The '63 Steelers (25 page)

Lombardi probably saw a lot of his own team's ferocity and manual-labor attitude in his opponent. “Beware of the Pittsburgh Steelers,” he said. “They'll fight you like a bunch of alley cats. If you're not up for them, they'll scratch you right out of the Western Division!”
⁵³

Between two surging football teams—the Steelers and the Pitt Panthers—and a healthy economy, life was pretty good for residents of western Pennsylvania. U.S. Steel reported third-quarter earnings of $46.4 million, bringing profits for the first nine months to nearly $150 million.

And the future looked even better, paved with prosperity and technological advances. After all, if the country's leaders had the technology and ambition to reach the moon, how could anything limit a family's aspirations? “City's Future Painted in Glowing Colors,” read a headline in Tuesday's
Post-Gazette
, “Pittsburgh of 1988 to Be Dreamland of Gracious Living.” Twenty-five years down the road, the average Pittsburgh man would make between $12,000 and $15,000 a year, his wife would be working, the level of education would be higher, and Pittsburgh residents would enjoy more leisure time, women from the United Jewish Foundation were told at an annual meeting. Local residents would be able to ride underground rapid transit trains and “giant aluminum hydrofoil crafts [that] flit up and down the river at 80 miles an hour.” Citizens could also expect an economic rebirth fueled by research organizations and new industries. But progress would also bring complications, such as “an increased threat to the stability of family life.
⁵⁴

The Jetsons
, the TV cartoon series about a family living in the twenty-first century, had gone on the air the year before, and it fed fantasies about futuristic life. But it wasn't all fantasy. And even if these potential changes were years away, the repercussions they suggested produced some anxiety.

“Planners sit up nights worrying about what the cities of the year 2000 are going to look like,”
Post-Gazette
editor Andrew Bernhard wrote in his column the day after the Steelers' win over the Cowboys. “All you need to understand what is happening is to drive out into the suburbs of Pittsburgh. The urban areas are exploding.”
⁵⁵

People still relied on newspapers for information. The
Post-Gazette
was the morning paper, the
Pittsburgh Press
the afternoon paper. Each cost seven cents. The
Pittsburgh Courier
was a weekly directed toward the black population. The tendency for many workers in the industry was not to look ahead much further than the next edition. But a few forward thinkers started to feel that newspapers were destined to change too, although some ideas might have seemed as if they came straight out of a
Jetsons
episode.

Tucked inside the
Press
the day after the rout of the Giants in September was an account of the convention of the Interstate Circulation Managers Association held in Pittsburgh. Edward Bennett, circulation director of the
Record
of New Jersey, told his peers that papers must adjust to “the rapidly advancing age around us. … The newspaper of the future may
well be produced right in the reader's home, according to Mr. Bennett. An electronic device similar to a television set, which would produce page likenesses in the home, could get the paper directly from the press into the reader's hands, Mr. Bennett said.”
⁵⁶

For the moment, when it came to making changes in the community, old-fashioned newsprint was enough to make an impression on voters. Life in Pittsburgh wasn't all that sunny to some observers in the press, and more than George Tarasovic's political career was at stake in the following week's elections. In a front-page editorial, the
Post-Gazette
warned that Pittsburgh was descending into a reincarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah: “Vice and gambling rampant with the knowledge and consent of key public officials. … Democratic party leaders grown lax and complacent because they think the voters will put up with anything … That is the current portrait of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.”
⁵⁷

The grandstands that filled with frustrated Steeler fans weren't the only places where tempers erupted. On the Friday night before the game in Green Bay, a political rally on the North Side “threatened to explode into a full-blown riot” among the political foes in the campaign, the city firemen, and the Teamsters. The riot squad and members of the K9 Corps were brought in, but chaos was avoided when Joe Marrone's band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “and the battlers pulled their punches and snapped to attention.” As the confrontations simmered, the band began playing “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Nobody, evidently, was tossed off a bridge and into the river.
⁵⁸

Football, on all levels, continued to provide an escape. Pitt was 4–1, having lost only to Roger Staubach and Navy. Crowds of 7,500 to 10,000 were common at high school games and, at least a dozen times, had exceeded 10,000. “The strong hold scholastic football has on fans of this area has never been better exemplified than during the present season,” wrote a
Post-Gazette
reporter.
⁵⁹

