About Three Bricks Shy: And The Load Filled Up

By Roy Blount Jr

Thirtieth Anniversary EditionAny number of writers could spend an entire season with an NFL team, from the first day of training camp until the last pick of the draft, and come up with an interesting book. But only Roy Blount Jr. could capture the pain, the joy, the fears, the humor—in short, the heart—of a championship team. In 1973, the Pittsburgh Steelers were super, but missed the bowl. Blount's portrait of a team poised to dominate the NFL for more than a decade recounts the gridiron accomplishments and off-the-field lives of players, coaches, wives, fans, and owners. About Three Bricks Shy . . . is considered a classic; Sports Illustrated recently named it one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time. This thirtieth-anniversary edition includes additional chapters on the Steelers' Super Bowl wins, written for the 1989 paperback, as well as a new introduction by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9780822979685

Book preview

ABOUT THREE BRICKS SHY . . . AND THE LOAD FILLED UP

THE STORY OF THE GREATEST FOOTBALL TEAM EVER

ROY BLOUNT Jr.

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published in 2004 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260

Copyright © 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1989, 2004 by Roy Blount Jr.

All rights reserved.

About Three Bricks Shy of a Load was originally published in hardcover in 1974 by Little, Brown and Company and in paperback in 1980 by Ballantine Books.

Portions were first published in Sports Illustrated.

ISBN 0-8229-5834-1

eISBN 978-0-8229-7968-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

TO ANDRE LAGUERRE, WHO CONCEIVED THIS PROJECT,

ART ROONEY, WHO CONCEIVED THE STEELERS,

AND MR. AND MRS. R. A. BLOUNT

WHO CONCEIVED

THE AUTHOR

MAY ALL OF THEM PARDON SOME OF THE LANGUAGE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION TO THE 1989 EDITION

ABOUT THREE BRICKS SHY

…AND THE LOAD FILLED UP

INTRODUCTION

Franco Harris, who hated getting hit, told me something once, about running with the ball, that I didn't get down in my notes. It was something to this effect: as much as he wanted to comprehend the whole problem of a long run, to anticipate the whole open-field maze and to improvise a continuous mind-body flow of cuts and angles that could only end in the end zone….

Essentially what he said was, you can see too many possible tacklers. Not so much because you're anxious, hearing footsteps in that sense, as because you're trying for too ingenious a solution—wanting to fake out more tacklers than necessary. Coach Chuck Noll's catchphrase, paralysis of analysis, cuts to the quick of the matter—too quickly for my satisfaction, but then I'm wary of coaching (and I didn't give Noll enough credit in this book). As I get older I register more tacklers, and feel tired. But I wrote this book when I was young, for a writer, and my mind was bursting with Steelers.

In the seventies giants walked the earth, and they didn't waddle, either. Guards didn't weigh three to four hundred pounds. When Moon Mullins was pulling out ahead of Franco on a sweep, he weighed about the same, 230 or so, as Franco. He was a positive addition to the run's complexity. A 400-pound blocker can't pull. Mean Joe Greene, with his insistent sense of fitness (he picked the ball up from the line of scrimmage once and flung it into the stands), would have harpooned and rendered a 400-pound blocker before the fat stopped jiggling.

Not only are today's linemen too big, they aren't funny enough. I see Warren Sapp of Tampa Bay holding forth in interviews, and to me he's a cover act, trying to do Dwight White without the sparkle.

So I sound like an old fart. So sue me. When I was a thirty-something fart, the Steelers were in their golden age, winning four Super Bowls in six years, and I was hanging with them. Actually loafing with was the Pittsburgh term, then. I don't know whether it still is or not.

I do know that since this book was published in 1989—as an expanded, updated version of my 1974 book about the ’73 Steelers—history has proceeded. Twelve of the people involved in the great Steeler teams of the seventies are now officially immortalized: Art Rooney, Joe Greene, Jack Ham, Mel Blount, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Jack Lambert, Chuck Noll, Mike Webster, Dan Rooney, Lynn Swann and John Stallworth are in the National Football League's Hall of Fame. And there's no reason in the world that L. C. Lover Cool Greenwood isn't among them, and how about Dwight White? Donny Shell? Andy Russell? How about me?

Okay, I didn't play. But I did do a lot of heavy-duty listening, and I did write the original core of this book in three months, on a manual typewriter, sleeping from nine to five and writing all night, busting a gut to see the whole field presented by the material, and feeling the book constantly getting away from me, because the stuff I had to work with was so good. When I hit a wall, I would remember what Ray Mansfield and Bruce Van Dyke told me you had to do when you were hurt: play through it. (A perhaps less salutary corollary to that was, when you feel like you're getting drunk, drink through it.) Iron men and wooden ships! Mansfield used to exclaim, by way of evoking old-school values. I wish I were back there wrestling with that raw material instead of sitting here adding another layer of varnish. (In the second chapter, by the way, there's a typo where Mansfield says to Van Dyke, I drove it. That's supposed to be I'd've done it.)

