50 years later, the legacy of Pitt’s 1976 football national championship endures

Here’s Mike Suley, right in the middle of it.

The Pitt superfan was 27 then. A brown belt is fastened around his dark blue jeans. Tucked into his pants is the light blue T-shirt he got for Christmas, with its contrasting navy trims on the collar and sleeves, and in the center a blue-and-gold-clad Panther holding a football below the message: “WE’RE NUMBER 1.”

Suley has his right arm held high, pointing his index finger toward the sky.

He arrived in New Orleans on Dec. 30, 1976, springing $798 for airfare and lodging via the Wayne Travel Service Sugar Bowl tour group out of Pittsburgh. Mostly older folks, but he didn’t care.

He celebrated New Year’s Eve and awoke the next morning in his hotel room at the Maison Dupuy Hotel, a little banged up from the night out but confident as could be in his beloved team.

And so it went half a century ago: Pitt 27, Georgia 3.

A perfect 12-0 season. Consensus national champions. The Panthers, No. 1, as good as it gets.

Some of the players hoisted their coach, the late Johnny Majors, above their shoulders before the clock struck zero. How could they wait?

Soon, they’d puff their cigars in the locker room, take the party back to the Marriott on Canal Street and revel in the feeling of a lifetime, the culmination of what had been the season of a lifetime.

The stories are passed down like heirlooms, parents telling kids and kids telling grandkids about what it was like.

This upcoming Saturday afternoon at Acrisure Stadium, when Pitt faces North Carolina and brings back members of the team to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that special season, so many of those stories will be traded.

“There’s an affinity with that team,” Suley says now. “I wasn’t a player, but I thought I was part of that experience. There has to be some luck, a little bit of magic and some greatness. I’ve always said the ’76 season to me was just magical in my life.”

‘Once-in-a-lifetime athlete’

It begins with grass.

On Sept. 11, 1976, a year before he’d be coaching back at Tennessee, Majors glanced down inside Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Ind., and said the playing surface looked like a wheat field in Kansas.

So the rumor goes, the Fighting Irish let the grass grow exceptionally high — engulfing ankles and spilling over cleats — in hopes of slowing down Tony Dorsett.

“They had the grounds guy come over, and it was a big stink,” Dave Wannstedt, a former Pitt offensive lineman and graduate assistant that year, told the Post-Gazette recently. “[Majors] was not happy about it.”

The irritation didn’t last long.

On Pitt’s first play from scrimmage, Dorsett took a handoff inside and bounced to his right, running with those long, graceful strides and churning those knees past the outstretched grasp of a defender, knifing his way deep into opposing territory for a 62-yard gain.

There was, as it turned out in the Panthers’ decisive season-opening win, nothing stopping the senior from Hopewell.

During the preceding offseason, offensive lineman George Messich arrived in Oakland as a junior college transfer from Potomac State. He didn’t know much about the team.

Messich called his father the night after the team’s first spring practice, anxious to let his old man know two things.

“Number one,” Messich said, “if I keep working, I know I can end up starting.”

“What’s the second?” his father asked.

“We’ve got this superhuman on our team,” Messich said. “Tony Dorsett.”

Already a three-time All-American by his senior year — previously the centerpiece of a 1973 freshman class that transformed the fortunes of the program — Dorsett was a preseason favorite for the Heisman Trophy and any other relevant distinctions the governing bodies decided to award.

In Week 7, against Navy on Oct. 23, Dorsett had that much within reach. So, too, was the all-time college rushing record. He was 152 yards shy of the mark then held by Ohio State’s Archie Griffin.

At 4:05 p.m. in Annapolis, Md., with 13:22 remaining in the fourth quarter, Dorsett took a pitch from third-string quarterback Tom Yewcic, filling in for the injured Matt Cavanaugh.

The play was called Haw Option 9.

“Everyone in the country, everyone in the world,” Yewcic said over the phone recently, “knew that he was getting the ball.”

Dorsett shed a couple tacklers en route to a 32-yard touchdown.

Offensive lineman Tom Brzoza was first to the celebration, tackling Dorsett in the end zone in a big bear hug. Messich was next. By then, the Panthers’ bench had cleared, Navy fired off its cannon and the Brigade of Midshipmen doffed their caps.

“I became emotional, and tears were running down my cheeks, and I had trouble talking,” longtime Pitt radio announcer Bill Hillgrove said. “I looked at [color commentator] Johnny Sauer for help, and he had tears running down his cheeks. We realized at that moment, this was a once-in-a-lifetime athlete.”

‘Dog meat! Dog meat!’

A great to-do was made of curfew.

Leading into the Sugar Bowl, the Georgia Bulldogs were staying at a hotel next to the Louisiana Superdome, and Bulldogs coach Vince Dooley was a stickler — 11 p.m. sharp, his players best be in their rooms.

