Dan Rooney (40 page)

“This is the first situation in the NFL where I have worked that it was not corporate,” says Tomlin. “Truth be known, that's what makes it special here. It doesn't matter what business you're in—it's a people business, and people are important here. You hear, ‘The door is always open.' Well, here it's not a cliché. There are a lot of things that make this place special, but that stands out when people talk about the Pittsburgh Steelers being a family environment and atmosphere. The business of professional football is competitive, and it's always going to be that way, but to have a pure open-door policy and a willingness to have conversation—both official and unofficial with your people—is something that makes this place special.”

During my seventy-five years with the Steelers and the NFL, I've seen a lot of change. Every year brought new challenges and opportunities. Throughout it all, I've had fun and made so many good and lasting friends. My life has been focused on family, faith, and football. I tried to do the best job I could and I try to make a difference. As I look back, I think there's very little I'd change, even if I could. Looking forward, I can see how the past shapes our future. I'm proud to have been part of the story. I've enjoyed my role as colleague to NFL
commissioners, especially Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, and now Roger Goodell. I hope my perspective and love for the traditions of the NFL have been a help to them.

Football is in my blood. In some ways I feel I'm the last man standing, the last of the first generation who knew the founders of the league and who set it on its course to become America's game.

On the day after we lost the 2004 AFC championship game, Jeff Hartings stood in front of a room filled with media and said, “We honestly love each other. I honestly felt that I would rather lose a game like this with this team than win a Super Bowl with a team I didn't enjoy playing with.”

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Many friends have helped me along the way. Margaret Vota not only first suggested I write about my experiences with the Steelers and the NFL, but also spent many hours reading and critiquing the manuscript. Bob Labriola of the Steelers organization and editor of
Steelers Digest
gave me the benefit of his knowledge of Steelers games and enhanced the book. Joe Browne, NFL executive vice president of Communications, also read the manuscript and made many suggestions. Patricia Rooney, Rita Rooney Conway, Art Rooney II, Chuck Daly, Trueman H. “Gus” Peek, and Gene Collier also read the entire manuscript and offered helpful changes. My friend and colleague Charles “Stormy” Bidwill encouraged me to continue writing. Joe Paterno, a friend for many years, lent support. I thank them all. They have made it a better book.

My heartfelt thanks also to Commissioners Roger Goodell and Paul Tagliabue for their support and encouragement.

Many within the Steelers organization helped: Tim Carey, Bill Cowher, Mike Fabus, Gerry Glenn, Joe Gordon, Joe Greene, Franco Harris, Danielle Hudak, Sam Kasan, Ed Kiely, Burt Lauten, Dave Lockett, Karen Mercalde, Rebecca Mihalcik, Chuck Noll, Bill Nunn, Tony Quatrini, Jan Rusnak, Andy Russell, Jimmy Sacco, Ike Taylor, and Mike Tomlin.

At the NFL offices I could always call on Pete Abitante, Greg Aiello, Anastasia Danias, Gary Gertzog, and Jeff Pash.

I would like to thank the staff at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, especially Betty Arenth, Audrey Brourman, Brian Butko, Sherrie Flick, David Grinnell, Jon Halpern, Lisa Lazar, Art Louderback, Jenny Pack, Tonia Rose, Ned Shano, and Bob Stakley.
I would also like to express my appreciation to Kaveri Subbarao, an associate attorney at Reed Smith, who offered expert legal advice.

Editor Kevin Hanover and the staff at Da Capo Press provided expert guidance and support throughout the project.

To my co-authors and friends Andy Masich and David Halaas I extend my deep appreciation for their historical perspective and hard work. From beginning to end it has been a rewarding experience.

Thanks to my children and their families—Art, Pat, Kathleen, Rita, Daniel, Duffy, John, Jim, and Joan.

A sincere thank you to my wonderful mother, Kathleen, and my father, Arthur J. Rooney.

My greatest thanks to Patricia, who has always been with me. She made this book possible.

