Bradshaw Isn’t Looking Back to Find Any Old Steeler Friends

For all the unity and excitement Terry Bradshaw helped generate in Pittsburgh while quarterbacking the Steelers to four Super Bowl victories, the plain-spoken Southerner with a bushel full of confidence and a catapult for an arm has walked away from the town and his team.

The latest evidence of that is the man Bradshaw invited to present him Saturday for induction into the Football Hall of Fame -- Verne Lundquist, his broadcasting partner on CBS-TV.

“I was hoping he would have picked someone from the Steelers to do that,” retired center Ray Mansfield said. “Even Babe Parilli would have been better than Vern Lundquist.”

Parilli, a quarterback coach, “was only with the Steelers for a year or two but at least he had something to do with Terry’s career,” Mansfield said.

“It’s tragic,” former guard Gerry “Moon” Mullins said. “It’s a personal decision on Terry’s part, and I’m not going to question it, but I think it’s a real shame he’s chosen to isolate himself from everyone.”

Few expected Bradshaw to pick Coach Chuck Noll, but some former teammates considered Bradshaw a good friend.

“Obviously, I wasn’t going to use Chuck, and I wasn’t going to use a player,” Bradshaw said. “I felt the person who presented you should be someone you are close to.”

Mansfield traces Bradshaw’s split with the Steelers to 1983, when injuries sidelined Bradshaw for most of what proved to be his last season. Noll said Bradshaw was of no value to the team if he couldn’t play, and he suggested the quarterback get on with his life’s work.

“I think Terry felt betrayed and rejected by the Steelers,” Mansfield said. “He felt like he had really done something for them and they had turned their backs on him. He ended up walking away bitter.”

Since retiring, Bradshaw has been back to Three Rivers Stadium only once, for a short promotional tape recording for KDKA-TV. His brother, Gary, says Bradshaw’s sports broadcasting contract with CBS stipulates he does not have to cover Steelers games.

Bradshaw never lost his love for Art Rooney, the team’s patriarch, “the guy Terry always said motivated him more than anyone in that organization,” said Bill Bradshaw, the quarterback’s father.

But Bradshaw did not attend Rooney’s funeral last August, and when Rooney’s son, team president Dan Rooney, called in January with congratulations on his election to the Hall of Fame, Bradshaw did not return the call.

“I wish Terry could put everything behind him,” former linebacker Andy Russell said. “He just has to realize the Steelers are the people who gave him the opportunity to show his talent. And Chuck Noll, while he might not have been as sympathetic to Terry’s mistakes as Terry would have liked, he’s still the guy who stayed with him and didn’t panic and didn’t trade him. He believed in Terry.”

In January Bradshaw said he loved Noll. But at other times since his retirement he has called his former coach a jerk and said he should get out of football.

“I think it’s terrible what’s happened between Terry and the coach, but I think they’ll be able to work it out,” the elder Bradshaw said. “Terry and I have talked about that many times.”

No one suggests the city wouldn’t fling open its arms to the boy from Louisiana Tech who helped Pittsburgh mature from a perennial loser to the best team in the NFL in the 1970s.

“The bottom line is Terry Bradshaw was the best athlete to ever play that position,” Russell said. “Physically he was so dramatically better than people such as Bart Starr and Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath. He could run faster, jump higher and throw a ball longer.”

The cold shoulder from Bradshaw seems all the more chilling because he carried so much of the Steeler dynasty on it.

“Terry is just Terry,” Dan Rooney said. “I think he’s a better guy than people think. But I do wish he would come back again and have fun.”