The '63 Steelers (44 page)

As nonchalant as Rozelle sounded about the issue, he seemed pleased that a neck-and-neck race was drawing publicity and attention to the NFL in its final week. Whether the novelty of the situation created a germ of an idea about wild-card races in the future, only Rozelle knew. “I think those ties made it pretty interesting,” the commissioner said. “I think it's very interesting when a fourth-place team can jump into first place practically overnight, don't you?”
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Joe Williams of the Scripps Howard News Service thought that Rozelle's predecessor had more to do with the issue, though the guidelines had been in place years before. “I imagine this was Bert Bell's baby,” Williams wrote. “In any case, it reflects the late commissioner's thinking on a commercially vital objective, namely, keep the race alive as long as possible. This purpose is served to a considerable extent by sweeping ties under the carpet.”
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(In 1972, the NFL changed the way it calculated winning percentages.)

The Steelers bristled at any suggestion that their claim on the Eastern Conference crown was sullied. “You mean that somebody thinks that even if we beat the Giants twice, they should still get the title?” said ex-Giant Lou Cordileone. “How ludicrous can you get?”
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The Steelers were still dealing with the skeptics who felt Pittsburgh's rout of the Giants wasn't legitimate because Tittle was held out of the game.
Post-Gazette
columnist Al Abrams ran into Huff at a gathering of college All-Americas in New York two days before the Steelers played in Dallas, and the Giants linebacker was full of swagger over the prospect of a rematch.

“There's no team in the league we'd rather meet than the Steelers,” Huff told Abrams. “Tittle will be the difference. You guys murdered poor ‘Goog' [Ralph Guglielmi] but it will be different with ‘Yat.' Wait and see. You fellows make a big deal over that 31–0 score. If I remember right, it was 10–0 going into the last period. When the dykes opened you made 21 more points. That doesn't mean a thing. Wait and see.”
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After he read the quotes in the newspaper, Cordileone couldn't wait to meet his former team again. “Who in the hell do they think they are?” he barked. “We'll show 'em they're nothing.”
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Three months after the whitewash, the Steelers still resented any suggestion that they had only beaten the junior varsity quarterback. “I've heard a lot of people say that the score might have been different if Tittle had been in there,” Buddy Parker said at Wednesday's practice.

Well, that's a lot of nonsense. The rush we put on that day would have been as harmful to Tittle as it was on Guglielmi.

We would have been in on top of Tittle, and no passer can be true when he has to hurry his throws, especially the long ones which can kill a team. … I think they know we intend to give Mr. Tittle one big, fat headache all afternoon. That's the only way to do it. Just don't give Tittle a chance.
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No one in the league had as impeccable a reputation for fair play, sportsmanship, and gentlemanly conduct—not to mention humility—as Art Rooney. On Saturday night, the eve of the game, Rooney stood among friends in the most popular bar in Manhattan—Toots Shor's, where the stars of all industries gathered—smoking a cigar, treating the crowd to drinks, and acknowledging the good wishes of admirers. He too was well aware of the carping over his team's number of victories compared to the Giants. “Well,” he said, “if we beat them again tomorrow, how can anybody say they deserve the championship and we don't? Both clubs know that everything is at stake in this one game. There shouldn't be any excuses.”
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The two teams took different approaches at practice that week. Parker stuck to his revised schedule of giving the players Monday and Tuesday off. The team seemed “relaxed and lighthearted” Wednesday as it practiced
for an hour in two inches of snow, focusing on offense, and taking time to pose for photos with Ed Brown holding a snowball and drawing plays in the snow.
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On Thursday, the team stressed defense as it worked out for about an hour and ten minutes in the South Park Fairgrounds.

The Giants, meanwhile, put in their longest day of the season Wednesday at Yankee Stadium, in meetings, watching film, and working on both offense and defense on the field, as if they were cramming for a test. Oddsmakers had made the Giants seven-point favorites, which only put more pressure on them, the Steelers felt.

“They're the defending champs,” Ernie Stautner said. “They're on the spot.”
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But the same kind of revenge that had driven the Steelers, smarting from a 45–7 loss, to battle the Lions in a no-holds-barred postseason exhibition the year before was chomping away at the Giants. Huff wanted to retaliate for his team's 31–0 embarrassment.

