The Bears weren’t very good when I was a kid growing up in Chicago in the early ’70s. The Abe Gibron era left something to be desired.
As a result, I gravitated to another team. In 1972, I actually started to root for the Pittsburgh Steelers, pre- “Immaculate Reception.” Mainly, I liked their uniforms and this new young quarterback named Terry Bradshaw. It doesn’t take much more than that when you’re 12.
Officially, I like to think I was an early rider on the Steelers’ bandwagon. Soon I had plenty of company for a team that was beloved beyond the city borders of Pittsburgh.
Gary Pomerantz revisits those Steelers in a terrific new book, Their Lives Work: The Brotherhood of the 1970s Steelers, Then and Now. He tells the story of how the dynasty was built and then revisits the players more than three decades later. He shows that the bonds created from those great teams still remains strong.
Highly recommended.
In an email Q/A, Pomerantz discusses the book:
What were the origins of this project? How did you get involved?
I first met these Steelers in summer 1981 – 32 years ago. I was an impressionable, 20-year old sportswriting intern at The Washington Post, and my editors handed me a dream assignment: Go to the Steelers’ training camp in Latrobe, Pa. and spend a couple days to see if the NFL’s 1970s dynasty was finally finished.
Nearly all the team’s stars were still there. I interviewed Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, John Stallworth, Lynn Swann, Coach Chuck Noll. As I interviewed Mean Joe Greene, I thought, This guy’s bicep is wider than my thigh! All of these players moved with swagger. They were historic and knew it. And they were all great interviews. They seemed lit from within. The array of talents and personalities on that team was arresting. Even a 20-year-old-sportswriting intern couldn’t miss that. Though I didn’t know it at the time, the seed for this book was planted way back then.
Now football is under the microscope. With the game’s violence under scrutiny, the attention is on brain injury, surely football’s highest cost. I decided that if I was going to examine football for what it gives, and what it takes, who better to use as a case study than the best team I ever saw, those men I met in Latrobe 32 years ago? In my narrative I would follow these men across the decades, through middle age and beyond, to explore football’s gifts and costs.
Why were those Steelers teams so special?
Well, it helps to have nine Hall of Fame players, including four selected in the first five rounds of the 1974 draft (Swann, Stallworth, Jack Lambert, Mike Webster), a drafting feat that has never been equaled.
The defense was the centerpiece of the Steeler empire with Mean Joe Greene, a destructive force of nature, as the alpha leader of the Steel Curtain defensive line. Study the Steeler defensive lineup in 1976: of those 11 players, 10 made the all-pro team at least once, and the eleventh, defensive tackle Ernie Holmes, was, when healthy, an annihilative force.
On offense, the Steelers running game was strong; running back Rocky Bleier was a fireplug lead blocker for Harris – “like having a third guard,” as Noll once said. As the NFL’s rules changed in the late 1970s, opening up the passing game, the Steeler offense necessarily evolved. It possessed just the right components to make that adjustment: a more mature leader and downfield passer in Bradshaw, plus Swann and Stallworth as wide receivers; in the first two seasons under the new passing rules, this tandem caught a combined 213 passes for 33 touchdowns.
Just how good were the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers? When the NFL named its 75th anniversary all-time team in 1994, these Steelers placed five players on that team: Webster, Greene, Lambert, Mel Blount, and Jack Ham. Think about that: Of all the players who had played in the NFL across 7 ½ decades, FIVE were selected from the 1970s Steelers. By comparison, Lombardi’s 1960s Packers, the defining dynasty of the NFL’s first half-century, placed only two men on that team.
It seemed like there was an unique dynamic at the top. Owner Art Rooney was so open and friends with the players, while Chuck Noll was distant, aloof. How did those relationships impact the Steelers?
The 1970s Steelers players shared a love for Art Rooney Sr. (aka The Chief). On a team of great characters, the Chief was the greatest character of all. As the Steelers’ founding owner, he had been a lovable loser for 40 years. As a horse-playing gambler, though, he rated among the very best in all the land. It’s interesting to consider that the Chief’s initial investment in the franchise, $2,500 in 1933, less than he was wagering on some horse races, has paid off handsomely; the franchise’s value today has been estimated as high as $1.2 billion.
The Chief occasionally invited to his house for dinner some of his favorite Steeler players – Bradshaw, Greene, Harris, Dwight White, and their wives. Once he took Ray Mansfield and Andy Russell to the Belmont Stakes, and gave them a few bucks to wager. He remembered the names of his players’ wives and kids, and their birthdays, too.
Art Rooney Sr. was an American archetype, Irish-catholic, up from the streets of Pittsburgh’s north side, his leather-bound prayer book in one hand, the Daily Racing Form in the other. His players wanted to win one for the old man, and by the end of the decade they won four for him.
If the Chief was like a lovable Irish uncle, Noll was more like a stern taskmaster. He kept his emotional distance from his players, running the team more in the manner of a corporate chieftain. It mattered more to Noll that his players were close to each other than to him. Decades later, his former players aren’t close with Noll, but they view him with deep respect.
Talk about the bond that existed with the Steelers back then and still exists today.
Too often we hear it said that a team is like a family. I don’t buy that, never have. Players and coaches bring widely varying biographies to the locker room. The share only a uniform, and a common purpose. They are NOT a family.
But brotherhood? Oh yeah, I absolutely believe in that, and with the 1970s Steelers players that brotherhood remains authentic, deep, and impressive.
What did football give these Steelers? More than those four Super Bowl rings, it gave them each other.
Today’s NFL players will never know the depth of camaraderie that the 1970s Steelers had, and still have. NFL players today jump from team to team for bigger and better contracts.
