Three Rivers, Three Rings

Three Rivers, Three Rings

The Story of the 1978 Super Bowl Steelers

Published by Sal Maiorana at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Sal Maiorana and Leo Roth

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Table of Contents

Prologue

1. Right Man For The Job

2. From Humble Beginnings

3. Cornerstone is Set in Place

4. A Dynasty Begins to Take Shape

5. The Steelers Become Super

6. The Journey of 1978 Begins

7. Week 1 – Steelers 28, Bills 17

8. Week 2 – Steelers 21, Seahawks 10

9. Week 3 – Steelers 28, Bengals 3

10. Week 4 – Steelers 15, Browns 9

11. Week 5 – Steelers 28, Jets 17

12. Week 6 – Steelers 31, Falcons 7

13. Week 7 – Steelers 34, Browns 14

14. Week 8 – Oilers 24, Steelers 17

15. Week 9 – Steelers 27, Chiefs 24

16. Week 10 – Steelers 20, Saints 14

17. Week 11 – Rams 10, Steelers 7

18. Week 12 – Steelers 7, Bengals 6

19. Week 13 – Steelers 24, 49ers 7

20. Week 14 – Steelers 13, Oilers 3

21. Week 15 – Steelers 35, Colts 13

22. Week 16 – Steelers 21, Broncos 17

23. Week 17 – A Wild Week of Rest

24. Week 18 – Steelers 33, Broncos 10

25. Week 19 – Steelers 34, Oilers 5

26. Week 20 – Super Bowl Hype Week

27. Week 21 – Steelers 35, Cowboys 31

Epilogue

Postscript

About the Authors

*******

Prologue

Joe Greene sat his tired body in front of the television set, settling in for Super Bowl XII.

The 1977 season had been a long one for the proud Pittsburgh Steelers veteran defensive tackle, and now, for the second consecutive season, he was relegated to watching two other teams play for the National Football League championship.

Suddenly, there it was.

A sign in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans hung by a Denver Broncos fan: JOE MUST BE GREENE WITH ENVY.

Greene seethed. But truth be told, Greene was envious.

The Broncos had defeated the Steelers two weeks earlier, 34-21, in an AFC divisional round playoff game, a loss the harshest critics said signaled the official end to a short-lived Pittsburgh dynasty.

Under the guidance of a calculating, smart young coach by the name of Chuck Noll, the Steelers had ended four decades of futility by winning back-to-back Super Bowls following the 1974 and '75 seasons. Only three other teams - Green Bay, Miami and Dallas - had won as many and nobody did it quite like Pittsburgh, its hard-nosed, colorful players dressed in black and gold leaving a trail of opponents black and blue.

The Steelers, who posted a 50-14-1 record from 1972-75, thought it would always be like this.

They won with their Steel Curtain defense led by Greene intimidating opponents, and their ball-control offense powered by the running of Franco Harris. Noll had taught them how to win, and they felt they would always win. They would sip champagne every January, collect rings like kids collect trading cards. They were the Pittsburgh Steelers and nothing more had to be said.

Even when they lost in 1976, they felt it was an aberration, a temporary setback.

Had Harris and Rocky Bleier, their two 1,000-yard rushers, not been injured in a brutal playoff win over Baltimore, they believed they would have defeated the hated Oakland Raiders for a third consecutive year in the AFC Championship Game, instead of losing 24-7.

Jack Lambert, the Steelers young, ultra-intense middle linebacker, put in his teeth after that loss and shrugged how now he'd just have to settle for winning nine Super Bowls if he played 10 years.

The bravado, the attitude, was all a charade.

In 1977, the Steelers were besieged by holdouts, walkouts and wigouts by players. Hit hard by injuries, they started 1-4 on the way to finishing 9-5, needing a Cincinnati loss to Houston on the final day of the regular season to qualify for the playoffs. The Steelers had backed into the postseason and they validated their questionable status in the mistake-filled loss to Denver.

So Greene sat in his living room in Duncanville, Texas watching a second straight Super Bowl.

And there was the sign. Indeed, he was envious.

