Chapter 2 - Looking for Terry

This is a dream I still have on occasion: We’re playing the New York Giants, driving for a game-winning touchdown. Three Rivers Stadium is packed. Fifty thousand, three hundred fifty people are on their feet, screaming. I can barely hear myself calling the signals. The ball is hiked to me, and I start scanning the field, looking for a receiver. I’m waiting, waiting, waiting for one of my teammates to break free. Suddenly, Lawrence Taylor breaks through my offensive line and is coming right at me. Nothing is going to stop him. I can see purpose in his cold eyes. He is going to tear me apart. I can hear his ferocious roar, louder than the entire screaming crowd. He hits me. There is nothing I can do but try to protect myself. Taylor grabs hold of me and rips off my head. It’s just rolling around on the ground; my teammates pick it up and glue it back onto my neck. And this was in the old days, before we had Super Glue, so they had to use that old-fashioned white paste that never held it in place very well.

Somehow, wobbling and shaky, I get up and go back into the huddle to call the next play.

I played fourteen seasons in the National Football League. I played in 187 games, leading the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl victories. I threw my last pass in 1983, and since that day, I have been out with an elbow injury. I never officially retired. I may still be on the Steelers injury list. There is still some part of me hoping they call and tell me they need me to start next Sunday.

After my playing career ended, I started working in broadcasting. For those of you without computers, that’s more than forty years. I couldn’t begin to calculate how many thousands of NFL games I’ve played in and watched. So believe me when I tell you it is the same game, but it is very different.

There are still eleven men on a side, four plays to make ten yards, a touchdown is six points, and the team who scores the most points wins, but just about every other aspect of the game is different. For example, the extra point can now be a plural. Please note, I am not saying the game we played was better. I still love it just as much as I did when I was throwing a football against the side of our garage, but it definitely was different.

That’s one reason it bothers me when people use statistics to compare my career with great quarterbacks who came later. Believe me on this, I have the greatest respect for players like Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and John Elway. I love watching Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Joe Burrow, but I have to admit, it does bother me to see them put on a pedestal and called the greatest of all time. I want to defend my contemporaries. I feel as though I have to be the voice of great players like Johnny Unitas, Y. A. Tittle, Norm van Brocklin, Sonny Jurgenson—all great players who have mostly been forgotten. Please don’t try to tell me that Roger Staubach wouldn’t be a star today. Or Fran Tarkenton couldn’t win football games. He could have been the original Patrick Mahomes. There has never been a better leader on a football field than Bart Starr, but since he played on black-and-white TV, young fans barely know his name.

I know people will consider this sour grapes, but I’d rather refer to it as a fine whine.

There is a joke that athletes tell about their careers: The longer I’m retired, the better I get. Well, that’s not true for me or the people I played with. The more time goes by, the worse we get. We keep moving down the various all-time great lists for one reason: the numbers.

Comparisons between players of different eras generally are based on statistics. Everything about the game today is analyzed for the people watching at home. “With that completion, Buzz Lightyear now ranks seventh all-time on complete passes for seven yards or more in the first two minutes of the second quarter.” Come on. The game is dissected down to shoe size, mostly because we have the capability, and it gives announcers something to talk about.

Stats, at least to me, are sophisticated fairy tales. I remember a play when I tossed the ball maybe six yards to the great John Stallworth, and he ran seventy yards for a touchdown, breaking tackles, bouncing off defenders while I was watching him, cheering. In the stats I got credit for throwing a seventy-four-yard touchdown pass.

As far as I have always been concerned, there’s only one stat that makes a difference: winning. The way I was coached was that my job was not to compile impressive numbers, not to throw for thousands of yards and hundreds of touchdowns, not to go into the Hall of Fame. My job was to win football games. I’ve had people tell me that I am not considered one of the twenty-five greatest quarterbacks because my career statistics do not measure up to Dan Marino, Dan Fouts, or other great players.

There’s a big part of me that thinks, I don’t care what people think. Then I go off and defend myself because way down deep inside I do care. We worked incredibly hard to accomplish incredible feats, although Steelers fans still ask me why we didn’t win a fifth Super Bowl ring for the thumb. I’m a competitive person. That’s my nature. I love it when I beat Tammy Bradshaw on the golf course, although admittedly I don’t always collect on our bets. And while I generally do not brag because I want people to like me and most people don’t like a braggart—in fact, no one doesn’t brag better than me—I have mostly been low-key about my career. I rarely even wear my Hall of Fame jacket or carry around my Most Valuable Player trophies, but I take tremendous pride in what I accomplished, what we accomplished. So okay, yes, it bothers me.

