Hell with the Lid Off: Inside the Fierce Rivalry between the 1970s Oakland Raiders and Pittsburgh Steelers
400
Hell with the Lid Off: Inside the Fierce Rivalry between the 1970s Oakland Raiders and Pittsburgh Steelers
400Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496214676 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2019 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 662,883 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Steelers a Work of Art
He was the "Chief," the cigar-chomping, bespectacled, and beloved boss of the Pittsburgh Steelers who, for his first forty years as an owner, was the league's most lovable loser.
Small-time politician, big-time gambler, folk hero, and, ultimately, creator of a football dynasty to rival any in NFL history, Arthur Joseph Rooney Sr. was all of these things.
The Pittsburgh patriarch was also something more, according to those who knew him.
Byron "Whizzer" White, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice who was paid a then princely sum of $15,800 to play for Rooney's Pittsburgh team in 1938, thought the Chief a "man's man," the finest person White had ever known. To White, Rooney was an engaging fellow, a fellow one could trust.
To famed sportscaster Howard Cosell, the Rooneys were the people he most respected in sports ownership. They were the finest people, Cosell said, people of integrity and character.
Pro Football Hall of Fame head coach Don Shula had mixed emotions when his Miami Dolphins played Pittsburgh in the 1972 AFC Championship Game. Not only did he have great respect for Steelers head coach Chuck Noll, Shula's former assistant with the Baltimore Colts, but Don also greatly admired Art Rooney. Shula had more respect for Mr. Rooney, he said, than any other NFL owner. He considered Art a tremendous human being.
"You talk about goodness and you begin with Art Rooney," Shula said. "You talk about generosity and once again you start with Art Rooney."
When Rooney was honored with induction in Pro Football's Hall of Fame in 1964, Vince Johnson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said the Steelers' owner had achieved the "inscrutable dignity of a philosopher."
Art's son Dan said the philosophy was simple: Treat everybody the way you'd like to be treated. Give them the benefit of the doubt, but never let anyone mistake kindness for weakness. It was, Dan once said, the Golden Rule with a little bit of Pittsburgh's hard-edged North Side mixed in.
Art Rooney Sr. wasn't the first member of the Steelers organization to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and that was perfectly fine for a man who preferred his players and coaches get the credit for the team's success. Rooney was "Chief," but he liked to be in the background, away from the bright glare of the spotlight.
When the Steelers won their first Super Bowl in January 1975, veteran linebacker Andy Russell noticed the Steelers' owner standing in the recesses of the champagne-lathered locker room. Russell thought Mr. Rooney, with his ever-present stogie and thick shock of white hair, looked like an onlooker, and he made Art go up onstage to receive the Lombardi Trophy.
"Chief, come up," Russell told his boss. "It's your team."
Russell saw it as a sweet moment for an amazing man. Rooney routinely braved the elements — cold, rain, snow — to watch his team practice. When practice ended, the Chief would be in the locker room, talking with his players.
"It was like a family," Russell remembered.
Steelers safety Mike Wagner said watching Mr. Rooney accepting the team's first Lombardi Trophy following Super Bowl IX was the highlight of that January day. The Chief was known as the good-guy owner, a wonderful man. He sought to connect with his players in a personal way, and he did so by always having something good to say and showing interest in his players' lives.
Rooney's players knew the number of years the Steelers had been a losing team. They knew, too, that the move to bring in Dan Rooney to run the Steelers' day-to-day business and the hiring of Chuck Noll as head coach were great moves. But at the end of the day, Wagner said, it was all about the Chief. The Steelers were his dream, his vision.
To fully understand what Franco Harris's Immaculate Reception meant to the Rooney family, the Steelers organization, and their fans, it's important to know Art's history and the history of his team and their community.
Art understood Pittsburgh, understood the people who lived and worked in the shadows of the steel mills. He often said that he once had a steel job. "For half a day," he said. "I never went back to collect my pay."
