published on May 04, 2024 in celeb

The last night at Pitt Stadium

The game ended with nine seconds left. Fans had flooded the football field. The public-address announcer pleaded with them. The game is not over! Please get off the field! The game is not completed! His words drowned in the noise. An avalanche of fans was pouring over the barrier wall and onto the field. The goalpost at one end of Pitt Stadium already was teetering, and soon it crashed into the crowd and was carried across the field toward the stadium exit.

Everyone wanted a piece of Pitt Stadium.

Fans tore into the AstroTurf with carpet cutters and scissors. At the top of the stadium, people dismantled bleachers with the wrench sets they’d brought from home, then lifted the bleachers over the back wall and out of the 75-year-old concrete bowl. In the bathrooms, men tugged on porcelain troughs, old-school urinals that would later become hot items in internet auctions. The scoreboard, too big to carry away, survived to tell the story: Pitt 37, Notre Dame 27.

This was 20 years ago — Nov. 13, 1999 — and the last game at Pitt Stadium lives on in the hearts and minds and, believe it or not, the bed frames of the Pitt players, coaches and fans who were there. They remember witnessing one of the most spectacular and surreal scenes in the Pitt football team’s storied history. They remember the night 61,190 came to say goodbye.

“It doesn’t feel like 20 years,” safety Ramon Walker, one of Pitt’s defensive heroes in that game, told The Athletic last week. “It feels just like yesterday.”

“I get chills just thinking about it,” said tailback Kevan Barlow, who scored the last touchdown at Pitt Stadium. “I want to put a uniform on right now. Man.”

Safety Ramon Walker sprints after stripping a Notre Dame tailback in the third quarter. (Courtesy of Pitt Athletics)

The Pitt players celebrated with the crowd as Pitt Stadium disappeared around them. By then, they all were aware of the Pitt athletic department’s plan. The football stadium would be razed within weeks, and a gleaming basketball arena would be built in its place. In retrospect, the investment ushered in one of the best eras of Pitt men’s basketball. The Panthers reached the NCAA tournament in each of their first nine seasons at “the Pete,” Petersen Events Center.

But the decision to move in with the Steelers, sharing a practice facility in South Side and a home stadium at Heinz Field, remains a sore spot for some Pitt fans and former players. The arrangement was an upgrade in so many ways and a plus for recruiting purposes, yet it came at the cost of having an on-campus stadium. That’s no small matter for students. Pitt Stadium had been built into a hillside in Oakland, nestled between dormitories and hospitals. And for everything the old stadium lacked — repairs, renovations, escalators, elevators, TVs, natural grass and seat-backs, for starters — it had soul.

“When we left, and when it was gone,” Walker said, “we lost a little piece of Pitt with it.”

Before they left, before it was gone, Pitt Stadium was alive for one last night.

That morning, a limousine crawled through a cemetery three miles from campus. It was perfect fall weather in Pittsburgh, crisp and cloudless. The limo stopped, and Mike Gallagher stepped out. He carried flowers. Leaves crackled as Gallagher, a journalist in Erie, Pa., at the time, walked toward his parents’ graves. When he reached them, he knelt, split the bouquet of roses in two, and placed half beside his mother’s gravestone. He kept the other half in his hand.

His day would begin at a cemetery in Greenfield and end at Pitt Stadium.

The stadium was a fixture for Gallagher’s family. When he was 6, Gallagher and his older brothers scalped tickets and saved three for themselves. A few years later, Gallagher started sneaking in with the marching band and stealing from the Pitt locker room. This worked until then-head coach Jackie Sherrill caught Gallagher holding a helmet and shoulder pads. Sherrill dragged Gallagher to equipment manager Boo Connors and told the boy, “You have two choices. You can come every day and help out. Or we can call the cops.”

And that’s how Gallagher became a Pitt ballboy.

He likes to say he was raised by the Pitt football team. He ate dinner and studied with the players. He watched Tony Dorsett’s Heisman season in 1976 from the Panthers sideline. Sherrill phoned Gallagher’s principal before road trips to make sure his grades were good enough for him miss Friday classes. Eventually, Sherrill taught Gallagher how to drive in his Buick Riviera.

