The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, the Cowboys, the '70s, and the Fight for America's Soul by Chad Millman & Shawn Coyne

Author:Chad Millman & Shawn Coyne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Sports
ISBN: 9781592405763
Publisher: Gotham Books
Published: 2010-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

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ART ROONEY JR. WAS IN HIS ROOSEVELT HOTEL OFFICE ONE morning in 1968. "I liked to call it the boiler room," Rooney says. He was always playing the part of the put-upon brother. And this day was no different. Dan and his father were making him meet with a sportswriter named Bill Nunn, who worked for the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest African-American newspaper in the country.

Every year, Nunn traveled across the United States covering black college football games for the paper. At the end of the season he put together a black college All-American team. It was a tradition that had been started by his father, Bill Sr., who was the paper's managing editor and good friends with the Chief. One afternoon Dan and Nunn ran into each other, two sons whose fathers were friends, and began a conversation. A writer from the Courier often hung around the Steelers offices at the Roosevelt, and Rooney asked Nunn why he never saw him there. "I told him about certain things I felt and things he wasn't aware of," says Nunn. "I told him how I put out this All-American team every year and got calls from some NFL teams about the players, but no one on the Steelers ever called."

After that, Dan told Art Jr. to pick Nunn's brain. Maybe there was talent the Steelers should be paying attention to. "At first, all we did was look at each other," Rooney says. "I was thinking, this black guy is getting a free job and he was thinking I'm just a rich white kid who couldn't get a job anywhere else."

But they were stuck in a room together. So they started talking. Nunn told Rooney about what he looked for in players he named to his All-American team and how he put it together. He went to the biggest black college football game every week, anywhere in the country. On top of that he had an extensive network of coaches feeding him the names of players who were, for the most part, playing in places that weren't on an NFL scout's itinerary. "After twenty minutes of talking I was blown away," says Rooney. "I told my dad, 'We've got to hire this guy.'"

Nunn paid immediate dividends after joining the team full-time in 1969. He helped the Steelers find Blount, who was playing at Southern University, in 1970, and Ernie Holmes the next year and Joe Gilliam from Tennessee State in 1972. "I wasn't just a black college players scout," says Nunn. But the credibility he had with black college football coaches was now the Steelers' credibility.

In 1974, Nunn was with scouts from several teams making a swing through the Deep South. Scouts often traveled in packs, partly to share notes, partly to reassure each other that they weren't missing anything, and partly to figure out who their opponents liked. One rainy afternoon the group was at Alabama A&M scouting an all-conference receiver named John Stallworth. They had him run some pass-catching drills and then, on a slick field, timed him in the 40.

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