There is nothing in life to compare to the Super Bowl, Greene said. That's the carrot that hangs in front of you every season. That's what keeps you going through 20 games, then the playoffs. The Super Bowl is a happening. The excitement, the intensity, all week the air is thick with it. Then there's the game. The atmosphere in the stadium right before kickoff is unbelievable. It takes your breath away.

Damn how he wanted to gasp for that air again.

Angered to his core, Greene got up. He found his two Super Bowl rings, set them on the TV set, and watched Dallas beat Denver.

He vowed to be back.

Little did Greene know but his Steelers teammates scattered around the country - the men he reached the highest highs with and felt the lowest lows - were making the same vow. The 1978 season would be different. They had learned how tough winning in the NFL really is and they would not take it for granted ever again. They would recapture lost glory.

And they would do it the Steeler way. With character. With faith. With fortitude.

*******

1. Right Man For The Job

From the start of training camp in the summer of 1978 at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa., Noll had a good feeling about his team. In nine seasons in Pittsburgh he had built a strong foundation, one that could again support a championship if the right buttons were pushed. If he could rekindle that old Steelers' magic.

For Noll, it all started on January 27, 1969 when, at the ripe old age of 37, he was hired by the Rooney family to be the Steelers' 14th head coach.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Noll got plenty of exposure to the sport of football. Analytical by nature, he loved the game's aesthetics, loved how it tested his mind and body.

I liked playing, Noll said. I felt it was ... a test of the whole person. Truly.

He passed all the tests. First as an All-Ohio performer for Cleveland Benedictine High School, then as a standout offensive lineman/linebacker at the University of Dayton where he captained the team his senior year. In a dream come true, Noll was the 21st-round draft selection in 1953 of his hometown Browns. At first, Noll was a messenger guard, shuttling plays into Otto Graham and later he became a tough, smart linebacker.

In seven seasons playing for legendary coach Paul Brown, Noll was part of the Cleveland teams that won five conference titles and the 1954 and 1955 NFL championships.

After the 1959 season, at age 27, Noll shocked his teammates and announced his retirement. It wasn't a premature move in Noll's eyes.

I wasn't worth a damn, he said modestly of his skills as a player. I thought I'd gotten all I could out of playing. I thought my life's work was to be entered.

As a player, Noll often found himself sitting on the bus after games feeling empty, that the climax of the event wasn't nearly as enjoyable as the preparation. As a coach, he could get much more out of the experience. It was a calling.

When the head coaching job opened at Dayton in 1960, Noll applied, but a Pittsburgh native named Stan Zadjel got it instead. Noll was crushed, but not out of luck. The American Football League was kicking off to challenge the established NFL and the much respected Sid Gillman, who would become the first coach to win division titles in both leagues, gave him the final opening on his new Los Angeles Chargers staff.

Feeling fortunate to be hired with no coaching experience, Noll soon had his eyes opened.

I felt I knew everything there was to know about football, he said. I quickly found out that I didn't.

A natural teacher, Noll was a quick study. In six years as a defensive assistant with the Chargers, the team won five division titles and the 1963 AFL championship. That success caught the eye of another young coaching prodigy by the name of Don Shula, who hired Noll to be his defensive backfield coach in 1966 for the NFL's Baltimore Colts. In Noll's three seasons on the Chesapeake, the Colts, led by the great Johnny Unitas, lost just seven games, winning the NFL title in 1968 before losing Super Bowl III to Joe Namath's New York Jets.

Back in Pittsburgh, the pro football team Namath rooted for as a kid was completing a 2-11-1 season, its fifth consecutive losing campaign. Once again the Steelers were in need of a coach. Owner Art Rooney considered George Allen. Then he heard of this good young assistant in Baltimore.

Rooney dispatched his eldest son and confidant, Dan, to interview him.

Noll got the job.

Could Noll have known what he was getting into?

*******

2. From Humble Beginnings

In 1969, the Steelers hardly had the aura that accompanied the Chicago Bears of the 1940s, Detroit Lions and Cleveland Browns of the '50s or the Green Bay Packers of the '60s.

This was a lovable-loser franchise owned by a beloved winner in life, Art Rooney, who fielded only eight winning teams in his first 36 years of ownership.

