CHAPTER ONE
The First Crack
THE FATHER WAS A PUSHER. It all begins with the father, a Navy veteran who managed a local finance company on Main Street in Monongahela, a thriving blue-collar town near a bend in the big river, in the pulsating steel and coal corridor of western Pennsylvania. It all begins in that volatile cauldron of affection and ambition and vicarious thrill that so often goes terribly wrong. It all begins in a very dangerous place, where love so often turns to hate.
Joe Montana Sr., the descendent of Italian immigrants, played competitive sports in the service and was known around town as a decent backyard athlete who battled for every basket in pickup basketball games with teachers at the local high school. But every man approaches fatherhood in a reactive state, influenced, often unwittingly, by the lingering shadow of his own childhood. “When I was a kid I never had anyone to take me in the backyard and throw a ball to me,” he once said. “Maybe that’s why I got Joe started in sports.” Sometimes it’s just that simple: a twinge of regret reverberating across the generations.
“Every guy wants his kid to be a better athlete than he was, and Joe was no different,” said family friend Carl Crawley Jr., who became the son’s youth league football coach. “Joe pushed and pushed and pushed Joey, because he wanted his son to have what he couldn’t have and because he could see the kid wanted it.”
The son, Joseph Clifford Montana, was born on a Monday, June 11, 1956, the year of Elvis, the Suez Crisis, and the Hungarian Revolution. His mother, Theresa, the daughter of Italian immigrants who had been lured to the new world by the great industrial expansion of the early twentieth century, eventually divided her time between homemaking chores and her employment at Civic Finance, where she kept the books down the hall from her husband. Joe Sr. had traded a career as an installer for the telephone company for the office job, which allowed him to spend more time with his family. The future Pro Football Hall of Famer was their only child. The Montanas were a tight-knit family, and in the years to come, in those adrenaline-filled days of the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Joey was starring in three different sports for local teams, often traveling across Pennsylvania and beyond for youth-league and public school tournaments, she was almost always in attendance—alternately manning the concession stand or cheering her boy on at the top of her lungs.
The son began his life in a modest two-story, wood-frame house on Monongahela’s Park Avenue, a working-class street of tight contours and steep lots located just blocks from the central business district. The first hint of athleticism could be seen—and heard—when Montana was still an infant. “He used to wreck his crib by standing up and rocking,” his mother, who died in 2004, told Sports Illustrated. “Then he’d climb up on the side and jump to our bed. You’d hear a thump in the middle of the night and know he hit the bed and went on the floor.”
Animated by dreams—encouraged by his father—of someday becoming a professional athlete, young Joe began gravitating to the front porch at the end of the workday, ball in hand, waiting for his dad to arrive home so they could continue his athletic education amid the creeping late-afternoon shadows. Even when he was exhausted, the father always made the time. It didn’t take him long to see that his son was gifted: fast afoot, able to throw farther and more accurately than other kids his age, capable of sinking a jump shot from long range. It didn’t take him long to start investing a measure of his own self-esteem in his son’s budding athletic career.
The elder Montana was the first to school him in the fundamentals of football, basketball, and baseball; the first to try to hone his raw talent; and the first to cultivate the competitiveness that would prove central to his success. Sometimes he taught by example, challenging the son to furious games of one-on-one in which he “grabbed … pushed … [and] threw his elbows.” Sometimes the pushing was tactical, like dangling a tire from a tree limb and making sure the son fired a certain number of tight spirals each day, so he could develop his arm. (Like many other Catholic boys across the land, he imagined himself as Notre Dame great Terry Hanratty, quarterback of the 1966 national champions, leading the Fighting Irish to another victory in the House that Rockne built. The father and son rarely missed an Irish game on the radio, and frequently watched the Sunday television replays.) Sometimes it was strategic, like fudging the paperwork so the eight-year-old could play nine-year-old midget league football. Even though he was a year younger than all the rest, the skinny kid with the closely cropped blond hair and the earnest blue eyes was immediately recognized as one of the best players, so naturally, he became a quarterback.
Unlike many of his teammates, he did not approach the game as an outlet for his boyish aggression. The chance to hit somebody was not what made him tick. A rather timid player who tried to avoid contact, he earned playing time by the projection of his superior athletic skills and a widely admired competitive streak. Even then, the coaches and players could see how much he hated to lose. Childhood teammate Keith Bassi recalled, “Joe thrives on competition. He lives for it.”
Two years after joining the youth league, when Joey, in a moment of youthful distraction, considered quitting the Monongahela Little Wildcats so he could join his cousins in the Cub Scouts, it was his father who manipulated his perseverance by insisting he complete the season—simultaneously teaching a valuable lesson about the importance of not quitting something he had started and protecting him from the consequences of a hasty decision.
“The father was a driving force,” said Crawley. “You take him out of the equation, I think you have a very different story.”
While the first critical element in Montana’s emergence was having a father who took an interest in his athletic development and endeavored to nurture it, this investment of time and focus also required a delicate balancing act. Under different circumstances, it all could have gone very badly. All that pressure could have yielded burnout, alienation, hatred. It could have produced some steel-country version of Southern California phenom Todd Marinovich, the can’t-miss creation of uber-paternal athletic engineering who flamed out with the Los Angeles Raiders just as Joe Montana was nearing the end of a brilliant career with the San Francisco 49ers. But the elder Montana avoided many of the pitfalls associated with so many sports fathers, managing to push the son toward achievement without causing rebellion or resentment—without pushing him away. In the end, it probably worked because the father was driving the son to reach for something the son truly wanted.
“You can push a kid and when they see what you’re trying to do, and their head’s screwed on right, they’ll take it, they’ll appreciate it,” Crawley said. “And Joey’s head was screwed on right.”
