Dan Rooney Read online

  They began on a shoestring. John Brown, a Steelers offensive tackle in the 1960s and early 1970s, told me he began to play on cinders and finished on a carpet.

  Pittsburgh grew, and football was its passion. Every young man who could play, did play. They learned the game as boys. They became the most knowledgeable fans in the National Football League.

  Steelers football is special. Here’s a letter I received following the Steelers-Chargers game in 1995:

  January 15, 1995

  Dear Steelers:

  I watched as the last few moments of the AFC Championship game drew down to one play. The Chargers deflected the pass, the game was over. And as I watched the players leave the field I saw the pain in their eyes. I am a Charger fan, I’m elated that the team I love most is going to the bowl of bowls. But I’ll tell you what. The city of Pittsburgh should be proud to have such a team. The players and their young coach are young, enthusiastic, talented, focused, spirited, and together. And the hospitality that poured out to the visitors—to the ENEMY was nothing short of awe inspiring. Championship is not measured by the wins or losses. True championship in pro ball requires talent, heart, courage, teamwork, and professional conductance. I could not believe what I was seeing on that field today. I saw a team that even in defeat would not let go of their championship heart. As I watched the players leave the field I said a prayer for your team. You guys are true professionals. No one can say that the Pittsburgh Steelers are anything other than a truly class A football team.

  In the short term there is no remedy for the pain of a loss other than time. But as time goes by, you will realize that what I’m saying to you all today is the absolute truth. Today, in my opinion, the real champions of the AFC lost the football game, but they did not lose the championship. You have broken my heart, and you have a new fan in San Diego. Give me a towel.

  Sincerely,

  Patrick J. Morris

  San Diego, CA

  The Steelers stood together in the steel mills ready to fight World War II. They played together those weekends. After working a full shift, they practiced. They all wanted to win.

  The league continued to grow. In 1960 Lamar Hunt put together the AFL. In 1966 the two leagues merged, forming a unified National Football League. In 1970 the merged league played as one. The Steelers, the Browns, the Bengals, and the Ravens joined in a division in the AFC North. You will read how this happened.

  I respect all the owners and the people on the thirty-two teams. They are all friends who want the league to thrive. Jerry Richardson always says, “Protect the shield,” the NFL logo. The commissioners have been vital. The players are special. They are the game. They make it. Fans love them—at least in Pittsburgh they do.

  I will tell about growing up with my brothers, sometimes our arguments, but mostly our love.

  Our mother was a wonderful lady. Our father was the “Chief.” He directed us. He gave his advice. He sure didn’t spoil me.

  I’ll give you some thoughts on my family. My wife, Patricia, our nine children and sixteen grandchildren. My nieces and nephews, my grandparents, uncles and aunts. It’s a lot, but they were fun to be with.

  In the end, I’ll try to sum it up—give a view of the future NFL. Roger Goodell will probably be the last commissioner I will know. He will provide the leadership to carry on. I hope I can help him. With God’s blessing, maybe.

  Dan Rooney

  Chapter 1

  IMMACULATE RECEPTION

  DECEMBER 23, 1972, dawned cold and gray, but today no one seemed to care about the weather. It had been a long time coming, the kind of day I dreamed about all my life—the first NFL postseason game to be played in Pittsburgh since 1947.

  Before the kickoff, thousands of fans gathered downtown under the banners of their heroes—Dobre Shunka (Good Ham) for linebacker Jack Ham, Gerela’s Gorillas for kicker Roy Gerela, and Franco’s Italian Army for rookie running back Franco Harris. Other fans—those who couldn’t get tickets, and there were only 50,350 who did—packed themselves in cars and buses in search of televisions outside the seventy-five-mile blackout radius. They crammed into motel rooms in East Liverpool, Ohio, and Meadville, Pennsylvania, or chartered buses and drove to Erie and jammed local American Legion and VFW halls. Anywhere with a television set. In some places, people were selling seats in their own living rooms to frantic Steelers fans desperate to see us in the playoffs.

