Says Coach Ignored Him When Needed Most : Blind-Sided by Noll, Bradshaw Declares

PITTSBURGH — Terry Bradshaw said his relationship with Pittsburgh Steelers coach Chuck Noll was often so strained “perhaps it’s a miracle we ever went to the Super Bowl, let alone won four of them.”

Bradshaw, inducted Saturday into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the only quarterback to win four Super Bowls, writes in a soon-to-be published book that Noll abandoned and ignored him after an arm injury cut short his career in 1983.

“When I was injured late in my career, feeling insecure, unwanted and unneeded as a pro football player, like all injured players do, I felt Chuck was turning his back on me,” Bradshaw wrote in the book “Looking Deep,” to be published next month.

Excerpts were published in Tuesday editions of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“When the end came, I needed Chuck most of all and he wasn’t there. . . . I guess what I wanted Chuck to do was say, ‘There will never be another Terry Bradshaw, what a great young man he is, what a thrill for this football team to have him as a quarterback.’ I guess I wanted him to stroke my ego, to build me up, blow smoke so I could feel good about myself.”

Bradshaw said Noll “dragged me around like an animal, screamed at me, wasn’t there for me” early in his career.