The '63 Steelers (45 page)

Tittle had capable receivers in Joe Walton and Frank Gifford, but the man who put fear in teams was speedy Del Shofner. “I'd rather cover anyone [other] than Del Shofner,” said Cardinal cornerback Jimmy Hill.
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Two seasons before, as Philadelphia was preparing for a showdown with New
York for the Eastern title, Eagles defensive coach Jerry Williams commented, “Our main problem is stopping Del Shofner. … Shofner is the man we're afraid of.”
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Pittsburgh had a comparable threat in Buddy Dial, who had caught only six fewer passes than Shofner, scored as many touchdowns (eight), and gained more yards receiving than anyone but Bobby Mitchell. But Ed Brown wasn't having the kind of year Y. A. Tittle was enjoying.

“Tittle is famous and in demand,” the
New York Times
commented, while Brown was “the anonymous quarterback.”
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He had been on three Pro Bowl squads while with the Bears and had led them to a Western Conference title in 1956, when he was regarded as “the boy wonder of football.”
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They faced the Giants in the championship game and were thrashed, 47–7, and Brown was knocked out of the game in the fourth quarter with a concussion suffered when he was hit by defensive end Jim Katcavage. Days before the Steelers traveled to New York, Brown wondered, “I guess he's still there, isn't he?”
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Brown ranked sixth among NFL quarterbacks, but his completion percentage was a poor 47.1, thirteenth among the fifteen rated passers. He had thrown nineteen touchdown passes and had been intercepted seventeen times, four more than Tittle. His average gain per completion was almost identical to his counterpart's: 8.4 yards versus 8.3. But all that mattered in the final week of the regular season was that Brown had led the Steelers to a point where they could make history. The Steelers had watched as new heroes arose virtually each game. “But more than any other individual player, it has been the ‘Question-Mark Quarterback' Ed Brown who has kept the hometown team in contention through eleven exciting weeks of football,” Joseph V. Rieland had written two weeks earlier. And Brown did not lack for confidence. “There is no question in his own mind,” wrote Pat Livingston during the preseason, “that he's the equal of Tittle.”
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But Brown had not completed 50 percent of his passes in one game since October 20, against the Redskins. He had struggled over the past three games, during which he had completed only thirty-one of seventy-four passes (42%), thrown a total of five touchdowns and six interceptions, and gained 596 yards. No question, he was erratic, but the self-described “too phlegmatic” quarterback hadn't lost in the past three weeks either.
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Dial, for one, admitted that coming into the season, he had doubts about whether the Steelers could win without Layne. “I wondered if Brown would work out as well because he is quiet,” Dial said. “But it's his quiet leadership that helps us and he is tremendous at throwing the right pass
after spotting a hole. I'd have to say that Ed has been the main factor in our drive this season.”
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A touchdown had been the widest margin of victory in the Steelers' previous five games, so the outcome of the Giants game loomed as a duel between Lou Michaels and Don Chandler, New York's punter and kicker. Sherman gave the edge to Chandler (nicknamed “Babe”), not because of Michaels's schizophrenic year, but because of the home field advantage, particularly in December.

“Yankee Stadium at this time of year is always full of winds, swirling winds,” Sherman said. “They play havoc with a ball that's not kicked just right. But this is our home and Chandler is better acquainted with the wind conditions here than any other kicker in the league.” Said Chandler: “Yankee Stadium is the toughest place for kickers in the league.”
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Michaels was only twenty of thirty-eight on field goal attempts, but his misses, including his “oh-fer” against the Browns, had not lost a game for Pittsburgh. Chandler was sixteen of twenty-six. Both could connect from fifty yards. “When their toe explodes against the cadaver of a porker you can hear the ghostly groans of purgatorial agony in the farthermost reaches of the park,” wrote Joe Williams.
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Touchdown passes from Tittle or Brown packed more excitement, “but in go-for-broke situations the kick can be as poisonous as a cobra cocktail, as suspenseful as a Fleming mystery.” In ninety-one games over thirteen weeks of the '63 season, Williams calculated that a field goal was the difference in twenty-two games—seventeen victories and five ties.
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The wind was unpredictable, Chandler said, and was just as tough on a punter. He didn't mention that the wind was bound to be as rough on a passer as on a kicker or punter.

