Dan Rooney Read online

  Finally, the University of Louisville in Kentucky, not known as a big-time football school, picked him up in 1951. Coach Frank Camp started the gangly freshman quarterback in the fifth game of the season against St. Bonaventure. Johnny’s team gave this strong football school a run for its money, losing only in the final seconds by a field goal. Despite the loss, Unitas led Louisville to a winning season. The university deemphasized football the next year, however, and reduced the size of the squad to only nineteen, requiring players to play both offense and defense. In the single-platoon system, the rules allowed for the substitution of only one player, usually the quarterback, but Johnny excelled at defense, too, hauling in more interceptions and making more tackles than any other player. He carried Louisville on his broad but skinny shoulders.

  At first Johnny was placed on academic probation, but once he settled in, he applied himself to his studies and turned into a better than average student. Despite his obvious football talent, the Louisville team couldn’t compete with other schools. By the time he graduated in 1954, the team’s record was undistinguished, but Johnny racked up 3,000 yards in passing, despite the fact he spent much of his senior year on the injured list. A hairline fracture of his right ankle limited his playing time, forcing him to wear high-top shoes that became his trademark in later years.

  When the 1955 NFL draft took place in January, Unitas wasn’t on anybody’s—not the coaches’ or the sportswriters’—radar.

  At that time, Ray Byrne and I managed the draft for the Steelers. Ray was a part-time undertaker at his family’s funeral home, and the butt of many jokes. People would ask, “What are you doing, drafting a bunch of stiffs?” But we had a good system. Ray was a thorough researcher, corresponded with all the college coaches, and kept detailed records of all the players. I’d telephone the top kids around the country, using the operator as a kind of secretary to connect the calls. Weeks ahead of time, we developed our priority list and strategy for our draft picks. Of course, we ran these by Dad and Walt Kiesling, whom Dad had brought back to coach in 1954, but by and large they deferred to our judgment.

  Now, the Steelers already had three quarterbacks. The starter, Jim Finks, was pretty good—in 1952 he had thrown for 2,307 yards and led the league with twenty touchdowns. His backup, Vic Eaton, was a versatile player who could do just about anything but wasn’t outstanding in any position. In 1953 Wellington Mara, owner of the Giants and my father’s good friend, had revealed that New York hoped to acquire quarterback Ted Marchibroda, the St. Bonaventure and University of Detroit standout, if he was available. So Dad snatched him up in the first round that year, even though we knew he would sit out two years for compulsory military service and rejoin the team in 1955.

  The Steelers were now quarterback rich. Even so, as the draft unfolded I kept an eye on Johnny Unitas. I knew he had great talent. With his wiry strength and those big hands he could fire a football like a bullet and knock down any receiver who wasn’t ready for the power of his passes.

  By the ninth round, Johnny still hadn’t been selected, so I told Ray Byrne, “We gotta get this guy now ’cause we don’t want him playing against us.”

  Kiesling thought we were nuts. Though Johnny’s six-foot-one-inch frame had filled out with 170 pounds of muscle, he still looked scrawny. But it didn’t make any difference. Kies didn’t like him, believing he was “too dumb to play.”

  We took him anyway, the 102nd overall draft pick. Can you believe it? The best quarterback in the history of football, and we got him in the ninth round for $5,500. Given Kiesling’s dislike for him, that money wasn’t a sure thing.

  Just weeks before the draft, Johnny had married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Jean Hoelle. Dorothy wisely advised that they should move in with her mother in Pittsburgh to save rent money. They really didn’t know where their next meal would come from. The Steelers contract seemed a blessing, but it wouldn’t kick in until the season began, so John worked a construction job between college and the opening of the Steelers camp in July.

  When camp opened, Johnny and Dorothy were expecting their first child. Patricia and I now had three children: Art, Patricia, and Kathleen. I was working hard, juggling babies and jobs. I was so busy Dad thought I should give up my volunteer coaching job at St. Peter’s, even though he knew how much this meant to me. But he was right; I had too much on my plate. At the camp I was negotiating contracts, taking care of all the logistics, and working out the game schedules with Kiesling.

