The '63 Steelers (48 page)

If there is a day that officially marked the team's descent back to the Steeler Ice Age of the thirties and forties, it was probably October 18, 1964, the afternoon of a 30–10 loss in Minnesota that started the slide. The team would not win more than five games in a season until 1971, Chuck Noll's third year. It would then take three more seasons—a total of six—for Noll to accomplish what Parker was confident he could do in five: bring Pittsburgh and the Rooneys an NFL title.

Cleveland, at 10–3–1, edged out 9–3–2 St. Louis for the Eastern Conference title in 1964 and routed Baltimore in the championship game, 27–0. The Bears had nearly as bad a fall as the Giants that year but avoided last place, with a 5–9 record.

The Steeler lineup that had challenged for the Eastern Conference title the year before unraveled quickly. This time Parker's moves did not pan out; they backfired with a vengeance. The Buddy Dial trade blew up, and first-round draft pick Paul Martha proved to be no replacement for the sure-handed Texan. Myron Pottios was injured in the preseason. In the aftermath of his tussle with Lou Michaels, Red Mack was dealt to Philadelphia, returned to Pittsburgh in '65, and in '66 became a member of the Packers during their Super Bowl I season.

Michaels's status was as shaky as Mack's. When Parker obtained kicker Mike Clark in a trade with Philadelphia, Michaels grew upset over ribbing about the deal, and KO'd teammate Jim Bradshaw. Michaels was suspended and then traded to Baltimore, and he would gain lasting notoriety for a confrontation with Joe Namath at a bar on the eve of Super Bowl III. “He stood there and he pointed to me,” Michaels recalled, “and he said, ‘We're going to kick the s-h-i-t out of you, and I'm going to do it.'” Namath taunted Michaels and poked fun at the Colts and Johnny Unitas. Michaels seethed, but no one was KO'd, and they parted amicably.
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The '63 season was the last in Pittsburgh for Frank Atkinson, Preston Carpenter, Glenn Glass, Lou Cordileone, and John Reger. Carpenter played two years with the Redskins, another with the Vikings, and one more with the Dolphins. “As long as I was playing football I didn't care where I went,” he said.
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Reger played for the Redskins for three more years as a teammate of Sam Huff.

Cordileone was out of football for a few seasons, then came back to play for two years for the Saints. He took a shot—a brief one—at the career as a mortician he had envisioned once his playing days ended. “I went to school for about a week,” he recalled. “I said, ‘You know what? I can't do this.'”
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He found something more to his liking: owning a bar in the French
Quarter called the Huddle, where he installed two barber chairs instead of stools at one end of the bar. “I just thought they'd be more comfortable,” he said.
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It was there that Cordileone got as close as he could to landing in a championship game as a Steeler. When the Steelers made it to Super Bowl IX, their first title game, held at the Superdome, the former defensive tackle was there as saloonkeeper, greeting friends and fans from Pittsburgh in town for the game. He eventually moved to California.

Thomas's all-around skills helped the Steelers in '64 when injuries reduced their receiving corps. The former Oklahoma Sooner switched over to wide receiver and caught forty-two passes over two seasons before returning to safety. He retired after the '68 season.

When George Allen left the Bears to become head coach of the Rams after the '65 season, he obtained Pottios, and the linebacker played there through 1970. When Allen took over the Redskins for the '71 season, he brought over Pottios as part of the “Over-the-Hill Gang,” which went to the Super Bowl in the next season and lost to the unbeaten Miami Dolphins. Pottios, who'd grown up in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, in the same county as Haley, retired after the '73 season.

Brady Keys concluded his eight-year NFL career with a half season in Minnesota and a final one with the Cardinals. Before leaving the Steelers, he embarked on an entrepreneurial career, beginning with his All Pro Fried Chicken franchises. “I want to be a model for black people who want to go into business for themselves,” Keys said in a 1969 interview.
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Theron Sapp played two more seasons with the Steelers before retiring. He too went into the fried chicken business, back in his home state. He earned the nickname “Drought Breaker” for a touchdown he made for Georgia, but the one he scored in Dallas helped the Steelers keep alive a dream of breaking a drought of their own.

