I’m here to tell you about those guys — the “other guys” from the ’74 draft. The ones most people don’t remember or never knew of. How did their lives turn out? What was their experience toiling under coach Chuck Noll and banging heads with Mean Joe Greene and Franco Harris during those brutal months in Latrobe?

The summer of ’74 was an unusual one at St. Vincent. Famous author James Michener was there, working on a book about sports and culture, but the Steelers veterans were not. They missed the first month-plus on account of a players strike, a fact Greene believes helped the team win its first Super Bowl that year.

The rookies, you see, had the run of camp for something like 50 practices, usually two per day.

“Those guys made a tremendous contribution that year, and I’ve always thought it was because they had a chance to get more reps during camp, because we weren’t there,” Greene says. “They were very, very important.”

Some were, anyway. Others were bit actors. Most never played here. I don’t have all their stories, but I do have some. More like snippets from the lives of a handful of men who even if they never played a down in black and gold can always say they were part of the greatest draft class in American sports history ...

‘Big Daddy’

Lawrence Hunt is the bionic man. He’s had both hips and his left knee replaced and is awaiting a new right shoulder. Yet he plays golf three times a week. He also is a man at peace — and that was decidedly not the case when he bolted Pittsburgh 50 years ago.

Hunt and his father flew in after the draft and met with Dan Rooney. A defensive lineman out of Iowa State, Hunt felt the NFL’s financial hierarchy was unfair. Once the stars got paid, there wasn’t much left. He cringed when he heard his fellow rookies whooping it up in their hotel rooms after signing paltry rookie deals. He asked the Rooneys for $100,000 and wasn’t taking a penny less, even if he was a 15th-round pick.

“One of the assistants pulled me aside and said, ‘We don’t pay linemen that kind of money,’ ” Hunt recalls. “They offered $40,000 with incentives to bring it to my number. I wasn’t going to take that. I said, ‘If I’m gonna move my wife and child from Ames, Iowa, to Pittsburgh, I don’t want to be poor.’ ”

Hunt returned to his room and told his father he was ready to go home.

...continued

©2024 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.