But the 1970s Steelers played in the years before free agency. Here is a remarkable statistic: Eight Steeler players – Joe Greene, L.C. Greenwood, Terry Bradshaw, Donnie Shell, Lynn Swann, John Stallworth, Jack Lambert and Jack Ham – played a combined 100 seasons in the NFL, a full century. Every one of those seasons they spent as members of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
They were teammates for a decade and more, and so they knew each other intuitively. They knew the women they loved, their favorite brands of beer and cigarettes. They saw each other bloodied and exultant, especially the latter as the greatest team of their time.
You can see and feel their brotherhood today in a hundred different ways. As Joe Greene spoke with me about his old friend Dwight White’s death in 2008 following back surgery, he wept. Frenchy Fuqua and Reggie Harrison still talk twice a day, and have each other on speed dial. Mansfield and Russell hiked mountains together in the far west after they retired, and travelled the world together, too. Stallworth kids call Donnie Shell “Uncle Donnie,” and Shell’s kids call Stallworth “Uncle John.”
Franco Harris hosts private dinners for his old Steeler teammates and their wives to commemorate the big anniversaries of the Immaculate Reception (1972) – the 25th, the 30th and just last December the 40th. Franco and his wife Dana rent out a nice restaurant in Pittsburgh, foot the entire bill, and hand out special keepsakes, once pearl necklaces for the wives, and last year cut-glass footballs from Tiffany’s engraved for the occasion. Franco told me that he is thinking about hosting these dinners for teammates every year because, as he said, “We are getting older and five years is a long time to wait.”
Who were your favorite interviews among the ex-Steelers? Also, was there anybody you wanted to talk to, but couldn’t get?
I conducted more than 200 interviews (in seven states) for this book. One Steeler player I’d hoped to interview but didn’t was Lambert. I left a message on Lambert’s cell phone, but he didn’t get back to me. That’s been his way since he left the game thirty years ago. He has showed up at a few Steeler reunions, but not many. He’s become more like a hermit, the J.D. Salinger of this team.
A few of my favorite Steeler players to interview? Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Greene and John Stallworth stand out. Here’s why: In their own unique ways, they were all-in, engaged and engaging.
I interviewed Bradshaw at a Beverly Hills hotel where I discovered him registered under the name of Gary Cooper, a nice Hollywood touch. Terry didn’t back down from any questions, and never has. He took on every one of them. He was fun and frisky, but also full of complicated emotions about his days with the Steelers. Greene, who played the game with rage, remains emotional, except now he is emotional in a different way. Greene is, at 67, the only surviving member of the Steel Curtain front four. He has eulogized Dwight White, Ernie Holmes and, just a few months ago, L.C. Greenwood. He wept at all three of those funerals. Joe is a straight-up guy, no B.S. in him. He remains all about the team. Together, we watched a DvD of Super Bowl IX against the Vikings in his living room, and as the Steelers asserted control, Greene, watching from his couch, became joyful, and started chanting, “Here we go, Steelers, here we go!” He was young again, and frankly it was beautiful to see.
Stallworth was a Hall of Fame receiver, everyone knows that. But Stallworth also was a highly successful businessman. He earned his MBA while playing for the Steelers, and after retiring from the NFL in 1987, he returned to Huntsville, Ala. There, he built an information technology firm in the aerospace industry, which he later sold for $69 million. Stallworth is now a minority owner of the Steelers. He is deeply thoughtful and introspective. He spoke of his former teammates with such devotion.
We should all be so lucky to have enduring friendships like these.
What was it like to interview Mike Webster’s ex-wife? How did his story play into the overall story of the Steelers?
I conducted multiple interviews with Pam Webster. She is a terrific lady. It’s difficult for most people to comprehend the despair that she and her family suffered. Mike Webster’s demise was slow, and torturous, and tore into the fabric of their family. In our interviews, Pam struggled to hold back tears.
Mike Webster was a Hall of Famer, obsessive in his year-round training regimen. Sometimes he pushed the blocking sled through his snow-filled yard in winter. That was Webby. He played 17 NFL seasons at center, a position no man should play in the NFL for 17 seasons. Sad to say, here is the shorthand summary of Mike Webster’s life: he retired from the NFL at 40, and died at 50, and in between he lost his money, his marriage and precipitating all of that, his mind. Near the end of his life, he lived out of his truck, ate meals bought from vending machines, and Super-Glued decaying teeth back into his mouth. At his death in 2002, he became the first NFL player diagnosed with CTE – Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative brain disease. Mike Webster took too many hits to the head.
The 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers suffered their share of tragedies. Among Steelers players from the years of empire (1974-1979), twelve died before the age of 60. They died from a variety of causes – cancer, heart attacks, accidents involving a car, a falling tree. Quarterback Joe Gilliam died at 49 from a cocaine overdose. Among those dozen, Webster stands apart. The cause of his death was, unequivocally, football.
In a sense, Mike Webster’s death has reshaped, and darkened, the legacy of the 1970s Steelers. In the archives of their legacy, next to those glorious highlight films and four Vince Lombardi Trophies and 12 busts in the Pro Football Hall of Fame (including Noll, the Chief, and Dan Rooney), must go the stained laboratory slides of Mike Webster’s brain.
On NFL Sundays, Pam and her son Garrett Webster sometimes watch Steelers games together. In front of the TV in Garrett’s apartment, they wear their Mike Webster jerseys. Both still love football.
What will be the legacy of the Steelers of the 70s?
Best team ever.
Well, I got quite a New Year’s greeting from a couple of old pals.
