Excerpted from Kevin Cook's "The Last Headbangers," to be published by W.W. Norton & Company in September.

Phil Villapiano's helmet didn't fit. The Oakland Raiders' lantern-jawed linebacker stuck his head inside, gave the helmet a whack, and felt it rattle around his ears. Plastic piece of junk! How's he supposed to stop Franco and Bradshaw with his helmet bobbing around on his head?

The visitors' locker room at Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium smelled of Brut and Right Guard and Hai Karate, liniment, and nervous sweat. The players -- big men but not giants, averaging six-two and 219 pounds -- adjusted their pads, guzzled water from squirt bottles, spat on the floor. Fred Biletnikoff, a scrawny receiver with thinning blond hair and a wispy mustache, stopped chain-smoking long enough to trudge to the can and loudly puke. His teammates mumbled what might have been prayers in another locker room, but not a room full of Raiders.

The Raiders were pro football's Hells Angels, and their mumbles were mostly curses. Safety George Atkinson stood in a corner, scratching the tight, shiny coils of his beard. Then Atkinson sprang forward, throwing a forearm shiver at a phantom opponent. Biletnikoff, returning from the can, sat on a wooden stool and tied the laces of his cleats. Tied and retied them. Ten times. Eleven times. They still didn't feel right. He retied them again, looking around to see if anybody was going to give him crap about it. No, the others were deep in their own routines, pounding each other's pads, grinding their teeth, making their own toilet trips in the minutes before they took the field for their American Football Conference divisional playoff against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Raiders were 4-point underdogs. Winner goes to the 1972 AFC title game, one step from the Super Bowl.

John Madden ran a beefy pink hand through his hair. Madden stood six-four, weighed 270, and sweated like the offensive tackle he used to be. His black polo shirt clung to an ample belly over polyester Sansabelt slacks. The youngest head coach in the league at 36, he wasn't the rah-rah type. Madden had one rule: Show up on time and play hard on Sunday. Pacing a locker room littered with socks and towels, Ace bandages, paper cups, and squirt bottles, studying his players' faces, Madden thought his team looked ready.

Villapiano, for sure. As Madden watched, the linebacker yanked the silver helmet off his head. He took a breath, then reared back and smacked his forehead into the cement-block wall. Bam. Bam bam. Now he paused as if waiting for the wall to crumble. But that wasn't it -- he was waiting for something else.

A moment later, Villapiano pulled his helmet back on. There, better. Knocking his forehead against the wall had made his head swell a little. Now the helmet fit.

A few yards away in the stadium's lower concourse, the Steelers sweated in their more spacious home locker room. They were less growly than the Raiders, more like a construction crew than a biker gang. Veterans Ray Mansfield and Andy Russell, who were among the better-paid Steelers, making $22,000 a year, carpooled to the stadium to save on gas that cost fifty-five cents a gallon. Quarterback Terry Bradshaw sold used cars during the offseason. Fullback Franco Harris, a rookie with Fred Astaire feet and the chiseled features of Hercules, sometimes hitchhiked to home games. Now Harris sat with his hands folded, staring at the green linoleum floor. A few feet away Roy Gerela, alone as usual, as a kicker was supposed to be, picked at the extralong sleeves of his jersey. Defensive end L. C. Greenwood stubbed out a pregame cigarette.

John "Frenchy" Fuqua picked his helmet off a hook beside his cubicle. Off the field, Fuqua sported a feathered Three Musketeers hat, a cape, and a gold cane. His platform shoes featured hard-plastic heels with live goldfish swimming around inside. Claiming to be a French count "turned black" by fallout from a nuclear test, he warned opponents that he would deliver "the coop de grah on 'em." Steelers coach Chuck Noll nodded to Fuqua, who was checking his helmet for smudges and his uniform for lint, tapping his toes to some internal music. That was Frenchy, off in his own world.

Noll, 40, was even less rah-rah than Madden. On the first day of training camp he'd told the Steelers, "If I have to motivate you, I'll get rid of you." Noll and Madden were part of coaching's younger generation, men who rejected the old-fashioned image of the NFL coach as a World War II general throwing fits and barking orders. They were space-age coaches who saw their jobs as similar to that of the lead engineer on a NASA mission: Manage your personnel, draw up a game plan, anticipate surprises, and create multiple responses to possible setbacks, including last-ditch options. When the game starts, let your men execute the mission.

Noll scanned the room. This was the time when old-school coaches delivered rousing pregame speeches.

Terry Bradshaw could have used a little rousing. The Steelers' third-year quarterback was this crew's gawky country boy, a Bible-reading Forrest Gump with a secret. Despite his rifle arm and aw-shucks manner, Bradshaw suffered moods as black as his helmet. He wanted approval, even love, from a coach who saw open emotion as a sign of weakness. (Later, when Marianne Noll ran to hug her husband after a Super Bowl victory, Noll shook her hand.) Alone with his worries, Bradshaw sat at his cubicle clenching and unclenching his throwing hand.

The coach cleared his throat. A few players looked up. Noll spoke without raising his voice, almost as if he were talking to himself.

"Play the way you've been taught," he said.

That was all. It was time to line up in the tunnel that led to the field.

The stadium's five decks shuddered with the thudding feet of fifty thousand fans hungry for a win. "Here we go Stilll-ers, here we go!" (Stomp, stomp!)

Battle of attrition

The halftime score was nothing to nothing. Gerela kicked a third-quarter field goal that brought his fans, Gerela's Gorillas, to their feet, hooting as they tried to see the field through the eyeholes in their Planet of the Apes monkey masks. Madden kicked a water bottle. Noll, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and an early Motorola headset -- clamps and wires connecting hard-plastic earpieces -- stood by the Steelers bench with his arms crossed. Noll liked a 3-0 score. This was the run-first, block-hard, chew-dirt football he championed: "Before you can win the game you have to not lose it."

In the fourth quarter, another Gerela field goal made it 6-0. Madden pulled Daryle Lamonica aside. "I'm sending Stabler in," he told his quarterback. Lamonica, who liked to throw deep, would have no chance to pull out a miracle win against the Steelers' prevent defense. His backup, Ken "the Snake"...