Rocky Bleier’s final carry as an NFL running back covered 9 yards through the middle of the San Diego Chargers defense, with right guard Ray Pinney throwing a savage trap block and center Mike Webster advancing quickly to the second level to help the play advance within three feet of a first down. That came 11 months after Bleier won his final championship with the Steelers. Nearly half a century has passed since.
And Bleier, a couple months short of his 79th birthday, remains a legend. He is an immediately recognizable figure throughout Western Pennsylvania. “The Play”, a one-person theatrical drama about his life, has been presented to capacity audiences in three cities, including at Pittsburgh’s glamorous Heinz Hall. In 2019, he filled the role of Judge Julius Alexander Randolph in the award-winning “A Few Good Men” at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, the city’s top regional stage. He regularly appears on TV, endorsing such products as a medicare supplement insurance plan from the city’s largest health care company.
Much of this is a product of Bleier’s unique story: his rise from 16th-round draft pick to 1,000-yard rusher, from infantry soldier severely wounded in Vietnam to NFL champion a half-dozen years later.
The biggest part, though, is his membership in an exclusive and enduringly popular fraternity. He is a member of the ’70s Steelers, winners of four Super Bowls in the decade. Their periodic gatherings, most often to mark the anniversary of a particular championship – including this fall’s 50th for the very first Steelers team to grab the Lombardi Trophy, in 1974 – are civic celebrations that go well beyond the definition of the word “reunion”.
“You think about: How did that happen? How did you get there? How fortunate were you to be at the right place, right time and be a part of that success? I don’t know if there’s any answer to that,” Bleier told The Sporting News. “I do feel very honored to be able to share that experience with all the guys I had a chance to play with during that time.
“There’s a certain camaraderie, a certain bond that takes place just because of that – and uniqueness now over a period of time.”
Bleier is one of 22 men who played on four Steelers champions in the 1970s. Those teams were the only ones ever to win four Super Bowls in a six-year period. To date, anyway. Because the Chiefs’ triumphs in the 2020, 2022 and 2023 seasons has placed them in a position to match that distinction as they enter the NFL playoffs, following their first-round bye as No. 1 seed, against the Texans at home Saturday afternoon.
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And the Chiefs also have the opportunity to become the only team ever to win three in a row.
What that would mean for their present is clear: parties, parades, rings, ancillary income.
What it might mean in 50 years is something only a few great men could explain.
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Jack Ham grew up in the 1960s in a small industrial city called Johnstown. Located in the Allegheny Mountains, it’s about a 90-minute drive from Pittsburgh. He was a terrific football player eventually recruited to Penn State, and he knew the reputation of the NFL team nearest to his home.
The Steelers have become so wildly successful as a franchise that even though they’ve produced no losing records in 21 seasons, many fans are furious they’ve failed to win a playoff game in the past eight years. There were decades when even a single playoff game would have been greeted like a miracle. Though founded by Art Rooney in 1933, who would grow to become beloved as “The Chief” of the organization, the Steelers never had appeared in a playoff game when Ham was drafted in 1971, had only seven winning seasons in 36 years and finished with losing records in each of the previous seven seasons.
“The Steelers teams prior … were so bad. I won’t say they were a laughingstock, but they were a team that was a physical team but would always either give away or lose a game in the fourth quarter, never could win close games,” Ham told The Sporting News. “The expectations for us – the bar wasn’t set all that high for us when my draft class, which was ’71, came along.
“We were 6-8 my rookie year, and then Franco came along the following year. We were 11-3 and never looked back. We began to win games, and the thing that put us over the top was the draft in ’74. We were a good team prior to that; that draft put us over the top to be a championship football team.”
It’s hard to imagine such a thing now, but in the half-dozen drafts from 1969-74, the Steelers selected 10 players – and signed one undrafted free agent – who would become Pro Football Hall of Fame selections, and another five who would be chosen by the team for its Hall of Honor.
They reached the NFL Playoffs for the first time in 1972, and their appearance led to one of the most memorable moments in the league’s history: Franco Harris’ Immaculate Reception, the last-second touchdown catch that secured the team’s first postseason win.
