Quiet Strength (8 page)

In addition to many great players, that team included some really solid Christians. Because of our physical and rough style of play, we weren’t necessarily seen as a group of believers. But even head coach Chuck Noll, who was a devout Catholic, often used Bible verses to inspire us. When Mark Brunell, Tony Boselli, Kyle Brady, and other Jacksonville Jaguars players were criticized in the late 1990s for not being tough enough on the football field because they were Christians, I could only think of our Steelers teams of the 1970s and smile.

Larry Brown, Jon Kolb, Donnie Shell, and John Stallworth all really worked hard to put God first in everything they did, every day. “What would Jesus do?” they asked, well before bracelets and bumper stickers made that phrase popular. Donnie, in particular, was one of the most fired-up Christians I had ever met. He was the captain of the special teams when I arrived, and he was determined to become a starter on defense, even with the great players the Steelers had then. He and John Stallworth were best friends, and both were great examples for me.

Jon Kolb and Larry Brown, two of the biggest, strongest linemen I knew, both had mild, gentle spirits. When I arrived in Pittsburgh, they were still known as the Steel Curtain and had a tough, somewhat negative image. Once I stepped inside the circle, I realized how far from the truth that perception was. It was refreshing to see how different these guys were from any other group I had ever been around.

As I alluded to earlier, I had always had a problem with my temper. I often earned technical fouls in my high school basketball games and was known to lose my cool in football games as well. In high school and college, I was a perfectionist, usually riding my teammates rather than encouraging them.

“Venting,” I called it.

“Dumb,” my dad called it.

Our exchanges usually ran something like this:

“Did you change the referee’s call?”

“No.”

“Did it make the situation better?”

“No, but I felt better, and then I could focus.”

“Well, you might have felt better faster if you were thinking about the next play instead of taking three or four or ten plays to ‘vent.’ You waste a lot of emotion and energy in venting or in worrying about an injustice or something you can’t do anything about.”

That was excellent advice from my dad, but I wasn’t ready to listen. It wasn’t until those Steelers invited me into their Bible study that I really began to change. There I was exposed to guys I respected who were constantly in God’s Word—always praying and reading their Bibles together. These professional players were not the weak and the meek; they were some of the biggest, toughest guys I had ever met. And yet they were drawing their strength and purpose from God.

I had known from a young age that I was going to heaven, but I had never fully engaged God and let Him direct my life moment by moment until I saw those guys doing it. I had been a good kid, by and large; I stayed out of trouble, was usually polite, and stood up for my values. Yet the concept of putting God first in
everything
I did hadn’t been my primary focus. Finally I understood, and I started to move from being a casual Christian to a fully committed follower of Jesus.

My crash course in playing safety must have worked, because I was still on the team as we headed into the final cuts before the regular season. Some of my success resulted from my efforts to absorb the defensive scheme by asking questions and watching film on my own, but a good bit of it stemmed from the fact that I bought into Coach Noll’s approach so quickly.

At the Steelers minicamp, shortly after the draft, I had taken to heart Coach Noll’s words about what it took to win in the National Football League.

“Champions don’t beat themselves,” he told us. “If you want to win, do the ordinary things better than anyone else does—day in and day out. We’re not going to fool people or outscheme them. We’re just going to outplay them. Because we’ll know what we’re doing. When we get into a critical situation, we won’t have to think. We’ll play fast and fundamentally sound.”

Chuck Noll developed much of his coaching philosophy from the legendary Paul Brown, and I got mine from Chuck. I tell people that I’m from the Paul Brown school of football.

It was the summer of 1977, and I still hadn’t made the team.

In those days, the relationship of the football clubs and the media was different. Local reporters traveled on the team charter to games. I vividly recall Dwight White, our Pro Bowl defensive end, sitting in the back of the plane, blowing cigar smoke rings while talking with Vito Stellino, one of Pittsburgh’s beat writers at the time. Vito always had good information, in part because he was good at what he did and in part because he sat in the back of the plane with Dwight White.