  I’ll say this about Kiesling. He was a real football mentor for me; he knew the game inside and out. In his playing days, he was an ox of a man whose leather helmet never looked quite big enough for his enormous head. He was a legitimate Hall of Famer as an offensive tackle, and a lot smarter than he’s given credit for. He was an extremely able mathematician, and it always amazed me how he could work out complex calculations in his head. At the same time, that head of his was awfully hard. When he got an idea, he latched on to it like a pit bull and no one could change his mind.

  Unfortunately, he had made up his mind about Unitas—even before camp began. I was responsible for drafting him, but that didn’t mean Kies was going to play him, a fact that became painfully clear as the summer progressed. Every day Johnny showed up on time, eager to play and show what he could do. He would have his uniform on, helmet in hand, standing on the sidelines. He’d do the exercises and run with the team. He did his homework and learned the plays, but Kies never let him take a snap. For some reason he thought John wasn’t smart enough to quarterback a team in the NFL. Just a dumb kid from Mt. Washington. Jim Finks and others had taken to calling Johnny “Clem Kadiddlehopper,” after the goofy country bumpkin made famous by comedian Red Skelton on his popular television show.

  I didn’t see all that was going on that summer because I wasn’t out on the field, but my brother Tim and the twins, John and Pat, were out there every day watching the players and following their progress. Especially Unitas. At the end of the day, Johnny stayed on the field and ran the boys through the passing plays that the team had just practiced. My brothers were all good receivers and were amazed at the precision of his passes and power of his arm. They came to me all the time, talking about how good he was. They had watched the other quarterbacks—Finks, Marchibroda, and Eaton—and believed that Johnny was the best of the bunch, hands down. They urged me to talk to Kies, and I did.

  But remember, I just turned twenty-three and I’m arguing with a guy, a Hall of Famer, mind you, who’s twice my age and who had taught me just about everything I knew about professional football. My father’s admonition to “let the coach . . . coach” rang in my ears as I pleaded with him to give Unitas a chance. Nothing doing. Kies could not be persuaded.

  Finally, I saw it was no use and gave up, but my brother Tim didn’t. He was furious and hand-wrote a twenty-two-page letter to Dad. My brother Art was in the office when the letter arrived. He said Dad just shook his head as he read through the pages of Tim’s diatribe. “That fresh punk thinks he’s some sort of football expert,” he said, then wadded up the letter and banked it into the trash can against the wall. Art allowed that Tim had a point, but Dad wouldn’t hear it. “I like John, too,” he said, “but Kies is the coach, let him do his job.”

  It might have been better to have let Kies cut Johnny at the beginning of camp rather than stringing him along through the final preseason game before letting him go. Now he didn’t have a chance to sign on with another team, at least for that year. I know Johnny unloaded on Kiesling when the coach asked him to turn in his notebook and clear out. He told Kiesling that it wouldn’t have been so bad to have been cut if he had screwed up, but he never had a chance to show what he could do. Kies said that in a thirty-three-man squad, he couldn’t afford to have four quarterbacks. Someone had to go, and he had to stick with the more experienced men. Johnny never forgave him.

  Without any prospects in the NFL, Johnny grabbed a job on a pile-driving crew at a steel mill in Aliquippa. H
e also signed on with the Bloomfield Rams, a semi-pro sandlot team in the Steel-Bowl Conference. They played at Arsenal School in Lawrenceville, on a grassless field covered with gravel and lead musket balls that still remained from the explosion of Allegheny Arsenal at that very site during the Civil War. The conditions were brutal. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for him, with his wife and new baby, his hopes for an NFL career crushed.

  Sometime later that year, I was driving my father and Kies down West Liberty Avenue on Pittsburgh’s South Side in the old Chevy station wagon. Dad was in the front and Kies in the back. A car sped past us. I recognized Unitas’s distinctive flat-topped crew cut and prominent ears.

  “That’s John Unitas in that car,” I said.

  “Catch him!” Dad said.