That 1974 draft haul – receivers Lynn Swann and John Stallworth, middle linebacker Jack Lambert and center Mike Webster chosen inside the first four rounds, safety Donnie Shell acquired as an undrafted free agent – led to the team earning a third consecutive playoff berth and entering with belief that something special might be possible.
They were not favored to win the Super Bowl, though. The Raiders and Dolphins both had superior records, and much grander histories. Miami had won the two prior Super Bowls; the Raiders had been in five league or conference championship games in the prior seven years and appeared in the second Super Bowl. A quirk in the seeding process meant the Steelers would open against the wild-card Bills while the other two met in Oakland.
The Steelers won easily, holding O.J. Simpson to just 49 rushing yards on 15 carries, whereas the other two staged a classic in which the Raiders won by just 2 points on Ken Stabler’s improvised touchdown pass with 26 seconds remaining. Afterward, as author Michael MacCambridge recounted in his 2016 biography, Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work, Raiders coach John Madden jubilantly declared, “When the two best teams in football get together, anything can happen.”
Noll never had been the sort of football coach who gave Rockne-style speeches. His attitude was that if a player needed a coach to motivate him, there probably was another player better suited to the job. He could not let Madden’s insult pass, though. He walked into a planned team meeting in a Three Rivers Stadium conference room early in the week of the AFC Championship game and delivered a short monologue.
“I’ll tell you what ‘anything’ is. ‘Anything’ is that Oakland isn’t getting to the Super Bowl,” Noll told the players. “The Super Bowl is three weeks from now. And the best team in pro football is right here in this room.”
That’s not exactly, “Win one for the Gipper”, but given the source, the speech hit like the crown of a helmet to a double-bar facemask.
“You get to know the personality of your head coach. It was only three years for me, but that’s long enough to know what your coach is like,” Ham told TSN. “He could have been a CEO of a company, and he coached that kind of style. I embraced that. He wasn’t into motivational speeches, all of that. His whole thing was preparation during the week, and nothing you tell a football team 5 minutes before a game is going to make them play any better or any worse.
“So, for him, when you never do that kind of a thing, it makes more of an impact. We all looked at each other. It got our attention.”
The Steelers surged from a 10-3 deficit with three touchdowns in the fourth quarter to win, 24-13. The Raiders were held to 29 rushing yards on 21 attempts, compared to a combined 211 yards just from Harris and Bleier. Pittsburgh indeed won that Super Bowl a couple weeks later, and then three more in the subsequent five years.
“How can you describe that feeling?” Bleier said.
The anniversary of that first Super Bowl passed just this week but was celebrated in October, during a Sunday night game against the Jets. There were 25 team members in attendance for an alumni dinner and then a halftime introduction. Among them were Hall of Famers Joe Greene, Mel Blount, Swann, Stallworth and Shell.
“This is where it all started… That history just kind of follows through the years,” Bleier told TSN. “How many people that you run into – I’ve run into 236,114 people who saw the Immaculate Reception, who were at that game. I’m going: Yeah, it only held 58,000. It’s kind of that legacy that is part of the Steelers and part of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania and ‘Steeler Nation’, and so there is some reverence toward those years that I think younger people who are Steeler fans got from their parents and grandparents.”
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James Winchester did not expect to play professional football after completing his college career with the Oklahoma Sooners in 2011. He began working in the energy business negotiating oil and gas leases, but it wasn’t long before he began to wonder if the long-snapping skills he had developed and polished at OU might not be applicable in the NFL.
He tried out for four teams before landing, four years after his final college football game, a job with the Chiefs. Talk about serendipity. The first team on which he played went 11-5, finished second in the AFC West and blew out the Texans for the organization’s first playoff win in 22 years. Winchester recalled seeing teammates “hug and cry” after ending that period of futility.
The following spring, they drafted quarterback Patrick Mahomes. The year after that, Mahomes took over the starting job, and in 2018, Kansas City reached the AFC Championship game and might have beaten Tom Brady’s Patriots if the overtime rules weren’t antiquated at the time.