Since my day the Steelers have been to the Super Bowl once. And—get this—they lost it. In the seventies, the Steelers had the biggest payroll in the NFL, but their highest paid player was Terry Bradshaw, who never got more than $400,000. Lambert got $200,000. The offensive linemen made considerably less than $100,000. Even adjusted for inflation, those figures are maybe a third of what players that good today can get, because they can become free agents represented by hotshot agents who negotiate multimillion-dollar contracts. In 1998 Ed Bouchette of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked a leading player agent to estimate how much the old Steelers would be worth on the ’98 market. To sign just twenty-two starters from the seventies, the agent figured, would cost $91.8 million. In ’98 each NFL team had a salary cap, for all fifty-three players on the roster plus injured ones, of $51.5 million.

Bouchette quoted Jim Boston, who was the Steelers’ chief negotiator in the seventies, as saying the dynasty Steelers could never have been kept together in the nineties: They would have gotten a cup of coffee as they passed through. Market freedom has prevented the Steelers from holding on to Rod Woodson, Levon Kirkland and other horses who might have started a new dynasty.

Any such dynasty, however, would get its butt kicked by the dynasty of my day. Only now can we realize how irreproducible this book is. You had to have great characters who were athletes rather than mounds of flesh and were funny without being derivative, and you also had to have the right—which is to say, exploitative—economic conditions. Toward the end of this book's chronicle of the ’73 season, you may notice, there is a reference to L. C. Greenwood's having signed with the rival World Football League. As it happened, that league folded before his Steeler contract ran out. Otherwise L. C. would have been somewhere else, making money commensurate with his uniqueness. Can you imagine the dynasty without L. C.? Wearing that gold chain with the bangle formed by the letters TFTEISYF, which, he explained when I asked, stood for The first time ever I saw your face? Right there in that corner of the locker room, L. C. of Mississippi next to Craig Hanneman of Oregon, numbers 68 and 67, respectively, you had the cast for a great buddy movie. And panning around to the right, we see, for instance, number 63, Ernie Holmes. Where else would I have gotten to know a man who shaved his head in the shape of an arrow?

So it was a rare moment in history that I had the great fortune to be a tangential part of. Heady times—see particularly the chapter herein regarding Super Bowl ’75. Even some of the players have said they didn't realize how good it was until it was over.

Art Rooney, the Chief, died in 1988 after a long, full life. But another of the Steeler immortals, Iron Mike Webster, died in 2002 at the age of fifty. He'd been hit in the head too many times, suffered too many concussions, resulting in brain damage. In his last years he was sometimes homeless, sleeping in his car or in bus stations. When old teammates greeted him at get-togethers he snarled, or wouldn't acknowledge them. Joe Willie Gilliam, such a great passer, died the same year, four days shy of his fiftieth birthday. In the latter part of this book, as of 1989, I reported that he had broken his drug habit. He broke it several more times after that.

A number of years ago Sam Davis was found mysteriously battered. He's in an assisted care facility. Steve Furness died of a heart attack at forty-nine. And the last time I saw Ray Mansfield, the Old Ranger, who was my age and my best friend on the team, he was lying in his coffin—smiling, to be sure, and holding a big cigar. That was 1996. I wrote a little memorial piece about him for Sports Illustrated, under whose auspices I took on the Steelers in the first place. Here's a modified version:

Nobody ever hung in there any stronger than the Ranger, who still holds the Steeler record for consecutive games played. Even in the insurance business, Mansfield remained a warrior. When a man reneged on an agreement to buy a big policy from him, he went back to the man's office six times and finally kicked a hole in his desk. Then he couldn't get his foot out. Not long before his death he ran into the formerly ferocious Dick Butkus, got right up into the old Bear's face and said, Dick, I owned you, and Butkus didn't argue.

Mansfield also set the unofficial Steeler record for hours enjoyed. Until he was sure there was no more conviviality to squeeze out of it, the Ranger would never call it a night. He had stories to tell that stretched from Bakersfield, California, where his family was living in a tent in an itinerant labor camp when he was born, all across the country. And he appeared prominently in other people's stories. The night before his funeral, Andy Russell told one:

"One night in training camp, Ray told me, ‘It's embarrassing. You've been my friend all these years, and you've never once sneaked out after curfew. Tonight's the night.’

"I said, ‘Aw, Ray, I can't be doing that, we've got to play Baltimore tomorrow.’

"The next thing I know, Ray, Jack Lambert and I are stealing through the darkness. Ray is dodging from tree to tree—here's big wide Ray, tiptoeing from one skinny little tree to another…

"So we get to this bar, and I can't just keep on drinking, I'll get sick, so I'm sitting there with coffee and Jack is dancing on the bar with his shirt off and Ray is arm-wrestling with the bartender…

"So I'm the designated driver, and Ray and Jack are in the back seat hitting each other on the arm or something, and here comes a big white horse toward us right down the middle of the road. I swerve to miss it, and Ray and Jack are outraged. ‘You're supposed to be the sober one!’

"There was a big white horse! I tell them, and they're even more outraged. ‘We don't see any white horse. And we're the ones drinking!’

Then the next day, Baltimore was on our one yard line, about to beat us—it was just an exhibition game—and Lambert came over to me and said, ‘Andy I think I see the white horse.’

