Dan Rooney (28 page)

“Yes I do, Your Honor.”

“Are you a Raiders fan?”

“Yes I am. We hold season tickets.”

“Do you think it would be fair to have a whole jury composed of people like you?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Thank you. You are excused.”

The lead attorney for the plaintiff, Willie Brown, was a very capable lawyer. He later became mayor of San Francisco and speaker in the California Assembly. On the first day of the trial, Chuck Noll took the stand. Now, Chuck is a man of great intelligence. There is an air of importance about him. He doesn't talk a lot, but when he does, people listen. He's a very credible witness—the last thing Brown wanted. In an interview after the trial, Brown described what it was like going head to head with the future Hall of Fame coach, Chuck Noll:

“It is in federal court with a jury. It is a two-week trial. I am in federal court examining Chuck Noll; I've got Chuck Noll on the stand. Chuck Noll is a witness worse than Clarence Thomas. He will answer no questions. He does it with a degree of dignity that you just get angrier, angrier and angrier and angrier. I was going nuts through this hour of examination. I was doing the best job you could do on Chuck Noll, but you really can't shake him. The judge was watching this whole thing with great amusement . . . So I was hammering away, hammering away, and I am getting no place in making the points with Chuck Noll. I finally just kind of looked, gave the judge a glance. The judge asked me if I wanted to take a recess.”

Brown regained his composure and changed his strategy. This time he asked Noll, “Do you see any criminals in this courtroom?” Players from both teams filled the room. Noll answered, “No,” and Brown walked away feeling he had won the point.

Now the plaintiff's attorney focused on me. Brown wheeled into the courtroom a floor-to-ceiling blowup of the letter I had written to Rozelle, in which I stated my objections to the fines levied against Atkinson (too low) and Noll (too high). That day they called me I wore my white shirt, coat, and tie. In the witness box, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to tell the whole truth.

Brown asked, “Have you ever seen this letter before?”

“Yes.”

“What's the nature of it?” he asked, hoping to throw me off by quickly firing questions.

“It's the letter I wrote to the commissioner.”

Brown asked, “Did you review the letter with Chuck Noll before you sent it?”

I replied, “No. I don't go over my letters with anyone. If I write a letter, I write the letter.”

He asked me if I thought Atkinson should be fined, implying that he didn't do anything more than our guys did. I said, “What do you mean? It was a cheap shot. He gave our guy a concussion and knocked him out of the game!”

MacInnis always seemed to have the trial well in hand. When the plaintiff's lawyer read a newspaper excerpt criticizing our players for unnecessary roughness, MacInnis spoke up and said, “That's an interesting bit of writing. Why don't we read the entire article?” The judge agreed, so MacInnis stood before the jury and read the whole thing aloud. Taken in context, the excerpt described nothing that would damage our case. When MacInnis finished reading, he turned to the jurors and said, “Seems to me, as Shakespeare said, this is ‘much ado about nothing.'”

A bunch of our players were called to testify.

Our star witness, it turned out, was Terry Bradshaw. Affable, frank, smiling, Bradshaw played to the courtroom, cracked jokes, and captivated the jury. He was terrific.

After two weeks of testimony and cross-examination, the judge gave the jury members their final instructions and sent them off to deliberate. Four hours later, they returned with a unanimous verdict that Noll was not liable. Chuck was vindicated. After the ordeal, I told a reporter outside the courthouse, “I'm pleased. It has been the most depressing experience of my life, but I'm happy.”

It's a good thing we won this case, both for the Steelers and the NFL. Noll's integrity remained intact, as did Pete Rozelle's. Pete had been called to testify and was very concerned about the outcome of the trial. Even more important, the case focused attention on the gratuitous violence represented by Atkinson's blindside clubbing of Lynn Swann. It served notice that such acts would not be condoned. Rozelle ordered the NFL Competition Committee to investigate rule changes that would make the game safer. At the same time, he removed Al Davis from this powerful committee.

 

 

The NFL faced other issues during this time. No issue received more attention in the mid-1970s than labor relations.