Back at the cemetery, Gallagher straightened and stepped away from his parents’ graves. He lost his father in 1992, and his mother five years later. The night Pitt defeated Miami in 1997, Gallagher and his brothers were at their mother’s bedside in Montefiore Hospital, steps from their childhood home on Chesterfield Road. The Pitt Stadium lights shined through the hospital room window that night. Tears welled in Gallagher’s eyes as he watched fans storm the field, tear down the goalposts and carry them out of the stadium.

“It was just like an epiphany,” he said.

His mother died two days later.

Gallagher returned to the limo he had rented and the 10 friends he’d invited along. The other half of the bouquet went with him. He had come to pay respects to Pitt Stadium, too. So, before the game began, Gallagher laid the remaining roses beneath one of the goalposts.

Defensive end Ken Kashubara still recalls almost every detail from that weekend. It was the last home game of his senior season. Pitt was 4-5, needing two more wins to be bowl-eligible. There was a banquet at Doubletree Hotel the night before, bringing the current team together with the more than 300 alumni — players from every decade of Pitt football since the 1920s — who were back in town. Two hours before the game, the team and alumni walked from Sutherland Hall to the locker room, the traditional Panther Prowl. Waves of fans climbed DeSoto Street, known as “Cardiac Hill,” toward them.

When Kashubara stepped on the field, he wanted to remember it forever.

“I took a (mental) snapshot of that,” he said.

Slowly scanning the stadium seats, Kashubara saw a sellout crowd building. But he also saw everything that made Pitt Stadium, as he says, “like home” to the players. Back then, they spent almost all their time at Pitt Stadium. That’s where they practiced. That’s where strength coach Buddy Morris made players run stadium steps carrying cinder blocks. That’s where Morris towed cars and trucks onto the red track encircling the field and had players push them.

An aerial photo of Pitt Stadium before its final game. (Courtesy of Pitt Athletics)

Scott McCurley, a walk-on freshman linebacker, was forced into action against Notre Dame because of injuries. He would make a name for himself that night — even if CBS misidentified him on the broadcast as his older brother, Jeff, Pitt’s starting center — with a blocked field goal and an interception.

Years later, McCurley worked on the Green Bay Packers coaching staff. At Lambeau Field, he said, people say the tradition is “in the bricks.” McCurley felt the same way about Pitt Stadium. Every Pitt legend since 1925 had played there, and so many of them — Dorsett, Mike Ditka, Bill Fralic, Craig “Ironhead” Heyward — came back for the final game. The Steelers had played there, too, with home games at Pitt Stadium in the 1950s and 1960s. The iconic photo of New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle, bloodied and helmetless, was taken at Pitt Stadium.

“When you walked into the place,” McCurley said, “you felt the tradition, the guys who came before you.”

For one last night, Pitt tried to awaken the echoes of Pitt Stadium. It would not be easy. The Fighting Irish were having a down season, at 5-4, but Pitt had not beaten Notre Dame in eight tries, dating back to 1986. The Panthers had lost the last six by a combined score of 280-77. But the people were there — “I just wish we didn’t have to tear down the stadium to get them to a game,” Harris joked later. “I don’t know do what we can do for an encore” — and they twirled their white pompoms. The pressure was on Pitt to put on a show.

“That day was what you sign up for college football for,” receiver Latef Grim said.

“You’ve got to win,” Harris said. “There is no tie. And for sure there’s no lose. There’s no way you can lose. You can’t let yourself lose.”

The unluckiest person at Pitt Stadium that night was Corey Culton. He had a sideline pass to sing the national anthem and alma mater with the Pitt men’s glee club. The mood was “celebratory,” he said, “but it had that undercurrent of a little bit of sadness.” And then Culton left early. Not by choice, really. He had to go to work. After the first quarter, with Pitt ahead, 7-3, Culton walked to his car and stewed in silence as he drove to Applebee’s in Monroeville.

During his shift, Culton listened to the radio broadcast in the kitchen, and he scurried out to the bar to catch the game on TV whenever he had a chance. What he saw surprised him. Pitt was hanging on. Kicker Nick Lotz hit a chip-shot field goal — one of three that night — to push the lead to seven.

But just as Pitt lost a fan — to Applebee’s — it gained another.

Bryan Mack was a Pitt freshman from Latrobe, but he’d grown up rooting for Notre Dame. He stood in the student section and wore a No. 3 Ron Powlus jersey. Sometime around the start of the second quarter, however, a thought occurred to Mack. He hadn’t been accepted at Notre Dame. He had at Pitt.