The Ranger's father died laughing, as I thought Ray might one night in my apartment in Pittsburgh in 1973. Pete Gent, the ex-Cowboy turned novelist, was in town, publicizing Dallas North Forty. After he and Andy and Ray did an interview together, they came to my place to do something that people who are now old farts would sometimes do back then: smoke a joint. Mansfield loved authors and books, and he was having a fine time discussing differences between art and life with Gent and Russell and me, even though he was in serious pain. A couple of days before, he had cut-blocked Jon Matusvak, bringing that enormous Raider down onto his, Ray's, neck all but completely separating a cervical connection. Suddenly one of Gent's off-in-the-ozone reflections—something about getting from point A to point B by way of point D—hit the Ranger's funnybone so hard that his top rib separated from his spine completely. He rolled on the couch, alternately laughing and crying. That injury plagued him until he died. Once he told me, It hurts so bad sometimes that I think about killing myself, but he always spoke of that evening fondly.

Even more than merriment, he enjoyed the Grand Canyon, which looked like a cathedral to him, he said, and where he backpacked many times. The last time was with his son Jimmy, then twenty-four, and a friend of Jimmy's. The Ranger loved camping out. Eulogizing him, Russell told the story about Butkus and the one about kicking the desk, and also about the time he and Ray spent the night outdoors on the ground, and Andy was freezing, and Ray, who was never cold, said, ‘Andy, you can cuddle.’ That was one warm body.

His blood pressure was way too high. No medication could correct it. He was still up around his playing weight of 250 or so, and he still indulged enthusiastically in big cigars, beer, salt on his food and physical exertion. He had business worries. His older brother and sister had both died of congestive heart failure. He had told Jimmy, I'm going to die in this Canyon. Along toward evening on their second day of hiking, he told the young men to go on ahead and set up camp, his ankle was bothering him, he'd be along. But he didn't show up. They couldn't look for him in the dark.

Next morning they found him sitting with his back against a big rock, a water bottle in one hand and a disposable camera in the other. He hadn't taken a farewell snapshot, the foil wrapper was still on. But his expression was serene, and the breathtaking vista he faced must have been even more so at sunset.

I gather from Steelers Forever, by Jim O'Brien, that most of the old Steelers are alive and thriving: Bradshaw and Swann on TV, Russell and Mike Wagner and Mad Dog White and Terry Hanratty in the money business, L. C. a CEO, Rocky Bleier in demand as a motivational speaker, Mel Blount running two youth homes, J. T. Thomas and Larry Brown owning and operating thirteen of whatever is the plural of Applebee's, and so on. Most of them limp.

Occasionally I talk to Russell, who has written two books about the old Steeler days himself. At the suggestion of my son Kirven, who has loved the Steelers steadfastly since he met them at age five, I sometimes go on Yahoo.com to catch the inimitable Myron Cope broadcasting the last few minutes of current Steelers games. I still remember phone numbers by Steelers’ jerseys: 201 223-2733, say, is Bleier, Bradshaw, Wagner, Edwards, Fuqua. I wear one of Mel Blount's old jerseys on special occasions.

And I'm still trying to tell myself, when I see the white horse, Play through it.

INTRODUCTION

TO THE 1989 EDITION

In 1973 I had the great fortune (except that this was back before sports books started making people rich) to spend a season amidst the Pittsburgh Steelers. And I wrote a book. And then they became the greatest football team of all time. (That is what Sports Illustrated's pro football maven, Paul Zimmerman, recently called the ’74 and ’75 Steelers, and since that is what he said, I agree with him.)

Even though the Steelers waited until after my residency to win four Super Bowls in six years, I did not hold this against them. I kept coming back. The first part of this volume—the original About Three Bricks Shy of a Load—is about the Steelers when they didn't quite have their act together, which I have been gracious enough not to take as a reflection on me. The second part—And the Load Filled Up—consists of stories and columns I wrote about them in their full fruition.

Four of the Steelers in this book—Joe Greene, Jack Ham, Terry Bradshaw and Mel Blount—have already been enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and others are likely to join them. None of the Steelers in this book are still playing. When Dwight White, in retirement, was asked what was wrong with the uninspired 1986 Steelers, his judgment was succinct: They don't have any gizzards. We had gizzards, man. But that's not all the Steelers had. They had a certain lift to them.

In 1989, when Pete Rozelle announced his retirement as commissioner of the National Football League, he said the brightest moment of his nearly thirty years in that office was when he presented the Steelers’ first Super Bowl trophy to Art Rooney, the team's founder.

When Art Rooney died in 1988, I was in the south of France eating mousse de chocolat amer avec les tuiles morbreés and beholding naked Frenchwomen for the National Geographic. If somebody had said, Would you rather go to the south of France and do all that or to Pittsburgh and pay tribute to Art Rooney?, I would have been there in Pittsburgh. But since I was already in the south of France I sat in a café in St. Tropez reading about the Chief's death in the International Herald Tribune. I thought about mortality, immortality, and a time when the Chief was distinctively down-to-earth in an elevator.

The Chief and I were riding in this elevator in a motel in Oakland, I think it was, back around 1974. A man got on, identified himself as an assistant trainer with some California junior college team, and started telling us about the Steelers’ chances the next day. He filled us in on who was going to be able to play and what the coaches had in mind, and he added a few words about the team's tradition. He spoke as a nonpartisan expert. A representative of the smart money. He held forth. The Chief put in a friendly word.

The expert looked at the Chief as an informed person might be expected to look at a harmless-looking, nondescriptly turned out old gent with a rumpled face who had presumed to put in a word. Whadda we know, though, huh? the expert said indulgently, and then he winked in my direction.

The next floor was the Chief's. The expert saw him off with a condescending smile, but then something seemed to strike him, and he said to me, "That old guy…connected with the Steelers?"

Created he them, I said, or words to that effect. The expert gave me a funny look as I got off at my floor, but what I remember is the expression on the Chief's face when he saw that the expert did not know who he was.

The Chief's eyes lit up. After all, whadda we know indeed? The Chief's lips puckered loosely with delight. I'm told he had the same expression one afternoon a couple of years later as he picked himself up on the sidelines, in Three Rivers Stadium, after a Steeler running back ran full tilt right over him, during practice, when he was seventy-eight. It buoyed the Chief, to be patronized by an assistant junior-college trainer or flattened by a young employee. Unlike too many leaders, he liked good solid irony. His amusement had both gizzard and float, and his team lived up to it.

ONE

ABOUT THREE BRICKS SHY

1. About the Title

2. A Little Background

3. Why Pittsburgh

4. Names

5. First Dip into the Scene

6. Training camp

7. Moosie and the Old Ranger

8. Contact

9. The Exhibition Season

10. Noll

11. Beating the Lions, the Browns and the Oilers

12. The Premises

13. Steelers Away from Work

14. Good-bye, Johnny U.

15. Fandom

16. The Bengals, the Jets and the Bengals

17. Terry and Terry and Joe

18. The Chief and Family

19. Burning Out the Redskins

20. Race

21. Mad Dog

22. Oakland and Denver

23. The Body

24. Scouting

25. Losing Two Barely

26. Franco, Frenchy and Preston: Dancing and Blowing

27. Mean Joe

28. Money, and Supe

29. Hands

30. The Playov

1

ABOUT THE TITLE

I got all my stuff together one time, and then I couldn't lift it.

—ROGER MILLER

Pro football players are adults who fly through the air in plastic hats and smash each other for a living. I now know a bunch of them, and I think they are good folks. They are made up, loosely speaking, of rickety knees, indoctrination, upward mobility, pain tolerance, public fantasies, meanness, high spirits, brightly colored uniforms, fear, techniques, love of games, Nutrament (a diet supplement used, sometimes with steroid drugs, for bulking up), corporate kinesthesia, God-given quickness, and heart. Sober, one of them told me, What it boils down to is, sacrifice your body with a picture in your mind. Drinking, one of them told me, When I'm on the football field I'm a knight in shining armor. When I'm selling insurance I'm just an asshole. Stoned, one of them told me, "You can be hit so hard it burns. High on the game he had just played, one of them told me, There was no other world outside it. There was nothing."

But there was a rich penumbra. I recall the afternoon of November 11, 1973. The Pittsburgh Steelers were beating the Oakland Raiders, 17–9, in a tempestuous game, in Oakland, on national TV. It was drizzling rain, great hunks of ill-rooted sod were flying through the air, sea gulls were frenetic overhead, Oakland fans were roaring and pulsing ambiguously…it was like standing in the eye of a tumbler washing machine, only noise and throat-figures all around instead of soapsuds and clothes. Steelers were running off the field with snot on their moustaches and glee and strain and grass blades in their eyes, and Craig Hanneman, a reserve defensive end from Oregon with whom I had often chewed snuff, turned to me on the mushy sidelines and cried:

You picked the right team! Oh, a great bunch of guys! And a bunch of crazy fuckers! I'm crazy too! We're all about three bricks shy of a load! Hanneman's last sentence—as an expression of wild approval, which I shared, tinged with then-unintended undertones of fallibility, which I tried to register as the year went on—summed up my six months with the Pittsburgh National Football League team better than anything else.

I spent the 1973 NFL campaign, from the first day of training camp in July through the draft in January, loafing with (to use the old Pittsburgh term for hanging around with) a rich mixture of Steeler or Steeler-related persons: players, coaches, scouts, fans, wives, girl friends, relatives, media people, front office people, hangers-on and prospects. I fooled around the periphery of practice, habituated the dressing room, experienced games from the bench, and followed people home. I helped Mean Joe Greene, the tackle, buy his wife a birthday card; lost 11–10 in electronic Ping-Pong to Franco Harris, the running back; heard Terry Bradshaw, the quarterback, sing his own songs and speak of welding; considered stereo buys with Frenchy Fuqua, the running back; chatted up nurses with Moon Mullins, the tackle-guard; played the horses with Art Rooney, the patriarch; and listened to Center Ray Mansfield's little girl play Faith of Our Fathers on the clarinet. I talked labor–management with vice-president Dan Rooney (management) and player rep Andy Russell (labor, but he sells tax shelters). I threw my arm out returning Kicker Roy Gerela's field goals to him in the cold; elicited catcalls from Palm Springs residents by dropping (in street shoes) eight end zone passes from Quarterback Terry Hanratty; and sprained my ankle and had it taped up with a vengeance by trainer Ralph Berlin. I reminisced fleetingly about candy bars with head coach Chuck Noll, met a man who steals phonograph records for a living (can't give his name), saw tackle Jon Kolb's goat, and was helped up off the floor by Bill Nunn, the scout, at 3 o'clock in the morning in a black after-hours club in Jackson, Mississippi. I gained some thirteen pounds of Steeler-related beer and perhaps an ounce or two (from pushing on the leg-weight machine while talking to people with knee injuries) of Steeler-related sinew. I shared linebacker Jack Ham's shampoo, interviewed at her insistence Mrs. Bruce (guard) Van Dyke's obstetrician, and heard the word collision used as a transitive verb. I hardly ever did anything I wanted to do.

