Dan Rooney (3 page)

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, but
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 born
¹
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.

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.

By the time he was eighteen he was out of the house and on his own. His intelligence and winning smile caught the attention of local politicians, like state senator James J. Coyne. Before he was twenty-one, Dad became chairman of the old Ward (actually Pittsburgh's 22nd Ward, but all the old timers insisted on calling it the 1st Ward, its Allegheny City designation). Dad had the Irish gift of gab, but he wasn't just a smooth talker—he genuinely loved people and they loved him. He liked nothing better than helping others and he learned to work the system to get the most for his friends and constituents. At the same time, he was a young man and actively participated in sports of all kinds, but in these early years boxing was his passion.

Carnivals came to town twice a year with professional boxers, pugs who would challenge the local talent. A tough mill worker could make $3 for every round he could go with the pros. The carney boxers usually made short work of the yokels—except when they got to our neighborhood and took on the Rooney brothers. My father and his brothers beat the carneys so many times and made off with so much money, the promoters banned them from the boxing tent. In fact, Dad was such a skilled boxer that he attracted the attention of the U.S. Olympic Committee, which in 1920 invited him to represent the United States at the Antwerp Games. My grandmother, however,
was against the whole idea. Dad would have liked to go, but he was so busy with ward politics and other enterprises he declined the honor. The Olympic Committee then tapped Sammy Mosberg, a good New York fighter who Dad had just beaten in a big tournament a few weeks earlier. To everyone's surprise, Mosberg came home with the gold medal. Just to show the home crowd who was best, Dad challenged Sammy to a rematch—and whipped him again. That was Dad. I still have the silver trophy he won for beating Mosberg at the 1920 Pittsburgh Athletic Association tournament, which he prized above all others. It's not a very flashy trophy, but to him it kind of represented Olympic gold.

Boxing, football, baseball—he loved them all. But he was more than an athlete. He was a skilled organizer and a great promoter. While still a teenager he started the Hope-Harveys, a regional semi-pro football team that played home games in Exposition Park, sometimes before crowds of more than twelve thousand people. “Hope” was the name of the fire station that provided locker rooms for the team, and “Harvey” was the doctor who tended to the players' bruises, sprains, and broken noses. The Hope-Harveys hit hard, won more than they lost, and as the best football club in the region developed a loyal and vocal following in the Pittsburgh area.

As he grew older, Dad turned to baseball. He was good at it, real good. Soon he was making money by both playing for and managing teams like the Wheeling, West Virginia, Stogies. He even signed with the Boston Red Sox for $250 a month, but found he could make twice as much barnstorming with semi-pro teams in the Midwest. For more than fifteen seasons he traveled the baseball circuit, holding his own with such Hall-of-Famers as Honus Wagner and Joe Cronin, not to mention Smokey Joe Williams and Buck Leonard of the Negro League. Of course, Honus Wagner was past his prime—“athletically old,” Dad said—but still the best player he'd ever seen. Cronin broke into the majors with the Pittsburgh Pirates but made history as a
slugger for the Boston Red Sox. He could belt the ball a mile and made a great impression on Dad. So did Williams and Leonard, two of the Negro Leagues' greatest players. In 1925, playing in the Mid-Atlantic League, Dad batted .369 and led the league in runs, hits, and stolen bases.