Sports cemented a deep bond between the two, a connection that proved strong enough to withstand the usual adolescent tensions and the complexities of raising a young man of such obvious athletic potential without allowing him to become spoiled, disrespectful, or arrogant. From the boy’s childhood, there always seemed to be a duality to their relationship. “Joe and Mr. Montana were best friends who happened to be father and son,” said college friend Steve Orsini. In time, obedience gave way to trust.
The fact that Theresa supported Joe Sr.’s efforts cannot be overlooked as a significant factor in Montana’s development. A loving mother who delighted in cooking traditional Italian dishes—including Joey’s favorite, ravioli—she was not the sort to nag her husband about pushing their son. She was not the type to ridicule Joey’s athletic aspirations. By all accounts, the mother completely bought into her husband’s belief that their son could someday play professional sports. She could see how much her boy loved competing, the way it lit him up, the way it fostered in him a sense of self and possibility. Her enthusiastic encouragement contributed to a solid domestic foundation bereft of conflict. At the same time, Theresa was usually the one who made sure Joey did his homework, providing the necessary balance to his life. Although he was a reasonably good student, he later conceded, “I was really concentrating on sports.”
One of the reasons the dynamic between father and son worked so well was the eventual transition to organized sports that handed off much of the coaching to others, including Crawley, a beer salesman with a discerning eye who volunteered his time as head coach of the Little Wildcats.
“Joey had a lot of speed, and I noticed right away that he could roll out and throw equally well, with good accuracy, to his left or his right, which was very unusual for a right-handed kid,” said Crawley, a stout, gregarious man with a raspy voice.
Once a star lineman and fullback at California University of Pennsylvania, a small liberal arts and teachers college, Crawley had earned tryouts with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers, where he survived until the final cut of training camp. He wound up playing several years of semipro ball and eventually spent two decades as a college football official, refereeing games all across the country, including the Rose Bowl, while climbing the corporate ladder at Jones Brewing Company, owned by the actress Shirley Jones, where he became vice president of sales and marketing. Crawley knew the game and had a knack for interacting with young boys. His coaching provided a critical bridge between the father’s backyard instruction and the more complex high school days to come.
When Crawley saw Montana loafing during wind sprints—even though he was beating his teammates by several steps—the man with the whistle gruffly urged him to reach for something more, introducing a concrete example of how to strive not just for victory but for his own potential. When he cracked his helmet after colliding with a tackler—a jarring experience that left him momentarily dazed—it was with a measure of pride that Crawley and the other coaches watched him race to the sideline and demand another, presaging the tenacity that would propel him forward in the years ahead. The once-timid player shattered an important psychological barrier by destroying his headgear. “I think that was a turning point,” said assistant coach Clem Uram. Never again would anyone wonder about Montana’s ability to take the punishment required to play the game.
Beyond his obvious skills, Crawley was struck by his maturity level. “He was a very intelligent ballplayer, a heady ballplayer, like a coach on the field,” he said. “You could talk to him like an adult. He was a quick learner, and he made good choices.”
At an age when many of his teammates were still trying to master snap counts and the fundamentals of blocking and tackling, Montana soaked up Crawley’s careful instruction about the nuances of the game. “I put in plays where the quarterback had to make a decision, and from that, he learned,” he said. “Bit by bit, I taught him how to play the game … how to play the game by thinking through all the choices and possibilities.” When to dump it off short. When to tuck and run. Confronted with each predatory defensive act, he learned how to react in a way that gave him the best chance to move the chains, taking the first tentative steps toward his life in the pocket. It was a fitful process for a young boy still growing and maturing and trying to learn his multiplication tables and his spelling words, but his combination of instinct and applied knowledge frequently put a knowing smile on Crawley’s face.
The beer salesman was the first man outside the Montana household to glimpse the future, quietly predicting, when the boy was ten, “This kid is going to be an All-American.”
Such heady talk served only to validate the father’s already high expectations.
* * *
The revolution began downriver, with a burst of fire and a billow of smoke. The year was 1875. On a tract of land just west of the Monongahela River, eight miles north of Pittsburgh in the village of Braddock, Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill. A new age dawned, on the same field where, more than a century earlier, in a decisive battle of the French and Indian War, forces led by British general Edward Braddock had been routed. The wilderness had finally been tamed, not just by military might but also by the consolidating force of the industrial revolution. Carnegie was not the first American to employ the still-new Bessemer process, which produced larger quantities of the still-precious metal more efficiently. But by harnessing the cutting-edge technology on a mass scale and embracing business practices that would one day be called “vertical integration”—just as the demands of an emerging continental infrastructure began to surge—Carnegie gave birth to an industry that made possible, or at least practical, many others. Cheap steel transformed America, nowhere more profoundly than Pittsburgh, where the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers converged like nautical superhighways, and the surrounding Monongahela Valley. By the end of the nineteenth century, once-sleepy western Pennsylvania was producing nearly half of the world’s steel, as well as abundant supplies of coal, iron ore, and kerosene-yielding petroleum (first discovered on American soil at Titusville, north of Pittsburgh, in 1859), much of it shipped to customers via the Monongahela, which became one of the busiest waterways in the western hemisphere.
As the industrial age gathered steam, the region became a magnet for immigrants seeking a better life, especially central and southern Europeans with little or no formal education, hearty souls undeterred by the prospect of demanding, often dangerous manual labor. The rapid influx of first-generation Americans gave rise to dozens of melting-pot communities that depended, directly or indirectly, on the steady demand for steel and coal.
The town of Monongahela, a horseshoe-shaped municipality located on a western bank of the river about twenty miles south of Pittsburgh, traces its roots to 1769. During the Whiskey Rebellion, an antitax insurrection that threatened the new republic during George Washington’s presidency, a group of Pennsylvania rebels conducted a meeting that was credited with peacefully ending the revolt. It happened on a bluff near the present-day intersection of Main Street and Park Avenue, three blocks from Montana’s boyhood residence. Like many communities in the valley, Monongahela exploded from little more than a settlement to a vibrant town in the early years of the industrial surge, crossing 5,000 by 1900 and peaking at 8,922 residents in 1950.
