The '63 Steelers (22 page)

Johnson was back in the starting lineup but got only four carries in the game, for 10 yards, before Parker pulled him early in the second quarter. Behind Hoak, who would finish with 58 yards on the ground, and Sapp, who would gain 45, the Steelers began a drive from their 34. Hoak cut over right end for 8 yards then left for 7. Dial made a diving catch at the Dallas 31, inches shy of a first down. Sapp picked up the first down and
then broke off right tackle for 12 yards to the 18. Brown was dumped for a 7-yard loss, but on third-and-17 from the 25, he hit Dial in the left corner of the end zone to cut the Cowboys' lead to 21–13, with Tracy, in place of Michaels, making the conversion.

Bullocks returned Michaels's short kickoff to the 23 and then carried for 12 yards and 11 more, as Dallas reached the Steeler 47. Meredith's completion to Clarke netted 16 yards to the 28, and Marsh's run around right end gained 14 yards as the quarter ended. Bullocks lost 3 yards, but a holding call on the Steelers gave Dallas a first down at the 11. Bullocks was tackled for a 2-yard loss, Folkins couldn't handle a pass in the end zone, and Daniel nearly intercepted a third-down throw. Sam Baker, a capable kicker, came on to attempt a 20-yard field goal but the kick veered wide left with two minutes gone in the fourth quarter. Michaels wasn't the only kicker having troubles.

Brown's powerful arm made the Steelers a threat to go deep at any time. More typical of the Steeler offense, though, was a painstaking drive in which they chewed up yardage and time while mixing in short passes and the occasional bomb. On second-and-8 from his 22, Brown heaved a throw that went into and out of Mack's arms at the Dallas 40. Dial made a leaping catch for a 14-yard gain, and Sapp and Hoak each picked up 6 yards. Preston Carpenter, reliable and sure-handed, picked up 9 on a crossing pattern, short of a first down at the Cowboys' 43. Brown threw incomplete and Sapp was stopped cold, leaving it up to Sapp to get the first down on fourth-and-1 with a 4-yard run off left tackle.

Brown went back to Mack with a bomb to the end zone, but again it slipped out of the flanker's hands. The crowd reaction was “almost hostile.”
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A screen to Sapp gained 7 yards, but a sideline throw to Dial for 3 left the Steelers about six inches shy of a first down. Faced with another fourth-down decision, Parker went for it, and Sapp picked up the first down with a 2-yard plunge to the 27. Dial caught a 13-yard pass but slipped and fell, leaving the Steelers at the 14. Brown rifled a pass incomplete to Ballman, and then Hoak juggled a throw in the end zone before it fell to the ground.

On third down at the 14, Brown called on Dial to run a post pattern from the right side. The
Dallas Morning News
called him “the magical Dial.” The
Press
referred to him as “that animated gluepot.” He was as clutch a receiver as any in the league.
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“When he came to the pros, he had all the moves, and he had sneaky speed,” Mack said of his teammate years later. “But he ran terrific patterns. That's why he got open all the time. Plus, terrific hands. He was always prepared. He was a student of the game. He knew the game like Bobby Layne knew the game.”
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Brown drilled a pass over a lunging defender, and Dial caught it inside the 1-yard line and stepped into the end zone to make it 21–20 after Tracy's conversion, with 8:17 left in the game. It took seventeen plays for the Steelers to march 80 yards.

Bullocks returned Michaels's kickoff to the 32, but this time Meredith couldn't move his team. Michaels had rejoined the defense after asking permission from John Best, the team physician, at halftime. Sam Baker punted, and the ball rolled dead at the Pittsburgh 15. There was only 4:16 left, and Pittsburgh “was racing the clock to either victory or oblivion in the gathering gloom,” when “the spindly-shanked” Mack pleaded his case to Brown. “Throw the bomb to me,” he said. “I think I can outrace that guy.”
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That was the guy Mack had blocked on Dial's first touchdown, Overton, the six-foot-two, 190-pound back from Utah.

Brown's confidence in Mack wasn't shaken by the receiver's trouble holding onto the ball in the previous series. But he wanted Mack to run an outside route, then cut across. “I think I can get there faster on the inside,” Mack replied. He took the inside route and “shot out of the pack like a human bullet.”
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Brown dropped back to the 6-yard line, “wound up and threw and hoped Mack could go out there and get it,” he explained later. This time, the ball sailed to the Dallas 45, with Mack streaking for it. “I thought I had overthrown him,” Brown said. “I didn't think he would come within 5 yards of the ball.” Mack had his defender beaten by three or four steps on the soggy turf when he caught the pass over his shoulder, tucked it in, and sprinted into the end zone. “I had it all the way,” he said with a smile.
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Afterward, Landry shrugged off the touchdown pass. “Even when everything goes right,” he said, “a team's only going to hit on a pass like that one time in 10.”
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Michaels kicked the extra point this time, making it 27–21, Steelers.

Meredith still had 3:51 left to work some magic of his own. For all his gifts as a quarterback, Meredith would be burdened with lofty expectations and undermined by some circumstances beyond his control. Two years later, Dallas would trail the Browns, 24–17, in a late-fall game and have first-and-goal at the Cleveland 1, where Meredith threw for Frank Clarke in the end zone. Linebacker Vince Costello intercepted, before 76,251 fans, and the Browns held on for the victory. Gary Cartwright's story in the next day's
Dallas Morning News
read: “Outlined against a gray November sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. You know them: Pestilence, Death, Famine, and Meredith.”
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Meredith was a target of the media as much as of defensive linemen, but his teammates never questioned his guts, willingness to absorb
pain, or desire to win. The same fates that had bedeviled the Steelers for years appeared to have descended on Meredith.

But the former SMU star was still looking sharp in the rain. He hit Howton with two consecutive passes for 11 yards each time, the second one a leaping grab that put Dallas on its 47. Working out of the shotgun, Meredith fumbled when he was hit by Michaels, but offensive tackle Ed Nutting recovered for a loss of 9 yards as the clock stopped for the two-minute warning.

On second-and-19, Meredith was hit as he threw, but he completed a 34-yard pass to Clarke, down to the Steeler 28. It was the same spot from which Charley Johnson had thrown the winning touchdown pass to Bobby Joe Conrad two weeks earlier. On first down, Meredith hit Clarke crossing over the middle for 9 yards, leaving the Cowboys about a foot shy of a first down at the 18. On second down, he aimed for Norman, but the second-year end dropped the ball at the 2 as he was hit by Haley and rookie Jim Bradshaw. On third down, Meredith didn't settle for running for the first down; instead, he threw for Clarke, who had drawn two defenders, in the right corner of the end zone. After twisting his leg, Clendon Thomas was out, just as he had been missing on the Cardinals' game-winning drive. Bradshaw, the ex-quarterback from Chattanooga, was in for him and made a game-saving interception. Bradshaw had a knack for being in the right place to make a key play.

Afterward, Buddy Parker was “spent, semi-collapsed” from the tension.
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A loss, columnist Al Abrams commented, “would have meant the point of no return.”
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Things were bound to get even harder in the next two weeks, against Green Bay and Cleveland, but they couldn't get much more taxing than the comeback over Dallas. “They're all alike—awfully tough,” Parker said.
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While the Steelers were rallying, New York was thumping the Browns on their home turf, 33–6, handing Cleveland its first loss and leaving both conference races “tighter than a pair of $5 shoes.”
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Jim Brown was held to 40 yards and was ejected near the end, along with the Giants' Tom Scott, for fighting. The Packers, playing without Bart Starr, sidelined with a hairline fracture in his throwing hand, beat Baltimore, 34–20, keeping Green Bay in a first-place tie with the Bears in the Western Conference.