I’ll tell you how I judge the greatness of a player. Is his team winning? Is he a difference maker? Is he the one responsible for winning? For losing? Is he the one the team depends on to make the great play during crunch time? How many games did his team win? How many Super Bowls? That’s it, winning. I brought my team to four Super Bowls. We won four Super Bowls. When I ride that horse, there are people who rightly point out, well, you had great players and that’s why you got your four rings. And I respond, “You’re absolutely right. If you don’t have a great team and great coaches, you’re not going to win one. But one thing I know for sure: My car isn’t going anywhere without a steering wheel.”

I remember when Fox brought in Tom Brady to join our Fox NFL Sunday team. We already were a pretty accomplished group. If we all took off our Super Bowl rings and tossed them on a hard table, they would make a whole lot of noise.

So when Tom came in with seven Super Bowl victories, someone wondered aloud why we needed him, pointing out, “That guy lost three Super Bowls!”

I find myself being criticized for completing only 51.9 percent of passes in my career, almost exactly the same as my 52.5 percent in college and exactly the same as the percentage of alcohol in my award-winning bourbon. Although admittedly, I never have figured out what 0.9 percent of a completed pass is. People tell me, “Well, Terry, you weren’t very accurate, were you?” They point out Patrick Mahomes has completed 66 percent of his pass attempts, Brady had 64 percent, Josh Allen has 64 percent.

Here’s a stat for you: In my entire career, I threw for more than three hundred yards in a game only seven times. Brady did it 113 times. But three of my seven 300-yard games were in the postseason, two of them in Super Bowls. The reason that percentage stat is so misleading is because during my career, the basic offense was far more oriented toward running the football. I was throwing to two, maybe three, potential receivers.

In the 1970s most teams ran the ball more than we passed. We claimed we passed mostly to keep defenses honest, to open up the game for our running backs. Today the rules protect quarterbacks. The league has built a magnetic fence around quarterbacks. Those rules give quarterbacks a little more time to look for an open receiver, and they have as many as five options to throw to. I wasn’t even in the top fifty in percentage of passes completed, but of the quarterbacks ahead of me on that list, only Joe Montana played when I did.

That stat was not the measure of success it is now.

Here is an example of how stats can be used to make a point: Tom Brady won seven Super Bowls and lost three. That’s a plus four! I won four and didn’t lose any. That’s also a plus four. And people say I’m not good with big numbers.

When I played, the rules were pretty basic. Players were allowed to use pretty much anything short of a lasso and taser to make a tackle. Our equipment was just beginning to evolve from little more than motorcycle helmets with a single bar into the futuristic space helmets with cages and plastic shields used today. I still have the helmet I wore my rookie season. It was essentially a plastic shell. It was still two or three years before they added foam padding. I often hear broadcasters describe a receiver as having “great hands.” No, he does not have great hands. He has great gloves. Those gloves make a huge difference. They make those spectacular one-handed catches possible.

Our receivers used Stickum on their hands. It was like glue, and even that got banned because it made it too difficult for other players to handle the ball. We didn’t have anything like tents on the sideline and concussion protocols to protect players. When my bell got rung, a coach stood in front of me, held up three fingers, and asked, “How many fingers you see?”

“Two!”

“Okay. Close enough, go get ’em, pardner.”

We didn’t have computers breaking down an opponent’s tendencies down by down. We had: “See that guy? Make sure you block him.”

The entire structure of the organization was different. During my career, the most coaches we ever had was six; teams now have as many as twenty-eight coaches, assistant coaches, and support staff. No human being can name all the coaching titles on a football team. Maybe they need those computers to keep track of all the coaches. Through most of my career, I never had an offensive coordinator. I never had a quarterback coach. I had Chuck Noll telling me as we walked out to the field to start the second half in Cleveland, “If you don’t play better, I’m benching your ass.”

Everything was different. We had cooks; today teams have registered dietitians and personal chefs. For fitness we had a few weights in a converted storeroom next to the locker room; now athletes have beautiful performance centers run by several trainers, strength coaches, and physical therapists. We had running hot water; now they have whirlpool hot tubs and swimming pools. Sometimes on a Friday before a game if our equipment manager, Tony Parisi, had time, he would give me a rubdown; now teams have several massage therapists.