By just sort of drifting around, and not having any readily discernible immediate objective, I became more intimate than a press person, more detached than a football person, and possessed of a certain amount of gossip from all angles. As the bricks in the load shifted, I acquired interstitial inklings of how players, coaches, scouts, fans, press and front office people fit together and how they viewed each other. (Generally, as necessary evils.)

On the one hand the Steelers in ’73 didn't make the Super Bowl, or even, as they had the year before, win a playoff game by a miracle; on the other hand none of them was caught up by tragedy—though two of the coaches were fired, two of the marriages broke up, and Mansfield, the veteran center known as the Old Ranger, did once offer, if it would help my narrative, to die of a pinched nerve. The Steelers won ten of their fourteen regular-season games and made the playoffs, but they were proved not to be as inevitable as they and their supporters thought they were. The previous year was the year the franchise lost its maiden, winning its first title, but ’73 was a year that innocence was lost. I never had a headier year in my life, though, than I did checking out the various feels and levels of the Pittsburgh load of bricks.

I doubt that Chuck Noll—a constrainedly low-keyed man and reputed gourmet cook who speaks in terms of programming, preparation, adulthood and good experiences—would like to think of his team as being three bricks shy of a load, which is comparable to playing with less than a full deck. But what deck that is worth anything can ever be said to be full, and what is so boring as a complete, neatly squared away load of bricks? We don't have the peaks and valleys, said a member of the NFL champion Miami Dolphins; neither do expressways through Kansas. The great thing in sports and nature is the way bricks slip and reassemble in unexpected combinations. That, for all the coaches’ planning, is how the Steelers won games and lost them. The Steelers and the people around them were a great miscellany of minds, bodies, backgrounds and visions of reality, held firmly but hazardously together by the goal of winning all the marbles. In ’73 they won only a good share of them—like most enterprises they fell short at the end, and heads rolled and players felt bleak and the fans in Pittsburgh very nearly started saying The Same Old Steelers again. But the Steelers’ mix was more than their aim.

I want to thank the Rooneys, Noll, engagingly upfront publicists Ed Kiely and Joe Gordon, and everybody else in the Steeler organization for the access and help—not to mention the almost unlimited Vitamin-E-and-wheat-germ pills and cigars—they afforded me, and Andre Laguerre, Roy Terrell, Ray Cave, Gil Rogin, and Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated for their guidance and sponsorship; and the men in Black and Gold—Hanneman, just for instance, for the title and the snuff.

2

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Après moi, le déluge, i.e., first things first.

—FATHER ORFE IN CARDS OF IDENTITY, BY NIGEL DENNIS

One day late in December 1972, Andre Laguerre, then managing editor of Sports Illustrated, summoned me, one of the staff writers, and said he wanted somebody to live with a pro football team for a season and write a book about it.

Well. I was thirty-one years old and just divorced, so I was at suitably loose ends, but otherwise I wasn't sure about the idea. I came into sportswriting unexpectedly from a newspaper job in which I made fun of, and occasionally deigned to talk to, politicians. I was the natural man, the politicians were the connivers. I was primary, they were secondary. In sportswriting I found it to be the other way around: the athletes were instinctive artists, just trying to stay inspired and exercise their craft, and I was in the position of trying to get them to conceptualize, to say something that they tended to feel would somehow get them into social, financial or ontological trouble. I will never entirely get over the sensation of realizing that my boyhood idol Willie Mays disliked me on sight. The fact that every other writer I know who ever tried to talk to Mays came away with the same impression does not really help. Willie, I said to him at one point, do you realize that the last eight innings you've led off, you've gotten on base seven times?

Man, he said, I don't keep up with that shit.

All I want to happen to me in heaven is for Willie Mays to come up to me and say, by no means humbly, but appreciatively, Do you realize that in the last eight descriptive sentences you've written you've used only one adjective?

Man, I will say (nicely, but firmly), I don't keep up with that shit.

I prefer doing outré sports stories—coon hunting, synchronized swimming, an eighty-two-year-old lifeguard. I like to hang around with people I feel I am in the same boat with, which is to say that we are all confused but have visionary flashes occasionally and like to argue and tell stories. Then I like to go back to my office and render these people as semisympathetic characters, which entails a certain amount of betrayal I–Thou-wise, but after all, if you hang around with an eighty-two-year-old lifeguard you put up with certain things, and the same goes for hanging around with a writer. Everybody, as subject or object, is a semisympathetic character at best.

