It was a Tuesday morning in January 2007, and Steelers history was about to be made.
Dick Hoak was going to announce his retirement after 45 seasons with the franchise, first as a halfback who rushed for 3,965 yards (still 8th on the team's all-time list) and then as a running backs coach who won 5 Super Bowls and helped Franco Harris and Jerome Bettis get elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He freely admitted that as a player he wasn't as good as the guys he coached, and as a coach he never rose above the rank of assistant.
That can describe Dick Hoak's NFL career, but so does this:
Both as a player and an assistant coach, Dick Hoak was an egoless part of the team, a man who did his job quietly but still at 100 miles per hour. He was loyal to the point of forsaking his own advancement to honor a commitment he believed he had made; he was more interested in winning than he was in being right; and he was way more interested in winning than he was in getting the credit.
Dick Hoak died on Wednesday, Nov. 11. He was 86.
"We are deeply saddened by the passing of Dick Hoak, a legendary member of the Pittsburgh Steelers family," said President Art Rooney II. "Dick was part of the foundation of this organization and played an instrumental role in shaping the Steelers as both a player and coach during his 45 years with the team.
"Dick represented everything the Steelers stand for with his toughness, loyalty, dedication and an unwavering commitment to the team. First as a player, then as a coach, Dick's contributions to this organization spanned generations.
"He was respected and admired by everyone who had the privilege of knowing and working with him. His legacy includes coaching some of the all-time great Steelers, including Franco Harris, Rocky Bleier, Jerome Bettis, and Willie Parker.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Hoak family during this difficult time. He will always be remembered as a valued member of the Steelers family."
Family was important to Hoak throughout his life, and his life's decisions reflected that. He grew up in Jeannette, starred on the Jeannette High School football team that won a WPIAL Championship, and then he went to Penn State and was voted team MVP. When the Steelers used a No. 7 (90th overall) pick in the 1961 NFL Draft on him, Hoak was staying home.
During his 10 NFL seasons with the Steelers, Hoak played for Buddy Parker, Mike Nixon, Bill Austin, and Chuck Noll.
"I couldn't have played today, I can tell you that," Hoak once said about his decade as an NFL running back. "At that time I was decent, I guess. But every year they kept trying to replace me. I wouldn't play the first three or four games because I was too small, too slow, but by the fourth or fifth game, I was the guy playing. I just stuck with it and made a career out of it."
The playing career Hoak carved out for himself ended with 5,417 yards from scrimmage, 33 total touchdowns scored, and 4 touchdown passes thrown. That's impressive, but it pales when compared to his time as an NFL assistant. As he often said, in the fraternity of NFL coaches there is an understanding that you're hired to be fired. Dick Hoak was hired by Chuck Noll in 1972 but never fired.
"That was important to me," said Hoak.
A year as a teacher at Wheeling Jesuit High School was Hoak's first post-NFL job, but after a year he found himself weighing two offers to coach football. One came from Carl DePasqua, then the coach at Pitt, and a second almost simultaneously from Chuck Noll. "No-brainer" wasn't a term used back in 1972, but that's what Hoak's decision was at the time. He accepted Noll's offer, and his first big assignment was that draft's No. 1 pick – Franco Harris.
"Franco made my job very easy," said Hoak. "His rookie year was my first year coaching. Coach Noll gave me some good advice after about a month with him. He said, 'Dick, just don't over-coach him.' So I just let him be himself."
But there was another young player in the backfield, and he required a different approach. Rocky Bleier had 16 games of NFL experience at the time, but he also was a guy who had been wounded in Vietnam and was fighting to resume his football career.
"When I came back from the service, Dick was there," said Bleier. "Dick was the kind of guy that from a coaching perspective, the way he coached is the way that he had played. The fundamentals that he learned are what he taught us about stance and reading holes, and then eventually to understanding the plays and the blocking schemes, all that came from an expert at my position. Because he had played it in the NFL and for the Steelers. I thought he had a great demeanor with his players, great relationship with his backfield and being able to get a lot out of them made him an awesome assistant coach. Secondly, a good friend and a former teammate. It was great to be able to have him in my life, and have that relationship built up over the years. And it's a shame that we've now lost him."