When I came off the field after a set of downs, our coaches told me essentially, “Go sit over there, Terry, and stay out of our way.” Today, while the defense is on the field, a quarterback sits on a heated bench surrounded by four coaches using an iPad to dissect the last set of plays. But for me, maybe more than anything else, probably the greatest difference between quarterbacks of my era and today is that we called our own plays. I take great pride in that fact. We didn’t have coaches sitting up in heaven, watching the game on a monitor communicating information by satellite to the offensive coordinator on the sidelines, who consults a computer printout that provides the most successful plays to use given that particular down and yardage, then relays that decision to the quarterback through a speaker system in his helmet, and the quarterback looks at the plays on his wristband, then finally calls the play. He hands the ball off to a running back who charges into the line for a few yards.

A team’s playbook today includes literally hundreds of different plays. I called all my own plays. Nobody told me what plays to run when. I looked at the down and yardage we needed and decided what play to call. We all did it that way. My good friend Howie Long told me, “Well, I could have called your plays. You only had four of them.” Not quite true, as I respond, “We could run them to the right or the left, so that’s eight right there.”

Admittedly our playbooks were not nearly as extensive as they are today. But you cannot tell me that a quarterback who calls his own plays in the huddle with no help from the sidelines is not playing a very different game than a quarterback being fed mumbo-jumbo by a voice in his helmet, then consulting the billboard he’s wearing on his wrist.

I had maybe forty plays I could call. Each week we had a different game plan. One week it might be run on first down, and if it worked, run on second down. I had twenty runs on second down I could call depending on the yardage we needed. The next week it might be short pass plays on first down. I had ten pass plays I could call. Down and distance, down and distance. Take what the defense gives you. I would call my play and go up to the line of scrimmage. I would look at the defense, and if I changed my mind, I would call an audible. I would change the play. That was based on recognition and instinct.

In the huddle I listened to my teammates. I remember calling a post one time for John Stallworth. He was supposed to run ten or twelve yards downfield, then cut toward the middle. “I’m not gonna run that route, Brad,” he told me in the huddle. “I’ve got my guy set up. I’m going to go to the corner.”

“Great. Let’s do it.”

We didn’t need to consult the CIA to confirm that plan. I appreciated the greatness of John Stallworth. We just figured, go for it. Stallworth faked to the middle, cut outside, caught the pass, and ran sixty yards for the touchdown. How many times did Franco Harris tell me, “Don’t call that. I wanna run a double wing”? You got it, big guy. It was like being the CEO, the chairman of the board listening to the people who do the work. I always had an idea what I wanted to call. But I listened. I asked questions. And then I called my play. My play.

The coaches were spectators. Head coach Chuck Noll had no idea what play I was calling. He’d be watching and thinking, Oh, that’s an interesting call, and when I got to the sideline, he’d blast me for it.

The game just wasn’t that complicated. The great Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry created a sensation when he introduced the Landry Shift. When his offensive linemen got to the line of scrimmage, they would suddenly stand up, then get down in their stance. It was like playing the Radio City Rockettes. But what Landry actually was doing was disguising his offensive movements. When his linemen were standing, his backs would move, and the defense couldn’t see where they were going. He was hiding his formation. “Hey, what happened to that guy?” Today the game is all motion, all movement and blitzes, designed to fool the computers. It gets complicated.

There. Got my rant done. I wanted to get all that in my book. As people who know me will attest, I don’t necessarily think in chronological order. I get started on a thought. I’ll follow its winding path to the end, unless I change my mind in the middle. My brain is the opposite of AI. It’s TB. Even I never know what comes next, what I will do or say on a Sunday afternoon. It definitely keeps life interesting.

I couldn’t have anticipated any of these things when I was the first choice in the 1970 NFL Draft. I definitely did not anticipate being the first pick. I believed I would go in the second or third round—that was a nice comfortable place for me. I definitely did not think the Steelers would select Terry Bradshaw from little Louisiana Tech.

One year earlier Pittsburgh had used the thirtieth pick to draft Notre Dame quarterback Terry Hanratty. Notre Dame had been ranked fifth in the country in 1969, and he had been their quarterback. In addition, Terry was close to a local boy, having grown up in Butler, Pennsylvania, less than an hour down the highway from Pittsburgh. Louisiana Tech wasn’t ranked; we weren’t even in the same division. The Steelers already had Notre Dame’s great quarterback, so why in the world did Chuck Noll draft me?

I wasn’t the slightest bit prepared for that. I would not have picked me first. I didn’t know who I was when I landed in Pittsburgh. I definitely was not prepared to play in the NFL, and I certainly was not prepared for the attention and the pressure that came with being the first pick. The Steelers told the media wonderful things about my ability. Mr. Rooney, the owner, said, “We had numerous trade offers for the number one pick, but most of them were for a lot of junk. However, we felt none offered us enough talent to equal the worth of Bradshaw.”

Baltimore Colts General Manager Don Klosterman told the Associated Press that I just might be “the greatest quarterback to ever come out of an American college.” Me? I’d always had confidence in my ability, but as Mickey Slaughter told a reporter, “It’s a lot more complex than anything Terry has had in college.”

My father was very happy the Steelers drafted me. When they had played an exhibition game in Shreveport in 1952, he had driven their team bus. He never forgot it. “I got a $20 tip,” he said. “The most I ever got from any other team was $5.”

The Steelers had finished 1–13 the previous season, tied for the worst record in pro football. They had lost thirteen consecutive games, so there wasn’t a lot of room for me to make the team worse. But the expectations were enormous. “Terry Bradshaw came to town the other day,” a Pittsburgh sports columnist wrote. “He flew in on an airplane, rode in a car. It was disappointing. Come to expect Superman and nothing less will do. . . . This city’s long-suffering fans were expecting a miracle worker. . . . He didn’t even throw a football across the Monongahela River, much less walk on it.”

I reinforced that, humbly telling a sportswriter, “I think I can go out there and make Pittsburgh a winner. If I didn’t, I would have stayed home.”

Meanwhile, while everyone else was talking football, I celebrated being the first pick by speaking to seventeen hundred high school kids attending a youth rally at Queensborough Baptist Church. “You don’t ever have to worry about being alone,” I told them, “because with God, you always have at least one friend with you. . . . When an athlete publicly professes his Christian belief, people may refer to him as an athlete who happens to be a Christian. I feel it’s much more important to be a Christian who happens to be an athlete.”

I had so much to learn, so much. I had no idea how to deal with media, for example. As I told one reporter, “The only sportswriters I knew before were the local fellows, my friends. Golly, now I’m meeting them from everywhere.” I did know from experience that I might be misquoted, so I added, “One time I even had my answers all written out. A lot of them ask the same questions. They didn’t even write it the way I said it.”

I learned early in my life that when people were laughing, that was a strong indication they liked you. No different than elementary school. Making people laugh was my way of protecting myself. I didn’t intentionally create the small-town Southern boy character. That’s exactly who I was—who I still am—but I followed the smiles. If people responded to me in a positive way, I doubled down on it. I think that’s pretty normal behavior. It’s the secret sauce of life. I just had no idea what that would lead to.

When I was interviewed, I tried to make it interesting. I didn’t want to give every reporter the same answer, an answer I might have written down ahead of time. If they were taking their time to talk with me, I wanted to make it worthwhile. So I’d answer the question, but maybe I’d tell the same story a little differently. The nuts and bolts stayed the same, but I might embellish a detail or two to make it a better story. I wanted to make sure every writer got a story they could use.

Reporters came to me because I was always available to them, and they knew I’d give them something they could use. But I was always truthful about making stuff up.

This started during that first visit to Pittsburgh. A reporter asked me if I had been offered any endorsements. Turned out I had. I told him I had modeled slacks at a retailers’ convention in Dallas. “Gosh,” I said, “they give you $100 a day to wear a pair of slacks. For $100, I’d wear a dress.”

That was my introduction to the great city of Pittsburgh, where the second part of my life was about to begin. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

My professional career did not start well. During our rookie party, I got drunk for the first time in my life. It wasn’t my choice, but I didn’t resist too much either. I had come to training camp surrounded by publicity. Many of my teammates were veteran players, and I was a kid on the cover of Sports Illustrated. I hadn’t played a single down, and I was being paid as much as or more than many of them. It would not have been unusual for them to test me. I just wanted to fit in, to be one of the guys, and drinking seemed to be required. I didn’t enjoy it—says the guy with his own bourbon brand—but I believed God would understand.

The most serious problem I encountered was that my coaches didn’t have my back. I get it. They were football coaches, not psychologists. I was often reminded by those coaches, those writers, and certainly those fans that I had been the number one pick in the country, first out of 442, so I’d better not screw up. I’d better learn how to walk on water.

Chuck Noll had the luxury of having two high-draft-pick quarterbacks on the roster, then two years later, the Steelers drafted Joe Gilliam from Tennessee State in the eleventh round. The only reason he lasted until that round was the color of his skin. No question he should have been drafted much higher, but he was Black and had played at a traditional Black college, and there had never been a Black starting quarterback in the NFL.

But Chuck Noll did not express great confidence in me. He didn’t give me a lot of room to make rookie mistakes. Or second-year mistakes. Or . . . Mickey Slaughter once said, “I have no doubt Terry’s going to be a great quarterback, but it’s not going to happen all at once.” The problem was I had been hyped so highly that people expected that instant success.

That all played to the most damaged parts of my personality. I now know from experience how important it is to make people believe they have your full support. At least for the first few years, I did not play with confidence. Rather than thinking, They picked me number one, and they’re the experts at this, so I must be really good, I worried about failing.

My playing career did not start well. We played a preseason exhibition game in Shreveport. My whole world was at that game. I wanted so badly to do well. Unfortunately, it was a typical Louisiana summer night: 95 degrees, 100 percent humidity, no chance of rain. I don’t know whether it was the heat, being nervous, or all of the above, but I got into the huddle and threw up all over my linemen’s shoes. How do you apologize for that?

Later, during my first regular season professional football game, I completed only four of sixteen passing attempts, threw two interceptions, and was sacked twice. That was terrible, but it was still better than throwing up on my linemen’s shoes.

After that game I was so frustrated, so angry, and so immature that I basically refused to talk to our radio people. Our veteran running back, the great Preston Pearson, pulled me aside and told me, “Terry, you need to go talk to them right now. It’s important you do that.”

That proved to be one of the best pieces of advice I ever received. I did as he said and learned a big lesson: Take the heat. Don’t point fingers. Put it on yourself. If you want the praise when you earn it, you better be ready to take the punishment. Be a man. Take the flame.

At times it seemed like everything I did somehow went wrong. This is absolutely true. My sixth game was against the Oakland Raiders. In the first period we were moving the ball well. We had a first down at the Raiders’ thirty-four-yard line. On our first play I was sacked for a thirteen-yard loss. On second down Pearson ran for twelve yards, but we were called for clipping and moved back another fifteen yards. We repeated the down, and I threw a thirty-three-yard touchdown pass to Ronnie Shanklin. We were rolling!

But that touchdown was nullified by a holding penalty, so we had to repeat the down. It got to be third and sixty-five—the longest distance for a first down in league history. That record stood for about thirty seconds, until I got called for intentional grounding. Then it was fourth and seventy-four. Fourth and seventy-four, a record that still stands as the worst set of downs in NFL history.

And that was the highlight of my sixth game.

My seventh game I threw three interceptions and got sacked seven times. A few weeks later we played on Monday Night Football, which was the league’s showcase game. It probably was the beginning of the NFL’s understanding they were in the entertainment business, not just sports. It was a huge ratings success, hosted by the most controversial broadcaster in sports, Howard Cosell.

This game against Cincinnati was going to be my introduction to America. Fans knew about me because they’d read about me. Now they were going to see me. Before the game I did an interview with Cosell. That was thrilling! I’d practically grown up watching Howard Cosell. Actually being interviewed by him was huge.

Cosell played what he thought was a joke on me. He and his crew pretended we were taping, and he began by introducing me. “I’m here with Terry Bradshaw, the number one flop in the NFL.” The number one flop in the NFL. That was his idea of a joke.

It fed directly into my biggest fear—the fear of failing—and it took place just before the game. I played so poorly that, by the third quarter, the entire stadium was booing me, and I was benched. Nobody—absolutely nobody—likes getting booed at work. Imagine being at your job and people started booing you, calling you names. Now magnify that by fifty-nine thousand.

In high school and college I sat patiently on the bench waiting for my opportunity, but I had never been taken out of a game for poor performance. Being benched was among the worst feelings I had ever experienced. It was humiliating. It told my teammates, the fans, and me that I was a failure. That I was not doing my job and I was responsible for all the bad things that were happening. I sat there on the bench trying to look like I accepted it, but inside I was shriveling. I knew that the entire stadium was looking at me with total disgust. Rather than focusing on what went wrong and figuring out how to fix it, as I would later in my career, I was ashamed; I had let down people who were depending on me. As a result, they were not going to like me.

The only protection I had was my faith. I understood that God was testing me, but I didn’t have the answers to why this was happening. My faith wasn’t enough. In public I held my head high and continued to work hard and support my teammates, but sometimes when I was alone, there were tears.

The first few weeks of military basic training are very tough for recruits because the service needs to break them down so they can build them back up tougher and stronger and smarter. Recruits mostly come out of basic training as much more capable people than they were when they entered the service. It’s a type of tough love. I was getting the tough, but not the love.

Throughout that entire season I played as if someone had poked holes in me and my confidence was draining out. Chuck Noll began rotating quarterbacks, replacing me with Terry Hanratty. That was not Terry Hanratty’s fault. I was not performing. But it was bad for both of us. I played scared. It seemed to me that every pass I threw had life and death written on it. If I threw an incomplete pass, I’d be afraid to throw another one, knowing I’d only get nineteen attempts so each one had to count. What if I called a bad play or threw an incomplete pass? I might be on the sideline. I might get benched. My family and my friends were going to know I was a failure. That fear of failure impacted my performance.

I was so immature. Me, nobody else—me. In the locker room after that Cincinnati game, I told reporters that if I couldn’t be the starting quarterback, I wanted to be traded. That was my frustration lashing out. By the next morning, I apologized, admitting, “Everything looks different today. I was certainly depressed and down in the dumps last night, but I’m okay now. . . . I have a tendency to pop off too much. I guess there were some things that I shouldn’t have said. Hereafter, I’m going to keep my mouth shut.”

How has that worked out?

Fans don’t see feelings; they see performance. I desperately wanted to please them, to make everybody happy, to be loved. Instead, I failed miserably. On the bus going to the airport after another game, a sportswriter actually told me, “We’re never going to be a winning football team if you keep throwing like that.” Imagine that, a sportswriter telling the starting quarterback he’s the reason the team wasn’t winning. I didn’t need to beat myself up for my failures. There were a lot of people volunteering to do that for me.

My problem wasn’t that sportswriter. It wasn’t Chuck Noll. It wasn’t guys not having my back. It was me. Me being insecure, me not believing I really was that good, me not trusting myself. If I had been mature enough, I would have told that writer to kiss my ass, and it wouldn’t have bothered me. Instead of being tentative, I would have gone out and played my game, and if I performed poorly, I would have stood in front of my locker and said, “I played bad. Watch me next week.”

Part of me wanted to be more like Joe Namath. He didn’t care if he was criticized. He would go out and have a drink with the ladies, wear a mink coat and high heels, and not pay any attention to what people said. If he cared what people thought about that, he kept it hidden behind his happy smile. Meanwhile, I was this Southern boy, raised by my parents to be good and kind, who did not have the slightest understanding that to survive in the National Football League—or to succeed in life—I needed to be tough.

In our last game my rookie year I came off the bench to substitute for our injured punter because I had punted at Louisiana Tech. At least I could do that well. My first punt got blocked and returned for a touchdown. That sort of summed up my rookie season. I’d thrown six touchdowns and twenty-four interceptions. I’d been sacked twenty-five times. I was sacked for a safety in each of my first three games. Supposedly, we learn from failure. I’m not sure how much I learned that year. It was like I had been picked up and dropped into a new world, a world in which I didn’t yet speak the language. Well, there was one thing I did learn that year: Whatever I’m doing, it isn’t working.

It was in the great city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I was forced to grow up. Pittsburgh is a no-nonsense city of proud, hard-working people who admire commitment, love their sports teams, and play to win. The person I was to become was essentially baptized during my first few years in Pittsburgh. I wasn’t just learning how to play pro football; I was becoming a different person. I was taking my childhood and setting it aside. This is a transition that we all have to go through, although most people don’t do so publicly.