Huff grew up in a coal town—No. 9 coal mining camp—run by a mining company near Farmington, West Virginia, near the Pennsylvania border. He was raised in a house that his father rented from the company, a home with no running water and an outhouse for a toilet. Like Dick Haley and Lou Michaels, Huff was determined to escape a life submerged in hardship. His father wanted him to quit school at sixteen but, said Huff, “I didn't want to go in that coal mine. Coal mines and steel mills were tough living.” Huff became the first member of his family to graduate from high school and went on to play for nearby West Virginia University. Butting heads with Jimmy Brown, Jim Taylor, and John Henry Johnson made for a tough living too, but it kept Huff out of the mines, and it fired up a passion for winning that hadn't cooled forty-five years later.
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“Let me tell you something,” Huff said. “You beat me once, the next time we tee it up I'm going to knock your head off. You ain't ever gonna beat me again. You play the game like me and Modzelewski and Grier and Robustelli and Katcavage, and we tee it up again, by God, we're gonna see.”
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To survive in the NFL, Huff discovered, you had to learn to be mean. “From the minute practice starts until the season ends, you make yourself mean,” Huff told the journalist Jimmy Breslin. “The minute I come on the field, I say to myself, ‘I'm gonna be the meanest guy on the field. I'm gonna give it to anybody I can get a shot at.' It gets easier to be mean every year and harder to get out of it at the end of the season. Pretty soon there's no in-between: you're mean all year round.”
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No one could understand and respect that approach to the game better
than Ernie Stautner, undersized at six foot two, 230 pounds, but a volcano of a defensive lineman. The 1963 season was Stautner's fourteenth as a pro, and though his age was listed as thirty-eight, some believed he was as old as forty-one. Skeptics had been saying for a few years that he was over the hill, and it was no different in July of 1963. If Stautner was going to make it through one final season, there was only one way to survive.

“I gotta be mean,” Stautner said back in camp. “At my size, I can't afford to play any other way. … You're gonna see the meanest guy in the league this year.” Stautner was routinely giving away twenty or thirty pounds or more to offensive tackles like the Browns' Dick Schafrath, the Giants' Jack Stroud, and the Packers' Bob Skoronski. “Unless I'm meaner than them, unless I can intimidate them, I'd have no chance in the world against them,” Stautner said of his opponents.
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Ernie Stautner was born in Bavaria, on the edge of the Alps, and he was three when his father brought the family to upper New York State, where he started a farm. Andy Russell's father disapproved of his son playing pro football; Ernie Stautner's father disapproved of his son playing football at all, but the boy was determined to play. He commuted to a high school in Albany; swore his brother, sister, and friends to secrecy about his playing football; hid the newspaper when his name or photo appeared in the sports pages; and made excuses for the cuts and bruises he got from football. By the time Ernie earned all-star honors, his father had relented on his objections.

But people still kept telling Ernie Stautner he couldn't play. He enlisted in the Marines and served during World War II. After his discharge, he offered his services to Notre Dame. Not big enough, Frank Leahy told him. Stautner enrolled at Boston College, where he played for four years. Back in his home state, he approached the Giants. Too small for an NFL lineman, Steve Owen told him. “Man, that got my dander up,” Stautner recalled years later. “I said, ‘I want to tell you something. I'm big enough to play for your team or anybody's team. And you're going to regret it.'”
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He sounded just like Buddy Dial several years later. Stautner and Dial were snubbed … Nutter cut … the Bears lost faith in Ed Brown—they all had something to prove, and at least Buddy Parker believed in them.

The second-round pick of the Steelers in the 1950 draft, Stautner was selected to the first of his nine Pro Bowls two years later. He earned those honors on guts and sheer desire.

“That man ain't human,” Baltimore Colts tackle Jim Parker once said. “He's too strong to be human. He keeps coming, coming. Every time he comes back, he's coming harder.”
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Stautner was symbolic of the Steeler way of playing defense. The Steelers had no intricate system on defense—nothing like Tom Landry was introducing to the Cowboys. Steeler assistant Buster Ramsey, coach of the defense, didn't like his unit to gamble. Parker wasn't much for razzle-dazzle; his teams came at you the same way Stautner did—relentlessly, with no letup.

