Dan Rooney (12 page)

Bell's greatest contribution to the NFL was his belief that the teams had to be competitive. He often said, “On any given Sunday, any team in our league can beat any other team.” He knew instinctively that the fans weren't going to stand for one team dominating other teams for years on end. The fans would lose interest. The lesson of the Cleveland Browns dominating the AAFC—they had dropped only four games in four years—was not lost on Bell or the NFL owners.

The answer, Bell saw, was the draft. He had realized this even while co-owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Now he could do something about it. Bell pushed for the draft system we know today. Teams with the worst records got the first picks of eligible college players. The neediest teams got the cream of the crop and could rebuild their franchises with fresh talent. In the mid-1930s when Bell (then owner of the Philadelphia Eagles) first suggested the draft system now in use, the owners thought giving the best player in the country to the worst team was crazy. Winning teams participated in the draft as well, but got the lower picks. The draft was the catalyst for the development of the modern scouting system. Teams needed good intelligence in order to make wise selections. A winning team no longer depended on coaches alone.

Scouts—those men out in the field talking to college coaches, compiling statistics, and meeting players—became increasingly important. Draft picks became a valuable commodity and could be traded just as players were traded. The team-building strategy going on in the front office became as important as the coach's strategy in the locker room and on the field.

This change came slowly to the Steelers. I was there, helping select draft picks, and I can tell you we didn't always make good choices. In 1956 we drafted a guy named Gary Glick with our bonus pick. Each year since 1937 one team would get a bonus pick. With it you got the very first pick of the draft—theoretically the best college player in the
country. Once the team got its bonus pick, it dropped out of the lottery.

By 1956 there were only three teams left in this lottery: the Green Bay Packers, the Chicago Cardinals, and the Steelers. In April, at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, with an eager press corps hovering around, Bert Bell placed three pieces of paper, one marked in pencil with an X and the letters B-O-N-U-S, into a gray felt fedora. I stood right next to him and saw where he placed the three slips. When it came time to draw, he looked at me and said, “Danny, you pick first.” Of course, I nabbed the bonus pick. Bert wasn't cheating. Maybe he didn't realize I was paying such close attention, but in any case, I wasn't about to let a gift like this pass us by. The Steelers needed all the help we could get.

But did we take advantage of this golden opportunity? No! A few weeks earlier, Kiesling had gotten a letter from the coach at Colorado A&M in Fort Collins, telling us that he had a player, a defensive back named Gary Glick, who he considered a great talent. Kies was a big defensive guy, and he decided we needed Glick more than anybody since Whizzer White.

From the time the coach's letter arrived, I argued with Kies until I was blue in the face. “The guy's okay. But we don't need to take him as our
bonus
pick. He's a sleeper. Nobody knows a thing about him. In fact,
we
don't know a thing about him. We don't have film, nobody's seen him, all we've got is a letter from a coach we never heard of. We'll take him, if you want, but we don't need to take him with our bonus pick. We can pick him up in the third round.”

Kies could not be moved. With the wild-eyed passion of a treasure hunter who's just found the pot of gold, he yelled back, “No, this guy is good and everybody is going to know about him. Everybody will want him!”

I couldn't believe it, so we went to my father. We both made our cases. My father said, “You have to let Kies take the guy he wants.”

“But, this is crazy,” I said. My father just shook his head. He always used to do that. That's how he was with my brother Tim about Johnny Unitas.

We went ahead and used our bonus pick on Gary Glick, passing over future Hall of Famer Lenny Moore and quarterback Earl Morrall. Pittsburgh sports reporters scratched their heads over the Steelers' draft strategy. Bob Drum wondered, “Who is this Harry Stick?”

Weeks later Mary Regan, Patricia's sister and the Steelers' secretary, told me the film had come in from the starry-eyed coach in Colorado. I took it up to the projection room on the eighth floor of the Union Trust Building in downtown Pittsburgh. Fran Fogarty, Coach Kiesling, and I huddled around the projector to watch Gary Glick, the number-one draft pick in the NFL. Our hearts sank. We saw a wind-swept stadium with open seats, no benches for the players to sit on, dogs running across the field. Glick and the Colorado team were okay, a half-decent team. When the film flapped to an end, we went down to see Dad in his office on the first floor. We didn't say anything, but he could read our faces.

“So he didn't look very good, did he?”

There was nothing for us to say. Let me add, however, Glick was a good player. He made our team and played safety, 1956-1959, and remains the only defensive back in NFL history to be drafted number one overall.

Even though I was proven right about our bonus pick, it would be years before the Steelers would figure out the NFL draft and use it to build a championship team. We had a lot to learn.

 

 

It may have been the same old Steelers, but it wasn't the same old NFL. Bert Bell had seen to that. Bell recognized that America's growing love affair with television would impact the game in every way.
Not only would teams be earning record profits thanks to television rights, but the game's live audience would be bigger than ever thanks to Bell's astute management of the blackout rule.

In 1949 the league's television rights amounted to less than $100,000, but by the end of the 1950s those same rights were worth millions. Nearly every American home had a television set as the 1960s began. Bell worried that the medium could kill football, as it had crippled minor league baseball and boxing, as spectator sports. Why would a football fan buy a ticket to a game and sit out in the cold when he could see the same game in the comfort of his living room? Bert's solution was to black out all home games in a seventy-five-mile radius from the stadium to ensure the seats would be filled every Sunday.

This led the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether the NFL's policy violated antitrust laws. It took two years to determine the legality of home-game blackouts, but on November 12, 1953, U.S. District Court Judge Allan K. Grim handed down a decision in Philadelphia allowing the league to impose television blackouts. Baseball continued without a blackout policy, steadily losing television market share and gate receipts, while football earned more of both.

