Not long ago, Dan Rooney the president of the
Pittsburgh Steelers handed me a copy of the
Sports Business- The Management Newsletter for
Sports Money Makers.
He pointed to an item he knew would interest me.
Under the Advisory for Fans, Sports Business confided
to the Moguls who subscribe to it: "Special, almost
Unclassifiable gimmick like the Steelers' Terrible Towel
are a fan turn-on. The keys to the most successful of
these devices seem to be 1)Color, and 2)Motion.
Crowds dressed in the same color clothing can make an
impact, but it is passive. Color plus motion in the stands
creates a kind of framework for the content itself,
making the entire experience more memorable for the
spectator. We suggest a look at the Japanese and
British sports crowds for examples of dynamic display of
color and motion."
I, as creator of the Terrible Towel, and instrument
with which Steelers fans had flogged their team to
victories in Super Bowls X and XIII (the Steelers won
Super Bowl IX without it), could not decide which
impressed me ore - Sports Business' expertise in
determining that color plus motion had made the towel a
success, or my audacity in creating the towel while
ignorant of the fact that I was mixing a precise formula
that would produce a "special almost unclassifiable
gimmick."
During the NBC telecast of Super Bowl XIII, Curt
Gowdy had referred to the towel as the "dirty towel" an
allusion that had not especially annoy me inasmuch as
Gowdy had botched the names of the legions of
professional football players. Let him know that Sports
business, which gets $60 for 24 issues from, sports
moneymakers, perceives the impact of the Terrible
Towel, which, dirty or laundered is held to be good
reason for the moneymakers to take a close look at
Japanese and British crowds. Lord, that I had known all
that at the beginning.
"Your ideas was pure genius," said Rooney. "But
you were too stupid to know what you were doing."
Here I should explain that I'm a Pittsburgh
radio/television sports commentator and an anlayst of
Steeler games on the radio. Late in November of 1975, I
received a call from the secretary to the vice president
and general manager of WTAE Radio who said, "Can
you step over to Ted's office?"
Crossing the hall, I found the burly figure of Ted J.
Atkins. He was huddled with the vice president for sales,
Larry Garrett. Atkins said, "The Steelers are going to
the playoffs. As you know the first game will be here in
Pittsburgh. As the Steelers flagship radio station, we
think we should come up with some sort of gimmick that
will involve the people."
Then Atkins barked, "Come up with a gimmick!"
"I'm not a gimmick guy," I replied. "Never have been a
gimmick guy."
"You don't understand," said Garrett. He explained
that were I to promote some kind of object that the fans
would wave or wear at the playoffs, advertisers would be
so impressed by my hold on the public that they would
clamor to sponsor my various shows.
"Beside," said Garrett, "your contract with us
expires in three months."
"I'm a gimmick guy," I shrugged.
Advertising salesmen were hurriedly summoned to
Atkins' office. Brainstorms erupted. "I've got it!" cried a
salesman. "Chuck Noll's motto is 'Whatever it takes,'
right?" Totally sober the salesman proposed that we
dress the 50,000 fans entering Three Rivers Stadium in
black costume masks upon which Noll's motto would be
painted in gold lettering. A phone call to a supplier of
novelties revealed that 50,000 black masks could be
obtained at a cost of 50 cents apiece, $25,000, vice
presidents Atkins and Garrett incisively concluded that
black masks were not the crowd pleaser we were looking
for.
"What we need here," I said, "Is something that's
lightweight and portable and already is owned by just
about every fan."
"How about towels?" Garrett said.
"A towel?" It had possibilities.
"We could call it the Terrible Towel," I said.
"Yes, and I can go on radio and television
proclaiming, 'The Terrible Towel is poised to strike!'"
"Gold and black towels, the colors of the Steelers,"
someone piped.
"No," I said, "Black won't provide color. We'll tell
them to bring gold or yellow towels."
"Yellow and gold will fly," cried a sales voice. "Tell
'em if they don't have one, buy one, and if they don't
want to buy one, dye one!"
"I'll tell 'em they can use the towel to wipe their
seats clean," I said, "They can use it as a muffler
against the cold. They can drape it over their heads if it
rains."
Another great concept in broadcasting having
being born, Ted J. Atkins sent out for champagne.
Later, when the Terrible Towel advanced for final
approval to Franklin C. Snyder, vice president and
general manager of the Hearst Broadcasting System, he
ordered only one change: "We must have black towels
too," he said gravely. "If we exclude black, we'll be
asking for trouble from the Human Relations
Commission and the FCC."
A few days later, on the heavily watched Sunday
night 11 o'clock television news, I introduced Pittsburgh
to the Terrible Towel, making a dammed fool of myself
by hurling towels at the anchorman, the weatherman,
and everyone else. Public response was instant and
pleasantly flabbergasting. One of the few resisters was
a co-captain of the Steelers, linebacker Andy Russell.