  Now, as the big game against the Oakland Raiders began, the built-up emotion and excitement spilled out of Three Rivers Stadium with a volume and intensity that could be heard all the way across the Allegheny River into downtown.

  “Here we go, Steelers, here we go!

  Here we go, Steelers, here we go!”

  Inside the stadium the noise was deafening. The concrete deck heaved so violently with every stomp of the crowd, I worried the structure might give way. For most of the game it seemed we were going to win. It had been a fierce defensive struggle; first downs were difficult to come by and both teams punted a lot. Daryle Lamonica had started as quarterback for the Raiders, but we intercepted him twice and beat him up so badly they took him out and replaced him with their young backup, Ken Stabler. Gerela’s two field goals had given us a 6-0 lead when late in the fourth quarter Stabler dropped back to pass, couldn’t find a receiver, and so slipped outside and ran 30 yards for a touchdown. With the extra point, the Raiders had a one-point lead.

  Now the packed stands were hushed. The scoreboard told everything: Raiders 7, Steelers 6, fourth-and-10 . . . 22 seconds on the clock. It looked like we didn’t have a chance. What a shame—the best season we ever had, and our first playoff game. I really wanted to beat Al Davis’s Raiders.

  As Terry Bradshaw and the Steelers offense broke huddle, I knew this was the last play. But when our players lined up on our 40-yard line, they didn’t look like a beaten team. Bradshaw still had his swagger, still seemed as confident and fearless as ever. Turning his head from side to side, he begins the count, then takes the snap. Bradshaw’s back, out of the pocket, running to his right. He ducks one pursuer, his eyes downfield, looking for a receiver. He shakes loose from the rush, then fires at Frenchy Fuqua cutting across the middle. The ball, Frenchy, and Raiders safety Jack Tatum arrive at the same place at precisely the same time. I hear the collision even from where I’m sitting—four levels up, just above the press box. That’s it . . . the game’s over . . . but wait! There’s Franco Harris with the ball—where did he come from?—running for all he’s worth along the near sideline toward the end zone—Go Franco!—stiff-arming the Raiders’ Jimmy Warren, somehow staying in bounds, then in for a touchdown. Unbelievable! The crowd goes crazy—is it really a touchdown? Fans swarm the field, mobbing Franco and Bradshaw. I know there’s going to be controversy, so I run down the stairs into the press box where the reporters sit stunned, looking at each other in disbelief.

  Everybody is talking, yelling, trying to piece together in their minds what their eyes just saw. They’re saying the ball ricocheted off Tatum’s pads, shot back 10 yards where Franco made a shoestring catch. Where’s the Chief? Seconds before the snap, I remember seeing him head for the elevator so he could be in the locker room to console the players when they came off the field. He missed the whole thing! The most incredible play I ever saw.

  Just then the press box phone rings. It’s on the wall right where I’m standing, so I answer it. It’s Jim Boston, our man on the field, calling from the baseball dugout. He tells me he’s got Fred Swearingen, the referee—the guy in charge of the crew officiating the game—standing right next to him. Boston says Swearingen wants to talk to Art McNally, the supervisor of the officials. I can see McNally in his usual place at the other end of the box. So I yell, “Art McNally! Art McNally! They want to talk to you!” He comes over, takes the phone, and I hear every word he says. The noise in the press box still hasn’t died down, so McNally is pressing the phone to his ear so he can hear what Swearingen is saying. I don’t know what the ref said, bu
t McNally shouts into the phone, “Well, you have to call what you saw. You have to make the call. Talk to your people and make the call!” Of course, no one had seen the television replay yet—it all happened too quick. So I turn back to the field. The officials are huddled together at the 30-yard line. I know the rule: If the ball bounced off Tatum before Franco caught it, then the play stands and it’s a touchdown. If the ball bounced off Frenchy, then the pass is incomplete, the game’s over, and the Raiders win. I’m straining to see the replay on the TV suspended overhead in the press box and trying to hear what the commentators are saying. They’re debating the call: “Did Frenchy touch the ball? Was the catch good?” Finally, Swearingen steps away from the other officials and raises his arms to signal touchdown. The press box goes wild, papers fly, reporters yell at each other—and I run for the elevator.