Weather was the other factor that could alter the course of the game. The forecast was for clear but very cold weather on Sunday, and Parker insisted that he preferred a dry, fast field, even though wet conditions might slow Tittle's passing game. “I can't agree with this talk that we'd be better off on a wet field,” he said. “On a wet field, football becomes impossible. The defensive backs can't cover the receivers, the runners can't cut and you can't run anything but quick, straight-ahead plays.”
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A tarp was placed on the Yankee Stadium field Wednesday night. It snowed Thursday morning, but the tarp protected the field, and the Giants were able to work out at 1:30 p.m. for an hour before the tarp was put back on.
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Piles of snow lay on the perimeter of the field when the Steelers had a run-through on Saturday.

Most athletes, including professional football players, are creatures of habit whose lives run on routine and repetition; that's why Parker stuck to his practice of giving players two days off once he made the change after the Packer game. Players can be almost as superstitious about changes as Parker was—well, not quite. But one season-long Steeler routine was altered during the week before the Giant game.

The Steelers regularly gathered for get-togethers, a practice that Parker encouraged. Bobby Layne organized bowling nights on Mondays and hosted all-night card parties. Some Steelers drank together every week at a restaurant called Dante's, where Layne once held court. Brown, who enjoyed a cocktail every bit as much as Layne and Parker, was a regular, sipping Scotch on crushed ice with a dash of Drambuie. But on the Wednesday before the Giants game, as sportswriter and later, broadcaster, Myron Cope recounted, Brown was a no-show, evidently abstaining before the big game, leaving “his insides [as] dry as a temperance union president's.”
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Lou Cordileone couldn't convince his roommate to go out.

I said to Ed Brown, “Come on. We got to go out.”

“No, we can't. I got to be ready.”

“Eddie, yo, fuck, you can't change your routine the last game of the season. C'mon, let's go out. Let's fool around.” Nobody went out. I don't think I went out one night. I said, “I'm not going to go out by myself. The hell with you guys.”
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Cope, no stranger himself to the establishment, said of Brown, “It is not in his nature to lock himself in a room.” Furthermore, Cope observed, Brown “contravened the very motto that had carried the Steelers to the brink of the title: ‘Stay loose.'”
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Brown had his own premonition of how the game would unfold. “Ed was a good friend of mine,” Cordileone said. “We're bullshitting the night before the game. We were in the [hotel] room, watching television, and people are coming around, like my family. It was so funny. Ed Brown said, ‘Well, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen tomorrow. If we can take the kickoff and go down and Michaels kicks a field goal, we'll win the game. And if he misses the field goal, we're in trouble.”
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Inside Toots Shor's on Saturday night, while temperatures fell into the mid-teens in Manhattan, Art Rooney was staying loose with the help of a crowd of friends and well-wishers. If sentiment could sway the outcome of the next day's game, the Steelers would have been a prohibitive favorite.
No one was admired and respected more around the NFL than the Steelers owner, and he was long overdue for a championship. “Good-Guy Rooney Deserves Winner,” read the headline over one column, and it expressed a universal feeling. “He's still a kind, generous, thoughtful, God-fearing man whose honesty is almost painful,” columnist Arthur Daley wrote. Even New York sportswriters found it difficult not to pull for the Steeler patriarch. “How can I root against Art Rooney in the big showdown?” a colleague of Daley's said.
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Rooney himself believed that he was on the cusp of ending three decades of frustration and disappointment. “Boys,” he said, “I'd like to win this one. It's been a long, long time.”
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The players stood to make another $5,000 or $6,000 with a berth in the title game, but they were aware of what Sunday's game meant to the Steelers owner. During Saturday's workout at Yankee Stadium, “The Steelers crackled with noisy confidence, tickled by the prospect of kicking the daylights out of all those New York players who pose for Madison Avenue's shirts ads.”
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On Sunday morning, as he waited for the team bus outside the Belmont Plaza Hotel at Lexington Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street, Buddy Dial stood alongside the Reverend Robert Messenger, who had conducted some religious services for the Steelers during the year.