But whoever did this book was going to have to spend a lot of time in a big-time dressing room. Big-time dressing rooms had always made me nervous. For one thing I could never spend longer than a few minutes in one without being galled by not having my own stool and uniform and helmet, or glove, and some of those cleated shoes that click on hard floors like the bears’ claws on the cement in the zoo. Faulkner said a novelist is a failed short-story writer who is a failed poet. I am a failed linebacker, or defensive end. I have gotten over those ambitions, at least vocationally, altogether (now I want to be a man who operates a steam shovel), but still my reaction around football practice is like that of my four-year-old boy Kirven. When I took Kirven to watch the Steelers practice he enjoyed it until he realized nobody in uniform was going to chase him. Then he wanted to go home. So he missed meeting Johnny Unitas, which was probably just as well considering the moods he and Unitas were in. (While the two moods were not identical, they were perhaps comparable, as we shall see.)

Another thing is that I had never liked being around a lot of people each of whom could so easily beat me half to death that there wouldn't be any point to it. It's not that I actively fear or feel antagonism toward football players. Many people do, I think, including football fans. And so might I, if I had gone to a college where jocks were more freely indulged than they were at Vanderbilt in the early sixties, where several Commodores were my friends—which may bear a relation to how seldom the Commodores won. Some drunk Georgia Bulldogs once threatened to kill my sister Susan and peed on her date's foot at a house party, and when she complained to Coach Vince Dooley he said the boys were under a great deal of pressure.

I never saw any Steelers bully any civilians, and in fact I saw some of them contain themselves when people were being pointedly obnoxious. Lemme at them, I remember crying one night. "I'll pee on the bastards’ feet."

No, I was told. It would reflect adversely on the organization.

I just made that up. But whenever I heard of Steelers being involved in barroom brawls I did wish, irrationally, that I had been there and had pitched in by doing what I once did as a fraternity pledge raiding the Sigma Chi house in college: leapt from the top of some stairs onto a crowd that was dragging a fellow pledge up the stairs toward the shower and knocked a good dozen people all the way down the whole long flight, in a thrashing heap. And ran.

But it wouldn't have been that way for me in a pro football brawl. I would have been hit spang in the middle of the face so hard that not only were my glasses broken and I had to be led back to the car but I also lost forever my sense of taste. That's what happened to a man I know who was fool enough to get in a fistfight because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. And the boys would have told me, Well, you certainly took all the fun out of that donnybrook. (Or whatever the appropriate term would be. In Pittsburgh they call a brawl a hey-rube.)

I had always felt uncomfortable in a big-time dressing room because everybody who belonged in it had laid his body on the line. I imagine that if you hang around a showgirls’ dressing room for very long without making an advance you feel like a eunuch. Hanging around a sports dressing room without ever having knocked anyone in it down, or tried to take his job, or helped him knock someone else down, tended to make me feel wispy.

Not that I am, by any means, of a mind with the civilians who come up to Van Dyke in Pittsburgh bars and try to get him to go one-on-one with them—the civilian rushing some imaginary quarterback, Van Dyke blocking—in the parking lot. I know you'll beat me, such a man once said, but I just want to see.

This one guy was so nice about it, Bruce said. I almost did it, he wanted me to so bad.

I drove it, Ray Mansfield said. And I'd've killed him.

Well, but you can't… said Van Dyke.

I think I'll start carrying a couple of helmets in my car. And when some guy comes up with something like that, I'll do it.

Well, but… said Van Dyke.

And I'll kill him, Mansfield said.

I don't have any desire to test myself against the best hitters, or to make a living hitting, any more than I want to make a living punching cows. I just want to act like a cowboy, and sing cowboy songs. (Interestingly enough, there are no pro football player songs, in the sense that there are cowboy songs. I thought about trying to write one during the season, but the closest thing I could produce was the title to an Ode to a Stewardess: My Seat Back, Tray-Table and You Know What/Are in a Full Upright Position Over You.)

But there is a shared sense of hardiness around a sports dressing room which a reporter pointedly does not share. Often have I watched a fellow reporter prying away (most often deferentially) at a sports figure in his cubicle after a game—trying to get him to say something catchy and courageous about the trials and tribulations of being the only Jewish defensive end on a team run by Arabs, say—and felt that I shared with everyone in the dressing room this unvoiced assumption: Well, old B. B. (short for Booger Bear, the sports figure's cognomen, richly earned in hand to hand combat with people justly named Hercules Koskov, W. W. Bad Tydings, C. M. Crazy Mother McFarlane and Boulder Feoli) could just stand up suddenly and with the updraft of his chest knock old Herb (the reporter) over into that pile of peeled-off bandages over there, if he wanted to.

Not that the likelihood of B. B.'s physically squelching Herb was high. (Though such a thing has certainly happened—I remember a New York baseball writer saying how much he liked Ralph Houk of the Yankees even though Houk had once picked him up by the shirt, in answer to a question, and held him against the wall of his office.) But the very fact that B. B. was refraining from the use of his physical presence against Herb—when that physical presence was the primary reason both of them were there—diminished Herb's stature. Conceivably, though by no means necessarily, Herb could have squelched B. B. intellectually, but there would never seem to be any point to that in a dressing room. For one thing, if Herb tried it, then B. B. probably would put him over into the pile of bandages, with some justice.