Aside from the rout of the Giants, the Steelers weren't dominating games. They were more like a racehorse bunched in the pack, still in the race, but no one's favorite. Landry rated the Giants as the team to beat in the Eastern Conference race, followed by the Browns. The Steelers, he said, “could do it, but they've got an awfully tough two weeks ahead of them.”
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To Raymond Klein “Buddy” Parker, the essence of football lay in fundamentals. The game was X's and O's, good technique, and diligent practice, not a batch of complex equations out of advanced calculus. Parker scoffed at the tactic of Cleveland coach Paul Brown, “once regarded as the miracle man of football,” in shuttling guards into a game to give his quarterback the call for the next play. “That ‘play messenger' stuff is the bunk,” Parker said. “What's so mysterious about football?”
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When he made his remarks more than halfway through the 1954 season, Brown was coming off back-to-back NFL championships that his Detroit Lions had won by beating the miracle man's teams in the title games. Parker showed due respect for Brown, despite their conflicting philosophies on calling plays. “He's so far ahead of the rest of us, it's pitiful,” Parker said.
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Parker won by keeping the game simple, minimizing the playbook, and resisting trick plays. The Lions had approximately twenty basic plays and, with variations, around fifty. “You'll find that straight football with good blocking can do more damage to a defense than a lot of dipsy-doodle back of the line.”
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Overcoaching, he felt, proved to be the downfall of teams. Players were smart enough to improvise and learn more plays, he agreed, “but why bumfoozle them?”
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The author of one magazine feature felt that Parker's coaching was a reflection of his personality: uncomplicated, straightforward, nothing fancy. During a game Parker was customarily stoic, chain-smoking (two packs a game, right on the sideline), kneeling beside players while he squinted at the
action or diagnosed a play on paper. He moved “in the shambling, relaxed fashion of a bear that has just made a successful raid on a honeycomb.”
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In truth, there was nothing simple about Buddy Parker, and the outward show of composure and restraint belied a complex man whose temperament could plummet into inconsolable despair after a defeat. At times he could be charming, erudite, outgoing. In other instances he could turn sullen, crude, and boorish … and self-destructive. There might not have been anything esoteric about the game of football in the fifties—or before or since then, for that matter—but within Buddy Parker lay the mystery and riddle of a man with a superior coaching mind and a psyche with the volatility of a summer storm of lightning and thunder. Private demons roiled inside him, and at times they would burst out with the fury of a fullback breaking loose from the clutches of a desperate tackler.

The worst place for the Steelers to lose was on the road, because the disappointment of failure was compounded by Parker's anger and frustration, and a plane flight could feel like a prison stay. Players on a jet headed home would never know whether a pilot's caution about “experiencing a little turbulence” was referring to the weather conditions or the coach's condition after a loss. Liquor was likely to heal some emotional and physical wounds among the players, but it only fueled Parker's petulance and angst. He made a lot of threats after a defeat, and sometimes he followed up on them. “You wanted to stay out of his way after a game if you lost,” Dick Haley said, “because you could be on the next boat [out]. If you didn't win, he was going to get himself pretty well oiled up, and so you wouldn't want to be in his vision on the airplane.”
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Any coach who's ever scratched plays on a chalkboard suffers after a defeat, but for Parker, losing was an agony that “often led to unstable behavior,” a torture as unrelenting as a migraine headache, one that led to a wanton search for consolation. “One common procedure was to lock himself in a room and commune with the spirits,” wrote
New York Times
columnist Arthur Daley. “Usually they were as mischievous as leprechauns.”
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They were more like monsters and goblins. There was a ritual to losing, a ceremonial attempt to exorcise the torment that haunted Parker almost like grief over the loss of a loved one. His distress suggested a need to almost punish himself, as if mentally he were making himself run extra laps, the way coaches disciplined players after a poor practice or game. It was a procedure that Parker had to endure much too often.

“When the team loses, Buddy has a routine that never varies,” Parker's wife, Jane, explained in a 1954 article aptly titled “He Dies for Detroit
Every Week.” “He flops on an ottoman in the living room and pulls out a pocketknife he's been carrying for thirty years. He raises the knife to his throat slowly and cuts his tie at the knot. Until I hear the material rip, I'm never sure it's the tie, not his throat, that he's cutting. He bends down and slashes his shoelaces with two quick strokes. Then he literally tears his shirt off his back without unbuttoning it.” A stillness would pervade the house until Tuesday. The only sound Parker could stand was music, his wife explained, but that provided only a temporary, mindless respite. Friends stayed away. Only one remedy could ease the pain. “Nothing brings him out of his black mood until he wins one,” Jane Parker said.
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