Noll Chuck - The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the 70s, and the Fight for Americas Soul

JACK LAMBERT

PROLOGUE

ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, 1969, THE FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD COMMISSIONER of the National Football League checked into a Jacksonville hotel. Forewarned that a charismatic, game-changing quarterback was in town for an all-star football game, hotel security was doing its best to hold fans at bay. But the commissioner couldn't help but notice the bevy of young women in the hotel's lobby and lounge, waiting expectantly for the star to make his entrance. This wasn't the kind of crowd Pete Rozelle was used to. Red-faced men in fedoras were more his speed. He settled into his suite, ordered a rusty nail and a bowl of nuts from room service and waited, just like the others, for the guy the kids were calling Broadway Joe.

Five days earlier, Joe Namath had led the New York Jets to victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Rozelle had read William N. Wallace's column for The New York Times the morning after the game:

Namath won with deception, handing the ball off when the Colts expected pass, and passing when the Colts were thinking run. When he threw the ball, it wasn't to Don Maynard, one of the top wideouts in pro football, but to a little known possession receiver named George Sauer Jr. He called the Jets plays brilliantly and, despite a stirring effort by legendary Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas, Baltimore played the patsy. Namath even guaranteed a Jets win days before kickoff. And his ability to back up his claim--seemingly singlehandedly--broke every tenet of proper pro football behavior.

But what made Rozelle wince the most was what happened after the game. As Namath left the field, filmed for posterity in heroic slow motion by NFL Films, he threw up his right index finger, signaling I'm Number One . Namath was the exact opposite of what Rozelle wanted from his league and his players--he was a bigger story than the game itself.

Rozelle firmly believed that professional football was America's favorite sport because it appealed to what the new president of the United States, Richard Nixon, defined as the "silent majority"--working men and their families. "They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care," Nixon decreed. Working men belonged to a union and drove the economic engine that made the United States the envy of the world. They wore hard hats--steelworkers, autoworkers, construction workers, meat packers, mechanics, and tradesmen. They'd fought hard to gain middle-class status and they resented the entitled youth culture that was tearing the country apart. They liked to place friendly wagers on games and chased shots of whiskey with their city's hometown beer. These men loved professional football because most of them had played the game once upon a time themselves and found it to be an apt metaphor for the hard and honest lives they lived.

Rozelle understood that the National Football League had deep roots in America's industrial cities--Green Bay, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York. With their flattop hair-cuts and high-top black shoes, NFL players were the sons of workers who didn't draw attention to themselves. Like their fathers, they knew how fragile a job was and the importance of getting on with the men they worked with, especially those who paid their wages. The NFL owners and coaches were paternal authoritarians. To play football was to be a tool of the establishment, and the hierarchy of the game mirrored the traditional social structure of the culture. There was a top, and there was a bottom. The power flowed from owner to general manager to coaches. And on the bottom were the players. They kept their mouths shut and sacrificed for the good of the team.

Joe Namath should have fit right in. He was born and raised in western Pennsylvania, the son of a steelworker at the Babcock and Wilcox works in Beaver Falls. His father, John, took young Joe through the mill when he was eleven so he could feel the searing heat, choke on the dust and fumes, and shudder under the constant grind and crash of the machinery. He got the message--make something of yourself so you don't have to come here for the rest of your life.

Namath grew up looking for an edge--something to keep him from walking through the B&W gates the day after he graduated high school. He found it at a pool hall called The Blue Room. At fifteen he walked into the joint and lost his mother's grocery money. From then on, Namath would be the hustler, not the hustled. He put on a seemingly effortless cool--sitting cross-legged and wearing sunglasses for the baseball team photo, smoking and drinking with male and female acquaintances from the Blue Room--while working tirelessly to perfect his athletic skills. Joe Namath acted as if he didn't need anyone. As quarterback, he led Beaver Falls High to a Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL) championship. As a left fielder, he led the baseball team to one, too. Then he went off to play for Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama.