Chapter 5 - Looking for Terry

The hardest thing about fulfilling your dream is that it leaves you without a dream to pursue. Dreams lay down a path for you to follow. If you’re fortunate, you reach the end of that path. Then what? I went from lying in my bed in Shreveport dreaming about how great a quarterback I was going to be one day to becoming a winning quarterback who could no longer throw a pass.

My football playing career was done. My dream was complete. Football had consumed me, and I was left with this big empty space in my heart. For the first time since seventh grade, football season was beginning, and I was not part of it. I had to decide what to do next. Was there even a what’s next? Can a person truly be good at more than one thing? It was the beginning of a different type of struggle for me.

Later in my life I would become a successful motivational speaker. I often speak at corporate gatherings. My main qualification for giving these speeches is winning four Super Bowls and talking about football on TV, which does not seem especially applicable. I was never part of the corporate world, but I learned about it. There are people who believe that because I’ve led this very public life as a professional athlete and TV commentator—not to mention acting, singing, doing reality TV, writing books—that my experiences don’t apply to them. That I never faced the same concerns that they do. That is just not true.

My career was over. I was looking at a big, long uncertain future. I was struggling with a lot of emotions: a sense of dread, that fear about what came next, that wondering, How am I going to pay my bills? Those are universal. Believe me, I know what it’s like to lie awake worrying all night, what it’s like to wrestle with uncertainty.

I was thirty-five years old, and I had to restart my life. Those roots holding me in place, football and my wife, were gone. It was an exciting and scary time. Anything was possible. Anything is a big concept.

By the end of my playing career, I was making a decent salary, but I hadn’t saved nearly enough to live on for the rest of my life. All I was was a four-time Super Bowl–winning quarterback. I knew that had some value. I could spend the rest of my life having been Terry Bradshaw, Super Bowl champion quarterback. My speaking fees were slowly rising. I could attend autograph shows and sign pictures. None of my football skills translated to any other career. You can’t hand off an insurance policy to Franco Harris. Nobody calls signals at a car dealership. Maybe I could have gotten a job as a coach, but that did not appeal to me. It didn’t appeal to anyone else either.

I was concerned and maybe a little anxious about how I was going to earn a living, but I wasn’t in a panic. I had faith that I would be able to figure it out. When I began my football career, my goal was to make a $50,000 profit a year. If I could make that, I believed I could be happy. The only career that made sense to me after football was raising my cows. The more I thought about it, the more raising cattle appealed to me. I decided I was going to be a rancher, even if it killed me. Which, by the way, it almost did.

This took place during my playing career—and almost ended it a lot earlier. One day I was at my teammate Jon Kolb’s ranch with him and Moon Mullins. We’d been out deer hunting in the morning and then he showed us his roping horse. Roping is an important skill for a rancher. I could throw a rope well enough to catch cows, but I wasn’t great at it. Jon was.

I was sitting on a rail, watching him riding his roping horse. He decided it would be fun to rope me, so he threw the lasso around me, then jumped off his horse. I popped the slack in the rope, which was a mistake. That horse yanked me off the rail and took off, dragging me. It was like being the outlaw in a Western. That horse dragged me through the pasture, across the creek, into the field, then back over the pasture. Little pebbles were smacking me in the face the whole time. It was petrifying. I barely missed smacking into a telephone pole in the pasture. I kept two hands on the rope and my head raised like a rudder so I wouldn’t roll.

Jon and Gerry were running behind us, maybe wondering how they were going to explain to Chuck Noll that they had killed his quarterback. That horse finally ran out of energy. Jon and Gerry caught up to me and then went running right past me to make sure the horse was okay.

I was pretty banged up. I was halfway unconscious. I can’t remember if they took me to the hospital or to the stadium. I had X-rays taken, and incredibly, nothing was broken. I missed practice but somehow we kept it from Noll. The bruises healed, but I had nightmares about it for years. It was scary scary but not scary enough to prevent me from being a rancher!

Once I make a decision, I’m firm about it. That’s it. This is my decision. This is the way it’s going to be forever! Or at least until I change my mind. My problem with raising cattle was that I wasn’t very good at it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was enthusiastic about doing it. I eventually ended up buying a bunch of old culls—cattle that weren’t any good, that basically had been taken out of other herds for a variety of reasons.

My response to that was to make a basic business mistake. I figured I could cure the problems caused by not knowing what I was doing by doubling down on it. I decided to buy more cattle. I bought two hundred yearling heifers. I bought a bull named Wilt the Stilt to service those cows. Two hundred heifers and one bull. Happiest bull you ever saw. I found out the hard way I couldn’t get them to breed. My cattle had no interest in sex, so I couldn’t get calves. There was no layaway plan for cattle. There is an old saying in poker that if you’re sitting at a table with five people and you don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you. Or in this situation, me.

I loved my cattle. Loved being around them. I loved them when they were fat and pretty. I took good care of them; I wanted my cattle to be happy. That worked out great for those cattle but less great for me. After five years, I ended up $200,000 in debt to the land bank.

Being $200,000 in debt was actually a very good deal for me. If I hadn’t been that deeply in debt, there is no doubt I would’ve borrowed more money and gone much deeper in debt. But that was a big number for me. It forced me to accept the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to raise cattle, and I didn’t know how to rotate pastures. But I did have some great cowboy hats.

That’s actually an important lesson I talk about in my corporate speeches: Don’t go into a business you know nothing about.

The fact is, there were still some people in the business world who continued to believe my football image—that I just wasn’t very bright—was real. It was so deeply ingrained into myth that it was never going to go away. I had accepted the fact that I was going to have to live with it. I had learned to smile, mostly, when someone made a dumb joke—literally and figuratively—about it and thought they were being clever. When I started going to cattle auctions, there were people who figured I had deep pockets and little knowledge and believed they could take advantage of me. I think everyone runs into people like that at some point in their careers. I made mistakes, but I was smart enough to learn from them. That was no different from football. I made rookie mistakes my first few seasons and learned from them. Opposing coaches took advantage of my inexperience, but I’ll let my record speak for me.

This is a reality in every field. No one is as good at the beginning as they will be after gaining experience. The biggest mistake I made was beating myself up for my mistakes. That’s the space a good teacher can fill. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, there’s no point in making them!

Just like I learned to read defenses and change plays, I learned who I could trust in the cattle business. I found people who had the experience, the knowledge, the contacts, and the judgment I lacked. I found my Franco Harrises and Lynn Swanns in that world and leaned on them.

I was not going to give up on my dream. I still loved being on my ranch. I had two ranch horses that I rode to work the cattle. My neighbors would ride over, and together we drove the herd up to the working pens to do all the things you need to do to cattle. I was doing real cowboy work. I wasn’t necessarily good at it, but all I had to be was smarter than my cows. Even now, when I watch TV shows like Shark Tank, I always admire those people who followed their dream, who persevered, who kept going no matter what people told them, and eventually became successful.

That wasn’t me. My cattle didn’t look anything like the cattle I saw at the sales. So I sold all my Shorthorns. I fell in love with a different breed, Simmentals. They are big and powerful, and because I had played football with big and powerful guys, that impressed me. Yeah, big and powerful win football games.

That was a big change. It allowed me to lose money on a much better breed. I had so much to learn, and I had not yet met the right teachers. One thing I had learned, though: Self-deprecating humor works. The more you make yourself the butt of the joke, the more people are going to like you. Good ol’ Terry—he’s even dumber than me! At times that even worked to my advantage, eventually. Trust me here, there was nothing funny about me being a terrible cattleman. I couldn’t make a penny, and losing all that money seemed like a long way to go to make people laugh.

I finally gave up my cattle. Then I decided to sell my roping horses. I put an ad in The Shreveport Times Sunday morning farm section, offering them for $500. I ran that ad for four weeks and didn’t get one call. I complained to my dad, “I can’t get anybody to buy these horses.”

“I can answer that, son,” he said. “It’s the way you’re going about it. You’re Terry Bradshaw. You’re supposed to be able to afford the best horses there are. People see Terry Bradshaw giving away these horses for only $500. They have to be thinking there’s something wrong with them. Put them in there for $5,000 apiece, and you’ll sell them.”

I looked at my dad like he was crazy. “I can’t even get $500. You’re telling me to ask for $5,000?”

“Just try it.”

I did just as he suggested. I sold them in about two days. That was a big lesson. I’m not sure precisely what it was, but it definitely was a big lesson.

That experience got me into the horse business. I ended up buying a few broodmares. I didn’t know what I was doing, but my uncle was a really good horseman, and he pointed me in the right direction. We ended up buying four or five old mares, then we paid $3,000 for a stud. We bred him to those mares and sold those babies for about a thousand dollars each.

Whoa, I thought, I got these plain old horses and their babies were selling for more than registered cattle? Maybe I was in the wrong business. It was a roundabout way to find out what I really wanted to do. Horses!

I subscribed to The American Quarter Horse Journal, a magazine filled with pictures of gorgeous horses. That struck a chord in me. I finally accepted the reality of the situation and sold my cattle.

I started studying quarter horses. I started looking at bloodlines. My knowledge was pretty basic. If you breed a brown horse to a brown horse, you’re going to get a brown foal. And yet there were people who doubted my understanding of bloodlines.

But once I got hooked, I dived in. Right from the beginning, my horse business was a success; of course, that depends on how you measure success. Basically, I was losing a lot less money every year than I had lost in the cattle business. Eventually, I gravitated to halter horses. Halter horses are bred for showmanship, not to be ridden. It’s a beauty contest. They’re bred to look beautiful, to be admired, and to improve the breed. If there was a Baywatch for horses, the stars would be halter quarter horses. Let me explain it this way: On this scale, I’d be a working horse, and Howie Long would be a halter horse.

I found out that my big love wasn’t performance. It wasn’t even showing. It was breeding. I felt the same way about my cattle, but you don’t breed cattle for good looks or a winning personality. When I got interested in halter horses, I studied and studied and studied. I studied their feet, their shoulders, their backs and hips, the length of their necks, their heads. I looked at generations of bloodlines and what produces what results. The challenge is breeding animals to improve specific parts in search of the perfect horse. But there are no guarantees, and that’s what makes it so interesting and so challenging.

It’s like the NFL Draft: Teams have a pile of scouting reports and performance statistics to examine. They have tapes of college games, and they’ve conducted interviews to help judge a player’s character. They’ve spoken to coaches, and they’ve put the athlete through workouts and measured the length of his arms, his vertical leap, and his time running the forty. They have investigated his background. They know what he eats for breakfast on Tuesday mornings and how many fillings are in his teeth. Finally—finally—on draft day they make him the team’s first pick, the seventh overall pick in the nation, knowing they are going to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions.

Then a reporter sticks a microphone in the general manager’s face and asks, “How good do you think he is going to be?”

And the GM responds honestly, “Well, you never know.”

You never know. Okay, that accurately describes the breeding industry. You put two bloodlines together, add in some hope, and get an outcome. Genetics is a roll of God’s dice. At one point they bred a quarter horse to a thoroughbred, which made no sense: The result was one of the greatest stallions in history. Impressive! There was no scientific logic to it, but there he was. Tell me why I was born with the ability to throw a football hard, long, and accurately with my right arm. What did my parents do to make that happen? The correct answer is nothing. That’s genetics. That’s the horse-breeding industry.

Once, I remember, after we got the business established, I bought two of the greatest broodmares that ever lived. They were very expensive, but they were multitime world champions. Their genetics were perfect. They were more chiseled than Muhammad Ali in his prime. Oh, I just looked at them and my heart melted. We bred them to equally imposing stallions.

You never know. The foals did not reflect the quality of the bloodlines. They just did not produce the offspring we anticipated. Now look, I love all animals. I’ve got a lot of dogs. Probably got even more cats. I once had a pet goose named Homer that I raised from a gosling, and Homer would fly alongside me when I drove my Jeep. When I went to town, he would sit in the passenger seat waiting for me. I had a pet owl we called Hootie that lived in the laundry room and enjoyed sitting on the kitchen counter while I made breakfast. I love my chickens. I have a 100 percent registered Brahman heifer named Lucy that we raised from the day she was born. Lucy believes she is a horse. She lives in the horse barn and follows Tammy and me everywhere. All she wants to do is love on you; if you don’t pay attention to her, she’ll lick your face, then headbutt you. We love Lucy. We love them all, but for me, there is no better feeling than walking through my barn and saying, “Good morning, boys,” then rubbing their noses and walking out.

The challenge is paying for it. My goal all those years ago was to transform horse breeding into a profitable business. Breeding horses that other owners will pay to breed with their horses is expensive. I’m going to tell you the truth about how I managed to pay for that. The truth is I’m not sure this is the truth. It’s just the way I remember it. I like to think it’s the truth.

In this memory I was on my ranch, working my cattle with my dad, which meant I had a mess all over me. Suddenly a limousine drove up. The luxury automobile, not Limousin cattle. It pulled up in front of the barn, the rear door opened, and Brent Musburger got out. He was wearing a nice suit. Brent Musburger was a top sports broadcaster at CBS. Twice in the past three years, after the Steelers had been eliminated from the playoffs, I had done some commentary along with Roger Staubach and gotten to know Brent a bit.

He admired my cattle, then handed me a piece of paper with a name and phone number written on it. “Terry O’Neil has been trying to get in touch with you,” he said.

I knew Terry O’Neil was the executive something at CBS Sports.

“He can’t get you on the phone. He wants you to give him a call.”

Then he got back in the limo and left in a cloud of dust. Strangest thing I’d ever seen in my life. Assuming I saw it, of course.

I put the paper in my pants pocket and went back to my cattle. Forgot all about it. Among the many appeals of the ranch was that it was a little bit out in the country. Our phone service wasn’t great, and if I didn’t happen to be in the house when the phone rang, there was no one to answer it. Five days later, I was doing my laundry. My mother taught me to always empty the pockets before you put your clothes in the machine. You might come up with some spare change. Instead, I found this crumpled-up piece of paper. Written on it was the name Terry O’Neil and a phone number. Oh yeah, I remember, I’m supposed to call this guy.

When I called, a secretary told me that he wasn’t there. I said, “Would you please tell him Terry Bradshaw called? I’ll try again.”

“Wait! Wait! Wait! Stay on the line. Don’t go anywhere.”

They went and found O’Neil. He eventually got on the phone and told me he wanted to sign me up and teach me how to be a broadcaster. The honest-to-goodness truth is that I had never considered becoming a broadcaster. I just assumed you needed some skills. But as I learned, in some ways, I was the Tom Brady of that time, the retiring football star. Winning four Super Bowls made me an attractive property. Win one, you get to make a record album. Win four, you get a tryout to be an analyst on sports television.

I admit it, the concept of being paid to talk about football was appealing to me. It was something I enjoyed doing. I had been talking about football for free my whole life. During my playing career, broadcasters loved to interview me because they knew I would provide material for them to use. I was always accessible, not because I craved the publicity—I did not—but because it was fun for me. When I did those interviews, my only goal was making them like me.

For example, the great Curt Gowdy loved me. I would sit down with him on Saturday and tell him, “You want our first three plays? I think here’s what we’re going to do.” I trusted him with that information. I loved talking to Merlin Olsen, the great defensive tackle who had been elected to the Hall of Fame and put as much into broadcasting as playing. I gave him everything I knew about the game plan, what vulnerabilities we intended to attack, everything. I wasn’t giving away nuclear secrets—the other team knew what we were going to try to do—but it enabled the broadcasters to be more knowledgeable. And in return, they treated me fairly. They quoted me, and in a respectful way, helped reinforce the quirky image that made me a “property.”

Here’s an example of how that proved beneficial. In 1973 Curt Gowdy invited me to go fly-fishing for tarpon in the Florida Keys on his show The American Sportsman. This show was extremely popular with outdoors people, but not necessarily football people. I suspected a lot of the viewers had heard my name but knew nothing about me. I had spent a lot of time fishing in rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, but this was a whole different fish for me.

Tarpons are big fish, one hundred pounds or more. Curt and his people taught me how to stand on the casting platform, cast with my right hand, and set the hook. Incredibly, on my very first cast, a tarpon took the fly. First try. I set the hook, steadied my feet just like I knew what I was doing, and got ready to battle this fish. I was ready; I was set. Then the fish turned, just ripped the rod out of my hands. That rod went flying into the water. I reacted. I didn’t hesitate long enough to think. I just jumped into the water after my rod. Now, to be honest, if I had had time to think about it, knowing me, I probably would have jumped in anyway because it was funny. But this was my natural reaction; it was instinctive. It’s what I would have done with my cousins at the old fishing hole. Why did I do that? Why did I do anything? You’re asking the wrong Terry.

Now, all these many years later, now that I have acquired the great wisdom that comes with age, I can ask myself: Would I do the same thing today? Well, of course I would. I wasn’t performing, but I knew that Curt and the others would enjoy seeing crazy Terry jumping in the water.

No harm, no fish. I caught up with my rod and stood up in the chest-high water, proudly holding it over my head, laughing, and admitted, “Even I can’t believe I did that.”

Boom! Image created. Terry Bradshaw is . . . different. Unusual. Quirky. Anything for a laugh. It was a different image than being dumb. It was the anything-is-possible-with-Terry image. That fly was cast.

The fact that I wasn’t qualified to be a broadcaster did not stop me from becoming a broadcaster. The biggest star in broadcasting at that time was CBS’s John Madden. His passion, his fan-friendly ability to explain football, and his humor made him wildly popular. I think CBS saw similar possibilities in me. I knew they were buying the “aw shucks, golly gee” personality, and I was happy to be that person. People had been laughing at me for a long time. All I had to do was play the person they already thought I was. And I didn’t see anything wrong with getting paid for it. Terry O’Neil eventually offered me a three-year, fully guaranteed contract to be a broadcaster at $100,000 a year.

I knew what that meant: I could paint my barn. That was as much as I’d earned my last season in Pittsburgh. Oh my, there is a God. When NBC heard that I was negotiating—a word I use loosely—with CBS, they contacted me. NBC was interested in signing me too. NBC! NBC had broadcast the AFL, and I always watched those games because those quarterbacks were throwing the ball all over the place. I thought, That’s where I need to go.

NBC had a rule at that time. They would not sign any broadcaster without first auditioning him. “It’s nothing,” they told me. It wasn’t a test, they said, but if I passed, they were willing to offer me $50,000 a year! It was time to put my PE degree to use. If I signed with NBC, they would give me a tryout, and assuming I passed, they would pay me $50,000 for one year. While CBS was guaranteeing three years at $100,000 a year.

I did the math. Three hundred thousand dollars versus $50,000. Three years guaranteed versus a tryout with a $50,000 payout. From that moment on, I always wanted to work for CBS. At the press conference announcing the signing, a reporter asked me if I would wear a hairpiece on air. The fact that I was bald was well known; I never hid that when I was playing. “Funny you should mention that,” I replied. “CBS has a dress code. No cowboy hats and no hairpieces.”

Everybody laughed. I was doing my job.

I had no preparation. No one gave me the training I needed. The reality was that CBS didn’t mind if I couldn’t spell X’s and O’s as long as people tuned in to see what fool thing I might say next. People had no idea what I might say or do, and neither did I. The fact that I also understood the game and had strong opinions was only a bonus. That’s not why they hired me. I remember before one game, the former Eagles coach Dick Vermeil, who also had become a color commentator, showed up carrying a pile of spotting charts and a thick notebook of the two teams’ performances and tendencies. That wasn’t me. I had to borrow a pencil and a scrap of paper in case I thought of something I wanted to say.

I had been on the answering side of the camera many times, but this was new and different for me. It’s only on television that the red light means go. They teamed me with a veteran broadcaster, Verne Lundquist, which was the luckiest thing that could have happened. Verne was a complete pro and had the one trait I needed in a partner: patience. I grew to love Verne Lundquist. We did two preseason games from the booth right next to Madden and Pat Summerall. That was it. That was my preparation. I believed I had been hired to talk, so I talked. I was nervous, and I knew I had so much to learn, but Verne was quite complimentary, telling reporters, “I’ve never seen anyone sweat so much.”

What I did not understand is that it wasn’t about me. It was about the game. I was so worried about entertaining viewers, with giving them my best Terry Bradshaw–meets–John Madden, that I forgot the game was the entertainment. I made the mistake many former athletes make when they become broadcasters: I wanted to tell viewers everything I knew. It took me time to learn that my job was to provide information to viewers to make what they could see with their own eyes even more entertaining. I learned there was no reason to tell viewers what they were watching—“See, Verne, they gave him that water because it’s hot and he’s thirsty.” Instead, a good broadcaster explains why they’re seeing it.

I remember when Roger Staubach and I were commenting at halftime during a 49ers–Bengals playoff game in 1982. Just two quarterbacks talking football. Cincinnati quarterback Kenny Anderson threw an interception in the first quarter. Roger said it “affected Anderson psychologically,” and talked from his own experience about how an interception can affect a player and the entire game. I agreed that Anderson should not have thrown the pass, but I put a little of the blame on the intended receiver, Isaac Curtis, saying, “He pulled up when he saw the defender, but if he’d run right through him, he could have maybe prevented that interception.” We were providing information that fans could not possibly know from what they had seen.

But I forgot all about that when I started working games with Verne. If there were a few seconds of silence, I wanted to fill it. A columnist in Pittsburgh wrote, “His biggest fault was talking too quickly and too technically. How about a super slo-mo for his voice?”

I tried way too hard to entertain people. The best advice I ever got about broadcasting came from an anonymous fan. During my first year, CBS had me working mostly New Orleans Saints and Tampa Bay Buccaneers games. Verne and I were doing a Saints–Giants game in New York, and toward the end of the first half, I saw a deliveryman handing a mailgram to the security guard at the end of the booth. The guard handed it to Verne, who was doing the play-by-play. Verne glanced at it and saw it was addressed to me, so he passed it along without opening it. It had no return address on it and no identification. My curiosity got to me. I opened it up, and in all caps the note read: SHUT THE F– UP!

I sat there, pretty stunned. This was from a stranger watching the game. Verne continued doing the play-by-play, and I didn’t say a word. Not a word. Instead, I went into my shell. I was never good at dealing with criticism, so I tried to avoid it. During my career, I never read the newspapers after we lost. I knew why we had lost; generally, I took responsibility for it. I definitely didn’t need a reporter to tell me why we lost.

When we went to a commercial Verne asked, “What’s the matter?” I handed him the note, then admitted, “I shut the f– up.”

Verne shook his head. He sighed. “Don’t pay any attention to that. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and you’re going to be great.” I knew Verne was trying to talk me down from the roof. But it helped.

I paid attention to that note. After the embarrassment wore off, I thought, He’s right. When a back ran into the middle of the line for a yard, I didn’t need to explain it. I learned to give it a breather.

I didn’t like working games in the booth and, at least at the beginning, I wasn’t very good at it. In sports terminology, I was playing out of position. For starters, I wasn’t good at remembering names and numbers, an essential skill for broadcasters. You have to be able to instantly identify players. Good play-by-play announcers know the whole roster. Boom! Boom! Boom! I couldn’t quickly match positions, numbers, and names. Even as a player I didn’t recognize names and numbers as much as I did positions. When an opposing player came up to me on the field, I knew his position but not his name, and I always found a way of avoiding using a name. It was terribly frustrating to me. It was like playing chess with pieces that were all the same size. I would know a rook from a bishop, but I wouldn’t know which ones move two up and one over or all the way across.

I also had a hard time pronouncing some of the names, especially the Hawaiian, Polynesian, or other foreign names. I never, ever meant any disrespect, but my tongue stumbled on them. I tried, I practiced, but too often they did not come out correctly. Although I am proud of an early review from the Pittsburgh Press, which noted, “He even correctly pronounced Manu Tuiasosopo.”

What I am good at is telling stories and giving opinions. My strength has always been that I understand and love the game. That’s why I tell my barnyard stories and make my down-home comparisons. That’s also why I have never been afraid to talk about those things that offend me or that I admire. That’s why I was always more comfortable in the studio than I was working games.