During Montana’s formative years in the 1960s and early ’70s, with the steel and coal economy still going strong, the so-called Mon City resembled hundreds of ethnically diverse, blue-collar towns scattered across the American industrial heartland. Unemployment and crime were low. Seven new car dealers vied for business in a town with eighteen churches and eighteen taverns. A large percentage of the men in town commuted to work in mills and mines in neighboring towns, traversing the steep, circuitous two-lane roads up and around the river. Shoppers converged on the locally owned stores on Main Street for nearly every conceivable need, from hardware to prescription drugs. Most mothers stayed home to raise their children. Front doors routinely remained unlocked. But it was also a time of mounting unease, especially if you happened to be an eighteen-year-old boy with a low lottery number.
“Vietnam cast a shadow across our generation,” recalled Don Devore, one of Montana’s high school teammates. “The thought of having to go to Vietnam was always in the back of your mind.”
After a merger of school districts, predominantly white Monongahela High School consolidated with predominantly black Donora High School, located in the steel town of Donora eight miles south. As the new Ringgold High spread classes across two campuses, the tension associated with throwing two rival communities together led to riots and unrest, some along racial lines. After a bloody stabbing incident at Monongahela, security guards patrolled the halls and a menacing vibe permeated the place.
For decades, educators in Monongahela and elsewhere had maintained a rather rigid schoolhouse discipline by cultivating a certain amount of fear. Students entered the system conditioned by their parents to respect authority figures. Those who stepped out of line were paddled, and many were destined to be punished more severely at home. “The thinking of the day was, the fear would give [the teachers] some amount of control,” recalled former Ringgold teacher Steve Russell. But the students were starting to change. Many were experimenting with illicit drugs. And fear was losing its power.
Like every corner of America, Ringgold was forced to deal with a new generation of students who had been influenced by the televised civil resistance of the era, young people who felt no obligation to sit down and shut up. They had seen their contemporaries stand up for racial justice and against the Vietnam War, and they had been moved by the horror of Kent State. But at Ringgold as in other parts of the country, petulance sometimes masqueraded as legitimate protest. When the senior class learned their senior trip had been canceled, due to the rowdy behavior of the previous graduating class, a large group skipped the morning classes and began a noisy outdoor protest. The crowd eventually burst through the front doors and began running through the halls. One teacher who made the unfortunate decision to try to stop the procession, a small man who wore horn-rimmed glasses, was knocked down by a student, beaten, and stuffed in a garbage can.
In their own way, teachers were also starting to challenge authority. Organized labor had been a force in the valley for decades, winning significant wage and benefit hikes for the rank-and-file workers while fomenting an increasingly adversarial relationship with industrial management. When a union movement swept through the various autonomous school districts in the early 1970s, at a time of mounting inflation, modestly paid, newly empowered teachers all across the valley began demanding raises and other concessions. Cash-strapped school districts resisted and a wave of teacher strikes roiled the area, dividing communities and contributing to an increasingly dark civic mood.
“If you were a teacher at that time, you were really torn,” said former administrator and teacher Tom Caudill. “You hated to go out on strike because you were there to make a difference for the kids. But so many teachers felt like they had to take a stand in order to negotiate a decent contract.”
Even the mills and mines were prone to cyclical layoffs and occasional strikes, and the number of jobs had already peaked in the halcyon days of the postwar boom. But output and demand remained high, despite the knowledge that foreign competitors were starting to eat into the American manufacturers’ business. Conditioned by the abundance of opportunity represented by the familiar red glow in the distance and by the increasingly generous contracts negotiated by the unions, relatively few students planned to continue their studies in college. “The caliber of students you had here, many of them struggled academically,” said Steve Russell, who later became the principal at Ringgold. Few young people of the day talked about escaping the blue-collar life to pursue white-collar professions. Each year, large numbers of students graduated from high school and immediately went to work at a steel mill. It was easy to believe those jobs would last forever.
As the son and grandson of a steelworker, Ulice Payne understood the benefits of such a life. “For most people the steel mill was a pretty good option. Good pay. Good benefits.” Some jobs were easier than others, and like many of his contemporaries, Payne learned the pecking order, from the finishing mills, where steel was cut and rolled, to the blast furnaces, which required significant intolerance to intense heat and therefore paid the most. “The problem was, beyond the mills or the military, there weren’t many other good options,” he said. A good student who became president of the Ringgold student body, Payne aspired to go to college, a door that would have been closed to him if he had not also been a talented basketball player. “Basketball for me was a way out, so I took it pretty seriously,” said Payne, who earned an athletic scholarship to Marquette, where he played on the 1977 NCAA championship team before embarking on a successful business career.
For a generation, a steady procession of western Pennsylvania high school stars had escaped the magnetic pull of the soot and smoke by earning athletic scholarships and, in many cases, playing professional sports. The list began with two quarterbacks who, each in their own way, loomed over the landscape in the sixties: Joe Namath, who learned to throw the bomb in Beaver Falls before moving on to the University of Alabama and the New York Jets; and Johnny Unitas, a Pittsburgh native who put his buzz cut and his icy veins to work for the Baltimore Colts after matriculating at the University of Louisville. In time, sportswriters would begin referring to the area as “the cradle of quarterbacks,” an appropriate description for an area that has produced a long line of nationally acclaimed signal-callers, including Johnny Lujack, George Blanda, and Babe Parilli (and, in the years after Montana, Jim Kelly, Dan Marino, and Rich Gannon).
Before becoming an all-star center fielder for the Cincinnati Reds and New York Yankees, Ken Griffey Sr. was a standout running back and wide receiver for the Donora Dragons in the late 1960s, playing on the same field where Montana would later elude tacklers. The school also produced St. Louis Cardinals slugger Stan Musial, the son of a steelworker who played baseball and basketball but not football. Minnesota Vikings kicker Fred Cox, a veteran of four Super Bowls, played four sports at Monongahela.
