Chapter 1: Billy from Crafton 1 Billy from Crafton As far back as I can remember, I was always surrounded by people who were passionate about one of two things: work or sports. For me, as early as nine years old, it was both. I embraced work so I''d be free to play all the games I found irresistible. I didn''t think there was anything unusual about the lives and routines of the families around me, because that was life for kids in the 1960s and ''70s of my Pittsburgh neighborhood. We were tireless grade-schoolers in the working-class area of Crafton, and we treated our games like our full-time jobs. My family lived in a brick Victorian on Hawthorne Avenue. It was a street where PAT buses--public city buses in Pittsburgh--would sometimes wait until the end of a play before driving through our pickup football games. Even then, several years before high school, I saw myself as a linebacker.

I shared a bedroom with my two brothers, Dale and Doug, and the posters on our wall told part of my story: One showed the Chicago Bears'' Dick Butkus, intense and athletic, in action, and the other was of his equally strong divisional rival, the Green Bay Packers'' Ray Nitschke. Both of them, in those pictures and in reality, always seemed to be ready for what was next. The next play. The next quarter. The next game. That was me. No matter what I had to do away from sports, I could always see a path back to the games, whether playing them or discussing them. For example, I can still remember delivering the old Pittsburgh Press on Sunday mornings in the fall.

I had about thirty customers during the week and even more on Sundays. I''d race to finish my route, then sit with my father, Laird Cowher, as he watched Notre Dame football highlights on TV (he always loved Notre Dame), then get ready for church. He followed all sports, but I wouldn''t say he was athletic. He was a tall man, about six-four, and lean. He had dark hair and a strong jawline. While Laird was his given name, everyone called him Bill. Which made me "Billy" to my family and friends. My father was our Sunday school teacher.

We attended Hawthorne Avenue Presbyterian Church, about four doors down from our house. Dad''s hour-long lesson plan was structured the same way every week: If we paid attention and did what we were supposed to in the first forty-five minutes, we could spend the remaining time talking about sports. In a lot of ways, that arrangement was a glimpse of how my father operated. He was an accountant who had a meticulous approach to his work. In his office area in the house, you could always find five sharpened No. 2 pencils along with an orderly assortment of staples, erasers, sheets of paper, and paper clips--all in a designated area. He put his thoughts on paper, whether it was to-do lists or his feelings about a particular topic. If any of us went to his desk for any reason, he''d loudly remind us, "Leave it the way you found it.

" If one thing was slightly out of place, he could always spot it. Business, and details, were important to him, but so were sports. Baseball was his first love. I remember how he''d spend hours with me in the cinder alley behind our house, trying to teach me how to throw a curveball. "Snap your wrist, Billy!" he''d say in exasperation. "Snap it." He''d show me the motion and then execute it flawlessly. When I tried, I''d either skip the ball well short of him, causing the cinders to fly in the air, or I''d leave the ball too high.

(I continued to play baseball, but I could never throw the curve. Or hit it.) Dad was no-nonsense about baseball, both as a coach and an umpire--he''d let you know if you weren''t playing the right way. One of my best friends growing up was a kid named John Lynch. John lived one street over from us, on South Linwood. He spent so much time at my house playing Foto-Electric football and table hockey that Dad was comfortable speaking with him the same way he spoke with us, his sons. Dad was the umpire for one of John''s baseball games and sensed that a frustrated John, not having a good day on the mound, was hitting batters on purpose. Dad called time and approached the hill.

"John, I know what you''re doing. Don''t be a punk. If you hit one more kid, I''m going to throw you out of this game." Even better, after that game, Dad saw John walking home. Dad slowed the car and offered him a ride. John tried to give Dad the No thank you, Mr. Cowher treatment, but Dad insisted that he get in. Of course, John knew that another lecture was coming.

Dad used that brief drive as another opportunity for more coaching on the right way to do things. That was a consistent theme with my parents. They wanted us to play well, and they wanted to see evidence that we were improving, too. I couldn''t get enough of sports. I played baseball, basketball, football, and tennis. I was on the run from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning until the end of the day. I excitedly went with my dad around the city, whether it was to the Civic Arena to see Duquesne University basketball, to walk up steep Lothrop Street (also known as Cardiac Hill) for University of Pittsburgh football games, or to Three Rivers Stadium to see the Steelers play. I was endlessly active, and tall but reed thin, so my mother, Dorothy--everyone called her Dot or J.

D.--tried her creative best to help me gain weight. She did all she could to get some pounds to stick. Every night before bed, she''d have a milkshake for me to drink, and she''d blend in a little of everything. When she made steak for dinner, I always got an extra one. She loved making brownies, and it made her smile when I filled up on them. If I went to Wendy''s, I''d order the triples. For breakfast, strangely, it was the smell of burnt toast that lured me to the kitchen.

We had a toaster that wouldn''t pop on its own, so the bread would often burn--and I grew to love the smell and the burnt toast itself. I''d eat everything Mom made and then either walk out the door if I saw the school bus coming down Hawthorne or run if it had passed the house because, fortunately, I could catch up to it when it turned on Linwood. It was a blessing to grow up where I did, and how I did. I never consciously thought at the time, My parents are a great team , but they were. They were both inspiring, with different styles. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. She was personable and warm, with a knack for making fast friends. She''d played basketball growing up, so she held her own in a house full of athletic boys.

Everyone in the neighborhood knew how friendly she was. She could be seen walking everywhere because she didn''t drive. My father tried to teach her many times, and it led to some naturally funny exchanges between the two: "Your father said that when you''re making a turn, you don''t have to turn the wheel back after that," Mom would say. "But, Dot," Dad would reply, "I didn''t say to take your hands off the wheel!" They pushed all of us boys to reach our potential as athletes. My brothers and I were constantly going off to some sports camp. We lived less than one hundred miles from West Virginia University, so I attended overnight football camp there multiple times. The first time I went there at eight years old, I was probably the youngest kid there. Jim Carlen was the head coach, and I was there when the one and only Bobby Bowden took over for him.

My parents put in the investment for my brothers and me, and they always wanted to know the same things when we returned: How did you get better? What did you learn? By the time I entered Carlynton High School in the fall of 1971, a few things had become clear to me. One was, I shared the same love and mastery of numbers that my father did. All aspects of math came easily to me. I looked forward to any math course, whether it was algebra, trigonometry, or, eventually, calculus. Our football team definitely had a math problem. That is, most of the time we had between twenty-two and twenty-four players on the entire roster. Everyone on the team played offense and defense. I started out as a center and linebacker, then switched to a tight end / linebacker combination.

At center, I expected to make every block. At linebacker, I expected to make every tackle. My thoughts on the field were straightforward: I was overjoyed to play, and I wanted to find every way possible to help my team win. There was nothing intricate about our playbook: We had six plays, three passing and three running; our six became twelve when we flipped the formation and ran the same plays. Our not having a lot of players led to our becoming an incredibly close team. I loved those guys, and I knew that it was mutual. By high school, I had long been hooked on the strategy and competition that football provided. But what playing on our team really taught me was the importance of unity and getting something--even the smallest contribution--out of every person on the roster.

In my sophomore year I became the best player on our team, being selected as one of our captains. It felt good to be the person everyone felt he could connect with, and the guy the others looked to for leadership and playmaking. What felt even better, though, was watching everyone on our team have a role that was uniquely his. That''s the beauty of football: You don''t have to be a great player or great athlete to be a part of it. It''s a sport that destroys divided teams and rewards those who rely on one another. At its best, football is a unifier and a confidence builder for young boys. In football-crazed western Pennsylvania, we were a Class A (or small division) team. We had success on the field, but the memories I''ll.