“About Three Bricks Shy...” author: I don’t know why the Steelers trusted me so much
“About Three Bricks Shy...” author: I don’t know why the Steelers trusted me so much
One of the greatest books about the Pittsburgh Steelers and arguably all of football celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. About Three Bricks Shy of a Load follows author Roy Blount Jr. as he embedded himself with the team for the 1973 season. Part of the “New Journalism” era that included Hunter S Thompson and Truman Capote, Blount befriended the players before they became Super Bowl legends. As a writer for Sports Illustrated at the time, Blount became interested in the up-and-coming Steelers while covering the baseball team that shared Three Rivers Stadium with them.
“The Pirates of the 70s were wonderful, wonderfully funny, and wild and crazy,” Blount says. “They had Stargell, Sanguillen, and Clemente, and they were always yelling at each other and picking each other off the ground and attacking each other. I thought that was the funniest locker room I’ve ever been in. And I loved the town of Pittsburgh. The fact that the Rooneys lived there, and Art Sr. walked to the stadium. There were lots of characters in Pittsburgh, and everybody was connected to the Steelers somewhere. And then, I saw the Immaculate Reception”
Blount earned the trust of the Steelers by promising the players and coaches that he would try not to get anyone arrested, divorced, or fired.
“I don’t know why they trusted me so much,” Blount says. “Hunter Thompson tried to do the same thing with the Raiders, but they ran him off after a while. My reputation was a little less gonzo than his, so I was able to slip in there. I tried to get as deeply into the individual players’ psyches as I could.”
Blount befriended many of the players who would later become Super Bowl champions, especially Ray Mansfield, LC Greenwood, Dwight White, and Rocky Bleier, who offered to give him access to the most sacred of Steelers places.
“Rocky actually offered to tape a team meeting for me,” Blount says. “I appreciated the offer, but I thought that was going where I was not invited. That’s the only aspect of the Steelers’ lives that I didn’t get in on, but I heard all about them afterward.”
The ‘73 season may not be remembered as fondly as the Super Bowl years, but it was anything but unforgettable. The offseason started with Ernie Holmes getting arrested following a highway shootout with police.
“Everyone was saying, ‘Don’t provoke Ernie. Don’t provoke “Fats,” Blount says. “So I gradually got to know him and talked to him about it. The Rooneys took him back and helped get him straightened out financially. So he was back on the team, and he was a big part of the Steel Curtain.”
Racial tensions were still very present in 1973 Pittsburgh. Publicly, the social scene among players was still pretty segregated. But behind the scenes, Blount says the players were able to work those issues out on their own.
“They had these parties that everybody came to,” Blount says. “There were lots of black family and white family interactions. People were telling what would now be considered inappropriate jokes back and forth across the color line. I thought it was a healthy mix.”
Despite their racial differences, Blount says the players had more important things in common with each other.
“A lot of players were from the south, from Texas or Mississippi,” Blount says. “So there’s some considerable cultural overlap there. Andy Russell was the only one with a middle-class background. I think they all had lots in common growing up. I found it was still sort of being sorted out, racially, but while I was covering them, it got sorted out. In fact, Joe Greene took me aside after the book came out and said, ‘You brought up a lot of s*** that we dug.’”
In 1973, Terry Bradshaw had not yet become the Hall of Fame quarterback we know today. This was more than evident by the fans who would boo Terry that season.
“I think fans in general, not just football fans, not just sports fans, but fans tend to think they own these public figures that they’re attached to,” Blount says. “They think they’re part of these people’s lives, and they will talk about them as if they know more about the players than the players themselves. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a player standing in front of them, and their mouths fell open, and they suddenly seem a lot less authoritative.”
All three quarterbacks on the roster started games that season: Bradshaw, Joe Gilliam, and Terry Hanratty. Even some on the team weren’t convinced that Bradshaw was the future.
“People would say things like ‘He’s a great specimen, but I don’t know whether he’s going to learn how to play the position,’” Blount says. “It was Ray Mansfield who said to me, ‘You want your quarterback to be like Bugs Bunny, always outsmarting everybody. Terry is just too much like Elmer Fudd.’ I talked to Bradshaw’s agent after the book came out. Terry called him up and said ‘Who is Elmer Food?’ But Bradshaw was a great. My book doesn’t do justice to him, because he came into his own after.”
Blount didn’t just spend time with the Steelers players. He also got to know icons of the front office, like Hall of Fame scout Bill Nunn, who Blount says was a lot of fun to be around.
“He took me on a scouting trip to a historically black university,” Blount says. “Nunn had been a pioneer of scouting those teams and getting prospects from those teams ahead of the rest of the NFL. At one point, we were eating chitlins and drinking bourbon at an after-hours club, and I tipped over backward in my chair and fell flat on my back. I just got back up and recommenced. I was able to hang with those guys, and they weren’t quickly embarrassed by me, so it worked out all right.”
Blount also got to spend quality time with Art Rooney Sr. during a fascinating road trip where he saw The Chief’s generosity and statesmanship firsthand.
“He managed to acquire a saintliness to the point where he worked hard at it,” Blount says. “He went to everybody’s wake. He seemed perfectly open and available, and yet he had this reserve. He played his character well. He actually played amateur baseball with Honus Wagner after Wagner played in the big leagues. So he had been around a long time.”
The Steelers’ 1973 season ended with a 33-14 playoff loss in Oakland. But the team’s pass defense is still arguably the greatest in NFL history. They had 37 interceptions in just 14 games and allowed a meager passer rating of 33.1, a mark that is unmatched in the Super Bowl era. But 51 years later, Blount looks back most fondly at the moments off the field.
“Oddly enough, falling over on my back in the after-hours club, and getting back up and eating more. That was a pretty good moment,” Blount says. “They were a very accepting organization. A big point of that team and that family was to not put on airs. I enjoyed that aspect of it.”
There are so many great moments in About Three Bricks Shy... that Steelers fans should discover for themselves, including stories involving Hitler’s chauffeur to arm wrestling wives to Jon Kolb’s real-life heroics. It’s currently available as an audiobook on Audible, and used copies can be found on Amazon. In the years since its publication, Blount wrote another two dozen books, appeared on shows like A Prairie Home Companion and HBO’s Treme, and even once performed with Bruce Springsteen. Today, he publishes an entertaining newsletter he calls Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now.
Listen to more of Blount’s memories from the 1973 season in the latest episode of What Yinz Talkin’ Bout.