“I realized Pitt is my team now,” Mack said. “I can’t root for Notre Dame.”

Mack zipped up his jacket over the jersey.

No sooner had he done that than Notre Dame charged back. Quarterback Jarious Jackson tied the game, 10-10, with a touchdown pass to Joey Getherall with 92 seconds left in the half. As Pitt pushed to regain the lead, linebacker Anthony Denman made quarterback John Turman pay, picking off an ill-advised pass over the middle. The Fighting Irish got into position for a 45-yard field-goal try.

Pitt’s special teamers had nearly blocked kicker Jim Sanson’s two previous tries in that game, so they liked their odds with him booting a low line drive from this distance. But no one expected McCurley to make a play. His role on the field-goal unit was to pin blockers and try to get another defender through the line. At the snap, McCurley put his head down. He busted straight through the line. He was directly in the line of fire when Sanson kicked.

“Nobody even touched me,” McCurley said. “It hit me right in the facemask.”

Even before the ball landed, McCurley was jumping up and down, his arms in the air. The bar at Applebee’s erupted. Time expired. The score was still tied.

Barlow had been bottled up. Pitt’s bruising running back had rushed for just eight yards before halftime, and the Panthers’ only effective offense to that point had been downfield strikes to receivers Antonio Bryant and Grim. (Turman, a starter-turned-backup starting again because of injury, completed only 10 passes all game, but he made them count. Grim had four catches for 120 yards, and Bryant had four receptions for 95 yards and two scores.)

Barlow was raised in East Liberty, a couple miles from Pitt’s campus, and starred at Peabody High School. He had dreamed of nights like this as a kid. But Barlow was nursing a left ankle sprain he had suffered two games prior. It had caused him to miss the Virginia Tech game. He suited up against Notre Dame and started, yet he wasn’t sure how much he had to give.

After Kashubara stripped Notre Dame running back Julius Jones early in the third quarter, Harris turned to his workhorse. Barlow plowed for nine yards, then dragged a safety over the goal line for a 3-yard touchdown to regain the lead. Barlow started to celebrate, then fell to the turf. He got up and limped to the sideline. He had reaggravated the sprained ankle.

“There was nothing that was going to keep me from going back out there and playing,” Barlow said, “unless it was broken.”

The score ping ponged, but Pitt never trailed. Notre Dame tied the game on a trick play, receiver David Givens passing to receiver Bobby Brown, and Pitt answered with a flea-flicker to Grim that set up a go-ahead field goal. Walker stripped Notre Dame running back Tony Fisher, setting up Bryant’s second score, and the Fighting Irish responded with a two-play touchdown drive. Then the teams traded field goals early in the fourth quarter.

All that scoring, and it came down to this: There were six minutes left. The Fighting Irish trailed by three, and they were driving.

Jackson dropped back in the pocket on first down and fired a dart over the middle to Getherall. Walker, the safety, smacked Getherall, and the ball somersaulted end over end through the air. McCurley, the walk-on, had faked blitz on the play, fell into coverage and intercepted the deflected pass.

“I’ll always remember looking up from the ground and seeing Scott with the ball, running, and knowing we have them on lock,” Walker said. “We’re going to win.”

On the sideline, Harris put an arm around Barlow. Barlow was hurting and tired. Harris coaxed Barlow onto the field, telling him, “You’re OK,” and instructed him to go end the game. Harris had struggled for three seasons to know how to best motivate Barlow. Those words sufficed.

“I wanted to run through a wall for him,” Barlow said. “He was counting on me.”

Barlow carried the ball eight times in the next 10 plays. He ran over people.

“I put the team on my back because I wasn’t going to let them down at that moment,” Barlow said. “Ironhead was there. All the alums were there. The stadium was sold out. You think we’re going to lose? Not while I’m there.

“I don’t think so.”

Kevan Barlow celebrates after scoring the final touchdown at Pitt Stadium. (Courtesy of Pitt Athletics)

On his eighth carry of the drive, Barlow bounced wide to the left and crossed the goal line. What he did next might not mean much to you, but it did to Harris. Before he was dogpiled by his teammates, before he kneeled and thanked God, Barlow handed the ball to the referee. Harris asked his players to do that after every touchdown. Some did. Some didn’t. A photo of that moment, of Barlow handing the ball to the ref, hung behind Harris’ desk until the day he left Pitt. Harris still has it at his home in Aspinwall.

