Mean Joe vs. Double O - SI.com

By Gary M. Pomerantz

CHUCK NOLL HAD NO SENSE of theater, not an ounce of Olivier in him. He was more like his old coach Paul Brown, a frozen lake in winter. In the Steelers’ locker room before a game, the battle about to be waged, Noll was all focus and details. For him, emotion was anathema. It befogged the intellect, threatened a week’s preparation. It got in the way of execution. Sunday’s games, he said, were won on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, at practice. “Remember,” Noll said flatly in more than one pregame talk to his players, “let’s make Sunday Fun Day.” But when he heard what John Madden said on television after the Raiders rallied to defeat Don Shula’s Dolphins, 28–26, in the divisional round, purging the two-time defending Super Bowl champion from the playoffs, Noll felt nearly jilted. He heard Madden say that the NFL’s two best teams had just played—the Dolphins and the Raiders—and that comment struck Noll as unfathomably wrong. It stirred his inner Lombardi. And so on the Tuesday before the 1974 AFC title game, the Steelers’ 47 players sat in chairs attached to small writing tables in their usual meeting room, expecting the usual tepid gruel from Noll. But Noll surprised them. He took his best shot, figuring it was early enough in the week so that an emotional rush wouldn’t backfire. He told his Steelers what Madden had said, and then, his eyes tightening at the corners, Noll said that Madden was wrong. “The best team in the NFL,” Noll said, thumping his index finger on a table, “is sitting right here in this room.”

The normally stoic Chuck Noll fired up his troops in relaying John Madden’s claim that the NFL’s two best teams—Oakland and Miami—had played the previous week. (Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated)

It took his players a moment to react, to decide whether their coach had just said what he had just said. Then their reaction was like a small dam breaking, hoots and howls, broad smiles and hand slaps, and Franco Harris saying, “Yep!” No player reacted more demonstratively than Joe Greene. He stood so rapidly to pump his fist that his right thigh stuck in the small writing table attached to his chair, and the chair lifted from the floor and toppled.

Noll’s speech ignited Greene. It was like additional gunpowder for an already explosive weapon. Much as he respected Noll, Greene had long craved more emotion from his coach—for his teammates, not himself— and now he had gotten it. It wasn’t what Noll said in the meeting room, or how he said it. It was simply that he said it. It caught Greene, and the entire team, by surprise.

From THEIR LIFE’S WORK by Gary M. Pomerantz. Copyright

Mean Joe vs. Double O - SI.com