After training camp, we stayed at the historic William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. Coach Noll made the rookie room assignments alphabetically, so my roommate was linebacker Robin Cole, the first-round draft choice from the University of New Mexico. I had met Robin at a college all-star game our senior year, so we were pretty good friends by then.

We played our last preseason game on a Friday night and had the weekend off until Monday’s team meeting. The last cut would be made on Saturday or Sunday, whenever the coaching staff made their decision. On Saturday morning, I picked up a paper and immediately turned to Vito Stellino’s article detailing which guys were going to get cut. My name was on Vito’s list. I figured that if the story was in the paper, Vito must have gotten his information from the coaches, Dwight, or some other “reliable source.”

I decided not to leave the hotel all weekend. I didn’t want to miss that phone call. The last thing I wanted was to walk into Monday morning’s team meeting and get cut in front of a roomful of guys. Meanwhile, my roommate, Robin, was gone for much of the weekend. He was relaxing—coming and going from the hotel with the confident swagger of a first-round draft pick.

For the second time in four months, I sat for two solid days beside a phone that never rang. I kept calling down to the front desk. “Are you sure there aren’t any calls for my room?”

Monday rolled around. It was a hot, steamy September morning in Pittsburgh. I drove to the facility with Robin, sneaking into the back of the locker room so nobody could see me. They had left my stuff in my locker. I was just about to take my personal belongings when I saw my name plate on my locker—it was still there. Suddenly I realized,
I’ve made the team.
I played it cool, making sure everything was hung up neatly, acting as if I had just been doing a bit of rearranging.

I don’t think Coach Noll even realizes what an important lesson I learned that weekend. It was an unforgettable and excruciating experience, that entire weekend of sitting and waiting. To this day, I make sure to tell our guys exactly when cuts are coming, and I try to give them a one-hour time window to stay by their phones.

Early in that first season, the issue of drinking and drugs—something I thought I’d already dealt with—finally came to a climax for me. During my first road trip as a Steeler, everyone was given two beers as we boarded the flight home after the game. I certainly wasn’t prepared for this, and I wasn’t sure what I should do.

I definitely wanted to fit in and be like everyone else. But I also knew that if I drank the beer, I probably wouldn’t be able to drive once we landed in Pittsburgh. Fortunately, I saw a few of the other guys give their beer away, and that little nudge of positive peer pressure helped me not to give in to something I didn’t really want to do.

That year, 1977, I had a fair amount of playing time at the safety position, and I ended up intercepting three passes for the season. One of those interceptions came in a game that was remarkable, at least from my point of view.

Back in May, when I had been anxiously sitting by my phone during the NFL draft, the Steelers had selected a quarterback named Cliff Stoudt from Youngstown State University in the fifth round. Now, in an October game at Houston, both starting quarterback Terry Bradshaw and backup Mike Kruczek were knocked out of the game with injuries. Cliff was on the inactive roster that day, so I was brought in at quarterback to finish up the fourth quarter.

I played terribly. I fumbled a snap, and Rocky Bleier and I fumbled a handoff. I didn’t realize the backs took the ball differently at Pittsburgh than they had done in college. To make matters worse, I threw two interceptions near the end of our 27–10 loss. In the process, I became the last player in NFL history to intercept a pass
and
throw an interception in the same game.

I felt awful about my performance because I knew I had cost us the game. Despite my disappointment, however, I realized that I had done something very few people would ever do. I took snaps from Mike Webster, handed off to Franco Harris, and threw passes to Lynn Swann and John Stallworth—all during a regular-season NFL game. If I had practiced with the offense at all, the fumbles wouldn’t have occurred. However, I once again began focusing on how I could continue to improve as an NFL safety.

Monday was an off-day for players, but that day, while I was watching TV, the phone rang. It was Coach Noll’s secretary; the coach wanted to see me right away.