The owners established the NFL Management Council, made up of one member from each of the twenty-eight clubs, to determine the league's labor policy. From this group a six-member Council Executive Committee (CEC) was appointed to negotiate directly with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA). CEC chairman Wellington Mara appointed me the league's chief labor negotiator in 1976. I had served as chairman of the Expansion Committee in the early 1970s and been successful in bringing the Seattle Seahawks and Tampa Bay Buccaneers into the league. My years of experience in negotiating players' contracts also served me well in this important new appointment.

The league's recognition of the NFLPA in 1956 had greatly improved communications between owners and players. Even so, the NFL suffered a number of player strikes, beginning in the 1960s. The forty-two-day strike in 1974, orchestrated by Edward R. Garvey, executive director of the NFLPA, resolved nothing. The players agreed to end their walkout but their grievances, numbering nearly one hundred, remained unresolved.

Remember, in the 1974 strike the players wanted to eliminate the Rozelle Rule, which put limits on free agency; arbitration of all disputes; elimination of the draft; elimination of the waiver system; and a contract to guarantee salaries. But the strike fizzled when most of the players returned to camp.

Garvey had a staff of eight and an experienced negotiating team. After talks between the league and players broke down, the NFLPA leaders took their fight to the U.S. courts. Once I was appointed chief negotiator for the CEC, I reopened talks with the NFLPA. I was joined by Jim Finks, the former Steelers quarterback and then general manager of the Minnesota Vikings, and Sarge Karch, the CEC's attorney. We met with Garvey and other association representatives repeatedly through the summer and well into the 1976 season. I spent seventy-seven days in New York that year, in addition to meetings in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Miami.

Formal meetings were getting us nowhere, so I began talks with Miami Dolphins All-Pro safety Dick Anderson, the NFLPA president elected by the player representatives from all the teams. These talks were so secret that not even Ed Garvey knew of them. Miami coach Don Shula cooperated in every way and allowed me to talk to Anderson privately, an unusual occurrence given we were in the middle of the football season.

I saw Dick in Buffalo, where the Dolphins played the Bills in a
Monday Night Football
game. We reached an accord, which has since become known as the “Anderson-Rooney Agreement.” When Ed Garvey learned what we had been up to, he wasn't happy. He'd been left out of the talks and said our agreement was “illegal.” The NFLPA wouldn't accept it. But Anderson and I kept on working.

We again met secretly, this time at Dick's apartment in Miami. In the middle of our discussion the phone rang. No one was supposed to know I was there, but Anderson handed me the phone and said, “It's for you.” It was Sig Hyman, the league's outside accountant and chief
number-cruncher. Sig said, “You know those figures I gave you? Well, they've changed.”

I thought Dick and I had made good progress, and I wanted to keep moving forward, so I told Sig, “It's too late now!” and hung up.

Dick and I continued our talks until we finally hashed out a draft agreement. This became the basis of an agreement both sides could accept, including Ed Garvey, who now entered the discussions, along with Sarge Karch.

During this time, the trust between the players and the league grew, and I got a chance to meet and know Gene Upshaw, the Raiders Pro-Bowl offensive lineman, and other team player representatives. I already knew Paul Martha, a labor arbitrator who had played defensive back for the Steelers. I had worked with him successfully during the construction of Three Rivers Stadium when the Pittsburgh Black Coalition, an organization of African-American business and civil rights leaders, pushed for assurances that black contractors would get construction contracts.

In February 1977, the league ratified a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the NFLPA. The five-year agreement was worth $107 million. It allowed for the continuation of the college draft through 1986; included a no-strike, no-suit clause; instituted a forty-three-man active player limit; reduced pension-vesting to four years; increased minimum salaries, as well as preseason and postseason pay; improved insurance and medical benefits; modified player movement and control practices; and reaffirmed the NFL commissioner's authority to discipline players.