Bob Ferguson's NFL career ended after playing in just two games with the Vikings after his trade from Pittsburgh. He returned to Ohio State to earn a masters in sociology, got elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1996, and died on December 30, 2004.

Bob Schmitz's playing career ended after the 1966 season. He spent thirty-three years as an NFL scout with BLESTO, the Steelers and Jets. He was just days into his retirement in June 2004 when he died from an apparent heart attack. He was sixty-five.

Several players stayed in football after their playing days and excelled in new roles. Ernie Stautner coached for more than thirty years, prominently as defensive line coach and defensive coordinator for Tom Landry's
Cowboys. Dick Haley played one more year with the Steelers and then began a distinguished career in evaluating talent, becoming the director of player personnel and helping Art Rooney Jr. draft the kind of players who would make them perennial Super Bowl contenders. The '63 year was Hoak's last on a winning team as a player, but he would share in the franchise's glory years. When he retired after the '69 season, he ranked as the second-leading rusher in team history, behind John Henry Johnson. He returned to the team as coach of the running backs, a position he held for thirty-four years, and was on the staff for five Super Bowl victories.

One can only speculate about the toll that playing like human pinballs took on the players. Some, like defensive back Willie Daniel, eventually suffered from dementia, but he was able to count on the loving care of his wife, Ruth. There's no telling what nature dictated, or what price was exacted for playing kamikaze football in a meaningless exhibition against Detroit in January 1963, what the cost was for the players who “gave it all they had for the pride these steel-hard giants take in their battering profession.”
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Who knows what was driving these players to prove—like Red Mack back on a high school football field, or John Henry Johnson—that they could be better than the next guy, or good enough to become a pro, or maybe even good enough one day to play for the NFL championship. And at the end, when there were no more practices, no more Sundays to compete against Jimmy Hill of Sam Houston State or Joe Fortunato of Mingo Junction, Ohio, or Joe Walton of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, was it all worth it?

“I did my job and I walked away happy and I don't regret anything,” Carpenter said. “And that's the best part.” Carpenter died June 30, 2011; he was 77. The pay was mediocre and daily life less than glamorous, “but I loved every minute of it,” Russell said. “I was so excited to be a pro. It didn't matter to me.”
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Three marquee players from the early sixties were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Bobby Layne in '67, Stautner in '69, and Johnson in '87. After being hospitalized for internal bleeding, Layne died of cardiac arrest on December 1, 1986. He was fifty-nine. Stautner watched the Steelers win the Super Bowl in February 2006 and then died a week and a half later. He was eighty, and he had been coping with Alzheimer's disease for eight years. John Henry Johnson died June 3, 2011, at age 81.

Ed Brown, who was named comeback player of the year by UPI a week after the season-ending loss to the Giants, retired after the 1965 season. In its account of his retirement, the AP called Brown “a rather unheralded starter.” Maybe that was true. He didn't win a championship, and he flopped in the
1963 showdown against the Giants. But on one Saturday night in Cleveland, Ed Brown was good enough to leave Jim Brown in awe, and he threw game-winning passes to Red Mack and Gary Ballman, and for one unlikely season he carried the hopes of Steeler fans on his right arm. His playing days over, Brown went back to California. “My dad asked me, ‘What are you going to do now?'” the quarterback recalled years later. “I said, ‘I don't know. All I've ever done is play football.'” His father bought him a liquor store, and Brown ran it for twelve years. He died of prostate cancer in August 2007.
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Russell had to leave the team to serve two years of military service, which he completed in Europe. “That's a long time to be away from football,” he said after the Giant loss. “What I hate about it is that I'll have to make the team all over again, just like a rookie.”
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Russell was a lot more intent on resuming his pro football career than he had been starting it. “I was very motivated to return,” he said. “I wasn't thinking about winning championships. I was just thinking, ‘Can I make it back?'”
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Russell returned and endured six straight losing seasons. But he wound up a twelve-year career with seven Pro Bowl appearances and two Super Bowl rings. He was the last active Steeler player from the '63 squad.