Andy Russell, the Steelers’ all-pro linebacker, may read the above and shake his head, and even without the condoning chortle with which he greeted my assertion that a fluttery forward pass is like a flaccid penis ("And you're going to write things like that, aren't you? he said, with bemused delight). Russell's hero is James Ling the businessman (or was, until Ling spoiled his record by going ill-advised into the steel business in Pittsburgh). Russell goes about linebacking the way Kissinger goes about negotiating (except that Noll doesn't give him as free a hand as Nixon gives Kissinger). But I would like to point out what Russell's friend Mansfield said about Russell and Joe Greene: When they're in there on defense it's like knowing your big brother is there, and if anybody tries to push you around he'll beat them up. Football takes us back to certain fundamental concerns. And I felt a resistance to the idea of hanging around, in their element, with 47 people who, if all 48 of us were on a desert island with 47 coconuts (see Noll's remark, in a later chapter, the strong will arise…"), I would naturally be on welfare, at best.

Of course, as in the children's hand game, paper covers rock. What remained for the aforementioned Herb, after B. B. had either squelched him or declined to respond meaningfully at all, was to go to his typewriter and deal high-handedly in prose with B. B's output or attitudes. And B. B. may well have deserved it. But that prose, sportswriting being what it mostly is, would probably not be so sound or compelling, in any primal sense, as the way B. B. moved on the field of play, or even as the way B. B. sat on his stool with sweat running down his neck and gauze unraveling down his legs. Among themselves, of course, Herb and his colleagues would have their own bonds and hardihood, highlighted by talk in some ways more rounded and venturesome than the players’. But the stories told would be about players, mostly. Check out the sportswriter characters in pro football novels. Chumps would be a player's word for them. Somebody you slap in the face and he don't do anything. That's the definition of a chump, Dwight White told me. And Joe Greene once referred to $50 as chump change. A player makes more money than a scribe, and yet has stayed truer to his fiercest childhood dreams; he pushes the equivalent of a dozen people down the equivalent of a flight of stairs on a normal working day. He lives firsthand, and doesn't like to admit, by and large, that he is in the same boat with a man who asks questions and describes.

He looks like a fag, one Steeler said to me about a member of the local media who was as straight as Vince Lombardi. What does he know about football?

What I should have said to that was, You look at least as much like a gorilla as he does like a fag. What do you know about journalism? But I was too deep into the scene by then—in a sense, I knew what he meant—and anyway that's not what a reporter says to a sports figure. What he does is take a mental note. It's not a very dignified role. But then again neither, if you think about it, is flying through the air in a plastic hat.

It was true that I had in a sense appeared in the bestselling pro football novel of all time (I guess), Dan Jenkins's Semi-Tough. But that was no real recommendation of me as the man for this job, since the character Elroy Blunt, a country singer, did not resemble me: I am not a professional country singer, I can't afford to give parties where beautiful, young, scarcely clad women try to get people to go upstairs and urinate on them in the tub, and I can't imitate a cricket (after the book came out I wore all the hair off the insides of my calves trying to learn). All I had done to merit such a place in literature was sing in Jenkins's company my song, I'm Just a Bug on the Windshield of Life, whose actual lyrics are as follows:

He drove up in his big new car

And gave a little toot on his horn,

And drove off with the prettiest girl

That ever was born.

He's in the driver's seat now,

Beside him sits my wife,

And I'm just a bug on

The windshield of life.

Now they're driving down the road

And never think a thing of me.

Two in the front seat's company,

You know what they say about three.

Now my wife looks over at him,

Her words cut like a knife:

"Old Arnie's just a bug on

The windshield of life."

The Lord above looked down on me

And said, "I tell you boy,

Where you are is just misery,

There is no earthly joy.

You and him and your wife are all

In a world of sin and strife.

On down the road I'll cleanse you from

The windshield of life."

I figured football players would have little sympathy for that kind of sentiment—that they were always in the front seat (I was wrong).

I have never claimed to be a fanatically interested or technically advanced student of pro football. Since I am an American it can stir my blood, of course, but here I was being told that somebody was needed to spend most of a year dwelling upon a pro football team, in a capacity somewhere between that of a tick and that of a consultant. I said, well, I would. And after some weeks of discussion, my preference for Pittsburgh was indulged.

3

WHY PITTSBURGH

"Have you heard of these people before, Georgiana? Certainly not, Serena. Nobody has heard of any one in Pittsburgh."

—TWO BOSTON LADIES IN 1874, QUOTED IN VALLEY OF DECISION, A PITTSBURGH NOVEL BY MARCIA DAVENPORT

Losing has nothing to do with geography.

—CHUCK NOLL

A good many of my colleagues could not understand why I chose Pittsburgh of all the places in the NFL. Members of the Sports Illustrated staff are always tearing off to exotic places. I remember photographer Jerry Cooke pulling up in front of me in a taxi outside the Time and Life Building one evening. He noticed I was standing there with a suitcase.

Where are you going? he asked.

Pittsburgh, I said.

There was a pause.

"Where are you going?" I said.

China, he said, and then he rode away.

Well, I had never covered the Steelers but I had done several stories about the Pittsburgh Pirates. I once asked Pirate catcher Manny Sanguillen about his hitting. My weakness is I swing at the first pitch too much, he said. I know this.

Well, why don't you stop? I asked him.

Because it makes me feel good! he cried, beaming.

I once got on a plane behind Pirate pitcher Steve Blass, who for fun had tied his tie so that it was only about four inches long.