The backfield of Franco-and-Rocky was a driving force on a team that won 4 Super Bowls in 6 seasons, and Dick Hoak's contributions to it were not going unnoticed. When the USFL was formed to compete with the NFL, the rival league put a franchise in Pittsburgh in 1983, and the Maulers were to be owned by the DeBartolo family. Their choice to be the team's inaugural head coach was Dick Hoak.
"I was offered the job by the Pittsburgh Maulers twice, (but I turned it down) because of this organization, the Rooney family," said Hoak. "They were always good to me. In fact, I interviewed for the job in Ohio and came back and I called Coach Noll and I called Dan (Rooney) and said that I was offered the job, but I just couldn't see myself going across the street to a rival football league in Pittsburgh. There was no way I could have done that."
And Hoak stayed. Chuck Noll announced his retirement on Dec. 26, 1991. Dan Rooney hired Bill Cowher to be the next Steelers coach on Jan. 21, 1992. Dick Hoak's desk stayed in the same spot.
"He was the only coach I retained from Chuck Noll's staff," said Cowher. "He was a conduit for me. He was a guy that I leaned on, that I used to discuss openly what a championship team looked like in a Pittsburgh Steelers uniform. He lived it. He did it. His wisdom, his experience was something that was vital to me coming in there as a 34-year-old first-time head coach.
"He was my guy in the booth that I talked to when it came down to the challenge flag. Everyone always had the answer after the fact, but during that 5-to-7 seconds you would have to make that decision everybody got quiet. So I said, 'OK, what do you think, Dick?' Dick Hoak would tell me yes or no. I would say, 'Dick, challenge or no?' And he would say, 'No, don't do it, coach.' Or he would say, 'Yes, throw it.' So, he was my challenge guy.
"He was a guy who was a voice of reason. He was a visionary for me that I could lean on to talk about what championship teams felt like, what they looked like, what was the culture that we were trying to build. Are we doing it the right way based on where they were, based on where we are. And he was a conduit for me, a voice of reason, a guy I listened to a lot, an advisor, and a very important part of my growth as a football coach."
As a part of Cowher's staff, Hoak worked with Barry Foster and Leroy Thompson and Bam Morris and Erric Pegram, and then during the 1996 NFL Draft the Steelers made a trade with the St. Louis Rams to bring Jerome Bettis to Pittsburgh.
"I just tried to let them be themselves," is how Hoak described his coaching philosophy. "I've played for a number of coaches, especially in my pro career. We changed coaches here a bunch of times. I had different (offensive) backfield coaches, and I saw things in some of them that I wouldn't want to do as a coach. So I tried to not do those things. I tried to let the players be themselves. When you get a player in the pros, most of them know how to run or they wouldn't be here. So I'd teach them other parts of the game."
If they were paying attention, those running backs learned more than just pass protection and blitz pickups and running routes out of the backfield.
"As a coach, he's a running back's dream," said Jerome Bettis in 2004. "He gives you the freedom of running to where you feel, but he also gives you an understanding of the play and the philosophy."
Throughout his career as an NFL assistant, Hoak made contacts, and some of those contacts led to job offers. But they were offers that would take him away from his home.
"In the same house since I got into coaching in 1972," Hoak reported on the day he announced his retirement. "I had offers. When Tony (Dungy) got the job in Tampa, Tony offered me the coordinator's job. That wasn't important to me. My family was more important to me than that stuff. My kids all went through the same school system, first through 12th grade. If I needed a doctor, a dentist, a roofer, a new furnace, I knew who to call. If I needed a banker, you all know I just had to call Tony DeNunzio. That was important to me."
When Art Rooney II created the Hall of Honor in 2017 to recognize those who had made significant contributions to the Steelers franchise, the decision was made that the Inaugural Class would contain all of their Hall of Famers to that point, plus 4 more significant figures. They were: L.C. Greenwood, Andy Russell, Donnie Shell, and Dick Hoak.
In June 2025, Dick Hoak was presented an Award of Excellence by the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a program adopted "to recognize individuals who work to drive team success within the sport."
It was a fitting tribute to someone who stayed in the job he loved with the team he loved, and after 45 years doing it, whenever he was asked for one memory that stood above all others.
"One memory? No, there are five of them," said Hoak. "The Super Bowls."
(Teresa Varley contributed to this story.)