If anything had Buddy Parker sitting up at night worrying, it wasn't population expansion; it was the Packers. He made a point during the week to praise his offensive line: left tackle Dan James, left guard Mike Sandusky, center Buzz Nutter, right guard Ray Lemek, and six-foot-six, 260-pound right tackle Charlie Bradshaw, who attended law school in the off-season. “But we will need more than a good offense to win,” the coach said. “Our whole team will have to give its best to bring about a win and keep us in the running for the Eastern title.”
⁶⁰

Lombardi's approach to football was a lot like Parker's. “The Packers win
by the simple process of running over people,” writer Bill Wise explained. Leading the charge on the offensive line were center Jim Ringo; left guard Fred “Fuzzy” Thurston, who was dropped by three teams before he found a home in Green Bay; right guard Jerry Kramer; left tackles Bob Skoronski and Norm Masters; and right tackle Forrest Gregg
. When it came to offensive lines, “Only the Green Bay Packers can claim a better blocking compact tha[n] the Steelers have,” the
Pittsburgh Courier
observed. “It is a pounding, punishing compact.”
⁶¹

The game, scheduled for County Stadium in Milwaukee, where the Packers played several times a year, had been sold out for months, but the crowd of 46,293 was tame. “You could tell it right from the beginning when they were introducing the players—there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm,” Lombardi said.
⁶²

The Steelers didn't appear to be their customary selves, either. A sportswriter stopped in the locker room before the game and noted “the choked stillness, the eerie, monastic silence.” A normally relaxed group had become “as tense as hawsers in a hurricane.”
⁶³

The Steelers should have gotten a big lift when Gary Ballman took the opening kickoff on the 5 and, with a block from Brady Keys on Willie Wood, raced 93 yards before being hauled down by Earl Gros at the Packer 2, from where Dick Hoak scored on the next play.

“The Bays,” as both the hometown and out-of-town papers called them, resembled the Steelers in their loss in Cleveland: They scratched their way into Pittsburgh territory, thanks to the Steelers' bungling, but they couldn't cross the goal line. Dick Haley appeared to have an interception on one throw but couldn't hang onto the ball. Taylor was picking up yardage on Green Bay's first drive in John Henry Johnson fashion, 3 and 4 yards a carry. Roach, filling in for Starr, hit rookie end Marv Fleming for 15 yards and a first down at the Steeler 34. After Taylor lost a yard, Roach gained 11, and Moore another 11 before he lost 4, back to the 17. Two passes fell incomplete, leaving it up to Kramer to kick a 23-yard field goal halfway through the first quarter.

The Steelers reached midfield after a 16-yard catch by Mack and a 5-yard reception by Johnson. On third-and-5 from the 50, Brown hit Hoak for an apparent first down at the Packer 36, but the ball popped out and defensive back Jesse Whittenton snagged it and returned the interception to the 50. “Hoak had a touchdown if he had held onto that ball,” Parker said later.
⁶⁴
The Packers failed to capitalize, though, as Boyd Dowler caught a pass
for 26 yards at the Steeler 18 and fumbled after the tackle. Glenn Glass recovered for Pittsburgh.

Green Bay held, and Brown's 29-yard punt left the Packers in good position at the Steeler 49, but Myron Pottios stopped the threat as the second quarter began, intercepting Roach at the 11 and returning the ball to the 21. Three plays later, Hoak fumbled and defensive end Willie Davis recovered at the 41.

Three carries by Taylor and one by Moore put Green Bay on the 14, but penalties for holding and offensive pass interference backed them up. Taylor ran 21 yards down to the 15, but another penalty pushed Green Bay back to the 30. The drive stalled, so Kramer came on to kick a 36-yard field goal that made it 7–6 halfway through the quarter.

A 13-yard reception by Hoak moved the Steelers to their 47, but another fumble, this time by Theron Sapp on a 13-yard catch, was recovered by linebacker Bill Forester on the Packer 40. Moore broke loose for 31 yards to the Steeler 22, and a face mask penalty on Glass moved the ball to the 11. Taylor gained 6 yards on one run but was stopped dead on two others. Kramer was on track for his second straight Pro Bowl season as a guard, and he would finish ninth in field goal accuracy (47%), but he was deadly on target this day. He hit his third field goal, from 12 yards, to make it 9–7 with 2:05 to go before halftime.

