The '63 Steelers by Rudy Dicks Page B

wonder now how many eleven-year-olds did. Mostly, I guess, I felt puzzled. We grew up playing with cap guns and watching men shoot pistols and rifles on
Combat!
and
Gunsmoke
and
The Untouchables
, and reading comic books with illustrations of soldiers who had been shot, but we didn’t comprehend that guns—real guns with real bullets—were fired on our own streets. We had studied Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, but it was the kind of event that seemed isolated and frozen in history, as unlikely to be duplicated in our day as an Indian attack in the neighborhood.
    Ten years later, my college professor Dewey Ganzel would tell us in his course on Hemingway that there are two seminal events in a young person’s life: when he realizes that other people die, and when he realizes that he himself will one day die. That spring of ’63, I started to learn about death.
    In the first week of May, my Uncle Shorty, a family doctor who treated us to root beer floats, took us for spins on his sailboat, and played taps on his old Army bugle at bedtime outside the family cabin in Minnesota, died of cancer. I wondered what kind of cruel disease could kill a man who lived his life with such gusto.
    One week later, a story in the
Vindicator
reported that Eugene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb, the Steelers’ mountain of a defensive tackle, had died from an overdose of heroin at age thirty-one, and I was left baffled by how a 290-pound man as quick as a cougar could be felled by a needle, the same instrument we faced every fall when given flu shots, the kind my deceased uncle had administered.
    Yet another week later, news came that Ernie Davis, the marvel of a running back from Syracuse, a Heisman Trophy winner, and the first overall pick in the 1962 draft, had died from leukemia. How is it, I wondered, that an athlete so fast and powerful could outrun everything except this curious disease? We caught colds and suffered through scarlet fever andstrep throat and the mumps, but as lousy as we felt, these illnesses did not kill us. How awful could a disease be that it could kill a grown man who could dart through tacklers and leave them clawing at his jersey in vain?
    One month later, my Uncle Rudy, the man I was named after, suffered a fatal heart attack in his home in Hibbing, Minnesota. I traveled with my mother and two brothers all night by train from Youngstown to St. Paul, Minnesota, and then by car another 150 miles north. On the morning of the funeral I rode in a car in a slow procession filled with men in military uniforms looking somber and pained, while a soldier beat an ominous rhythm on a drum throughout the entire route.
    I cried for my uncles, but not for Big Daddy or Ernie Davis or the president. Yet they had the kind of impact on an eleven-year-old kid that would last a lifetime.
    The morning after the Kennedy assassination brought a clear sky and unseasonably mild weather, allowing my friends and me to play tackle football in our yard. Life went on; I had learned that by gazing at my uncle’s casket in a Minnesota cemetery. On any other Saturday afternoon in the fall my dad and I would watch college football, but on that day we watched Walter Cronkite and broadcasters with grim faces talking about a funeral and a murder suspect. My dad stared at the TV screen and said, “I wonder if they’ll play the game.”
    I glanced at him but kept silent. I wondered to myself, “How could they not play the game? The Chicago Bears are coming to Pittsburgh, and we have tickets.”
    Years later, I would look back at my resolve to see that game, and I would not fault myself for being insensitive or immature. I was eleven, and a young boy lives his hopes and dreams through his favorite team, not through politicians or statesmen. And I was far from alone in my thinking. A total of 334,892 fans would show up for the seven games on the NFL schedule that Sunday, only four involving teams still in a race