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Sunday, November 04, 2001

By Tony Dorsett

This is the 25th anniversary season of Pitt's 1976 12-0 national championship team. The Post-Gazette is publishing a weekly diary by members of that team. This week, the author is Tony Dorsett, who was a senior tailback and became Pitt's only Heisman Trophy winner. He now lives in Dallas and is involved in several business ventures. A street near Heinz Field has been named after him and was dedicated yesterday.

It was a very memorable year for a number of reasons.

You can start off at the beginning, changing the Notre Dame game to be the first game of the season at South Bend on national television. I saw Dorsett dummies hanging out of the dormitories. I saw a tombstone saying we're going to kill Dorsett -- DOR-sett back then.

Then Notre Dame takes the ball on the opening drive and marches to a touchdown. We come back. I break one for 60-some yards, and a few plays later I'm in the end zone. Then you could hear a pin drop.

The second game of the season, at Georgia Tech, our starting quarterback, Robert Haygood, he's back in his hometown. He had some of the sweetest moves I ever saw. Unfortunately for us, he blew his knee out.

Matt Cavanaugh comes in and does a fantastic job for us. Then he got hurt for a few games. We were down to a walk-on quarterback, Tom Yewcic. The beat kept going.

Our game at Navy [a 45-0 victory that made Pitt 7-0], that was probably one of the more emotional days in my life when I set the [all-time college rushing] record. My mom and my dad were there.

We were pretty much in control of the game. Coach [Johnny] Majors pulled the offense aside. He said, "Do you want to break the record here or do you want to wait until we get back home?" I said, "Let's go for it. You never know if your next play is your last play." He said, "I'm going to give you one more series [before pulling the first team]."

The guys were clutching hands in the huddle. The guys said, "Let's do this. Let's do it now for Hawk."

On the run that broke it, I was running, breaking tackles and stuff. Then one minute I'm jumping up and down in the end zone with my finger up in air and the next minute I was just smothered.

To finish it, we had that game against our rival, Penn State, in Three Rivers Stadium, with Coach Majors having the brilliant idea of moving me to fullback at halftime.

It took us four years to do it, but we finally got it done. We finally beat Penn State [24-7]. We finished up the regular season spanking their butt pretty good, which we all enjoyed.

Then we went to the Sugar Bowl. My classmates, we started our career against Georgia [a 7-7 tie in the 1973 opener] and we ended it against them.

We made a pact as freshmen that by the time we left Pittsburgh we were going to win a national championship. Then of course along the way we got the Heisman Trophy to go with it. That wasn't too bad.

But it was a great year for all of us.

They should make a movie out of that. This is a script for Hollywood. It was just one heck of a season.