Bell was the right guy at the right time. The son of a Pennsylvania attorney general, he was a credible witness in court. He knew how to work members of Congress, and he kept owners united on the blackout policy and other contentious issues.

I remember at league meetings how Bert would always get his way, even if he had to resort to crying. Michael MacCambridge, in his fine book
America's Game,
recounts a wonderful story told by Baltimore Colt's owner Carroll Rosenbloom:

 

I remember such scenes. You never felt you had been bullied into a decision. He built consensus, and there was this “we got to stick together, boys” atmosphere that got things done, even with such strong-willed men as George Marshall, George Halas, Paul Brown, Wellington Mara, Dan Reeves, and Curly Lambeau, and, of course, my father.

The idea of a players' union was one of the toughest issues. And, believe me, the players had some legitimate gripes. They wanted, for example, a second pair of shoes (if you look at the Steelers locker room today, each player must have thirty pairs, with shoe manufacturers tripping over themselves to give them more). My father, being from Pittsburgh—a strong union town—supported the idea of a players' union and the value of collective bargaining. He knew that withholding this right wasn't fair and would only antagonize the players. The issue found its way to Congress, where several key legislators championed the cause and pressured the league to accept a players' union. Bert testified before a congressional committee, stating publicly that the league would recognize the union. But the owners hadn't agreed to it, and my father knew it would be a hard sell. Halas and Marshall were dead set against it. Rosenbloom was on the fence. By the 1956 fall league meeting, Bert needed nine of the twelve owners to vote in favor if the resolution was to pass.

Easier said than done.

My father thought we had the votes, but when we walked into the league meeting room (I remember because I was still in my early twenties, and just starting to regularly attend league meetings) I saw George Marshall with his arm over Carroll Rosenbloom's shoulder. George Halas was with them.

“Uh-oh, we've got troubles,” my father said.

When the union resolution was advanced, Marshall slammed his fist on the table and shouted, “You can't do that! We can't give in!”

With that, my father stood up, and reasoned, “Listen, if we want any credibility, we have to recognize this union because Bert Bell has told Congress we would. If we don't do it now, then there'll be all kinds of trouble, and the pressure will be terrible. Congress will be after us every chance it gets.”

“What are you talking about?” Marshall asked. “What are you trying to do? We don't have to recognize the union.”

“We
have
to recognize the union,” my father repeated. “Bert went before Congress and said that we would recognize it. And if we don't, then he's finished as a commissioner because they'll say he has no clout, no authority, and can't get the big deals done.”

By this time we had eight votes in favor. Bell took Rosenbloom aside, and after he had finished working on him, Carroll came over, too. Only Halas and Marshall voted against the union.

This is the first really important issue I faced at an NFL board meeting. My father had put forward the resolution to recognize the players' union, and it was great seeing how Bert and Dad worked together. These old friends had been around and knew how to get things done.

Dad sent me to represent the Steelers at the first union meeting. He said it would be a good learning experience for me. Each team sent a player representative. Our players sent their teammate Charlie Bradshaw, who was later president of the union (he was replaced by Jack Butler as the Steelers' player representative). The players not only wanted a second pair of shoes, they wanted to get paid for preseason games.

These were reasonable requests and the NFL did the right thing by recognizing the union and agreeing to needed reforms. Looking back on this meeting, held in 1956, I realize now how important—
and historic—it was. For the first time, owners and players from each team sat around the same table to air grievances, discuss issues, and make the NFL a stronger organization. The owners and the players realized there had to be give-and-take if the league were to be successful. We understood for the first time that we were all in this together. It's a much different world today. The Players Union is well established; it's a professional, well-run organization, and the owners take seriously the issues and recommendations it brings forward, doing their best to cooperate on matters of policy.

I was twenty-four years old then, and I can't help but think that I'm the last of the NFL executives who attended that first meeting—all the others are gone.

Bell understood the importance of protecting the league's image. He strictly enforced rules against gambling. Some people may think this odd, but my father supported him and was, in fact, his strongest ally. Betting on sports, especially where a conflict of interest might exist, went against my father's grain. He knew gambling by players, owners, and insiders could ruin the NFL just as it had almost ruined baseball. With Bert, he worked diligently to ban it. Bell came down hard on known gamblers with fines and suspensions. If a player knew of illegal gambling but didn't report it, he'd be suspended, too.

Bell believed the game had to be kept clean and fair. During televised games, he made certain that network cameras would not focus on fights between players. Gratuitous violence had no place in professional football, and no player should have his career ended by a cheap shot or unnecessary roughness.

Bert was a big phone man, he was always on the phone, encouraging, cajoling—and even coercing, if necessary—owners, coaches, and players. He knew the game. He was a real football man and wouldn't allow anything that might hurt the game.

In the 1950s on-field officials did not travel outside their own regions. On the West Coast, West Coast officials ruled. Likewise in
the East. Many sports fans suspected the officials were biased in favor of their regional teams.

In a game played on the West Coast in 1955, we were leading 26- 24 with less than thirty seconds remaining in the game. My old high school buddy, Richie McCabe, a defensive back, was called for unnecessary roughness. Richie had placed his hand and knee on a downed player. He barely touched the guy, but the Los Angeles-based referee called a fifteen-yard penalty, which stopped the clock and gave the Rams time enough to bring on their field goal unit and win the game. Kies went berserk. LA Coliseum security guards had their hands full keeping Kiesling from tearing the officials apart with his bare hands. I'd never seen him so angry.