The Pittsburgh Steelers, the NFL Draft, and the Connections that Bind a Community

With each new discovery, my Daisy Lampkin biography gives me some new cause to celebrate my hometown of Pittsburgh. Now, for the next few days, the whole nation can join in on the love: the National Football League is holding its annual draft this year in the Steel City. I’m not quite the (American) football fan I was growing up in the 1970s, when all the boys on the playground idolized Franco Harris and Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann. As Pittsburgh becomes the center of the professional football universe for a few days, there is, I have come to learn, a connection—thin, perhaps, but nevertheless there—between Daisy Lampkin and the Steelers and Pittsburgh and the NFL’s annual player draft.

​The Steelers were not always a championship-caliber franchise. For decades they were perennial cellar dwellers. Things began to change in 1969 when the team hired Chuck Noll as head coach. Noll brought a new professionalism and a mirthless determination that helped turn around the team’s fortunes. But Noll was not the sole architect of the new winning formula in Pittsburgh. To another man belongs great credit as well: William Nunn Jr.
 
In 1967 Bill Nunn accepted a part-time scouting position with the Steelers. He became a full-time scout and then assistant director of player personnel two years later under Noll. It is Nunn’s scouting and drafting strategy that is responsible, perhaps above all, for the team success that would follow.

Bill Nunn Jr. with the four Lombardi trophies he helped the Steelers win in the 1970s.

​Nunn saw talent all over the country. At a time when many scouts ignored smaller colleges and universities, tending to focus instead on the top powerhouse programs, Nunn understood that many historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) produced athletes that could flourish in the NFL, but because of segregation or straitened opportunities had elected to play for a small school instead.
 
The first player drafted under Nunn’s philosophy was a talented but raw defensive tackle from North Texas State University named Joe Greene. Probably no single draft pick has ever been so pivotal to the future of a professional football team’s subsequent history. From that point forward, Nunn’s keen eye identified players from HBCUs that would become fixtures on the Steelers roster: Mel Blount, Donnie Shell, L. C. Greenwood, Ernie Holmes, John Stallworth, and Sam Davis, among many other fine players.

The legend, Mean Joe Greene, who became the cornerstone of one of the great sports dynasties of the twentieth century.

​How did Nunn come to appreciate this rich crop of players from the HBCUs? Before he worked for the Steelers, Nunn had been a journalist. He served as the managing editor of the Pittsburgh Courier in the 1960s, taking over from his father, William Nunn Sr., who had for many years served in the same capacity. Before his stint as managing editor, Bill Jr. was the Courier’s sports editor. And in that role he had produced since the 1950s a special feature, an annual Black College All-America Team report. Long before he joined the Steelers, Nunn knew the world of black college athletics inside and out.
 
The Courier’s commitment to black sports did not come out of nowhere. Pittsburgh was a center of black athletics, fielding not one but two legendary Negro League teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays. The paper built its powerhouse circulation in part from its extensive coverage of this black sporting excellence. Extending the paper’s habit of organizing political crusades, its famed sports reporter, Wendell Smith, first proposed to Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers that it was time to break the color barrier in the Major Leagues and that a young athlete from Pasadena named Jackie Robinson was the guy to do it. Thus the Courier’s reputation for levering political change out of its sports journalism was well established by the time Nunn transferred his journalistic insights to the Steelers draft room.

The Courier's crusading sports reporter, Wendell Smith.

Daisy Lampkin was the vice president of the Courier throughout this period. What role, if any, she played in the Courier’s sports coverage remains to be seen. She had always been a crusader, and the Courier had certainly garnered a reputation as a crusading newspaper—against lynching, for black inclusion, for Roosevelt, against segregation. Wendell Smith’s championing of Robinson and Nunn’s promotion of worthy football talent fit this mold well. I may yet discover that Lampkin’s crusading tendencies left an imprint on the paper that extended far into the playground fantasies of a young white boy growing up in the Pittsburgh suburbs.
 
The Steelers’ embrace of Nunn’s vision was historic for the franchise and helped transform professional football. The franchise would continue to pioneer inclusiveness. In 1974, they would be the first franchise to name a black quarterback, Joe Gilliam, as a season starter. Much later, as pro football fans know, the Steelers would pioneer what became known as the “Rooney Rule”: the requirement that teams interview minority candidates when coaching and senior executive positions come open. The storied career of Mike Tomlin is one result of that history.
 
The organization's openness to racial inclusion was part of the team’s DNA. The franchise’s storied founder, Art Rooney Sr., was a tough Irish kid, a boxer and a gambler, the kind of guy that in the earlier part of the century would have been called a “sport.” Rooney used to hang out in Pittsburgh’s predominantly black neighborhood, the Hill—Daisy Lampkin’s neighborhood—tossing back drinks and stories at Gus Greenlee’s famed Crawford Grille. Greenlee was for a time the owner of the Pittsburgh Crawford’s, a famed Negro League baseball team that fielded stars such as Satchell Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell. Rooney mixed easily with the gamblers and athletes and jazz musicians and sports who made up Greenlee’s world. He must have welcomed Nunn’s unorthodox scouting strategy.

Art Rooney Sr., patriarch of the Pittsburgh Steelers, maintained close connections with the sporting world of Pittsburgh's Hill district. Gus Greenlee's famed Crawford Grill sold Rooney's Beer to thirsty patrons.

​Nunn’s appreciation for talent over pedigree served him and the Steelers well. Soon the other teams caught up with the Steelers’ approach and new strategies would be needed. But the commitment of Nunn to talent over pedigree had already changed the landscape of pro football, college football, and the fortunes of the athletes who play the games. Nunn was himself elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2021, as a “contributor” to the game. He was the first African American elected in that category. Thirteen of the players he drafted are there with him.

--David J. Snyder