After the two-minute warning, with the ball on his 36, Brown seemed in no hurry. He called five runs on the first seven plays, but Pittsburgh got a first down at the Packer 41 with fifty seconds left. Hoak gained 9 yards, giving Michaels a chance at a 40-yard field goal, but it was wide left. Even after dropping the ball and muffing their chances, defense kept the Steelers within two points of the Western Conference coleaders, even though Green Bay had already racked up 147 yards rushing.

Still, Lombardi felt his team's lead against a team that had proved it could rally and strike quickly was precarious. “I've seen pictures [film] of this ball club,” he said later. “They're behind 21–0 and, all of a sudden, they're throwing the ball around and they win 24–21. That Dial and Mack are two of the greatest receivers in the league, particularly Dial.”
⁶⁵
The problem for Pittsburgh, however, was that Brown had hit only four of fifteen passes.

Taylor, “the crunching Bayou Bronco,” had won the rushing title in 1962, racking up 1,474 yards on the ground—more than 300 more than runner-up John Henry Johnson—and averaging 105.3 yards a game, almost 24 yards more than Johnson, at No. 2.
⁶⁶
It was understandable that Taylor might have a drop-off in '63, and that five-time rushing leader Jimmy Brown would
regain his No. 1 status after being hampered by an injured wrist in '62. But as the second half began, the Packer fullback proved he had a lot more left in him than his coach thought after the Cardinal win, and behind him “Coach Lombardi's world champions settled down to tear their opponent apart piece by piece and yard by yard.”
⁶⁷

The Packers took the kickoff and let Taylor and Moore bang their way to the Steeler 41. Moore had the unenviable task of filling in for Hornung, but the former Vanderbilt star had “supreme running ability.”
⁶⁸
Moore took a Roach pass and raced 40 yards to the 1. After being stopped once, Taylor plunged over to make it 16–7.

Green Bay forced a punt, and Brown's feeble 24-yard kick went out of bounds at the Packer 37. Roach was only three of ten at halftime—and he was only three of sixteen in the two previous seasons as a Packer backup— but he hit Marv Fleming for 33 yards—matching his total passing yardage for 1962—and pass interference on a throw to Max McGee gave the Pack a first down on the Steeler 17. Taylor and Moore alternated grinding out yardage down to the 2, and Elijah Pitts scored from there to make it 23–7 with 4:11 left in the third quarter.

“There was nothing but holes in that line,” Taylor said with a broad smile afterward. “They were on both sides, too—big ones. They were stunting quite a bit, and we caught 'em a couple of times. Made it easier to run to the outside.”
⁶⁹
The next day, the day before the elections, in the Steeler offices, secretary Mary Regan, with a trace of a smile, passed on what she said was a message from an anonymous phone caller: “Tell that Tarasovic it's too bad he wasn't elected justice of the peace last week. Then he might have arrested Jimmy Taylor for speeding on Sunday.”
⁷⁰

From his own 30, Brown threw for Preston Carpenter, whose brother Lew was a halfback-end with Green Bay, but the pass was picked off by defensive back Hank Gremminger, giving the Packers possession at the 37. Pittsburgh held, but Kramer had a shot at his fourth field goal, from 37 yards, on the second play of the fourth quarter. The kick was good, and the Steelers were down 26–7. Worse yet, they had shown little of the explosiveness Lombardi had raved about. Hoak and Sapp combined to march the Steelers to the Packer 31, but any hope of a miracle dissolved when Hoak fumbled again after being hit by linebacker Ray Nitschke and tackle Henry Jordan, and defensive back Willie Wood recovered at the 30.

The Steelers got the ball right back at their 23 with ten minutes left. Dial, the league's No. 2 receiver, had been held without a reception. “We
worked like hell on him,” Lombardi said later. “[Jesse] Whittenton and [Herb] Adderley did an outstanding job.”
⁷¹

Brown hit Dial twice and found Mack two times, to the Packer 33. Mack, who would finish with five catches for 87 yards, got open behind Wood and Whittenton in the left corner of the end zone for a 33-yard TD that made it 26–14 with 5:25 to go, but it was too late. The Packers recovered Michaels's onside kick and rode Taylor and Pitts down to the 1, from where Pitts went in to make the final 33–14. The game was over in two hours and twenty-six minutes.