It’s also the vehicle author Michael MacCambridge now uses to take you along on one of the best stories he found in one of his several trips to Dayton to research his new book: “Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work.”
While the official publication date is Friday, the book on the intensely private Hall of Fame football player and coach will be presented today by MacCambridge at a 4-6 p.m. book signing at the UD bookstore on campus.
Back in his Flyers days, Noll was a football standout who became especially good friends with Chris Harris, a guard on the UD basketball team.
As MacCambridge tells it, Harris was suspended from the team for a game, which happened to be at Baldwin-Wallace in Berea. Noll and some of his beefy football buddies decided to go to the game in the Green Hornet and Harris went along.
On the way back, they were caught in a snowstorm and, an hour out of Dayton, their headlights went out. That’s when Noll came up with the idea that Harris should lie on the hood holding a big flashlight to illuminate their path.
To keep him from sliding, Harris said the others used a rope to tie him down.
Sports annals tell you they got back home that way:
Harris ended up in the UD Hall of Fame, as did Noll, who went on to win two NFL championships while a lineman with the Cleveland Browns and then a record four Super Bowls in six seasons (1975 through 1980) as coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
But more than just a successful coach, Noll was a champion of black athletes and coaches, many of whom he ushered past old-time misconception and bias, straight into the NFL.
Yet, when people talk about NFL coaching greats, Noll’s name is sometimes overlooked and almost never pushed front and center.
Part of the problem was that Noll was never one to toot his own horn. He was uncomfortable in the spotlight and never revealed much of himself to anyone, especially the media, as I can attest.
After he retired following the 1991 season, Noll — unlike other ex-coaches — was rarely seen. Then came a private battle with Alzheimer’s and finally, at 83, his death in June 2014.
All this adds to my appreciation of what MacCambridge has done here. He’s managed to tell Noll’s story from his days growing up in Cleveland right to when he died.
MacCambridge entered this project with quite a resume. His “America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation” won much acclaim a dozen years past and just a few years ago he penned a book on the late Kansas City Chiefs owner, Lamar Hunt.
That track record not only is what caught the eye of Steelers chairman Dan Rooney, who pushed him to write the book on the coach, but it’s what helped him gain access to the Noll family and even Chuck, who was already in the grasp of Alzheimer’s, but able to participate at times.
One place MacCambridge found a treasure trove of stories was at UD.
“I was in Dayton at least three or four times,” he said by phone from his home in Austin, Texas. He said he was especially aided by Doug Hauschild, UD’s director of athletics communications, who even produced bio sheets that Noll and his teammates had filled out some 65 years ago.
He said on one trip here he toured campus with a couple of Noll’s former Flyer teammates and then “had a few beers with Bucky (Bockhorn) at Kramer’s Party Supply.”
He heard stories about everything from what a dedicated student Noll was and how he learned to play the ukulele from Hawaiian teammate Jimmy Akua to how, in the offseason, he did everything from park cars at the Hungarian Village supper club to sometimes serve as a pallbearer for hire when the Harris Funeral Home needed someone to tote a casket.
And then there was Noll’s junior season when he helped lead the team to a New Year’s bowl game: the Salad Bowl against Houston in Glendale, Arizona.
When the UD brass initially balked at the cost of the trip, Noll’s teammate and pal, Jim Currin, made a suggestion to the administration, which he repeated for MacCambridge:
“If you would just take a freight car, throw straw in it and a barrel of beer in each corner, we would be glad to go that way.”
As that story began to make the rounds, the brass relented.
The team went by chartered train.
A broken man
“I originally had wanted to tell the Dayton part in just one chapter,” MacCambridge said. “But as I did more interviews, I felt I needed to spend two chapters because UD was such an important stage of his life.
“When he got to Dayton, all his dreams had been dashed. He arrived, to a large extent, a broken man.”
After starring at Cleveland’s Benedictine High School, Noll had been invited to walk on at Notre Dame in the fall of 1949. Unbeknownst to the Irish, he had suffered from occasional epileptic seizures since he was 11.
He had medicine that curtailed it, but as MacCambridge reported, Noll decided not to take it when he got to Notre Dame in late August because he wanted to be sharp.
But then he suffered a seizure on the practice field and Irish coach Frank Leahy sent him home.
Crushed, Noll sought out one of his high school coaches, Ab Strosneider, who had played at UD and eventually got Flyers coach Joe Gavin to take him.
At Dayton, Noll found brotherhood, a nurturing atmosphere and enough confidence to speak out assertively on myriad subjects. And thanks to a teasing Currin, he soon had the nickname “The Pope.”
“If there ever was a discussion, whatever his conclusion was, end of discussion,” fabled coach Don Donoher, back then a Flyers basketball player, told MacCambridge. “Chuck’s was the last word, so it just became: ‘He is infallible.’ ”
UD transformation
Noll might have been dubbed The Pope, but UD didn’t quite follow through with a papal coronation when applied for the Flyers head coaching job in 1960.
He was 27. His six-year playing career with the Browns had just ended and he was hoping to replace Bill Kerr.
Instead UD hired Stan Zajdel, who went 5-25 in three seasons and was fired.
Noll spent nine years as an NFL assistant coach and then took over the Steelers in 1969, a job he would hold for 23 seasons and 209 victories.
Thanks to lessons he learned in Cleveland and while at UD, he also made a mark tilting racially-skewed convention.
Growing up near East 74th Street in Cleveland, he lived in a neighborhood with a large black population and played on teams of black and white players.
As MacCambridge discovered, once in Dayton, Noll — who liked jazz — used to frequent the “black and tan clubs on East Third Street where black musicians played for integrated audiences.”
With the Steelers, that ability to see beyond skin color prompted him to often take on players from small all-black colleges. When the late Joe Gilliam from Tennessee State took over as the Steelers quarterback, he became the second black starting quarterback in the NFL’s modern era.
Noll also added black coaches to his staff, most notably Tony Dungy, who became the first black coordinator in the NFL and later, the first black head coach to win the Super Bowl.
As was his way. Noll never took credit for any of this.
That lack of self-promotion and unease in opening up to others left an area to be mined by MacCambridge and he was able to do so when he was finally embraced by Noll’s family, who shared stories, scrapbooks and even home movies.
From it he has gotten an often-warm portrait of a man who didn’t often exude warmth in public.
And no place helped better kindle the story than UD.
The place transformed Noll. It took a broken kid and turned him into The Pope.
“He didn’t go out of his way to court that name, but you got the sense with him it was almost like with Bruce Springsteen being called The Boss,” MacCambridge said. “He didn’t think of it, but he also didn’t hate it.”
MacCambridge started to laugh as he referenced an incident from the 1950s when Pius XII was Pope:
“One bit of proof I mention in the book was when Jim Currin was getting married. He was doing military service so his fiancee Judy had to get all the sizes done. Chuck was in the wedding and he wrote her a note that he simply signed ‘Pius.’
“He was pretty OK with the connection.”
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