., who ran the team's scouting department, recalled the final decision to pick Harris over Newhouse was ``like the Battle of Midway.''
Harris' first pro start was something of a disaster - he fumbled twice and gained all of 35 yards in a loss to Cincinnati. But, of course, he went on to become one of the most popular and productive players in Steelers history.
``Before [drafting Franco], we never won anything,'' Art Jr. once said. ``After that, we won everything.''
The 1974 draft would be particularly stellar for the Steelers, and many experts consider it the best NFL draft ever. In one fell swoop they got Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth, Jim Allen and Mike Webster.
Also in '74 they discovered an undersized linebacker in South Carolina State's Donnie Shell. He was undrafted, the Steelers invited him to camp that year and Shell went on to four Pro Bowls as a safety.
No team was better at finding talent at predominantly black colleges, and no team was luckier on draft day. Landing these quality players was like hitting the NFL mother lode, and the Steelers mined them like a rich seam of coal. The starting lineup barely would change as the team won its four Super Bowls. From 1972 to '79, the Steelers never missed the playoffs and never lost more than five games in a season.
Nobody could part the Steel Curtain in those days. Harris ran off a string of 1,000-yard seasons and Bradshaw finally settled down after a rookie year in which he threw for six touchdowns and had 24 interceptions.
The Steelers were something of an all-star team in the '70s. And they were lucky, too. Never more so than with the ``Immaculate Reception.''
Two days before Christmas 1972, the Steelers were trailing the Oakland Raiders 7-6 and down to their last play. Bradshaw threw a pass to John ``Frenchy'' Fuqua - he of the aquarium shoes - and the ball was batted into the air by defensive back Jack Tatum. Harris, coming along at a full lope, caught the ball on his shoetops and scored. The Steelers won 13-7 and advanced to the AFC championship game against Miami.
Alas, Art Rooney Sr. - whom everyone knew as the Chief - never saw the Immaculate Reception: He already was on his way down to the Steelers' locker room to console his players.
Defensive lineman Ernie Holmes was admitted to a psychiatric facility in 1973 after shooting at passing cars on a freeway overpass, and the '74 season had some interior turmoil as ``Jefferson Street'' Joe Gilliam briefly took Bradshaw's starting job.
But the '74 team would give the Chief his first NFL title, a 16-6 defeat of Minnesota in Super Bowl IX. The Steelers repeated the following year, then turned the same trick in '79-80. Two of those four Lombardi Trophies came at the expense of the Dallas Cowboys.
``That first Super Bowl, I clearly remember it, was fantastic,'' says longtime equipment manager Tony Parisi. ``The Steelers' people, when they went down to New Orleans, it was such a good time, I think they made the Super Bowl what it is today.''
When the Steelers reported to their 1980 training camp at St.Vincent's College in Latrobe, Pa., the rallying cry was ``One for the Thumb.'' They wanted their fifth Super Bowl ring, but the Eighties would not be a continuation of the Seventies.
In the early '80s, mills and mines all over western Pennsylvania began closing, and the region would be plunged into a painful and persistent recession.
Around the football team, crazy things, un-Steeler-like things had begun to happen. Blount, Lambert and Holmes held out for pay raises. Quarterback Cliff Stoudt broke a hand on a punching-bag game. Blount sued Noll for allegedly including him in comments about ``a criminal element'' in the league. Harris, wildly popular with Pittsburgh fans who assembled themselves into Franco's Italian Army, abruptly was waived when he demanded more money.
But the most damning occurrence of all was the Steelers' first pick of the 1982 draft.
Art Sr. wanted to take Dan Marino, a Pittsburgh kid who had grown up within walking distance of fabled Forbes Field, the Steelers' old home. Marino was a strong-armed quarterback who had starred at Pitt, where the Chief had watched him play.
But Art Jr. opted for Gabe Rivera, a defensive tackle from Texas Tech, who later was paralyzed in an auto wreck.
``My father never forgave me for not drafting Danny Marino ... even when he was essentially on his deathbed,'' Art Jr. once told journalist Jim O'Brien. The Chief had long since passed daily control of the club to his son Dan, and in 1986, Dan replaced Art Jr., his younger brother, as director of scouting.
By most accounts, Dan conducts business with much the same simplicity his father did, although the son says he doesn't have the quick generosity and conviviality of the old man. Those close to him say Dan is private, direct, frugal, fair.
And tough - it was Dan who made the call to waive Franco Harris.
``I think it's a great organization,'' says Steve Morris, owner of the legendary Froggy's tavern in Pittsburgh and close friends with many in the Steelers' organization. ``They win, they don't throw their money after bum players and they make a profit.''
A couple of years ago, Dan Rooney and his wife, Pat, sold their $500,000 house in Mount Lebanon, Pa., to move back to the old Rooney homestead. The 130-year-old townhouse, located on North Lincoln Avenue in Pittsburgh's cramped and busy North Side, was purchased by the Chief in 1939 for $500 down.
The Chief, although he easily could have afforded a suburban mansion or rural farm, lived in the house on North Lincoln until his death in 1988. He liked it there - he could walk to Mass at St.Peter's over on Arch Street, then walk the five blocks down to his office at Three Rivers Stadium.
There's a splendid oversized statue of the Chief - brandishing a cigar, of course - in front of the stadium. It's just a few yards from a state historical sign that commemorates the first professional football game, played on the site in 1892.
Current players and staffers say the spirit of the Chief still lives inside Three Rivers, within the offices and the locker room. And some of them say they wouldn't be surprised, as they report to work some morning, to discover a big, well-chewed cigar left behind on a desk.
LENGTH: Long : 199 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Quarterback Terry Bradshaw led the Pittsburghby CNBSteelers to four Super Bowl championships in six seasons. PITTSBURGH
STEELERS. 2. Chuck Noll, hired in 1969, was 12-30 in his first three
seasons as coach. 3. Linebacker Jack Lambert was a member of the
Steelers' 1974 draft, which many experts consider the best in NFL
history. KEYWORDS: PROFILE FOOTBALL