"What's this crap about a towel?" he growled at me
in the locker room several days later. We're not a
gimmick team. We've never been a gimmick team."
His words had the ring of familiarity. But I fell back
upon bravado. "Russell," I said, "You're sick."
Mind you, I did not see the Terrible Towel as
witchcraft to hex the enemy. It would be a positive force,
driving the Steelers to superhuman performance.
Unsure of my own sanity, almost daily I intoned on radio
and television, "The Terrible Towel is poised to strike!"
The very morning of the playoff game, against
Baltimore, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette warned that I was
trying to turn Three Rivers Stadium into a tenement
neighborhood, yet at least 30,000 spectators turned up
for the game waving Terrible Towels. It was a fine start.
In foul, wet weather, wide receiver Frank Lewis wiped his
hands with a Terrible Towel, then made a scarcely
believable one-handed catch of a Terry Bradshaw
bullet. Later, Bradshaw went down, his leg injured, and
did not emerge from the locker room tunnel when his
teammates took the field for the second half. Only
seconds before play resumed, the crowd exploded,
filling the air with towels, for Bradshaw had reappeared.
Could Russell remain a nonbeliever? A young
woman named Lisa Benz beheld the towel's effect upon
him (Russell scooped up a Colts fumble and, through
playing on an injured leg, lumbered 93 yards to a
touchdown) and later mailed me the following verse:
He ran ninety-three
Like a bat out of hell,
And no one could see
How he rambled so well.
"It was easy," said Andy,
And he flashed a cooked smile,
"I was snapped on the fanny
By the Terrible Towel!"
Yea, verily did infidels cast aside their skepticism
as the Steelers and the Terrible Towel whipped their
way through the Oakland Raiders to the American
Conference title, and through the Dallas Cowboys to
victory in Super Bowl X,
Last year Pittsburgh again earned home-field
advantage for the playoffs. That dictated the Terrible
Towel's resurrection, its use being reserved exclusively
for post-season games. And if I say so, this set a
standard of commotion worthy of the Beatles and Elvis.
The Denver Broncos came out on the field at Three
Rivers and found themselves trapped in a vortex of
yellow, gold and black terry cloth whirling against the
bitter December sky like the swords of 50,000
Cossacks.
Lynn Swann, answering his introduction by the
P.A. announcer, loped out to the goal line, leaped 4 feet
into the air and snapped a Terrible Towel overhead,
whereupon from the crowd there came a thunderclap of
a roar such as I had never heard at an athletic event.
Swann then presented his towel to his fellow wide
receiver, John Stallworth, who proceeded to catch not
three or four passes (a good day's work) but 10. Later
as the Steelers put the finishing touches to a 33 - 10
trashing of the Broncos, an eavesdropping NFL Films
microphone caught Swann and Stallworth on the
sideline taking inventory of their prospects for going all
the way.
"We've got the offense," said Swann. "We've got
the defense. We've got the QB. We've got Franco.
We've got Joe Greene. We've got Chuck Noll." Slapping
hands mightily with Stallworth, Swann concluded, "And
we've got the Terrible Towel."
Next, Earl Campbell and the Houston Oilers came
to town for the AFC Championship game. Multitudes of
Western Pennsylvanians who had been unable to get
ticket to the game draped towels over their television
sets and radios, even over their dogs, cats and children.
Towels hung from windows, lampposts and roofs. A
department store chain that offered Terrible Towels at
$6.50 each, with a charity earmarked as the beneficiary,
had run out of them in four hours; it then ordered
another shipment and had run out in two hours.
As the Steelers and the Oilers lined up for the
opening kickoff, a yellow towel suddenly descended
from the deck above the WTAE broadcasting booth, and
as if by magic, jerked to a halt in midair 15 feet in front
of the booth.
My binoculars revealed that painstaking Steelers
fans had strung fishing line from the top deck clear
down to the end zone to our left, their plan having been
to release the towel at kickoff and let it slide by means of
a pulley to the end zone. But then fishing line, so fine it
had been invisible to the naked eye, had become
coated with ice in the freezing rain that whipped the
stadium, and that arrested the towel before our very
eyes.
"What is that dammed towel doing out there?"
cried my broadcast partner, Jack Fleming. A large
deep-voiced man and a football purist who from the
outset had been hostile to my Terrible Towel. Fleming
now found that the one before him removed half the
gridiron from his vision as he was about to begin his
play-by-play.
"Somebody get that towel out of here," he
bellowed.