If there was one football team whose regrets and frustration could match the Steelers', it was the University of Pittsburgh. The Panthers went 9–1, their finest season since the 9–0–1 team of 1937, yet they wound up snubbed by all the bowls. Navy, the only team that beat Pitt, was invited to the Cotton Bowl to play Texas. Nebraska met Auburn in the Orange Bowl. The Gator Bowl matched North Carolina against Air Force. Pitt was left out.

The world had been shaken up and scarred in 1963, and not even the most optimistic forecasts for innovation and the economy were going to ease the pains of a chaotic, traumatic year. If
U.S. News & World Report
had been on target in its conclusion before the Kennedy assassination that the national attitude was “one of some uncertainty rather than one of full confidence,” what in heaven's name was the state of mind of the American people in the aftermath of November 22, 1963?
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Sports had changed forever too. Pro football, with a rival league, more lucrative deals for coveted players, and the growth of television, was changing swiftly from the days when Art Rooney Sr. and Bobby Layne could simply shake hands on a new contract. “It's a new era,” Rooney said days after the season-ending loss to the Giants. “Now it's really big business.”
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Sports Illustrated
named Pete Rozelle its man of the year, a departure from its practice of honoring athletes, and a nod to the “big business” that pro football had become, as Rooney noted.
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Buddy Parker resigned during the first week of September 1965 after four consecutive preseason losses. Upset that his authority had been usurped when Dan Rooney balked at a proposed trade with Philadelphia, Parker finally made good on his threat to quit. He returned to Texas to run a business. Two years later, he said in an interview, “No, I don't miss football really.”
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That sentiment is believable, on one hand; anyone who suffered so mightily after a loss might feel immense relief to be unburdened by the weight of coaching responsibilities and the dread of one more loss. On the other hand, how could someone who practically mortgaged his soul and sanity to win football games for fifteen years not feel the lure of his raison d'être? And how could he have undergone such a change of heart after declaring a year earlier, “I'll listen to any job, head coach or assistant”?
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Parker's abrupt decision to quit the Lions lingered as one of his regrets. Surely there were others. In the fall of '75, about nine months after the Steelers won their first Super Bowl, Parker praised Rooney and said, “I would have liked to have won a championship for him. I guess I was about a decade too soon.”
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But he was right on time in Detroit.

Parker died on March 22, 1982, from kidney failure, two weeks after being hospitalized for a ruptured ulcer. “The charge that I was in too big a hurry to give the Steelers a championship is true,” Parker was quoted as saying in his obituary. “The charge that I gave away too many draft choices for veterans I thought could help us win is true.”
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He was sixty-eight.

Noll took over the Steelers in 1969—Hoak's last year as a running back—and, after winning the opener, lost the next thirteen games. In 1974, he took the Steelers to the Super Bowl and brought home the franchise's first championship, eleven seasons after Buddy Parker and a blood-'n'-guts team of renegades came mighty close to doing it themselves.

But what if Y. A. Tittle's third-down pass had glanced harmlessly off Frank Gifford's hand and fallen onto the frozen field at Yankee Stadium? What if Don Chandler had been forced to punt and Brown had led the Steelers on a scoring drive that put them ahead, 17–16, and they had hung onto the lead? “Maybe take the game. Who knows?” Parker said afterward.
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What would have happened in a rematch with the Bears two weeks later on the frozen turf at Wrigley Field? “I don't know. I think we could have beat 'em, but who knows?” Cordileone said forty-seven years later. “You don't know what's going to happen.”
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“We would have beat them,” Russell said with no hesitation. “I think we did beat 'em in Pittsburgh.”
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Rooney made the trip to Chicago to watch his friend George Halas coach the Bears to a 14–10 victory over the Giants. After the game, Rooney said, “Yeah, the Steelers could have beaten both of them, only we weren't in there.”
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After all the second-guessing, the analyzing and reflection, sometimes there's no room for logic. Sometimes you're left with the quirks of the game, like a crooked upright on a goalpost, or the volleyball bounces of a pass that gave St. Louis a touchdown in the Cardinals' victory. The '63 season looked like it could have been the year the Steelers had been waiting for since 1933.
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