“That picture captured, like, my whole career,” Barlow said. “Walt played an instrumental role in my development as a young man at that time. Me handing the ball to the ref meant a lot to him, like everything (he) did with this kid was worth it in the end.”

As soon as Barlow scored, students began climbing over the wall and onto the track. There was a minute and a half left on the clock, and Pitt led, 37-27. Players stood on the bench, whipped towels and egged on the crowd.

“You didn’t have a choice,” said Mack, the fan who had left his Notre Dame allegiance behind in the first quarter. “We all started to walk closer and closer to the field.”

Former Pitt players fished footballs out of bags on the home sideline and began hurling them into the bleachers. Ironhead Heyward threw one, and John Welch, who had graduated from Pitt in 1998, jumped to catch it. He slammed against the bleachers on the way down, but he held on. “Then I squeezed tight,” Welch said. When the students rushed the field, Welch ran the other way, out the stadium exit and to his car. He missed the fun, but he kept the souvenir.

“It was pretty important to have a piece of the stadium,” Welch said.

Everyone seemed to agree.

When Jackson’s fourth-down pass was knocked away with nine seconds left, McCurley raced after the ball as it bounced out of bounds. Across the field, the student section already was running for the goalposts. A Notre Dame ballboy hassled McCurley to give the ball back, but this was the last game ball at Pitt Stadium, McCurley said, “I was trying to hold on to the darn thing.” McCurley eventually handed the ball off to a teammate and, well, he never saw it again.

“Unfortunately,” McCurley said, “it’s not sitting in my basement right now.”

Harris and Notre Dame head coach Bob Davie met at midfield, amid the mob, and Davie told officials to let the clock run out. The game was over.

“The goalposts were headed right toward me,” Harris said. “It was a little scary getting out of the way, not getting gored by the goalposts. Our students went crazy.”

Mack, his jacket still hiding his No. 3 Notre Dame jersey, squeezed between bodies and grabbed the crossbar. He remembers people yelling directions. They wanted to carry the goalpost down Fifth Avenue and put it on the Cathedral of Learning lawn. Mounted police stopped them short, keeping the goalpost in the stadium, but order was far from restored.

“It was complete destruction,” Mack said. “I can say I was truly a Pitt fan for the last three quarters of that game. And I have never looked back.”

Doug Smoyer, a 1998 Pitt graduate, had gotten separated from his friends when they ran onto the field. He was watching the madness unfold when someone tapped him on the shoulder and asked, “Can you block for me?” The guy was pulling on a big chunk of turf. Smoyer surveyed the haul and said, “Sure, I’ll block. But you’ve got to give me a piece of that.”

So Smoyer strolled away with a strip of turf about 12 inches by six inches.

Later that night, behind the bar C.J. Barneys, Smoyer stood shoulder to shoulder with Pitt fans as they drank and listened to broadcaster Bill Hillgrove’s postgame radio show. At one point, Smoyer and a buddy stepped onto the stage to answer a few questions from Hillgrove. After Smoyer told the story of how he got the turf, Hillgrove asked how he was going to split it with his buddy. Smoyer shrugged. Hillgrove summoned a bartender, and she brought a kitchen knife to the stage. She sliced the turf in half, and the crowd roared.

“That ended what was an incredibly memorable and great way to say farewell to my beloved Pitt Stadium,” Smoyer said.

In the afterglow, once police cleared the field, much of the crowd remained in the stands as a man stood alone at midfield. This was Marshall Goldberg, the star running back from head coach Jock Sutherland’s back-to-back national championship teams in 1936 and 1937. Goldberg, a two-time All-American and a College Football Hall of Famer, held Pitt’s career rushing record until Dorsett passed him in 1974.

On this night, Goldberg was asked to capture the spirit of Pitt Stadium in the closing ceremony. There was a wooden box on a small pedestal in front of him.

Marshall Goldberg at the stadium’s closing ceremony. (Courtesy of Pitt Athletics)

An armored truck rolled onto the field and stopped near Goldberg. He opened the box and didn’t put anything inside. He just wanted to capture the ethos of the stadium and the program and the magic of that night. When Goldberg was sure the spirit from 75 years of Pitt football was safely inside, he closed the lid. The box went into the Brinks truck, and away it went. (Two years later, Goldberg returned to release the spirit of Pitt Stadium at Heinz Field.)