  At the next red light I pulled up next to him. I could see John had his wife, Dorothy, and their daughter, Anna, with him.

  Dad rolled down his window and yelled out, “John!”

  “How are you doing, Mr. Rooney?”

  “I hope you catch on with a team and have a great career!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rooney,” John replied, genuinely pleased.

  Kies slumped in the back seat, looking like he’d just swallowed a large spoonful of vinegar, and growled, “He’ll never amount to anything.”

  The light changed and we both pulled off, going our separate ways.

  After a year of sandlot ball and backbreaking physical labor, John finally caught a break. He had written to every team in the league begging for a tryout. Somehow one of his letters surfaced on the desk of General Manager Don Kellett, just at the time the Baltimore Colts were looking for a backup for their rookie quarterback sensation out of Oregon, George Shaw. Johnny signed on for $7,000, $1,500 more than I had offered him to play for the Steelers. He told Dorothy, “Look at it this way, hon, I didn’t get cut, I just got a fifteen hundred dollar raise.” In preseason, Johnny impressed scouts and sportswriters, but it didn’t look like he was going to get any playing time as long as Shaw held the number-one quarterback slot. But in the fourth game of the 1956 season, Shaw got buried in a pile of Chicago Bears linemen, tearing ligaments in his right knee, knocking him out for the rest of the year.

  Johnny got the call, and the rest is history.

  His career with the Baltimore Colts is the stuff of legend. In my mind, he’s by far the greatest quarterback in football history. His brand of football—brilliant play-calling, pinpoint passing, showman-ship, and never-say-die intensity—changed the game just as television came into its own. The 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants remains one of the greatest games ever played. Nationally televised, forty-five million Americans watched transfixed as Unitas drove his team downfield in overtime to defeat the powerful Giants. Unitas threw that day for 349 yards, surpassing Redskins’ Sammy Baugh’s title game record that had stood for more than twenty years. Johnny’s two last-minute drives brought home viewers to their feet, cheering, and made America passionate about Sunday football. The game would never be the same.

  I was one of the forty-five million people watching the game on television that historic day, and I remember thinking, “How did we ever let Johnny Unitas get away?” The Unitas story stays with me as a reminder that sometimes you have to trust your instincts, even if those around you, people you know and trust, don’t agree. In this case, my brothers and I were right; Kies and Dad were wrong.

  CHAPTER 4

  COMING OF AGE: “THE GAME’S CHANGING, DAD”

  SINCE THE LATE 1940S and early 1950s the game had been changing. The upstart All-American Football Conference, a serious rival to the NFL, boasted teams like the Baltimore Colts, San Francisco Forty-Niners, and Cleveland Browns. These teams looked to capture a piece of the NFL fan base, so they opened their play books—nothing was sacred—and experimented with innovative offenses and defenses. The Cleveland Browns, coached by Paul Brown, had pioneered a new pass offense, one that confounded opponents and wowed the fans. The Browns broke the game wide open with their aerial attack, which by itself could win games.

  In 1949, after much soul-searching and debate, the NFL owners agreed to merge with the rival AAFC, but only the three strongest teams—the Colts, Forty-Niners, and Browns—would be brought into the fold. These teams brought with them their exciting new play.

  In the summer of 1950, my father arranged for the Browns to play one of their first NFL games against the Steelers. This preseason contest would be played in War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo. So far the Browns had annihilated the opposition, averaging 35 points a game and racking up a 4-0 record. They shouldn’t have taken us by surprise, but they did. They never stopped passing. They went on to beat us 41-31, but the game was never close.

  Later, in the regular season, we played the Browns again, this time on our home turf at Forbes Field. At halftime as I walked off the field into the tunnel with Bob Davis, our wide receiver and defensive end (they played both ways in those days), Davis yelled over to the Browns players, “Hey, you guys pass so much you should be playing with the Celtics!” They just laughed, and went on to beat us again, 17-0.