When I arrived in his office, Coach Noll updated me on the situation: Bradshaw was getting his wrist X-rayed, and Kruczek would be out for an extended period of time. They were in the process of trying to locate Neil Graff, a quarterback who had been with us during training camp and was now somewhere in Canada on a hunting trip. In the meantime, Coach Noll told me to attend the quarterbacks meeting that afternoon.

I immediately wondered about Cliff Stoudt. After all, Coach Noll had drafted him, not me. Cliff might have struggled in the preseason, but I had been playing defense and hadn’t practiced one minute at quarterback.

Coach Noll answered before I could even ask my question. As always, his assessment was brief and to the point: “We have some questions at quarterback right now. As the week goes on, we’ll have a better idea about Terry, Neil, and Cliff. We’ll see who gives us the best chance to win. If you do, you’re going to play. If we have another option that gives us a better chance, you’ll go back to safety.”

After the quarterbacks meeting, I raced home and began calling my buddies. “I might be starting on Monday Night Football against Cincinnati . . .
at quarterback.
”

The next day they did locate Neil Graff, and Terry Bradshaw checked out healthy enough to play with a cast. I was back at safety. But even so, in the days and years to follow, I drew great satisfaction from knowing that Coach Noll had had confidence that I could go in and play quarterback—and direct all of those future Hall of Famers.

Some people had suggested to me that I wasn’t drafted as a quarterback because of my race. At first, I didn’t agree; I just figured that playing quarterback in the NFL was completely different from playing in college. But after talking with coaches and scouts that first year, I grew less certain. A number of them said they had passed on me in the draft because of quantifiable characteristics such as my height and arm strength. Later in the season, however, when we played guys like Bob Griese, Joe Ferguson, and Fran Tarkenton, I would deliberately walk by, look them in the eye, and measure my height against theirs. I was as tall as each one of them. I began to wonder if race had indeed played a role. To make matters worse, when I saw the backup QBs . . . now
that
was really frustrating. A lot of them just weren’t very good. I continued to wonder.

During that week in the middle of the 1977 season, I realized that quarterbacking in the NFL was ultimately no different from playing quarterback at any other level. I believe I could have done it, given the opportunity. But I didn’t get that opportunity, and whether it was because of my race or because of some legitimate factor, it was time to move on.

In the following off-season, I was able to work out regularly at the stadium. I added about eight pounds to my frame, reaching 188 pounds. Back then, the Steelers and the Pirates shared Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, so I tried to schedule my off-season workouts—which fell during the Pirates’ regular season—for the middle of the day. I often wrapped up my workout and headed next door to the Pirates clubhouse just in time to see guys like John Candelaria, Bert Blyleven, Dave Parker, Phil Garner, Rennie Stennett, and Omar Moreno.

The Pirates clubhouse was noisy, worlds apart from the silence and anxiety of a football locker room on game day. The baseball players were frying chicken and playing cards, yelling back and forth, answering mail, and listening to radios. In the middle of the bedlam, I saw my first Spanish-language Bible as Manny Sanguillen sat in his locker—as I learned he always did—quietly reading.

The next season, when the Pirates had added Bill Madlock and Tim Foli and were on their way to a World Series win with their “We Are Family” theme, I asked Willie Stargell about the noisy atmosphere in the clubhouse on game day. “Isn’t it a little distracting?”

Willie flashed that broad smile of his and then laughed as he decided the question was funnier than he first thought. He looked at the wiry, twenty-four-year-old Steeler in front of him and spoke thoughtfully. “I’ve been playing baseball for a long time, Tony. When I look over in your locker room on game day, I can’t believe how tight everybody is. As for me, every time I’ve ever heard the umpire get ready to start a game, he always says, ‘Play ball!’ I’ve never once heard him say, ‘Work ball!’ I think that’s something you football guys have forgotten.”