The great-grandson of immigrants James and Mary Rooney, who fled Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s and moved to Montreal, Art's philosophical wisdom was won in "the Ward," a rugged section of the North Side near Exposition Park. He was of Welsh-Irish descent; the Rooney name in Gaelic is Ruanaidh. His father, Dan Sr., a saloonkeeper, was Welsh; his mother, Margaret, Irish.
Born in Wales, Dan was two years old when the family returned to Canada. In 1884 they moved again, this time to Pittsburgh. Dan opened a saloon in Coulter, a coal town in the Monongahela Valley, and it was there he met and married a coal miner's daughter, Margaret "Maggie" Murray.
Art was born on January 27, 1901, in Coulter, and the family took up residence on the North Side in 1913. Purchasing a three-story building on the corner of Corey Street and General Robinson Street, Dan ran a saloon and café on the first floor, while the family resided upstairs. Their house sat just a block from Exposition Park, which had been home to Honus Wagner and the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball club until 1909.
A product of St. Peter's Parochial School and Duquesne University Prep School, Art was a standout multisport athlete who played football and baseball and was a boxer. He was sought after by Notre Dame football and Boston Red Sox baseball and was named to the 1920 U.S. Olympic boxing team, though he didn't participate in the Games. He studied at Indiana (Pennsylvania) Normal School, now Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and spent his final year at Georgetown University on an athletic scholarship.
Art was Amateur Athletic Union welterweight champion in 1918 and played Minor League Baseball from 1920 to 1925 for the Flint, Michigan, Vehicles and Wheeling, West Virginia, Stogies. In 1925 he was Wheeling's player-manager and as an outfielder appeared in the most games (106) in the Middle Atlantic League, scored the most runs (109), collected the most hits (143), and led the league in steals (58). His .369 batting average was the second highest in the league; his brother Dan was third at .359.
Art loved baseball and would later state he was a better baseball fan than football fan. From time to time he helped support a Negro League baseball team, the great Homestead Grays. Located in Homestead, adjacent to Pittsburgh, the Grays were founded by Cumberland "Cum" Posey and during their existence featured twelve future Hall of Fame inductees, including Josh Gibson, James "Cool Papa" Bell, Oscar Charleston, Martin Dihigo, Judy Johnson, Buck Leonard, et al.
An arm injury cut short Art's promising baseball career, but he continued his involvement in athletics by playing for several semipro football teams. As a teenager he founded the Hope-Harvey Football Club, an enterprise he later claimed was, in a small way, the start of the Steelers.
Art and younger brothers Dan and Jim helped Hope-Harvey win Western Pennsylvania Senior Independent Football Conference titles in the early 1930s. Hope-Harvey was renamed Majestic Radio after gaining a sponsor and was then renamed a second time the James P. Rooneys to promote Jim's run for the state legislature. Along with the Rooneys the team was composed largely of local college players from the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Tech, and Duquesne.
In 1931 Art married Kathleen McNulty, and the couple would have five children — Dan, Art Jr., Tim, John, and Pat, the latter two being twins. They purchased a house on North Lincoln Avenue for $5,000, a three-story redbrick Victorian on Pittsburgh's North Side. Their new home had twelve rooms, high ceilings, and a backyard large enough for a fast-growing family. The boys would water their yard until it was muddy enough for trench warfare. In winters Art Sr. would place boards around the blacktop out front and hose it down so it could freeze over and host hockey games.
Deeply religious, Art Sr. kept for some forty years a weathered red leather-bound prayer book whose pages had yellowed from age and constant use. The book contained a prayer card with Art's marking in pen; the Chief kept a strict count of his devotions. The words in Art Sr.'s prayer book were crucial to the code that the Chief lived by. He went to Catholic Mass every morning, prayed the rosary, and treated everyone with respect.
When the Steelers moved into Three Rivers Stadium, Art Sr. had equipment manager Tony Parisi keep a hidden statue of the Virgin Mary in the Pittsburgh locker room with a lid on it for holy water. Over the years the Chief would sprinkle the holy water in the Steelers' locker room. Parisi eventually gave the Virgin Mary statue to Art Jr., and when the Steelers moved to Heinz Field, Art Jr. sprinkled the statue's holy water into the carpet of the Steelers' new locker room.
Along with his religious beliefs, Art Sr. had one other code: if you wanted to smoke, the tobacco better come from a cigar. The Chief favored fine cigars the same way he favored French provincial furniture, Buick cars, and baseball on the radio. For the most part, Art Sr. did not care about material possessions. He would tell his sons, "The more you own, the less freedom you have."
Art taught his sons not to be what he called "big shots." It's why the Chief drove Buicks his while life, and it's why he scolded his son John for buying a Lincoln and why Tim Rooney kept the Rolls-Royce he purchased hidden from his father. The only degree of vanity his sons ever saw in their father was his brushing lanolin cream into his hair; it was as much a daily ritual as morning Mass, praying the rosary, and smoking a cigar. Appearances mattered to the Chief; he wanted to keep his thick head of hair, which he did. He also kept his clothes neat and his shoes so shiny they could have served as reflective mirrors.
Like a lot of people, Art's life changed dramatically in the watershed year of 1933. In Art's case it was change for the better, despite the country being in the depths of the Great Depression.
The repeal of Pennsylvania's restrictive blue laws had begun in 1931 when the Philadelphia A's successfully challenged a law declaring the illegality of organized sports competitions on Sundays. Because NFL teams scheduled games on Sundays to avoid conflicting with college football games played on Saturdays, Philadelphia Eagles cofounder and co-owner Bert Bell helped convince Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot in 1933 to introduce a bill to the state legislature deprecating blue laws. The bill passed that April, allowing the Eagles to play on Sundays, and became law on November 7.
Anticipating the repeal of the blue laws, Art applied for a franchise, and his request was granted on May 19. Pulling together $2,500 during the Great Depression — an amount equal to $46,000 in modern money — Rooney purchased the Pittsburgh Professional Football Club, Inc., on July 8, 1933. In deference to their baseball club landlords at Forbes Field, the NFL's newest team was named the Pirates.
Art Sr. was the proud owner of a fledgling pro football team, but his passions were still racing, boxing, and baseball. In the summer of 1937 he stopped at Yonkers Raceway and made enough money to fund a follow-up trip to Sarasota. It was here that he earned a reputation as one of the country's top handicappers. With his friend Tim Mara, the owner of the New York football Giants, serving as his bookmaker, Art won a small fortune.
The Chief watched races in his typical fashion — cigar in hand and displaying little emotion whether he won or lost. Yet on this occasion he was so grateful he told Tim he would name his newborn third son after him. Tim Rooney's daughter, Kathleen, married Chris Mara, one of Tim Mara's grandsons. The couple produced two granddaughters who became movie actors — Kate Mara and Patricia "Rooney" Mara.
Pittsburgh's city flag was the inspiration for the fledgling franchise's first uniforms. Gold with black stripes and adorned with the city's crest, they were functional as well as aesthetic. The black stripes were felt overlays, and as such helped ball carriers hold the football more securely.
The Pirates were paced by their player-coach, Forrest Douds. A local legend, Douds was born in nearby Rochester in Beaver County and was a three-time All-America tackle at Washington & Jefferson College in suburban Washington, Pennsylvania. He was All-Pro in the NFL in 1930 for the Providence Steam Roller, which in 1928 was the first New England team to win an NFL title.
The Pirates' inaugural game was a 23–2 loss to the New York Giants before a crowd of twenty thousand. The fans, Rooney thought, didn't get their money's worth. They did one week later, when Pittsburgh earned its first win, a 14–13 final over the Chicago Cardinals. The Pirates finished 3-6-2 in 1933 but made history by being progressive. Pittsburgh tackle Ray Kemp became the first black man to playNFL football for Pittsburgh and one of just two African Americans in the league at that time, the other being Joe Lillard of the Cardinals.