  On our bye week, Coach Kiesling and I decided to see for ourselves how the Giants’ defense would handle the Browns’ passing game. I gassed up Dad’s Buick (the one that advertised on the doors, “North Side Buick” in gigantic letters and “Pittsburgh Steelers” underneath in barely readable print) and drove the two hours to Cleveland. I enjoyed that trip, especially spending time with Kies as he talked about the defensive options the Giants might use against the Browns. Our coach, John Michelosen, had utilized a 6-2-3 defensive formation (six men on the line, two linebackers, and three deep backs) in our game against the Browns. It didn’t work. They picked us apart.

  But the Giants-Browns game was a real eye-opener for me. The Giants’ coach, Steve Owens, pulled the two ends off the front line to protect against the short pass, while the safeties covered long. The four guys up front had to stop the run. This is the first time we’d seen a 4-3 defense. It was a revolutionary change. They shut down the Browns’ passing attack, forcing them to rely on only their ground game. The Steelers—and everybody else—saw the writing on the wall and had to adapt. The passing game was here to stay, and the 4-3 defense was the way of the future.

  When we got home to Pittsburgh I told my father all about what I’d seen in Cleveland. “The game’s changing, Dad,” I said, “and we’ve got to change, too!”

  Years later I learned that a young Johnny Unitas had also watched the Cleveland Browns play that season. He saw the same thing I did, but while Kies and I focused on defense, Johnny was inspired by the offensive opportunities. And he was just the quarterback to apply the new style of play introduced by the Browns and the other NFL newcomers.

  But change came hard to the Steelers. Dad continued to defer to the coaches and, let me tell you, these guys weren’t on the cutting edge of football theory. Coach Michelosen held on to Jock Sutherland’s old single-wing, while everyone else had gone to the more versatile T formation. But as hard as he tried, Michelosen was not Jock Sutherland. His team lacked the punch and creativity that Jock’s eshibited.

  After Michelosen went through two losing seasons among his four as coach, my father decided to replace him, this time with Joe Bach, who had last coached the Steelers in the mid-1930s. He was a tough customer back then. He had the brass to stand up to my father and once squared off with him during a four-day train ride home from Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Bulldogs, a West Coast semi-pro team, had badly beaten and embarrassed Pittsburgh in an exhibition game. Dad hated to lose, especially to these bums. The fight broke out when he tried to tell Bach how to do his job, and only ended when Dad delivered a right cross to Bach’s jaw, knocking him out cold. Back in those days, my father hadn’t made up his mind to let coaches do the coaching. Dad fired him at the end of a disastrous season. Actually, Joe threatened once too often to resign, and this time Dad called his bluff and accepted.


  Don’t get me wrong, Bach was a pretty good coach in those early years, but time had passed him by. In his second stint with the team, 1952-53, Bach had lost the old fire, racking up an unimpressive 11-13 record. Suffering from loss of stamina and the effects of diabetes, Bach remained mired in the past, grudgingly adopting the new T formation over the single-wing.

  In 1954 Dad brought Kies back for the third—and last—time. With him came his old coaching staff, those who were still around. Remember, these are the same guys who let Unitas go. They were a conservative bunch. It seemed like every play was right up the middle. Bob Drum of the Pittsburgh Press invented a little ditty that he’d sing in the press box at the start of every Steelers game:

  “Hi-diddle-diddle, it’s Rogel up the middle.”

  Kies was as predictable as the Pittsburgh streetcar schedule. And it was true: every team in the league knew running back Fran Rogel was coming up the middle. Kies saw the game as a test of strength and will. We didn’t need to outsmart or outmaneuver the other teams—we’d drive straight ahead and overpower them with Pittsburgh-style football.

  By now Dad had decided not to interfere with the coaches’ play calling, but even he grew frustrated with Kies’ one-dimensional attack. He pressed the coach to try a pass on the first play of the game.

  “Look Kies,” he said, “I want you to throw on first down.”

  The coach resisted. “No, you don’t throw the ball on first down!”

  But Dad insisted and was so certain that this opening play would make Steelers history, he told all the boys in the press box to watch for a pass.

  Drum said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  Dad chomped his cigar and smiled. “You just watch—I guarantee it.”