“You know something?” Dial said to Rev. Messenger. “I want to win this game more than any game I ever played in.”

“Of course,” Rev. Messenger replied. “It would be a great thing if you could beat the Giants in their own backyard.”

“No, not that,” Dial said. “I want to win this game just for Mr. Rooney's sake. I'd give all the money I'll make if we win just for the satisfaction of bringing it in for Mr. Rooney. That's what I think of him. Sure, we want this game, but I'll bet that deep in our hearts, none of us want it as bad as he does.”
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The Steelers were in trouble as soon as they stepped on the field for warm-ups. The turf that had been in such good condition two days earlier had changed overnight. “Yankee Stadium was an ice pond,” Clendon Thomas recalled. “It had low spots that had, literally, ice spots in them. Little ponds of ice. It was just atrocious. You couldn't stand up. … We didn't have the right shoes. We had left our ‘ice shoes' in Pittsburgh. It's like some epoxy on tennis shoes that will let you run on it. It was like 18 degrees. It was somewhere between dry ground and a slick spot, and, of course, those guys are smart. They'll take you down to a slick spot and turn, and down you go.”
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The Giants had experience playing in frigid conditions. They'd lost the title game to the Packers the year before at Yankee Stadium amid “fierce” winds
and a frozen field that Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor said made it “impossible” to cut back on runs. In the heated press box that day, it was still cold enough to freeze the manual typewriters. Despite the unsure footing, Taylor was one among many players who wore regular football cleats.
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The Steelers had adjusted to winter conditions before, too. For a mid-December game in Chicago in 1959, Bobby Layne wore black high-top basketball shoes, and Tom Tracy wore sneakers, too, as did some Bears players. The year before, on the eve of the season finale at home against the Cardinals, coach Frank “Pop” Ivy paid a visit to Pitt Stadium where the caretaker of the field, Leo “Horse” Czarnecki, had his crew “attack ice and snow bumps with a sweeper, picks and a blowtorch” to thaw out icy spots on the field. Ivy despaired that the Cards would never be able to stop Layne on that field, and he was right. Layne threw for a team record 409 yards in a 38–21 Steeler victory.
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In the battle for the Eastern crown, some Giants stuck to football cleats. Tittle wore his high-tops; Huff, a pair of Riddells; and Erich Barnes, a pair of Spot-Bilt cleats. Others, like Shofner, King, and Jerry Hillebrand, wore white sneakers. Gifford wore low-cut black ones.

“It had gotten cold real quick, and the field was very rough and frozen in spots,” Dick Haley said. “I can still remember we had fires built on the sidelines to try to keep warm. We didn't have the equipment we should have had. We wore regular football shoes. It was very difficult to maintain your footing and to make quick cuts.”
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The day after the game, Fran Fogarty, the Steelers' business manager, said the team had bought sixty pairs of sneakers in August and routinely brought them to away games. “We kept them in a big box on the sidelines, and anyone could change who wanted to do so,” Fogarty said.
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“There could have been,” Russell said, “but they weren't offered to us.”
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The temperature an hour before the 2:05 p.m. kickoff was 29 degrees, and there were 25 mph gusts of wind, creating a wicked wind chill.
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The Giants kicked off before a capacity crowd of 63,240. On the first play from scrimmage, Theron Sapp fumbled after being hit by end Andy Robustelli, and safety Jim Patton recovered for the Giants on the 25. Michaels was struggling with his kicking, but it didn't affect his defensive play. He dumped Tittle for a 6-yard loss on first down, and after an incompletion on third down, Chandler kicked a 34-yard field goal. It was an ominous start, but “This didn't bother us,” Parker said later.
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Gary Ballman finally broke loose again, taking the kickoff on his 14 and racing 57 yards to the Giant 29. John Henry Johnson gained 6 yards over
right guard, but Brown threw incomplete to Ballman on third-and-4. Michaels lined up for a 30-yard field goal attempt, the scenario Brown had imagined the night before while talking with Cordileone. The kick veered wide right.