Chuck Noll won four Super Bowls with the Pittsburgh Steelers — a record matched only by Bill Belichick’s six. He also earned two NFL Championships as a Cleveland Browns player in the 1950s, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and was named to the NFL’s 100th Anniversary All-Time Team. Yet Steelers owner Dan Rooney believed Noll remained underappreciated among the NFL’s legendary coaches.
Rooney shared this view with Michael MacCambridge after reading his acclaimed America’s Game, and even helped to get His Life’s Work commissioned. He stayed hands-off editorially, leaving MacCambridge free to shape the definitive biography.
The four-year research process spanned the final two years of Noll’s life. Although the coach was battling dementia, he contributed interviews for the project, with his wife Marianne often stepping in when needed.
MacCambridge, known for his meticulous reporting, conducted hundreds of additional interviews and combed through exhaustive archives — including research notes compiled by Roy Blunt Jr. for About Three Bricks Shy of a Load. Only Terry Bradshaw, the quarterback for all four Super Bowl victories, declined to participate, remaining reluctant to revisit his relationship with Noll.
Title: Chuck Noll
Author: Michael MacCambridge
First published: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Buy the Book: Amazon US | Amazon UK*
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As expected from MacCambridge, Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work stands as the definitive account of one of football’s most quietly influential figures.
THE AUTHOR
Michael MacCambridge’s history of the NFL, America’s Game, is widely considered to be the best football books every written and he’s followed it with a string of books, including exhaustively-researched biographies of Lamar Hunt (2012) and Chuck Noll (2016).
REVIEWS
“I really, really liked Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work by Michael MacCambridge. I think he demystified Chuck Noll more than he had been at the time. Dan Rooney cooperated with him a huge amount. And when I say cooperated with him, I mean he opened up the Steelers a lot to Michael MacCambridge, that we hadn’t really seen before.”
Peter King
“Even though the Steelers of the 1970s have been written about and discussed for a generation, MacCambridge unearths enough nuggets to keep the narrative fresh for even the most dedicated Steelers scholar, such as a re-telling of the Chuck Noll-Terry Bradshaw relationship but from the perspective of Bradshaw’s backup Cliff Stoudt. Where MacCambridge really fills in a lot of blanks comes in the re-telling of the 1980s, the post-Team of the Decade doldrums that Noll, who would become an accomplished pilot and sailor, never could steer the Steelers out of.”
Bob Labriola, Steelers.com
“MacCambridge agreed to take on the task, and now, after four years of dedicated research (the bibliography covers five printed pages), hundreds of interviews, and actually sitting down and writing, football history, not to mention football fans in general and Steelers fans in particular, are the better for it. I just finished reading this book and I cannot recommend it highly enough.”
The Grandstander
“This is one book that has truly earned every word of praise that has been heaped upon it. Was there ever a football coach less interested in promoting himself than Chuck Noll? Probably not. That didn’t make MacCambridge easy, but he tackled it with the effectiveness of Joe Greene participating in his first training camp Oklahoma Drill at St. Vincent’s.”
Steel Curtain Rising
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