They’ve won three Super Bowls since. Winchester has been a part of it all.
“When you’re in the middle of something like this – a great run, dynasty, whatever you want to call it, we’re having a lot of success – after the fact it only gets sweeter. When you’re in the middle, you don’t really appreciate it,” Winchester told Todd Leabo of WHB Radio. “For me, personally, it’s like trying to appreciate what we’re doing now. Reminding yourself: Hey, this is huge. But at the same time not putting extra pressure on ourselves and just being us, doing exactly what we’ve done the last six years that has gotten us into these opportunities to win championships.”
Head coach Andy Reid, who arrived in 2013, rejuvenated a franchise that had wandered without substantial direction for the better part of the previous two decades. The KC postseason victory drought included six coaching changes in 15 years, with Dick Vermeil, Herman Edwards and Todd Haley each producing just one trip to the playoffs.
It ended before Mahomes became the starter, but he all but wiped it from memory. He can lead the Chiefs through this postseason to an unmatched feat – no team that won two Super Bowls in a row ever made it back to try for the third, let alone pull off the “three-peat” – and also to one that has a single, very famous precedent.
Reid will entertain no discussion of this at the moment. Perhaps if the Chiefs arrive in New Orleans, he’ll have little choice but to discuss what the history they are trying to achieve. For now, the road ahead is too long and filled with some vicious obstacles, whether it’s the Texans’ C.J. Stroud or, possibly, whichever burgeoning legend (the Bills’ Josh Allen or the Ravens’ Lamar Jackson) might await in the AFC title game.
“There’s no place better to do it than right here in Kansas City, but when you’re in the middle of it, you really don’t think about it,” Reid told Leabo. “You’re thinking about the next game. That’s just how this business is. When you look in the rearview mirror, then you normally get your tail kicked. So you’ve got to be careful of that.”
One of the significant differences between the Steelers’ achievements and what the Chiefs have accomplished is there were 22 Steelers who remained inside the dynasty for all four Super Bowl championships. If these Chiefs can win a fourth, only six players will have earned a full set of rings: Mahomes, tight end Travis Kelce, defensive linemen Chris Jones and Derrick Nnadi, kicker Harrison Butker and Winchester.
That’s how profoundly the sport and league have changed over the course of five decades. The Steelers were able to remain relatively intact because free agency and the salary cap were not obstacles. The Chiefs are able to remain dominant despite such profound roster turnover because they have the league’s best quarterback, maybe history’s best, and rules changes favoring the passing game and protecting the QB in recent decades have allowed the most capable at that position to become even more dominant.
Mahomes has been so extraordinary KC has won its Super Bowls while he’s thrown completions to 15 different receivers. Kelce has been the only consistent thread, responsible for 21 of 81 completed passes. When the Steelers won their four, Bradshaw needed just 11 receivers, and Swann and Stallworth were responsible for 55 percent of his completions.
In today’s game, that’s the sort of difference an elite quarterback can make.
“There’s a lot of people who don’t know how a lot of fans had been struggling before the Mahomes era, how they’d been rooting for us throughout everything, and how everything has been turned around the past six or seven years is magical to them,” Nnadi told Leabo. “Even me, it’s magical to be a part of. I’ll be focused on the next day ahead, next thing, next objective, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a magical thing that we’ve all put into to make it what it is.”
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Bill Peduto grew up just beyond the border of Pittsburgh, in suburban Scott Township, but area residents who do not have a city address long have considered themselves Pittsburghers. Eventually, the invention of the slang term “Yinzers” helped resolve this conundrum, and Peduto handled it personally by moving into town, working in politics, winning a seat on council and becoming mayor in 2014.
It was in that capacity he stood at a dinner hosted by Michael Bloomberg in London in 2018 and delivered a talk about Pittsburgh’s journey from a collapsing steel industry that ignited what has been described by sociologists as a diaspora to the modern hub of business and technology it became in the years since.