Minutes later, the roof above Fleming sprang a
leak, and in an instant he was soaked. "Give me one of
those damned things," he yelled reaching into an
assortment of Terrible Towels at my elbow. While he
mopped his spotter boards, I wondered. "Is the towel
punishing an unbeliever?" I sat less than 3 feet from
Flemming's left, yet no water fell on me. Meanwhile, our
producer produced an umbrella, Fleming, livid, clutched
it in a white-knuckled fist throughout the first quarter,
craning to follow ballcarriers and receivers as they
disappeared behind the yellow towel suspended before
us, and roaring during every timeout for workmen to cut
down the infernal rag.
That done at last, Fleming settled into a mood of
controlled churlishness striving to find enjoyment in the
fact that the Steelers were thundering toward a 34 - 5
win. Without warning, however, a Steelers fan named
Larry Opperman, a one time unsuccessful candidate for
the State Legislature, leaped from the stands across the
field as the Oilers deployed to receive a kickoff.
Opperman wore two Terrible Towels over a bathing suit,
and he twirled another towel overhead. He raced past
the Oilers' bench to the 50-yard line. He then zigzagged
his way downfield through the entire Houston team,
whooping like a madman. The crowd roared "Idiot,"
snapped Fleming.
Two days later, Opperman popped into my office
unannounced. "I thought you might like to have this," he
said. He handed me the towel he had worn. It was still
slightly damp but was obviously a memento to e
cherished. "How kind of you," I said.
But the impending Super Bowl showdown against
the Dallas Cowboys at Miami troubled me. "The Terrible
Towel does not like to travel," I cautioned the faithful in
my radio and television commentaries. "The towel
breathes life from the support it gets from the fans in the
stadium, but Steelers fans are finding Super Bowl tickets
hard to come by." Those fans, I had forgotten, had
demonstrated at two previous Super Bowls involving
their team that when it came to procuring tickets, John
D. Rockefeller was no more adept at unearthing oil.
They showed up in the Orange Bowl at least 20,000
strong, flying their Terrible Towels, and at game time,
the towel gave a sign to the nation that it was ready.
On the Steelers' first play from scrimmage, center
Mike Webster hunkered over the ball wearing a yellow
Terrible Towel tucked into his wristband. "I believe," said
Bradshaw as he lined up over Webster. He touched the
towel and proceeded to bombard the Cowboys dizzy
firing four touchdown passes. The Steelers were ahead
by 18 points, with some seven minutes remaining, whine
I trotted down from our booth to the Pittsburgh bench to
be nearer to the locker room, where I would conduct
postgame radio interviews.
"Here," Webster said to me. He handed me the
game towel, soggy by now. "I guess we don't need this
anymore."
I stuffed the towel into my briefcase and zipped it
closed. With that, the Cowboys awakened. They rallied
for a quick touchdown to draw within 11 points. Steelers
fans having had to lay 4 1/2 points and more, because
uneasy. The towel, I was to realize later, cried out to be
turned loose from my briefcase, but I did not hear its
plaints above the din that filled the Orange Bowl. As the
Cowboys drove to yet another score to reduce the final
margin to a calamitous four points, the towel shrieked till
its fibers popped, but it went unheard.
"How could you suffocate the towel when we
needed it most? a fan demanded afterward. "I'm
laughing for the Super Steelers but I'm crying inside to
the tune of a hundred and a half."
Still the Steelers' triumph prompted the information
of the Terrible Towel bandwagons. From Ohio State,
Purdue and the University of Iowa, reports came to me
of basketball crowds twirling towels. The pro bowling
tour stopped near Dallas where a transplanted
Pittsburgh woman approached her favorite bowler,
Marshall Holman, and handed him a Terrible Towel.
Using it to wipe the perspiration from his hands, Holman
won the $15,000 first prize. A distraught woman sent me
a check for $6.50, beseeching me to send her a towel;
the department store had been sold out when she tried
to buy one. She explained that her nephew, injured in
an auto accident weeks earlier, lay in a coma. "He's a
Steelers fan," she wrote. "When he wakes up, the first
thing we want him to see at his bedside is the Terrible
Towel."
Mind you, being high priest of a towel does not
turn my head. I have published four books and, before
that, learned to play the clarinet, saxophone and piano.
Yet it now appears certain that when my time comes,
they will say to me in Pittsburgh, my longtime hometown,
"Oh, he was the fellow who had that towel." Indeed in the
aftermath of Super Bowl XIII, I received notification from
the Pro Football Hall of Fame at Canton, Ohio, that a set
of three Terrible Towels was to be enshrined there for
all to behold. I must remember to visit the Hall of Fame
to see if the towels hang along side the busts of Bronko
Nagurski and Sammy Baugh, or in a lavatory. Either
way, I still remain composed.
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