“You grew up hearing about all those great athletes, with an understanding that there was something pretty special about this area,” said Don Devore, one of Montana’s high school teammates, whose father owned Devore Hardware on Main Street.
Monongahela boys grew up wanting to be part of something that was important in their town, a closely watched institution that unified the community and reflected their values. Even when the football team was poor, it gave many fathers and mothers a chance to stand tall, secure in the knowledge that their boy had worked hard and paid the price to represent their little corner of the world in those autumn showdowns with neighboring towns. From the perspective of an unlettered man who worked his tail off all week, hard enough to feel it in every fiber of his body, and looked at the world through the prism of someone who often felt like an easily replaceable cog in a mighty engine, never to be patted on the back, the experience was not merely entertainment. It was validation.
The creation of Ringgold complicated the matter of the local sports teams, with two longtime rivals suddenly joining forces as the unified Ringgold Rams, who played their football games at Donora’s Legion Field. Several times during Friday-night games, fights broke out in the stands, prompting the school board to reschedule games on Saturday afternoons, when, in the light of day, tempers cooled.
The Ringgold teams managed to avoid the strife. A small number of athletes fell into what Ulice Payne called the “militant camp,” players who were increasingly vocal about matters political and social—away from the team. But it never touched the varsity programs, which remained color-blind zones. “When you run wind sprints with a guy long enough, and you get cursed out by your coach together, that binds you,” Payne said. Writing about the situation years later, Montana said, “The players on the teams got along fine. Race was no big deal to us.”
For many of the working-class athletes who wound up going out for football at Ringgold, seeking an outlet for their aggression and their ambition, the road to controlled violence on a chalked field began with daily fistfights, one young punk challenging another over some grudge or simply the desire to prove who was tougher. “I got in a fight every day, ’cause in our neighborhood, that’s what you did,” said Paul Timko, who was one year older than Montana. The first time he got beat up by a bigger kid, Timko ran home crying and instead of consolation, he was confronted with his parents’ indifference. “One of these days,” his father said, mocking his son’s tears, “you’ll be toughened up.” The need to prove one’s guts could be seen in the nervous young boys who were coaxed by friends and older brothers to confront their fears by playing hockey on frozen parts of the river, their ears attuned to the ominous sound of cracking ice. By the time the sturdy sons of steelworkers and coal miners pulled on numbered jerseys and helmets for the first time, they were already conditioned to the thrill and the pain by furious games of tackle contested in cramped backyards and vacant lots. “If you drove through town in those days, you always saw groups of boys outside, one neighborhood bunch playing another,” said Don Devore. The sight was like a steady heartbeat of that time and place, because in a culture imbued with the hard-edged ethos of men who worked with their hands and needed to scrub up at night, football was more than a game. “Your parents expected you to be tough, and playing football was a big part of that,” said Timko, who became Montana’s first football rival.
Montana was not the sort of kid to go looking for fights but by lining up against all those boys who measured themselves through a lens that valued physical and mental toughness, he learned something he could never fully absorb from his father: how to compete.
After suffering through consecutive losing football seasons—including a winless campaign in 1970, the second year of the merger—the Ringgold administration made a change at the top in 1971. Chuck Abramski was not the sort to tolerate losing.
By the time he arrived in Monongahela, Abramski had already developed a winning reputation at several western Pennsylvania public schools. But his passion for the game often pushed him near the edge. He coached for several years at Brownsville, part of the Big Ten Conference that included Ringgold. In the days leading up to a Ringgold game against Brownsville in 1969, the Rams’ coaches were convened in the office, watching opposition film, when suddenly the clicking sprockets yielded a rather amusing sight: Abramski, clearly upset, ran up to a rubber yard-line marker and kicked it so hard it landed in the stands.
Long before he coached a game at Ringgold, the players and staff knew he was different. “Chuck was a good football coach but he was also nuts,” said assistant coach Alan Veliky.
By the summer of ’71, the high caliber of high school football played in the western part of the state was widely acknowledged across the country. Much as the rise of the steel industry could be traced to the abundance of the essential elements required to produce the metal—iron ore, limestone, and coal—football thrived in the area at least in part because several key ingredients conspired to make the sport such a force: the ethnic diversity of the steelworkers and coal miners who flooded the region and began mingling their bloodlines; their suitability to the sort of exertion required by the game and the resulting societal emphasis on physical strength and toughness; and the influences of harsh geography and decentralized population trends that tended to produce small communities located only a few miles apart, which promoted a civic chain of independence, pride, and rivalry. All this, and the sons of steelworkers really liked to hit.
Like many other aspects of Ringgold, the football program was accustomed to a certain austerity that approached neglect. When Abramski arrived, he discovered a shopping cart full of beat-up old shoes with missing cleats, the mud still caked on from the previous season. Some of the uniforms didn’t match. Some of the shoulder pads were falling apart. They were still using the old-style suspension helmets, the ones with very little insulation between head and plastic. After linebacker Rich Goldberg suffered a concussion, his father bought him a modern helmet with inflatable padding—the kind many prosperous schools across the country had been wearing for several years. His teammates treated the helmet like a technological marvel. One night, in a spurt of surging team pride, some of the players gathered at the gym and spray-painted their old headgear, adorning each with a ram’s horn, drawn by hand. Some horns wound up bigger than others.
Meeting with parents and players, Abramski pushed an optimistic line, determined to build a winning foundation on a winning attitude. Frequently he reminded all who would listen, “Losing can be a habit; so can winning.”
Soon after taking over, he announced a summer weight-lifting program to get his players into shape before preseason practice. But this exposed a problem: The school didn’t have a weight room. After years of resisting the influence of free weights, many football coaches across the country were just starting to embrace the idea, and Abramski was determined to ride the wave. Without a budget to tap, he worked with a group of players and their parents to build weights—some of which were assembled out of spare parts in the basement of Devore Hardware.