I loved talking about good ol’ boys like Louisiana Tech’s “Mean” Fred Dean. “That boy was so tough,” I once told Verne, “that when he was at Ruston High School, he shot himself in the stomach with a shotgun—and still insisted on playing!”

But I also didn’t hold back when I got “a burr under my saddle,” which is Louisiana speak for “pissed off.” No one ever told me not to state my opinions. For example, when the Baltimore Colts made John Elway the number one pick in the 1983 draft, he refused to sign with them. He didn’t want to play in Baltimore for a losing team, he said, so if they didn’t trade his rights, he was going to play baseball. That bothered me. Hey, I went to Pittsburgh!

So I said that was a slap in the face to the National Football League. “I could have come out when I was the first player drafted and said I don’t want to go to Pittsburgh. It’s ugly, it’s cold, and the people don’t understand a Southern boy, and I want to be close to my mama. I didn’t. I went because they were 1–13 and I said, ‘I’ll go up there and make them a winner.’ ”

“Play baseball,” I said about Elway. “Because in my opinion, he’s not the kind of guy you win championships with. . . . I don’t think he’ll do it in Denver and, personally, I don’t care if he ever does it.”

That was considered highly controversial when I said it. I didn’t intend to insult the entire city of Pittsburgh, but by that time, they knew me real well and understood that was me being me. CBS must have liked it because they offered me a contract. But John Elway did not like it at all. Many years later, I handed him the award for being selected the MVP in the 1998 Super Bowl. “I get to take the trophy from Terry Bradshaw,” he said, “so what goes around comes around.”

Decades after that, Elway, who only called his own plays for part of his career, said I was “way down on his list of the greatest quarterbacks.” As I like to suggest in response to comments like that: “Let’s throw our Super Bowl rings on the table, and long after yours have settled mine will still be rattling.”

That is my competitive nature still kicking in. That part of my personality has never settled. For example, a lot of people have had cancer. So I had to have two different cancers. I have always set goals for myself, although getting twice as many types of cancer as most people was never one of them.

I’ve always known how important it is to have an objective to measure success against. Whether you ever reach it or not is the motivating force. It gives you direction. The entire Steelers team was like that. We won four Super Bowls? Not enough. A lot of us still look back and know we would have won more championships if Franco Harris and Rocky Bleier hadn’t been injured in 1976. If I hadn’t been hurt . . . if, if, if. Enough was never enough.

It definitely caused me problems at CBS. My expectations were way beyond my experience and my ability. The top team at CBS was Madden and Summerall, and the reality was that Verne and I were never going to catch them. Nobody was. I knew that, but I didn’t want to accept it. We were the number two team—sometimes number three—which I hated. I didn’t want to be better. I wanted to be the best.

CBS apparently had plans for me, though. They were reinforcing my image. While I was just trying to get my footing, they put me on ice. “Great news, Terry,” I was told. “We want you to go to Alaska and cover the big dog race!” Wow, I thought, my broadcasting skills must be improving. They’re sending me to broadcast the famous Iditarod. As I later found out, nobody else wanted to go. Send the new guy!

The joke was obvious. Southern boy goes to Alaska. Or as the newspapers wrote, “A good ol’ boy from Louisiana following dog sled teams on a 1,100-mile race through the most remote sections of Alaska?” Actually, I thought it might be fun, and I rarely turn down a chance to have fun.

This was the first time an athlete had ever broadcast the race. There wasn’t much preparation other than buying the warmest clothes I could find. Instead of a ten-gallon hat, I bought ten-pound boots. The day before the race they taught me how to mush, stand on the back of the sled, and yell directions to the dogs. I did what I was supposed to do, fell down in the snow, and looked silly. Falling over was not hard for me because it was snowing hard and slippery.

There isn’t a lot of strategy involved in the Iditarod. Basically, go fast. I did several interviews with competitors from around the world. I would talk to anyone willing to talk to me. I came across a man from Asia. I said, “Hi, I’m Terry Bradshaw with CBS. Tell me about your dog team and what it’s like to come here all the way from your country. How many dogs do you have?” I waited. No answer. I suddenly realized he didn’t speak English. He had no idea what I was asking him. So, in desperation, I said the first thing I could think of. “John Wayne!”