Hello, the stewardess said.

Hello, said Blass. I'm the one in the short tie.

Dock Ellis, another Pirate pitcher, was once called upon suddenly to pinch-run. He ran out of the dugout wearing a Steeler warmup jacket. An umpire told him he couldn't run the bases dressed like that. So Ellis took off the warmup jacket and had nothing on underneath. I once asked Ellis about the Cadillac El Classico he had driven to spring training. It was white with red-leather outside trim and a grille that looked like the Parthenon in chrome. It ain't nothin’, he told me, but a DC-8.

I once sat with Pirate slugger Willie Stargell in a dugout in Bradenton, Florida, on a hot, sluggish day. Stargell commented on how little electricity, everything considered, was in the air.

A great day to be in the outfield, I said.

Yeah, said Stargell. To just stay out in the outfield all day. And every ball that comes out there, paint it a different color.

I figured any town with a baseball team that sportive ought to have a football team worth loafing with. I knew the expression loafing with already because I had been to Pittsburgh on various assignments and had met some of its people, including a man who sat down next to me in an ice cream parlor and said, "You're looking at me—you may never see me no mo’. I may die before I get out of here, we don't know. That's one thing we don't ever know. Gimme a butter pecan, lady.

I prophesy, he added. "I don't use no cards. That's gifted. That's from the Lord. I broadcast tonight at 7:30."

I knew Pittsburgh, by reputation, as a town full of locally famous eccentrics, past and present—such as the late Baldwin McMoney, the late Yutzy Pascarelli and his assistant One-Way, the extant Maniac McDonough and the man, whatever his name may be, who walks the downtown streets wearing two huge sandwich-board signs and carrying a third sign on a stick. In June 1973 (they change), the three signs were hand-lettered as follows, in part:

President Nixon Vice President Agnew and Congress has the Power and Authority to Redress My Grievance Against All the Federal Courts of America But Purposely Failed to Redress My Grievance to Help U.S. Steel and the Steelworkers Who Has Tortured Me for Over 8 Years and They Will Abuse Me Until the People of America Bless Me With Their Help to Get My Grievance Against the Federal Government Properly Redressed. Please Show the World You Can Do It…. The sign man is usually struggling with the wind and often seems about to be carried away by it, especially as he goes around corners. But if you evince a glimmer of interest in his message, while walking or driving past (not many people do) he will turn gradually so as to remain readable to you for as long as possible.

People—including a good many in Pittsburgh—tend to look upon Pittsburgh as a Loser town. Perhaps it is the Pitts in the name, suggesting depression. Perhaps it is the immigrant millworker image of the population. Perhaps it is the fact that Pittsburgh has never been westerly enough to imply frontiersmen, easterly enough to imply sophisticates, or middle enough to imply stolid prosperity. Perhaps it is the fact that the Steelers went forty years without a championship of any kind. Perhaps it is the soot.

That's all people otta ton think of the Burgh as, a local bartender told me: Soot. (Burghers sometimes refer to their town as the Burgh. For the ow sound in words they say something which I have tried to render here with a short o, as in donton longe, but which is more precisely, to take the case of town, a blend of tehn, tahn and tan. It falls somewhere in between the Boston version of the short a and the East Tennessee version of the long i. The Pittsburgh accent is unique.)

And to be sure, the city's air before 1946 was so bad from the smoke of steel mills that the streetlights often had to be lit at noon. Here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn, wrote H. L. Mencken, that it reduced the whole aspiration of men to a macabre and depressing joke.

James Parton, writing in 1868, called Pittsburgh Hell with the lid taken off, a phrase which Lincoln Steffens used as the title of his exposé of the shame of the town. Anthony Trollope, after stopping in Pittsburgh in 1862, called it the blackest place…I ever saw. At his hotel, on coming out of a tub of water my foot took an impress from the carpet exactly as it would have done had I trod barefooted on a path laid with soot. I thought that I was turning Negro upwards.

But there are ways of putting a better face on the soot. (Not, to be sure, that I want to imply that there need be anything abhorrent about turning Negro upwards. Many a white defensive back would love, would give his eyeteeth, to have black feet.) There was an eternal mist, an everlasting fog in the air, writes Stefan Lorant in Pittsburgh, the richly celebrative photo-and-text book he published in 1964.

The silhouettes of the buildings and those of the boats were soft, at times hardly visible, more felt than seen. The figures of humans as they walked through the streets seemed unreal, like in fairyland. The world was quiet, one could hardly hear the steps of the men who emerged from the fog, coming from nowhere and disappearing into nowhere. The city had about it a dreamlike quality—a phantastic and romantic paradise for photographers and painters. It is strange that no more works of art were done during Pittsburgh's smoky decades.

I gather that the Burgher in the street took the air's condition in his stride, and even developed a certain proprietary feeling toward it. For one thing, the open-hearth (pronounced open-herth) furnaces gave the mills a bright side, too. Nobody ever said anything about the soot and smoke, Steeler owner Art Rooney told me once. This used to be some town, Roy. When those mills lit up the rivers. I remember coming in on the train with [Chicago Bear owner George] Halas from Chicago to New York, we came by Pittsburgh at night and those mills lit up the rivers all the way along.

"Little pieces of soot