To conduct his weight-training program, Abramski commandeered the cramped basement of a nearby grammar school, crowding the equipment alongside an ancient coal-fired furnace, which had recently been abandoned. The night when they moved in, the room was covered in soot. The ceiling was so low, many of the players had to duck. In the heat of the day, with no air-conditioning, it felt like a sweatbox.
“It was like a dungeon,” Carl Crawley recalled with a chuckle.
“We didn’t know anything about weights,” said offensive lineman Don Devore. “But we knew we wanted to get better, and that summer we all worked hard in that weight room to get stronger … which brought us closer as a team.”
Not everyone showed up.
The same activity that promoted unity also created dissension.
By the time he graduated from Finleyville Junior High and entered Ringgold in ’71, Montana was well established as a three-sport athlete. At Finleyville, he had started as a seventh-grader on the ninth-grade basketball team. “A real money player even then,” in the words of head coach Tom Caudill. Instead of playing on the junior high football team, he had continued with the Monongahela Wildcats, growing stronger and more confident with each passing year. About the time his new football teammates at Ringgold were sweating in the weight room, Montana was busy playing summer baseball, in which he alternately pitched and played shortstop. Montana could bring the heat. He pitched three perfect games in the youth leagues and would become a powerful force on the mound for Ringgold as well, but his zeal to win sometimes caused him to press too hard, especially if the fastball hurler was two or three runs down and needed a strikeout. “Joe could be very emotional out there,” said junior high competitor and high school teammate Ulice Payne. “If he was in trouble, you had to stay light on your feet in the batter’s box. He really needed to win.”
Abramski was not impressed with Montana’s versatility. He saw the young man’s absence as a direct challenge to his authority and proof that he was not sufficiently committed to football.
“Chuck took it personally,” said quarterbacks coach Jeff Petrucci. “He had no compassion for kids playing other sports. He wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to share his athletes.”
The first preseason camp under Abramski was intense. After moving out of their homes and into the Monongahela gymnasium, where they slept on army cots, the Rams practiced three times a day in the blistering August sun as the new coach ran around the field jerking helmets, yelling obscenities, filling the space with his manic sense of purpose.
“All of us had heard about Coach Abramski from his previous job down at Brownsville, and then, that first day, we learned what a maniac he was,” said quarterback Paul Timko. “His idea was to treat us like a drill sergeant, to make it so rough on all of us that we’d bond together.”
The players grew accustomed to a familiar refrain, usually delivered after an especially heated drill.
“Son, I’m bustin’ your fucking ass ’cause I love you!
“When I stop bustin’ your fucking ass, you’ll know I don’t care!”
But just as the general student population was starting to openly resist authority, athletes in 1971 were no longer so easy to dominate.
When only about half the team returned to the practice field after lunch on the first day, an agitated Abramski sent one of his assistants to the cafeteria to fetch the rest of the squad. Several minutes later, he trotted back onto the field alone. “They’re all gone.”
“Piss on ’em,” Abramski thundered. “We don’t need ’em.”
Among those who quit were several returning starters, including a linebacker who happened to be one of the best athletes on the team. In the days ahead, Abramski kept pushing, believing, like Woody Hayes and Bear Bryant, that the hard-line tactics would separate the wheat from the chaff.
Like many others, Devore experienced the sort of pain he had never felt in his life—deep in the pit of his churning stomach and deep in his cramping legs. Lying on his cot at night, as he heard some of his teammates fighting back tears, his own eyes welled up. He considered quitting. But at this moment of weakness, his thoughts turned to his mother and father, who had not wanted him to play football. “I couldn’t figure out what I would say to them … how they would react,” he said.
The ones who stayed demonstrated their commitment to building a winning football program at Ringgold, including a sophomore quarterback named Montana, who earned his way onto the varsity roster. Like other coaches before him, Abramski could see Montana’s talent but, for reasons that had less to do with performance than his absence during the off-season program, the coach kept him on the bench while Timko took most of the snaps. One year after a winless campaign, the Rams finished a vastly improved 4–6, demonstrating to one and all that Abramski was leading the program in the right direction.
The first hint of trouble arrived by telephone.
Carl Crawley’s home phone rang around midmorning, before he started his daily beer rounds.
“Carl, I think you need to get over here.…”
Concerned after a brief conversation with a friend at the Monongahela campus of Ringgold, Crawley got in his car on that August day in 1972 and made the short drive to the school. When he arrived, Joe Montana Sr., his good friend and hunting buddy, was in the midst of a heated conversation with Abramski. Upset with the way the coach was treating his son, the father was threatening to transfer the boy to nearby Butler High, where he had a friend on the coaching staff.
Years after he began encouraging his son to make the most of his athletic skill, the senior Montana remained a constant presence in Joey’s sporting life, watching intently from the bleachers, filling the air with the whiff of great expectations. The father was always in the son’s head, reminding him to be precise in his mechanics and motivating him with the glorious possibilities within his reach, if only he played up to his potential. In time, the world would come to see Montana as an extension of Bill Walsh, but it was the pushing and prodding by Joe Senior which made that Montana possible, exerting a deep influence that set his son on the road to greatness.
Up to this point, according to those who were around at the time, the father had always deferred to his son’s coaches and never interfered with their decisions. “Joe’s father never bothered me as a coach,” said Tom Caudill, his junior high basketball coach. “Yes, he would come to practice, practically every night. But he never came up to me [saying], why aren’t you doing this or that? Joe’s dad wasn’t like that.”
But by refusing to give Montana a chance to win the starting quarterback job heading into his junior season, Abramski had crossed a line with the father, who felt compelled to stick up for his boy.
Standing in the breezeway between the two buildings, Crawley and another family friend attempted to defuse the situation. “I tried to calm Joe down,” he said. At that point, Crawley wasn’t interested in diving into the issue of whether Joe should be playing quarterback. “I just didn’t want to see him move his kid on a whim … do something he might regret … because I felt like the situation would work itself out.”
