Bradshaw is also an actor and recording artist, having participated in several television shows (mainly as himself) and films, most notably co-starring in the movie Failure to Launch, and releasing several country music albums.

[1][2] His father, William Marvin "Bill" Bradshaw (1927–2014), a native of Sparta, Tennessee, was a veteran of the United States Navy, a former vice president of manufacturing of the Riley Beaird Company in Shreveport, and a Southern Baptist layman.

[10] There, he attended Woodlawn High School, played under assistant coach A. L. Williams, and led the Knights to the AAA state championship game in 1965,[2] but lost 12–9 to the Sulphur Golden Tornadoes.

While at Woodlawn, he set a national record for throwing the javelin at 245 feet (74.68 m);[11] his exploits earned him a spot in the Sports Illustrated feature Faces in the Crowd.

[12] Bradshaw's successor as Woodlawn's starting quarterback was another future NFL standout, Joe Ferguson of the Buffalo Bills.

[14] Bradshaw decided to attend Louisiana Tech University in Ruston,[2] recruited in part by future Hall of Fame coach Jimmy Johnson.

As a junior during the 1968 season, he amassed 2,890 total yards, ranking number one in the NCAA, and led his team to a 9–2 record and a 33–13 win over Akron in the Rice Bowl.

[10][27] Bradshaw took several seasons to adjust to the NFL, but he eventually led the Steelers to eight AFC Central championships and four Super Bowl titles.

In 1972, he threw the "Immaculate Reception" pass to Franco Harris, among the most famous plays in NFL history, to beat the Raiders in the AFC Divisional playoffs.

In the 1974 AFC Championship Game against the Oakland Raiders, his fourth-quarter touchdown pass to Lynn Swann proved to be the winning score in a 24–13 victory.

[30] His late-fourth-quarter, 64-yard touchdown pass to Swann, released a split-second before defensive tackle Larry Cole flattened him, was selected by NFL Films as the "Greatest Throw of All Time".

He was sharp in a 40–14 victory over the Baltimore Colts, completing 14 of 18 passes for 264 yards and three touchdowns and achieving the highest-possible passer rating of 158.3.

[33][34][35][36] Donald Kroner was the 33-year-old pilot charged with reckless flying, littering, and making a bomb threat against former Baltimore Colts linebacker Bill Pellington.

[43] Before Super Bowl XIII, a Steelers-Cowboys rematch, Cowboys linebacker Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson famously ridiculed Bradshaw by saying, "He couldn't spell 'cat' if you spotted him the 'c' and the 'a'.

[46] Early in the fourth quarter, with Pittsburgh down 19–17, Bradshaw again turned to the long pass to help engineer a victory: a 73-yard touchdown to John Stallworth.

Bradshaw shared Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year award that season with fellow Pittsburgh star Willie Stargell, whose Pirates won the 1979 World Series.

[49] In a 31–28 Wild Card Round loss to the San Diego Chargers, Bradshaw's last postseason game, he completed 28 of 39 passes for 325 yards, two touchdowns, and two interceptions.

Then on December 10, 1983, against the New York Jets, he felt a pop in his elbow while throwing his final pass, a 10-yard touchdown to Calvin Sweeney in the second quarter of the Steelers' 34–7 win.

[55] In July 1997, Bradshaw served as the presenter when Mike Webster, his center on the Steelers' Super Bowl XIII and XIV title teams, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

[56] On November 5, 2007, during a nationally televised Monday Night Football game, Bradshaw joined former teammates including Franco Harris and Joe Greene to accept their position on the Steelers' 75th Anniversary All-Time Team.

Bradshaw retired from football on July 24, 1984,[52] and quickly signed a television contract with CBS to become an NFL game analyst in 1984, where he and play-by-play announcer Verne Lundquist had the top-rated programs.

During the early part of his career with the Steelers, Bradshaw was a used-car salesman during the off season to supplement his income, as this was still during the days when most NFL players did not make enough money to focus solely on football.

As of September 2007, Bradshaw was the top-ranked former pro football player in the Davie-Brown Index, which surveys consumers to determine a celebrity's appeal and trust levels.

He was first married to Melissa Babish (Miss Teenage America, 1969)[68] from 1972 to 1973; ice skater JoJo Starbuck from 1976 to 1983; and family attorney Charla Hopkins from 1983 to 1999, with whom he had two daughters, Erin and Rachel.

[72] Bradshaw's anxieties about appearing in public, away from the controlled environment of a television studio, led to an unintentional estrangement from the Steelers.

[84] In an interview with NFL Films in 2016 for an episode of A Football Life about Noll, Bradshaw felt that they had too much of a culture clash with their personalities.

[85] In the same episode, however, former Steelers public relations director Joe Gordon characterized the animosity as "a one-way street," with former teammate Jack Ham adding that Noll "insulated" Bradshaw from certain issues while taking a "rest of us be damned" approach with the other players.

The most recent was the series of live ads for Tide detergent along with his Fox Sports co-host Curt Menefee, where Bradshaw shows up with a shirt stain on what appeared to be live TV from the Fox broadcast booth at Super Bowl LI and then washes it with Tide at the house of Jeffrey Tambor.

The teasers leading up to the Super Bowl showed Tambor initially taking his shirts to Rob Gronkowski's dry cleaners, only to see the sleeves get ripped out.

[94] In 2016 and 2018, Bradshaw had a leading role in the NBC reality-travel series Better Late Than Never, where he travels around the world with William Shatner, Henry Winkler, George Foreman, and Jeff Dye.