With the expiration of the agreement five years later in 1982, the NFLPA authorized another strike. This time the players demanded a percentage of gross revenues for salaries and pensions. They wanted wage scales and compensation tied to seniority. The free agency issue had not been resolved to anyone's satisfaction, and players were concerned
about injuries caused by artificial turf. The strike began two games into the regular season and lasted fifty-seven days. Eight games had to be cancelled—the first time anything like this had happened. Because of the shortened season, we devised a sixteen-team playoff tournament to determine who would play in Super Bowl XVII.

As we negotiated with the players during this time, Paul Martha was very helpful in keeping the talks moving. When it seemed things were falling apart, he got it back together. We worked long days and late nights, especially on wages and pensions. I remember one November night I was about ready to call it quits, saying, “We are not giving another dollar.” Our meeting broke up, and I went back to my hotel. Only Martha and Garvey knew where I was staying.

About midnight, Paul called. I told him, “I'm leaving. I'm going home in the morning.”

Paul urged me not to leave, saying, “It's going to happen. Stay.”

And he was right. The logjam broke the next day, and we agreed on a CBA that we could present to the League and the NFLPA.

Paul attended the CEC meeting in New York on November 17, 1982. Chuck Sullivan, the oldest son of Patriots owner Bill Sullivan, then chairman of the committee, may have played up his role in the compromise, but in fact his grandstanding almost killed the agreement when he tried to make last-minute changes to get more than we had already agreed to. Paul Martha stood firm. “We can't change it.”

I strongly supported Paul, and told everyone, “We've already been through this—we're not changing anything at this stage of the game. This is the deal we agreed on. Let's vote!” Fortunately, the CEC ignored Sullivan and approved the agreement, which then went on to the league for its approval.

The new CBA would run through 1986, and the NFL draft was extended through 1992. The veteran free-agent system was left unchanged. We agreed to a minimum salary schedule based on seniority;
training camp and postseason pay increased; medical insurance and retirement benefits increased; and a severance pay system was introduced—a first in professional sports.

These were exciting times, and we got a lot accomplished as we built mutual respect and trust. Working together, we formed the Player Club Relations Committee (PCRC). Gene Upshaw and Len Hauss represented the players; Wellington Mara and I spoke for management. We solved problems and made the collective bargaining process work.

 

 

It's not hard to know just why we didn't have a more successful season on the field in 1977: distractions. The “criminal element” trial certainly didn't help. Then there were the holdouts by Jack Lambert and Mel Blount; Glen Edwards and Jimmy Allen both left the team briefly during the season in protest of their contract situations; Bradshaw broke his wrist in October and played with a cast for much of the season; and just to top everything off, Chuck Noll slipped on a patch of ice in Cincinnati and broke his arm on the night before a December 10 game against the Bengals that we ended up losing.

We, along with other teams, had to adjust to the rule changes. Noll and the coaching staff liked running the ball, but now with the new rules favoring the passing game, we had to adapt. In the long run the rules changes would help Terry, but this season we couldn't put it all together. Don't get me wrong, in the old days we would have been proud of a 9-5 record. But after two Super Bowl victories, our team and our fans expected more. We knew we had a great football team. We got to the playoffs, but lost in the divisional championship to Denver. The Dallas Cowboys dominated Super Bowl XII, crushing the Broncos, 27-10.

In 1978 everything came together for the Steelers. At one time,
NFL Films rated this team as the greatest in football history. And it's hard to dispute that claim. We had the players on both sides of the ball. Bradshaw won the passing title that year and was named NFL Player of the Year. Harris had another tremendous year—I believe Franco, as much as anyone, was the key to our success. Swann and Stallworth were the best receiving duo in the game. Even with the new rules, our defense continued to dominate.

We had the coaches. Chuck Noll assembled a coaching staff second to none—guys like Rollie Dotsch (defensive line), Dick Hoak (offensive backfield), George Perles (defensive coordinator), and Woody Widenhofer (linebacker and secondary). Chuck said he would build the team with young new talent, and he did. But it was his vision and commitment to excellence that lifted this team to a new level. Joe Greene said, “I've been in locker rooms where you get all kinds of speeches and platitudes—they don't mean a thing. All Chuck said was, ‘Play the way you've been coached,' and that's what developed the consistency in that football team.”