News of the confrontation reached the players, and when Montana returned to practice, some of his teammates were not very happy to see him. Especially among Timko’s friends, Montana’s failure to participate in the off-season workouts created a certain amount of bad blood that would not soon dissipate. Amid the whispers about closed-door meetings, they were left wondering how the father’s intervention would affect their team and the quarterback competition.
During a scrimmage, Montana faded into the pocket and was immediately crushed by Timko, who was playing both ways, and fellow defensive end Chuck Smith.
“I heard the crack,” said Devore, the left tackle. “One of the hardest hits I’ve ever heard. You could almost hear the air going out of Joe as he hit the ground.”
Timko delivered his lick with such force, Smith tumbled to the ground alongside the quarterback. “I took more of a blow than Joe did,” Smith recalled with a laugh many years later. “Paul just crushed the both of us.”
As the quarterback crawled off the ground, Abramski got in the face of every offensive lineman, apparently believing that they were not blocking for Montana.
“They go full speed all the time!” Abramski yelled, pointing toward the defense.
“You go full speed all the time!” he thundered toward the offense.
Soon all the linemen were running laps.
The experience of facing off against his rival every day in such a direct way toughened Montana, but also left him increasingly weary. “Every day he just beat the hell out of me,” remembered Montana, who didn’t play defense and therefore never got the chance to hit back.
In the season opener against the Elizabeth Forward Warriors, Timko started and was shaky. At the half, after he had tossed two interceptions and Ringgold trailed 14–0, Abramski grabbed him by the face mask and flashed a nasty look. “One more and I’m putting Montana in!”
When he was picked off again, on the second play of the second half, a mistake that led to yet another Warriors touchdown, the coach inserted Montana, who performed reasonably well but could not manage to affect the devastating 34–6 loss.
Confronted with a simmering quarterback controversy that divided the community and the team, Abramski still resisted starting Montana, which provoked a nasty shouting match with quarterbacks coach Jeff Petrucci.
“Because Joe hadn’t come to the off-season lifting program, Chuck didn’t want to play him,” Petrucci said. “He was wrong and I told him he was wrong. It got pretty heated … Joe did nothing wrong. Absolutely nothing … Chuck just couldn’t deal with the fact that [Montana] wasn’t a one hundred percent football player. It was all Chuck’s ego.”
Like many other coaches across the country, Abramski could not feel the cultural winds shifting. He lived in a world where the football coach was a demigod, able to impose his will on the field and off, mashing all those disparate personalities into one powerful organism, squeezing so hard that the individual eventually disappeared. Montana was probably the first football player Abramski ever encountered who wasn’t completely committed to football. By asserting his right to play basketball and baseball—and therein challenging the head coach’s definition of commitment—he was saying he didn’t want Joe Montana to disappear.
Abramski’s zealous coaching played a significant role in Montana’s development, but Petrucci, who doubled as a driver’s education teacher, proved to be a much greater influence in his evolution as a passer. A former record-setting quarterback at California University of Pennsylvania, he was the first to work with Joe to throw the ball at precise points on the field, helping him hone a skill that would become crucial in the years to come.
Watching the way Abramski treated Montana left a profound impact on Petrucci. When he became a high school and college head coach, he was determined to strike a different chord. “I wanted kids to play other sports, and was a big proponent that kids need to hear from other coaches and be around other players,” he said.
Like many others around the program, Petrucci believed Montana was the better quarterback and deserved the chance to start. During the closed-door argument with his boss, he pushed an idea he had already floated with the rest of the staff: They should start Montana at quarterback and move Timko to tight end, where the Rams had just lost a player to a season-ending injury. Abramski believed Timko was the better player and rejected the idea at first, yelling about the need to reward an athlete who had paid the off-season price. By attaching such meaning to the weight program, Abramski was questioning Montana’s toughness while promoting an idea that undermined him with the other players: How could he ever be really good if football didn’t mean everything to him? Such thoughts never completely vacated the coach’s mind, but under the circumstances, Petrucci’s argument proved to be too compelling.
When the next game on the schedule was canceled because the rival’s schoolteachers went on strike—a common occurrence in those days, as the newly assertive unions tried to maximize their leverage during football season—administrators hastily arranged a scrimmage against Churchill. Montana looked impressive running the offense, and Abramski agreed to start him the following week against powerful Monessen.
A good athlete with a strong arm, powerful legs, and a linebacker’s manner, somewhat in the mold of future Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, Timko lacked one quality that would define and empower Montana. The pressure—and the lingering residue of his mistakes—often overwhelmed him. For a quarterback, this can be a debilitating weakness. Trotting back onto the field against Elizabeth Forward, he was still consumed by Abramski’s warning, still bothered by his last interception, which clouded his judgment and his focus.
“I had a hard time letting stuff go,” he said. “Joe wasn’t like that. He had a real quarterback mentality. Nothing seemed to bother him.”
The way Montana battled for the position earned Timko’s respect, but the muscular young man who had been forged by all those neighborhood fights, by all those years of absorbing and administering powerful licks in the youth leagues that constituted a feeder system for Ringgold, struggled to compartmentalize his own surging fury. “We were too competitive to be friends,” he said. “Can you ever be friends with someone you’re competing with?… Somebody who’s trying to take your job?”
By Montana’s junior year, when he was driving to school in a little sports car, teachers and administrators at Ringgold were whispering among themselves what they were hearing from the athletic coaching staff: This Montana kid has the makings of something special.
For all the inherent danger in the way his father pushed him, it was clear that Montana had absorbed all the teaching and the single-mindedness without gaining an inflated sense of his own importance.
He didn’t strut. He didn’t mouth off. He didn’t cause any trouble. Still skinny, growing toward six foot two, with long hair, he cast an introverted air that disarmed those who were inclined to be sensitive to the flowering of athletic entitlement.
