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Sport: Super Bowl: A Family Affair

7 minute read
TIME

The teams of a patriarch and a widow go for the title

Make no mistake about it. The Pittsburgh Steelers are one big happy family. The team that will try this Sunday to win its fourth Super Bowl is a homegrown crew. No Steeler has ever played for another pro team, and the club is bankrolled by a kindly patriarch and brainrolled by his savvy sons.

Make no bones about it. The Los Angeles Rams are one big battling family. Appearing in their first Super Bowl after 14 years as the league’s perennial bridegrooms, the Rams are a motley crew presided over by a beautiful and stubborn widow who fired her stepson, hinted of plans to unload her coach and outraged her players. The Steelers, as befits the defending Super Bowl champions, sailed through their season like a proud flagship; the Rams endured the football equivalent of a voyage on the Bounty.

The psychodrama of the Rams began last spring when Owner Carroll Rosenbloom drowned in the surf off the Florida coast. Rosenbloom was a man fiercely determined to have things his way: when he wanted to move to Los Angeles, he simply swapped his Baltimore Colt franchise with then Rams Owner Robert Irsay and also managed to make a tax-free $4.4 million profit on the deal. Going it alone was a quality Rosenbloom taught his son Steve, 35, and his second wife Georgia, 52, who was to become his widow, and therein lay the rub.

Steve, who had started as a youngster picking up wet towels and sweaty uniforms from the Colts’ dressing room floor, was left only 6% of the Rams’ stock in his father’s will, but he also got the power to run the day-to-day operations of the club. Young Steve promptly demoted General Manager Don Klosterman, considered by many experts to be one of the league’s shrewdest executives, and put himself in charge of player personnel, picking draft choices and making trades. Widow Georgia, however, inherited 70% of the stock, and, determined to use her clout, started attending Rams workouts. A onetime showgirl, she turned up at training camp in powder blue jogging suits, took a turn at place-kicking and pecked the tobacco-filled cheek of Head Coach Ray Malavasi.

A family fight for power began behind the scenes between Steve and his stepmother, not on the best of terms to begin with. Steve maintains that Georgia held an elaborate wake for his father that appeared to him to look like “a celebration.” Said he: “It was sickening. It wasn’t my father’s style.” Steve also claims she was an hour late for the funeral.

The feud got rough just after the exhibition season began. Georgia called her stepson in and, with a lawyer on hand to back her up, fired him. Said Steve later: “I knew the handwriting was on the wall when my father died.”

Steve, who has since become general manager of the New Orleans Saints, chose not to sit in the owners’ box for the Rams’ games. He grew a beard, wore a hat lettered “Mack Trucks” and sat in the stands to watch his old team in action. The players registered their support of Rosenbloom fils by calling him into the dressing room to receive a game ball after one exhibition victory and then demanded —and got—a meeting with Mrs. Rosenbloom in which she assured them that their jobs, and those of their coaches, were secure.

The Rams were undefeated in exhibition games, but disaster struck once the regular season got under way. The Los Angeles roster resembled the casualty list from a 40-car freeway pileup: 18 of the 45-man squad missed all or part of the season. Quarterback Pat Haden, a Rhodes scholar, broke a finger; Fullback John Cappelletti missed the whole year because of a groin injury; Defensive Tackle Cody Jones sat it out with a torn achilles tendon.

As the team wallowed, rumors began flying that the widow was going to fire Coach Malavasi and bring back George Allen, whom her late husband had fired during the pre-season training in 1978 after sharp policy and personality differences. Recalls Defensive End Fred Dryer: “It was a macabre scenario. We were told at times that George Allen was showing up, that [Coach] Don Shula was on the next plane from Miami. If this was a soap opera, you couldn’t make a script for it. No one would believe it.”

Coach Malavasi survived, barely (“This is the roughest season I’ve ever been through”), and so did Mrs. Rosenbloom, despite the efforts of the Los Angeles press. The Times assigned two newsmen to poke into her past for a month and reported that she had been married five times before wedding the Rams’ owner and that her first marriage had been annulled when she was 15½ years old.

With just five games left, the Rams had won five and lost six and appeared on their way to missing the playoffs for the first time in seven years. But some of the walking wounded returned or, as was the case with Linebacker Jack Youngblood, who appeared in two playoff games with a broken left fibula, simply kept on walking. (Youngblood: “I’ve gotten over the worst of it, which is the idea of playing with a broken leg.”) The Rams beat their hated rivals, the Dallas Cowboys, 21-19, in one playoff game, then outdueled —some would say outdulled—Tampa Bay for the National Conference title, 9-0.

With Klosterman restored as general manager, Mrs. Rosenbloom is busy overseeing the team’s move next season from the Coliseum to Anaheim, 30 miles to the south. No one doubts she is in charge. Says she: “I don’t give up; I’m very stubborn. I wish I could laugh at myself at times like this, but I can’t. I am just so darned determined.”

Mrs. Rosenbloom’s determination will be pitted in the Super Bowl against a carefully constructed football team coached by Chuck Noll that may be the finest in the history of the game. The family franchise in Pittsburgh is as peaceful as the Rams’ is stormy. Owner Art Rooney Sr., 78, has turned over the operation of the Steelers to his two sons. Dan, 46, team president, runs the business side. Art Jr., 43, is a vice president and the man who has assembled a marvelously balanced team led by Quarterback Terry Bradshaw, 32, who survived his trial by fire when the Steelers were still losers, and became a seasoned, consistent and fiercely competitive team leader.

Bradshaw’s oppositive number is Vince Ferragamo, Haden’s backup, who frankly admits: “I’m a young, inexperienced quarterback. I’ve had to rely heavily on my instincts and earlier training because I haven’t had much time to work with my receivers.” The strength of the Rams is their defense and their goad is a history of failure ever to reach the Super Bowl. On Sunday the team’s many veterans will be trying to make up for a decade of frustration.

It will take some doing. The Steelers, Art Rooney Jr. said last week, “are like the great Yankee teams used to be. The peer pressure is very strong. Just putting on the uniform motivates a player to perform beyond his potential.” At week’s end, the Steelers were 11-point favorites to keep right on winning.

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