Admittedly, I found myself lost. Being good ol’ me was no longer sufficient. I didn’t understand the NFL. I didn’t understand having to study so much. In college my natural skills had enabled me to compensate for any lack of information or mistakes that I made. The NFL was not so forgiving. I had been successful whenever I had the opportunity to play. I was everybody’s All-American. I was on the cover of Sports Illustrated! I was dating Miss Teenage America! I was the hometown hero for Shreveport, but I did not know how to deal with failure. I didn’t have the tools. I had never needed them.

Before my second season, the Steelers brought in Babe Parilli as the quarterback coach. Parilli was a quarterback who played eighteen seasons of professional football in different leagues. He had been Joe Namath’s backup when the Jets won the Super Bowl. He was exactly what I needed. He totally understood the importance of the mental aspect of this physical game. He didn’t work with me on technique. He saw that I had the skills, so instead, he taught me how to think football.

I remember once he told me a story about the day he and Namath were watching game films of the Baltimore Colts before the Super Bowl. “At one point we just looked at each other and realized that the Oakland Raiders team we had just beaten was better than the Colts. We knew we could beat the Colts. That gave us the confidence we needed.”

Babe Parilli became the coach I needed to serve as the buffer between myself and Chuck Noll. I have often complained about Chuck Noll. People look at the results and see he coached one of the greatest teams of all time. We won four Super Bowls, which was more than any other team in history at that time. The man created a dynasty; he’s deservedly in the Hall of Fame. But people don’t know the stuff that happened for us to get there. I believe I could have flourished under a different type of head coach. I had the physical skills, but I lacked the knowledge and maturity to best utilize them.

Parilli eased me through my second season. Years later he revealed that Noll had told him to be the good cop so he could be the bad cop. It worked. Parilli calmed me down. He took the sharpest edges off Noll’s approach, which allowed me to have a much more productive year. I completed more than twice as many passes for more than twice as many touchdowns, but I became far more assertive in my play calling. I went from thinking, I hope this play works to believing, This is the play that will work. We won six games, only one more than we had won the previous year, but the foundation for greatness was being laid. The change in attitude—both in the team and myself—was evident. We were just beginning to appreciate how good we could be.

My personal life was equally complicated. In 1972 I married Miss Teenage America. As a Christian I believed marriage should be forever, like my parents’ marriage. They were affectionate with each other right up until the day my dad died. He was always patting her on the butt, rubbing her shoulders, or kissing her. I recall only one fight they ever had, and it probably was about money. My dad picked up the tea jug and slammed it down on the table and shattered it. My brother and I went and sat in a concrete sewage ditch, convinced they were probably going to get a divorce.

The loving part was what I thought marriage was. This was a no-fault marriage. Forever, in our case, turned out to be eighteen months. She was a nice, beautiful young woman. I thought I loved her, but the truth was I hoped I loved her. I wanted to love her. It was a sweet story. Miss Teenage America marries the handsome quarterback. As I was also learning, the limelight definitely can make a man handsome. If that light is bright enough, or actually maybe lime enough, a missing tooth can become “distinctive” or “add character.” But I had no idea what I was doing, getting married. I was just so lonely, and she was there.

There was one thing that helped keep me centered during those first few years: my pigeons. Growing up, I couldn’t just sit around like other kids. I always had to be doing something that occupied my attention. Years later I would be diagnosed with ADHD. I don’t remember when I first became fascinated by birds—I learned everything I could about them. Especially racing pigeons. I made phone calls to people who raised and raced them. Then I built my own pigeon loft, and after school I’d let my birds out. I’d let them fly. I taught them how to go into the trap, the entrance to the loft. I loved the fact I could take these birds five hundred miles from Shreveport, turn them loose, and they would come home. There is something so majestic about them.

I built a beautiful pigeon loft in Pittsburgh and raised my own birds. I loved going up there, letting my racers out and checking on my babies. It was a place where I could be alone and not be lonely. In a time of turmoil, I found peace there. I got involved with pigeon racing in Pittsburgh; I ended up winning two races, almost $10,000 in prize money. While that was a considerable amount of money at that time, it wasn’t nearly as valuable as the refuge from failure that it provided me.

Unfortunately, when we got divorced, I gave away my birds. Eventually, though, after moving to Texas, I built another beautiful loft and started again.

When I look back at that time I have to wonder, Who the heck was that person? How incomplete I was as a football player and as a person. What in the world was I doing getting married? And I think how incredible it is that I got all the way from that guy to me. I have been told by a therapist that we learn from our mistakes. If that’s true, I had a lot of learning ahead of me.