Throughout his life, Montana’s family, friends, and teammates were struck by the dichotomy in his personality. “Once he walked on the field, you look at him and can tell, that’s the guy in charge,” said 49ers receiver Dwight Clark. “He was the five-star general who had this aura about him. You wanted to follow that guy into battle.” But the same man who commanded a huddle with a quiet but firm presence, able to approach the most desperate situation on a football field with ice water in his veins, repeatedly seizing the moment with confidence and a clear head as millions watched, was rather shy in real life. He did not like to be the center of attention. Too much focus on him made him uncomfortable, and he was the sort of man who battled nerves if he had to speak in front of a crowd. In most instances, whether he was fifteen or thirty-five, he happily faded into the wallpaper, which once led 49ers running back Wendell Tyler to remark, “If you didn’t know Joe, you wouldn’t know he was Joe Montana.”
In homeroom at Ringgold, teacher Steve Russell sometimes needed to remind him to keep his hands off the girls.
“Oh, Mr. Russell,” he would respond apologetically, while sheepishly lowering his head.
“I almost felt guilty for saying anything, Joe was so nice, so self-effacing.”
Some nights, Montana stopped by the filling station where Russell pumped gas to make a little extra money, shooting the breeze while his teacher earned eighty-five cents per hour.
Around his teammates, he developed a reputation as a practical joker who enjoyed pulling silly gags, such as filling one guy’s underwear with shaving cream or hiding another’s shoes. “We learned if something was going on … if something was missing … Joe was probably behind it,” said basketball teammate Ulice Payne.
This sort of behavior would become a fixture of his competitive life. As the undisputed leader of the San Francisco 49ers, he often went to great lengths to mess with his teammates. He was always hiding Roger Craig’s keys. Once, after practice, he stole Freddie Solomon’s clothes, making one of his favorite targets … one of his favorite targets. During a 49ers training camp, several members of the team walked out of the dining hall to find their bicycles dangling from the lofty branches of a nearby tree—wondering how the culprit managed to climb so high with such a payload. “If something happened, you could put your money on Joe,” explained teammate Guy McIntyre. “He was almost always the person behind the prank.”
Such mischief was his way of keeping things light, reflecting the only child’s way of treating his teammates like the brothers he never had. He loved being one of the guys, until it was time for him to take the field and morph into that other Joe Montana.
“Joe was a nice kid,” Timko said. “I don’t think he got in a lot of fights growing up.”
Even after he overcame the timidity that coaches saw early in his youth football career, Montana approached the contact inherent in the game as a means to an end. He did not need to hit somebody to feel better about himself. To him, football was never about rage. The driving force behind his competitiveness was an unmistakable joy of playing the game—and finding a way to win.
“Joe is not an aggressive human being,” Petrucci said. “Now, you put him in a position to compete, then you’ll see aggression.”
On a memorable Saturday, the last day of September 1972, the Ringgold players put on their uniforms and helmets, loaded onto a yellow school bus, and made the short drive to Monessen. It was common in those days for teams in the area to dress at home, for two principal reasons: The schools were so closely situated, and most of the visiting dressing rooms were cramped or nonexistent. At Monessen, the visitors congregated before the game and at halftime in the woodshop classroom at the adjoining trade school. The players also understood the need to keep their helmets on at all times, because opposing fans sometimes threw bottles and rocks.
One of the powerhouse programs in the WPIL (Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic League), the Monessen Greyhounds, who had allowed just six points in three games, were favored to capture the Big Ten Conference championship—and wipe the field with the struggling Ringgold Rams. A large crowd of perhaps 6,000 packed into the stadium, which the newspapers referred to as “The Hounds Lair,” to see well-established stars such as Monessen running back Bubby Holmes, headed to Minnesota, and Ringgold linebacker Chuck Smith, who later played for West Virginia. Many fans weren’t sure who Ringgold’s number 13 was when the game started. Soon they would all learn his name.
“We all learned that night what we had in Joe,” said teammate Chuck Smith. “He was a natural and Monessen didn’t know how to deal with him.”
Trailing 7–0 early in the first quarter, Montana faded into the pocket from his own 21 yard line and hit Timko for a 19-yard completion. Montana to Timko. It was a combination that would be seen and heard all night long—totaling eight receptions and three touchdowns—as a new age dawned between old rivals. “The combination,” wrote local sportswriter Ed Gray, “was just too much for the Hounds to cope with.”
As the teams battled to a 34–34 tie that Gray proclaimed “a moral victory” for Ringgold, Montana completely vindicated Petrucci and others who had been pushing for him to take the job. Completing 13 of 24 passes for 256 yards and four touchdowns—including the first of many to his friend Mike Brantley—he looked like a quarterback who was going somewhere.
“That game put Joe on the map,” Petrucci said. “It was a real defining moment.”
That night and in many others to come, teammates often were struck by Montana’s calm demeanor, the way he never got too excited, too high or too low.
An example of his unflappability could be seen during a game against Laurel Highlands. Following a Ringgold touchdown, fullback Craig Garry trotted onto the field to relay the two-point conversion play from the head coach. In the excitement, Garry forgot the play. “I just went blank,” Garry recalled. Many quarterbacks faced with such a situation would have called a time-out and jogged to the sideline. Not Joe Cool. “Joe didn’t miss a beat,” Garry said. “He just calmly called a play—a 36 slant pass—to me, threw it perfectly, I caught it, and we had our two points.”
In a preview of coming attractions, Ringgold claimed a 14–12 victory over Belle Vernon Area when Montana rallied the Rams for the winning touchdown with 1:29 left, finding receiver Don Miller in the end zone.