  Now, I don’t know if the Lord is worried about every football game that’s played, but in this case it sure seemed like a case of divine intervention. The locker room is a madhouse. I look for my son Artie, but he’s still out on the field picking up the team’s equipment and running interference for the players making their way through the swarming fans. Across the locker room I see number 32—Franco. I’m not a touchy-feely kind of guy, but after I shove my way through the crowd I can’t help but give him a big hug. “Franco, that was the greatest play I ever saw!” And I mean it, too. Then there’s the Chief, standing with Coach Noll, players all around them—Joe Greene, Andy Russell, Gerela, Ham, Rocky Bleier, Bradshaw, Frenchy—helmets off and grins as big as can be. Dad doesn’t say anything, but Chuck steps up and makes a little speech, “You guys played a great game—I’m really proud of you! Now next week we have another big game, so don’t celebrate too long.” Chuck is all business. Can you believe it? He could keep his cool even during the “Immaculate Reception.” That’s what Myron Cope, the voice of the Steelers, later called it. At first I thought it was sacrilegious, but over time it kind of grew on me.

  The Immaculate Reception is one of the greatest touchdowns in the history of football, even though Al Davis and coach John Madden complained bitterly about the call and how it destroyed their season and the Raiders dynasty that might have been. Frenchy—ever the showman—added to the controversy by refusing to give a straight answer about whether or not he had touched the ball. But Chuck Noll summed it up: “Well, if Frenchy didn’t touch the ball . . . and Tatum didn’t touch the ball . . . well, the rule book doesn’t cover the hand of the Lord.”

  The Immaculate Reception changed not only the history of the Pittsburgh Steelers but the NFL itself. The Steelers went from forty seasons as the “lovable losers” to a great, great football team. Maybe the best that ever played. The national television audience for that game was huge, one of the largest ever to see a football game. The excitement of that one play captured the imagination of fans everywhere, especially throughout the far-flung Steelers Nation. The moment was so powerful, so memorable that millions of people who saw the game on TV honestly believe they were in the stands at Three Rivers Stadium that day. The Immaculate Reception immediately entered the realm of sports legend. It is still one of the greatest plays in NFL history and, for that matter, all of sports. This play and this playoff game helped establish pro football as America’s passion, surpassing baseball, “America’s pastime,” as the number-one sport.

  Of course, there are other milestones in the history of the NFL. I saw most of them, because I celebrated my first birthday the same year the Steelers played their first season in 1933. In some ways I think of myself as the Last Steeler, the last of the founding generation of the NFL. I’ve had the good fortune to know and work with the men who started the league—Wellington Mara, Curly Lambeau, Tim Mara, George Halas, Walter Kiesling, George Marshall, Charley Bidwill, Bert Bell, and, of course, the Chief—men who knew and loved the game and shared with me their values of hard work and sportsmanship and fairness. The National Football League has come a long way since its beginnings, and I’m honored to have been a part of it.

  Pro football was born1 on the muddy fields of Pittsburgh’s North Side in 1892—just three blocks from where I was born forty years later. I guess you could say the game is in my blood.

  CHAPTER 2

  GROWING UP ON THE NORTH SIDE

  I WAS BORN IN MERCY HOSPITAL in Pittsburgh on July 20, 1932, the first Rooney to be born in a hospital. The Sisters of Mercy came from Ireland during the great potato famine of the 1840s to care for the people of Pittsburgh, and I’ve always been proud of the fact that Mercy Hospital was the first hospital west of the Allegheny Mountains.

  The Pittsburgh of my youth is hard to describe. The Great Depression of the 1930s gave way to the boom years of World War II. The city of the 1940s was a remarkable mix of natural beauty and urban ugliness, peaceful parks and industrial energy. Here, two great rivers, the cool green Allegheny and the muddy Monongahela, wind through the forested hillsides and rocky bluffs of Western Pennsylvania to merge at the point of land where Pittsburgh was established by George Washington in 1758. The two rivers form a third, the mighty Ohio, one of the world’s busiest and most important waterways. At the confluence of these three rivers, the city of Pittsburgh grew and prospered, becoming by the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803 the “Gateway to the West.”

  By the end of the nineteenth century it was one of America’s great manufacturing and industrial centers. And by the time I came along, Pittsburgh was the City of Steel, building a worldwide reputation as the “Arsenal of Democracy.” During the war years Pittsburgh forged its steel into shells and ships, jeeps and big guns, and every article and implement imaginable to support the war effort. Towering stacks above the mills and red-brick factories spewed black soot around the clock. As a boy I often thought day and night seemed reversed. Smoke blocked the sun during the day, causing street lights to blink on at noon, while at night, the orange glow from the blast furnaces lit the sky.

  Not everyone saw this industrial energy as a good thing. One early visitor, overwhelmed by the noise and smoke and sulfurous stink, declared Pittsburgh wasn’t a city at all but “Hell with the lid off.” But for Pittsburghers the smell and smoke meant jobs and money. White-collared businessmen gladly changed their soot-grimed shirts in the middle of the day, while hundreds of thousands of blue-collared mill workers walked or rode inclines and trolleys from their crowded hill-side homes to the factories below.

  From around the world—England and Ireland, Italy and Germany, Slovakia and Russia and Poland—men and women migrated to Pittsburgh to build a better life for themselves and their families. They settled in unique neighborhoods—ethnic communities reflecting the language, culture, and character of their homelands. Although their accents hinted of their origins, these newcomers quickly adapted to their surroundings and became Americans. Yet to this day Pittsburghers identify themselves by their neighborhoods.

  My neighborhood, the North Side, was different than most. It was a wonderful coming together of all these immigrant groups, although when I was growing up, Germans, Italians, and especially the Irish held sway. Sometime in the 1880s, my great-grandparents Arthur and Catherine Regan Rooney came to America from Newry, a small town in Northern Ireland. Arthur worked as a bricklayer in the Pittsburgh steel mills with his son, Daniel, my grandfather and namesake. Daniel married Margaret Murray, and in 1905 they moved with my father, Arthur J. Rooney, and his two younger brothers to the North Side, then known as Allegheny City. This thriving community, situated directly across the river from the Point and Pittsburgh’s downtown, stretched northward from the Allegheny River to the hills beyond. Though the people of old Allegheny bitterly fought to remain an independent city, sprawling Pittsburgh annexed it in 1907. My father and most of his contemporaries refused to recognize the “hostile takeover” and for the rest of their lives continued to call our neighborhood Allegheny.

  I knew it as the North Side, pronounced as one word: Norseside. We thought ourselves separate from Pittsburgh, in
fact separate from anywhere. We were different and proud of it. We had our own style and our own language. Though our family never spoke what is called “Pittsburghese,” there is a unique dialect that I and everyone else on the North Side understood. People would say yunz instead of y’all. In this dialect Pixburgh was dahntahn. Neighborhood parks were the most bee-you’-tee-full. When hungry, people asked for some snik-snaks. They drank pop, ate jumbo (baloney) sammiches, and in the summer they cooled down with flavored shaved ice from Gus the icy-ball man. We bundled things with gumbans (rubber bands). And when people stuck their noses in our business, we called them nebby.

  I can pick out a Pittsburgh or North Side accent anywhere I travel. In Florence, Italy, at a dinner one time, a young woman started talking and my ears pricked up immediately. She talked just like me! I knew right away she was from the North Side. Our peculiar dialect has good points and bad. On one hand it defines us and gives us a sense of belonging and community, but I’ll be the first to admit our way of talking can sound coarse and a little strange to a refined ear. Sometimes people jump to the conclusion that we’re uneducated, but nuh-uhh, we’re a lot smarter than people think.

  My father and his seven brothers and two sisters lived in an apartment above grandfather’s “Dan Rooney’s Café and Saloon.” My grandfather owned the entire building, located just a block from Exposition Park, a field for football, baseball, and any other game or match you can imagine. My father grew up strong and tough and streetwise. A natural athlete, he loved to compete. Baseball, football, boxing, you name it, he played it. And he played to win.