“I would often start speeches, both nationally and internationally, by talking about 1979,” Peduto told TSN. “It would just be very simple” ‘In 1979, I started high school. The Pirates won the World Series. It’s been a long time. The Steelers won their fourth Super Bowl in six years. And Pittsburgh died. It died.’
“I use that as the example, and I think of it constantly as one of the most critical years of my life – the understanding that the reason I’m still here is I decided to stay and fight. All three of my brothers left. All of my friends who I grew up with with who watched those ’70s Steelers, except my buddy Kevin Harkins, they all left.”
U.S. Steel mills in McKeesport, Duquesne and Homestead all disappeared from the Monongahela Valley as the industry declined. Gradually, the Jones & Laughlin mills nearer to downtown faded from the Hazelwood and South Side neighborhoods. A total of 200,000 residents of Allegheny County departed the area. In many (or most) cases, affection for the Steelers became a principal connection to the homes they left behind.
Brian O’Neill arrived in Pittsburgh in 1988 to become a featured columnist for The Pittsburgh Press, and he transitioned to the same role at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when the Press closed four years later. He’d always been a passionate baseball fan, but he found out quickly which sport – and team – ruled. He touched on this in a 2009 book called, The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the 21st Century.
“The Steelers unite Pittsburgh like nothing else,” O’Neill told TSN. “And then I say in the book: ‘The Steelers unite Pittsburgh like nothing else – is that not a shame?’ If you want to talk across racial lines in Pittsburgh, the easiest way is to strike up a conversation about the Steelers. Because you know the person is going to be interested.”
There is some logic to this. Starting with the Pirates’ Roberto Clemente and then continuing on through Greene, Swann, Stallworth and Shell, the city’s superstar athletes introduced a generation of young, white Western Pennsylvanians to the very concept of racial diversity. The Pirates were the first Major League team to field an all-Black lineup, in 1971. The Steelers hired journalist Bill Nunn as a scout, and he discovered many overlooked talents playing at HBCUs; Nunn’s work changed the NFL and led him to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Several of the Steelers who earned four rings have been lost over the years: Webster, Harris, guard Sam Davis, defensive linemen Dwight White, L.C. Greenwood and Steve Furness. But their legend endures. It’s obvious at any Steelers home game, where the jerseys worn by fans don’t just represent current stars Cam Heyward, T.J. Watt and Najee Harris but a variety of team legends.
And it is not just confined to Acrisure Stadium on game day, and neither is it limited to senior citizens who watched the Steel Curtain in their prime. A woman waiting tables in a breakfast restaurant in suburban Verona wore a No. 17 Joe Gilliam jersey, honoring the quarterback who started the first six games of the initial Super Bowl season. A teenager running the cash register at the Giant Eagle supermarket in the North Hills was decked out in Greenwood’s No. 68. My nephew Jason, still in his mid-30s, showed up to a Christmas Day party wearing Lambert’s No. 58.
“Yeah, but they know about them. There’s a lot of people who knew Babe Ruth – never watched him play, but knew who he was. That’s what I always tell people,” retired Steelers beat writer Ed Bouchette, winner of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Dick McCann Award in 2014, told TSN.
“And there’s another reason: They can buy one of those shirts and never have to take it off. Because the player isn’t going anywhere.”
That legend will endure, as it will for these Chiefs. They already have established a legacy that will survive for decades. It can be so much more, though. With three additional victories, they can stand alongside the ’70s Steelers. And they can stand alone.
“I don’t know that the numbers matter as much as the mythology, the legacy that’s been created,” said Jim Wexell, author of six books including the most recent, Pittsburgh Steelers: An Illustrated Timeline. “What those players in the 70s did, and what they meant – and Kansas City’s going to have their own mythology.
“As Mel Blount comes into a locker room and talks to Cory Trice and Joey Porter Jr. about being a cornerback, I assume Kansas City will have that. They’ll be welcome in the locker room. They be welcomed for returns at their 50th anniversary of when it all started. I don’t know how worthwhile it is, but I think it’s pretty damn cool watching it all unfold.”
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