Ironically, no player benefited from Montana’s ascendance more directly than the man he had supplanted. Timko thrived at tight end, attracting attention from recruiters all over the country before signing with the University of Maryland. He didn’t realize it until the switch was made, but he also felt more at ease as a receiver, removed from the mental burden of being a quarterback. “It was nice to have all the pressure off, the pressure of winning and losing on your shoulders,” he said. But at the same time, he struggled to let go of the one that got away. It bothered him, the way things worked out. He replayed it over and over again in his mind, wondering what might have been.
* * *
Before the first bell, Montana often could be found in the Monongahela gym playing basketball. Plenty of regular students and even teachers showed up to take part in the pickup affairs, and anyone who wound up with the short straw of having to guard Montana was in for a sweaty first period.
Endowed with an impressive vertical leap for a man who was still growing to six foot two, Montana was Ringgold’s designated jump ball specialist, even though the team’s center, Ulice Payne, was six foot six and headed for the Final Four. Often, as the teams approached center court for the opening tip-off, the sight of Montana drew snickers—until he out-leaped his much taller competitor to control the ball. Frank LaMendola, the Rams’ head coach, moved him into the starting lineup as a sophomore. “Joe was very coachable and led by example on the court rather than by words,” recalled LeMendola, who called him “very unselfish.” Working at both forward and guard—and even, after Payne’s graduation, at center—Montana could can it from long range and he could drive powerfully to the hoop. He was a vigorous defender. His ability to quickly flick an outlet pass to half court was instrumental in Ringgold’s fast-break offense.
Nearly a decade before he would be called upon to master the quick reads of the West Coast Offense, Montana displayed an uncanny ability to find the open man with what could best be described as an intuitive touch. Long before Jerry Rice, Roger Craig, and John Taylor entered his field of vision, he practiced the art of just-in-time delivery on the basketball court, hitting Ringgold players including Payne, Mike Brantley, and Melvin Boyd at the precise instant they became open—and sometimes even an instant before.
“Our coaches would get really pissed off because Joe would try passes that a lot of guys couldn’t pull off,” Payne said. “But he had a knack. His timing was something. His eyes were always up and he was always looking to pass.”
His passing ability became a powerful weapon for the Rams, especially when opponents tried to press. “Nobody could press us [effectively], because Joe could throw it anywhere,” recalled assistant coach Alan Veliky.
During Montana’s junior year, he was part of the greatest basketball team in Ringgold history, featuring five starters who earned Division I college scholarships. The 27–2 Rams strung together sixteen straight victories and finished third in the state tournament, losing in the semifinals to a General Braddock team they had already beaten twice.
On an electric night at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, 8,900 fans showed up to watch the Rams knock off General Braddock, 54–47, to capture the WPIL championship. The Falcons pressed nearly the entire game, and Montana proved to be the key man in consistently breaking the defense, demonstrating the poise that would define his athletic career.
“I thought that was Joe’s finest hour,” Payne said. “The only way we were going to win was if we could break the press. When it really counted, Joe never got flustered.”
This defining trait carried over to the football field.
Beneath the surface, Abramski never let go of the grudge concerning his most famous pupil. He had a big mouth and a big ego and it was only a matter of time before his hurt feelings overwhelmed his judgment. But as the 1973 football season arrived, he could see Montana was the key to his team. Abramski built the Rams’ offense around Montana, calling him “the next Joe Namath.”
“Let’s put it this way,” he told a reporter from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Montana is taller than Namath and [former Notre Dame star Terry] Hanratty, can run faster, has as strong an arm … and is a better basketball player.”
Prior to the season opener against Ringgold, Thomas Jefferson head coach Bap Manzini said, “We have to stop Montana. He’s an excellent passer.”
Employing a menacing rush, the Jaguars found a way to neutralize the senior quarterback, claiming a hard-fought 8–6 victory that turned on a failed two-point pass in the closing minutes. But it proved to be the only blemish in a breakthrough 8–1 regular season, as Montana finished his high school career with 20 touchdown passes. After leading the Rams to a share of the school’s first Big Ten championship, spoiled by a first-round playoff loss, Montana earned Parade All-America honors and emerged as one of the year’s most-prized recruits, fielding scholarship offers from a long list of major programs, including Georgia, Michigan State, Notre Dame, and Purdue.
Johnny Majors, who had recently taken over the long-suffering University of Pittsburgh program, tried to convince him to stay close to home. Majors was on his way to the 1976 national championship with a powerful team built around Heisman Trophy–winner Tony Dorsett. One cold and wet day at Pitt, Abramski and Petrucci were watching practice when Majors walked away from a scrimmage to visit with the two high school coaches.
“How’s my boy?” the gravelly voiced Majors wanted to know.
After several minutes of small talk, much of it about Montana, Majors walked away, reached the hash mark and suddenly turned back to face the men from Ringgold.
“Make sure to tell Joe I said hello.”
Abramski liked the attention Montana brought him, especially from high-profile coaches such as Majors, who accorded him a new level of respect in the wooing process, and he desperately wanted to affect his pupil’s choice. Through the years, the fiery coach went out of his way to help a long list of his players earn scholarships. But he exerted little influence on Montana’s college destination.
By the middle of his senior year, Montana was a young man facing two decisions. Some scouts believed he was an even better basketball player, and several major basketball schools offered him scholarships, including North Carolina State, which captured the NCAA championship that winter behind Player of the Year David Thompson. But football appeared to be his stronger option. Once he made the decision to play football, none of the other schools had a real chance. He was headed to Notre Dame.
For as long as he could remember, Montana had dreamed of playing football for the Fighting Irish, just like his boyhood idol Terry Hanratty. Now it was there for the taking. All he had to do was sign on the dotted line. He could fulfill his boyhood fantasy and make his father happy, too. Yet there was also a practical reason football and South Bend ultimately prevailed. Like his father, Montana believed, given his relatively modest stature, that he had a much better chance of playing professional football than professional basketball. Even before he departed Monongahela, he was focused on a distant end zone.
Copyright © 2015 by Keith Dunnavant