“When the Brinks truck was driving away, the game had been over for an hour,” the defensive end Kashubara said. “Two things hit me. The first was — I wish I had realized it before — how many people care about the program.”

The second, he said, was how much his senior class had endured to reach that point. They had been recruited by former head coach Johnny Majors. They lost more than they won. And they were beat up. Kashubara had three knee surgeries during college, and another one afterward to repair a torn cartilage he had injured early in the fourth quarter that night against Notre Dame.

“It was a storybook ending to the whole experience,” he said, “a moving moment that made all of those years, all of that everything, totally worth it.”

She’s been gone 20 years, but Pitt Stadium lives on in ways you wouldn’t expect.

One day last week, Lotz, who kicked the last point scored at Pitt Stadium, was in his office in Philadelphia, where he works as a corporate banking manager, talking on the phone with a reporter from Pittsburgh. On his desk, beside the office telephone, sat a small square of turf. On top of the turf was a circular piece of white metal stamped with the date and the score. It’s a slice of the goalpost that came down after the Notre Dame game. It holds Lotz’s pens now.

“That’s the one piece of memorabilia that hangs around,” Lotz said.

At the season-ending banquet, every Pitt player received a piece of the turf and goalpost. Walker has his in a trophy case at his home in Houston. When his sons ask him what it was like to play football, he doesn’t start with his three seasons with the Houston Texans. He takes them to the trophy case, shows them turf and tells them about the last night at Pitt Stadium.

The fans held on to their bits of turf, too. Mack, the ex-Notre Dame fan, bought an aerial photo of Pitt Stadium and tucked the turf into the corner. It now hangs in his basement. Smoyer, whose turf was cut by the C.J. Barney’s bartender, worked in pro football — for the Redskins, for the Giants, for the NFL — for many years. The turf always has been on display in his office.

A piece of turf sits in the lower left-hand corner. (Courtesy of Bryan Mack)

Even Culton, stuck in the Applebee’s kitchen as fellow students stormed the field, came away with a memento. His might be the best one yet. One night in early December 1999, Culton was walking home with friends. At the top of DeSoto Street there was a chain-link fence guarding Pitt Stadium, which already was mostly demolished. Culton squeezed under the fence and saw a metal hand railing, about five feet wide and three feet tall, lying in the rubble.

“We’ve got to get that,” Culton told his friends.

So Culton dragged the railing underneath the fence and hurried home. Initially, he wasn’t sure what to do with his new hardware. Culton has moved a few times in the past 20 years and now lives in Baltimore. But he hasn’t lost his piece of Pitt Stadium. The railing is now the headboard of his bed.

The roses remained beneath the goalpost until they were trampled and the goalpost fell. Gallagher watched with delirious happiness. On the sideline, he found Harris, the head coach, and hugged him. “How about that, Gallagher!” Harris yelled. “How about that!” It had been the perfect goodbye.

“It was powerful,” Gallagher said. “It was Hollywood powerful.”

Gallagher has since retired to Florida, but he still has close ties to Pitt. He is a family friend of James Conner, the record-smashing former Pitt running back who now starts for the Steelers. Gallagher’s son, Sean, is one of Conner’s closest friends. So Gallagher was on the Louisiana Superdome sidelines as a ballboy in 1977 when Dorsett set Pitt’s bowl rushing record with 202 yards, and he was on the sidelines again in 2013 when Conner broke Dorsett’s record by rushing for 229 yards in the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl in Detroit.

When Gallagher was back in Pennsylvania last month, he decided to attend a Pitt volleyball game at Petersen Events Center, the arena at the former site of Pitt Stadium. As he walked up DeSoto Street, up Cardiac Hill, Gallagher could still envision the front façade of Pitt Stadium standing there. He had texted his son earlier that day to say he was going to visit his childhood home on Chesterfield Road and his other childhood home — the old football stadium.

“Dad, you don’t get it,” Gallagher’s son replied. “It’s always going to be Pitt Stadium to you. But to me, it’s always going to be the Pete.”

(Top photo: Gary Tramontina / The Associated Press)

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