The Pirates' total attendance for their five home games in their first season was fifty-seven thousand. The gap in popularity between the NFL and college football at that time is illustrated by the fact that the Pitt-Duquesne game that fall drew sixty thousand fans.
Declining to retain Douds as head coach — he remained a player for the Pirates for two more seasons — Rooney looked to lure Heartley "Hunk" Anderson, who had recently stepped down as head coach at Notre Dame, and then Earle "Greasy" Neale. Both turned down their offer in favor of coaching jobs at North Carolina State and Yale University, respectively. In 1947–49 Neale would coach the Philadelphia Eagles to three straight Eastern Conference titles and in 1948–49 consecutive NFLChampionships.
In 1934 Rooney turned his attention to the legendary Red Grange, who had recently retired as a player. Grange spurned Rooney's offer in favor of being an assistant coach with the Chicago Bears. In 1936 Pittsburgh earned its first nonlosing season, going 6-6 under coach Joe Bach. Bach was a former Duquesne coach and one of Notre Dame's "Seven Mules" who paved a path for the famed "Four Horsemen." Rooney then made what he later called a mistake when he let Bach go to Niagara University. Rooney would later muse, behind his ever-present cloud of cigar smoke, that if Bach had stayed in Pittsburgh, the organization might have won championships long before the 1970s.
Bach wasn't a racetrack man like Rooney, but his successor, Johnny "Blood" McNally, was. Rooney, by his admission, was at racetracks all the time. Problem was, Johnny Blood was usually there with him. Rooney told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Blood was one of the few coaches who never worried about his players; his players worried about him, Blood being a playboy. A former player for the Pirates and a colorful character, Blood was a fan favorite, and Rooney hired him in part to boost ticket sales.
Pittsburgh suffered severe growing pains in the franchise's early years. Their first seven seasons saw them burn through five head coaches while winning just twenty-two games. Forbes Field was home, but competition with baseball and college football forced Rooney to take his team to nearby cities Johnstown, Latrobe, and Youngstown, as well as Louisville and New Orleans, in attempts to generate fan interest. Rooney said that the biggest thrill in those days wasn't in winning on Sunday but in meeting the club's payroll on Monday.
In 1938 the Steelers signed their first star player, Whizzer White. He led the league in rushing that year and was considered by Rooney to have given as much of himself as any athlete who ever lived. Teams traveled by train in that era, and while most players occupied themselves playing cards, Rooney would see White reading books. Rooney would later say he figured they were law books. As a Supreme Court justice in future years, White became one of the NFL's more illustrious alums.
To represent and pay tribute to the heritage of steel-town Pittsburgh, Rooney adopted the name "Steelers" in 1940. Two years later the Steelers, aimed by head coach Walt Kiesling and triggered by rookie rushing leader "Bullet" Bill Dudley, secured the first winning season in franchise history. Dudley joined the armed forces the following year as the nation engaged in World War II. Depleted wartime rosters caused Rooney to merge his Steelers with the Eagles in 1943 — the team becoming known as the Steagles — and in 1944 the Steelers merged with the Chicago Cardinals (CardPitt).
Throughout the Steelers' struggles, Rooney hid his disappointment behind an unruffled exterior. Still, his inner fires were well banked. "Nobody," he said, "feels any worse than I do about losing."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hell with the Lid Off"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Ed Gruver and Jim Campbell.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Prologue: Immaculate Reception or Deception? 1. Steelers a Work of Art 2. Darth Raider and the Mad Bomber 3. Raider Nation, Franco’s Army, and Knowledge Noll 4. Mean Joe, Marv, and Madden 5. Steelers Feel a Draft in ’74 6. Hard Road to the Big Easy 7. Seeing Stars 8. Of Ice and Men 9. Autumn Wind Is a Raider 10. California Dreamin’ Epilogue: Hot War Turns Cold