Born in Coultersville, Pa., on January 27, 1901, Rooney, the oldest of nine children, moved to Pittsburgh with his family at a young age and spent his boyhood on the very site where Three Rivers Stadium would be built. Affectionately called The Chief, he lived in the same modest home just a short walk from the stadium up until his death in 1988 at age 87.

Growing up, Rooney excelled in boxing, baseball and football - he turned down an offer from Knute Rockne to play at Notre Dame to instead attend Indiana (Pa.) Normal College - and he carried his love of sports into adulthood.

With $2,500, allegedly his winnings from a particularly good day at the racetrack, Rooney founded the Pittsburgh Pirates pro football club in 1933 at the height of The Depression. The only teams still in existence from that time are the Chicago Bears, the Chicago Cardinals (now located in Arizona), the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants.

Rooney, who regaled reporters for decades with his ever-present cigar clenched in his fingers, once said he would have joined the NFL much sooner but blue laws in Pennsylvania that deemed it illegal to work on Sundays made it too risky.

I had a team we called the Hope Harvey's, Rooney said in Jerry Green's book, Super Bowl Chronicles. Harvey was the doctor and I didn't have enough money to pay him, so I named the team after him. That and 'hope', because we were always hoping.

The Pirates - who later became the Steelers in 1940 to honor the city's heartbeat industry - played their home games at Forbes Field before sparse crowds.

In the 1950s when the Steelers struggled to hit .500 and the offense was less than imaginative, the Steelers started every game by diving running back Fran Rogel, a Penn Stater, into the line. Fans would entertain themselves by chanting Hi Diddle Diddle, Rogel up the middle!

With little money to be made in pro football at the time, the team was little more than Rooney's hobby.

The team operated out of a room at the Fort Pitt Hotel which Rooney kept open 24 hours. Politicians, athletes, actors and sports groupies stopped by when moved. A card game was always playing.

Meanwhile, when it came to scouting, the Steelers' system was, to be kind, less than high tech. They found out about players by subscribing to newspapers from around the country supplemented by the Street & Smith Yearbook. They took this system into the 1960s.

Incredibly, some pretty good players fell into the Steelers' lap.

Colorado All-American back Byron Whizzer White, the honored Supreme Court Justice whom Rooney gave a then-record $15,800 contract to in 1938 to shock the football world, was a first-round pick.

Running back Bill Dudley (first round, 1942), a triple threat who led Pittsburgh to its first winning season in 1942; quarterback Bobby Layne, a free agent from Chicago who wound up his career leading the Steelers to three winning seasons in five years (1958-62); Johnny Blood McNally, a notorious player and coach in the 1930s; and defensive tackle Ernie Stautner (second round, 1950), are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Still, the Steelers seemed to always lose out on many more great players. Their history with quarterbacks is the stuff of NFL infamy.

Hall of Famers Sid Luckman and Layne achieved stardom with the Chicago Bears, who used first-round picks acquired from Pittsburgh to select each. Native son Johnny Unitas was a ninth-round pick of the Steelers in 1955 who was cut in training camp, enabling him to achieve immortality with Baltimore. Len Dawson was on the roster then traded. Jack Kemp was cut.

You know the Steelers had a history of bad first-round draft choices. We wound up discarding them, the way we did with Unitas, Rooney would later recall. We missed so many good players over the years.

That all would change with the arrival of Chuck Noll.

Before Noll, Rooney went through 15 head coaches, one of them twice (Joe Bach) and one of them three times (Walt Kiesling). In the early days, there were records like 2-10 (1934), 2-9 (1938) and 1-9-1 (1939 and 1941).

Behind Dudley, Kiesling fielded a 7-4 playoff team in 1942 then lost all his good players to Uncle Sam and World War II. The team survived by combining rosters with the Philadelphia Eagles. The team was called the Steagles, and they went 0-10 in 1944.

After the war, Dr. Jock Sutherland, a coaching legend at the University of Pittsburgh, was hired by Rooney in a bold move designed to gain respectability, and Sutherland put together an 8-4 squad using the single-wing offense his second season in 1947.