“John Wayne!” he repeated, smiling broadly.

When I got home, I went out to Television City in Los Angeles to do voiceovers and script revisions. Basically, I put the narration into my own words. For instance, the word pirouette was used in the script. That’s not a word the audience had become accustomed to hearing me use. Instead, I substituted the word with spin around.

Eventually, I became comfortable as a color analyst. I developed my own style—if using a roll of toilet paper to demonstrate how a football should be hiked can be considered a style. My style, I guess, was doing the same things differently. I once described it as “hee-hawing my way around the NFL and having a grand old time.” I did it that way for six seasons.

At times, I struggled. I tried to give the audience what I thought people wanted, but CBS told me to tone it down a bit. They reminded me the game was the star. As my first contract was running out, I was convinced I was on my way out. I started planning for the future. I started studying how to sell life insurance. I figured people would want to meet me and buy their life insurance. I know I could have been a great life insurance salesman: “Hi, I’m Terry Bradshaw. Ever think you’re gonna die?”

But I went into a room with Ted Shaker, who had replaced Terry O’Neil, and we had a heart-to-heart shouting match. He hollered at me. I hollered at him. I was sure I was a goner. But instead of firing me, Shaker wanted to make me a better analyst. “You’ve got to cut out doing this silly stuff,” he told me, “because you’re killing your credibility. You can have a personality, and you can be silly and funny, but your focus has to be on the game.”

Shaker once told a columnist, “He’s going to be a star and soon, and he’s very much part of our plans here.” And so ended the career of one of America’s potentially great life insurance salesmen.

Shaker convinced me I didn’t need to push so hard, but he didn’t try to harness me either. On the air, in addition to a dose of Terry, I was totally honest. Absolutely honest. I said what I thought. This was long before people were using the phrase “politically correct.” I was what was then called “outspoken.” That was me. From my days in elementary school, no one ever accused me of being inspoken. I remember one time during a press conference, I was asked my opinion of John Elway. Yes, that John Elway, and I said, “He’s very good, but not great.”

Boom! Take that, John Madden. To be honest, if I had known that comment was going to cause the massive eruption it did, I probably would have made it a lot sooner. That’s the way I felt, and I said it. In some ways that comment was a turning point in my career. After that, people accepted the fact that if they wanted to know the truth, call me.

Mostly, I enjoyed it. But after all that time I felt like I was going the wrong way. I had a hard time being second behind Madden. I decided that I was done broadcasting. I informed CBS that I couldn’t do it anymore. “Think about it,” they responded.

Really? If I was the type of person who spent time thinking about it, I wouldn’t have bought all those cattle. Musing is not something I do. I was finding out that making quick decisions I might later regret was another part of my personality that needed fixing. There was a reason I did things like that.

But on April 1, 1990, CBS executive producer Ted Shaker called. “We’re gonna redo NFL Today,” he said, “and we want you to be on it.”

It was April Fools’ Day and I was too smart to fall for that one. NFL Today was CBS’s live studio show surrounding the game broadcasts. It had been hosted for fifteen years by Brent Musburger and included people like Irv Cross, former Miss America Phyllis George, and Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder. It was the first football pregame show, originally going on the air in 1961 for fifteen minutes, and had always been the most popular.

I thought he was kidding. “We’re firing everyone,” he continued. “We’re bringing in a whole new format. We want you to be the studio analyst. You interested?”

I hesitated for just a second.

Shaker kept going, “We’re gonna tear up your contract and write you a new one for $750,000 a year.”

“I’m interested.”

Which is how I got into the studio.

Without question I had created an image that people really liked. I was being offered all kinds of wonderful opportunities. For example, because of my proven ability as an actor, on the popular TV show Hardcastle and McCormick, I played a murdered fisherman. That was a perfect role for me. Here was my line: _____.

The only problem with being that Terry Bradshaw is that I had to be him all the time. No matter what I was really feeling, when the red light went on, I snapped into character. In reality, though, in private my life wasn’t going so well. Even with all that success, at times I was still scrambling for happiness, still sinking into that darkness, and I was having serious trouble dealing with it.