“This is the toughest ball club physically that we'll ever play,” Giant assistant Emlen Tunnell, a future Hall of Fame defensive back, said after returning from Dallas on a scouting mission. “They do nothing fancy. The defense is simple. But they hit, hit, hit.”
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“That's their history,” Allie Sherman said. “They play hard.”
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For all the luster surrounding the Giants, the Steelers had something else on their side, an intangible that went completely against the grain of a team whose approach to football was to treat each game as a human demolition derby. It was romantic and fanciful and a little spooky. For anyone who wanted to believe that the football gods eventually rewarded the unsung, the workers with bloodied knuckles, scraped cheekbones, and unbowed hearts, the Steelers were a team of destiny.

“There is something eerie about them,” sportswriter Joe Williams wrote. “They don't know when they are beaten. … They've got something going for them besides mundane mechanics. A sort of mysticism that defies analysis, makes assessment impossible. Ray (Buddy) Parker is not a coach, he's a voodoo doctor who burns candles to a heathen God, revered by his disciples as the ‘last gasp.'”
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Appropriately enough, the story ran in the
Press
on Friday the thirteenth, a hobgoblin of Parker's calendar.

Sherman, by contrast, was much like the former Giant assistant Landry— a human computer. “All week he has been working on blocking, tackling, timing, dull terrestrial commonplaces,” Williams continued, “when he should have been reading tea leaves, attending spiritual séances, boning up on witchcraft.”

The cast of the '63 Steelers was shaped by the touch of a wizard. Only some kind of sorcerer could compile such a motley grab bag of players and have them challenging for a conference title on the final Sunday of the season. A headline in the December 10
New York Times
cast an epitaph for their year: “The Steelers: A Lot of Discards Seeking a Jackpot.”
Times
reporter William Wallace counted nine starters on offense who had played for other teams, and six on defense. “There are no publicity heroes on this team, no television nor radio announcers, no product endorsers, just dangerous, hungry football players,” Wallace wrote.

The Steelers were relatively healthy, but they had lost one vital cog in their defense: cornerback Brady Keys, who had suffered a season-ending injury to his chest when he collided with Jim Brown in November. Still, the defense had coped without him. Bobby Mitchell went wild against the Steelers in D.C., catching eleven passes, but the Eagles' Tommy McDonald was held to one catch, and Billy Howton had been shut out in Dallas. The Giants, however, presented a new set of problems.

The suspense in New York was over whether fullback Alex Webster would be ready after missing almost a month with a pulled thigh muscle. The Giants didn't have a rusher in the top ten. Phil King ranked eleventh and was averaging 3.6 yards a carry. Joe Morrison was averaging 4.8 yards but was tied for fourteenth place in the league. Morrison's value lay in his versatility: He could play flanker, halfback, fullback, tight end, even defensive back, and he could return punts and kicks. “He was the ultimate team player,” said Wellington Mara, son of the team's founder, Tim Mara. “He would do anything you asked him.”
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But that didn't seem like enough. “Without big Red [Webster] at his effective best, the Giants have little but the magic in the arm of the elderly Tittle,” Arthur Daley wrote. Without a dependable ground game, the Giant attack “becomes a sporadic, hit-or-miss thing.”
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Those who harped on Tittle's absence from the lineup in the second week forgot that the Steeler running game racked up 223 yards that day and held New York to just one offensive series in the first quarter. “Tittle still hasn't discovered the secret of throwing touchdown passes while the opposition has the ball,” Daley wrote.

But what magic remained in that thirty-seven-year-old arm. Tittle ranked as the No. 1 quarterback, ahead of Johnny Unitas, going into the final Sunday, and he had thrown thirty-three touchdown passes and completed 59.8 percent of his throws. That week he was named most valuable player by the AP, “and people [were] coming at him with money in their fists.”
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Tittle also had the respect of opponents. He even drew the admiration of ex-Steeler defensive back Johnny Sample, who never stepped onto the field against a quarterback he couldn't criticize. “Y. A., I think, was everything you'd want in a smart quarterback,” Sample said.
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