The Panthers had been practicing for four days right off of the Gulf of Mexico in Biloxi, Miss., before they took buses to New Orleans and shuffled into their hotel a block away from Bourbon Street.

Jim Corbett, Pitt’s star tight end, said most of his teammates were out on the town, getting back to the hotel around 2 a.m. before “swimming in the hotel’s heated pool.”

“We went out in groups and stayed respectable — didn’t do anything wrong,” Yewcic said. “We were very loose. They were tight, and by the time the game came around, they just didn’t have a prayer.”

Pitt squeaked by Syracuse and muscled its way to a close win against West Virginia earlier in the season but otherwise had mostly breezed to 11-0. It weathered the early injury to starting quarterback Robert Haygood and then the hairline ankle fracture that kept Cavanaugh out for four games.

The Panthers defense was fierce, anchored by a line of Don Parrish, Randy Holloway, Cecil Johnson, Al Romano and Arnie Weatherington. In the back end, safety Bob Jury picked off 10 passes that season.

Much was also made of those shaved heads.

See, Dooley promised his team he’d shave his head if they beat Georgia Tech and won the SEC championship. They did, and Dooley and more than 20 Bulldogs arrived at the Sugar Bowl bald as cue balls.

And those Georgia fans. Oh, those Georgia fans.

“The Georgia fans were really rabid — but almost to the point of being obnoxious,” Hillgrove said. “They would crowd our lobby and chant, ‘Dog meat! Dog meat!’ to the point where the players, to get up to their rooms, would have to use a service elevator.”

Outside the hotel, in the French Quarter, Suley estimates the Bulldogs fans outnumbered Pitt’s supporters 10 to 1.

“They weren’t mean. There was no violence or anything,” Suley said. “Everybody had their heads shaved, and they came screaming at us, ‘Dog meat! Dog meat!’ It was intimidating.”

Pitt dominated Georgia from the outset, sprinting to a 21-0 halftime lead. Cavanaugh — who was named Sugar Bowl MVP — rushed for a touchdown and connected with Gordon Jones for another before Dorsett scampered in for a score.

By the fourth quarter, there was a chant rising from the Panthers’ sideline: “Dog meat! Dog meat!”

“We didn’t like it,” Dorsett said on Jan. 3, 1977, of the pregame jeers from Georgia. “And the guys wanted to go out there and show the Georgia Bulldogs who was the dog food.”

‘Like we were brothers’

So many memories.

A little over an hour south of Pittsburgh, Messich sits in his office inside the locker room at Mapletown High School. It’s where he graduated in 1973 and where he’s going on 44 years as the small Greene County school’s head football coach.

After a practice, Messich is regaling the tales that occupy his mind daily, the ones he frequently wakes up from dreams about.

Who could believe it’s been 50 years?

“It’s like we were brothers,” said Messich, the starting right tackle on Pitt’s Sugar Bowl team. “It was a special bond.”

Some of those brothers he’s lost, including fellow linemen. Joe Stone died last year at age 70. Matt Carroll, a four-year starter and standout guard, died in late August at 69 years old.

Others are battling various health issues — that includes Dorsett, who in 2013 was diagnosed with signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, better known as CTE.

Messich thinks about these things, thinks about where the time has gone.

His wife, Linda, Mapletown’s athletic director, walks into the office and sits down.

“How close were we?” Messich asked, referring to the bond of that 1976 team.

“Oh geez ... ” Linda said, chuckling and shaking her head.

He plans to wear his Sugar Bowl watch to the reunion on Saturday and wonders who else kept theirs.

After that game on Jan. 1, 1977, the only thing the players turned in was their shoulder pads. Messich kept his jersey and helmet, which both are displayed in the game room of his home less than a mile away from the high school.

“What hits everybody is how quickly those 50 years disappeared. But that’s life, and the older you get, the faster it seems to go,” Hillgrove said. “That time went really fast. But the memories were so good and so stark that they’re forever imprinted in your brain.”

The memories endure

This is as much about history as inheritance — about the stories enduring, about future generations knowing and appreciating what it was like.

Suley, personally an avid sports fan and professionally the chair of the Allegheny County Board of Property Assessment Appeals and Review, feels “blessed” he was able to see Dorsett at Pitt in the golden age of Pittsburgh sports in the 1970s.

Naturally, the connection to that time shrinks with each passing decade, with each additional reunion of that championship team.

Suley has maintained much from that Sugar Bowl. So many memories. He kept his game-worn T-shirt in storage, and you bet it held up. Recently, he snapped a picture of his 10-year-old grandson, Max, wearing the shirt.

It’s a bit long on him, but in the photo, Max is holding his right arm high, pointing his right index finger toward the sky.

On Saturday, attending Pitt’s game against North Carolina and enjoying the 50th anniversary celebration with his grandpa, Max will be wearing that shirt.

The message written in gold above the Panther has hardly faded: “WE’RE NUMBER 1.”

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