 

Nunn: Vast things changed as far as the organization. I'm surmising this, because of the type of people Dan and Chuck were. All of a sudden you started seeing black coaches there. Black people working in the office, sitting at the front desk. The whole structure started to change. To me, both of them were the same type of person. I don't think they see color, and I don't say that about a lot of people. I say that sincerely. When we used to line up the draft board, Chuck wasn't concerned with the dots. There was a time when dots would be put up on the board.

 

 

Nunn: Just a black dot so you could identify the players. That's the way teams did it. At one time the NFL Scouting Combine identified people by race, and they did it there by using numbers. I said that's illegal. Eventually it was stopped. They had numbers, something like 110 was white and 111 was black, for example. They didn't identify Jews or Italians, it was just black or white.

 

Nunn: As sports editor of the
Pittsburgh Courier,
I did an All-America Team every year, and Mel was one of my All-Americans at Southern University. Chuck and I disagreed on him. We both felt he could play, but I thought Mel would have trouble as a cornerback because he was almost six-foot-four. I thought he should have been a safety. Chuck felt Mel could play cornerback. We went back and looked at the film. Chuck was right because of one doggone thing that I hadn't taken into consideration. With the bump-and-run, Mel could jam the receiver at the line of scrimmage so he couldn't get off and get into running his route. You couldn't do that today. Mel was a great athlete.

 

 

Nunn: Bradshaw—great talent, no question about it. Great arm, marginal touch on his flair passes that you had to have, particularly in the beginning. Great hands to catch. Would have had a lot of balls intercepted early, but the ball was coming so fast that even the defensive players couldn't catch it. Great athlete. Physically had a lot of things.

I'm no coach. I'm not in meetings. I always say it's very easy on the outside to look in, but if you don't know what a guy is supposed to be doing, how can you say he's right or wrong? Early on, Bradshaw had the reputation of being an idiot. That wasn't true. Maybe he wasn't the smartest quarterback, but he did call his own plays. So questioning his intelligence did not hold up.

One of the things about Chuck was that he gave the quarterback a lot of responsibility on the field. As a result, I go along with the Chief's analysis, which was: we won the first Super Bowl despite Bradshaw and the last two of those four Super Bowls because of Bradshaw.

Terry was another guy who came from a small school who needed
to be developed. And he wanted to be loved. I didn't like the way he handled the best athletic wide receiver he ever had in Frank Lewis. Frank was an introvert, and he needed the same things that Bradshaw needed, but in a different way. Lynn Swann handled Bradshaw really well, because Swann realized early that since Terry was the quarterback, Terry would be deciding where to throw the football.

When I was a newspaper guy, the first guy that brought that to my attention was Bobby Layne. I was down at the Roosevelt Hotel one Monday and I started asking Layne some questions. “What makes a wide receiver good?” He said, “I'll tell you something, see this guy here?” His name was Jimmy Orr. “You know what makes him a good receiver?” said Layne. “I like him, and I throw him the ball.”

I never forgot that. A wide receiver needs to get nice with the guy who's going to throw him the ball. He's got to be able to catch the ball, but if he has talent and there are two equals, the one the quarterback likes the most will get the ball. Swann picked that up early.

 

 

Nunn: To the best of my knowledge, and it might not be the case every single time, Dan never interfered. I never saw him interfere with his brother's job. Scouting, personnel, that was Art Jr.'s job. He'd come in and look at some film, and he saw a lot of things when he was looking at films. Dan would make a little remark every now and then. He's a workaholic, and in all probability he would have been a good appraiser of talent himself. I never knew of him interfering with Chuck or Art or the department when it came to that.

 

 

Nunn: It's hard to say. There are different ways of interfering. If you intimidate your employees by sticking your nose in, then it's a difficult
situation. If your employees are free to express themselves, then it's something else. It takes a certain type of employee to stand up and say exactly what he thinks. Even if you get torn down, at least you're saying what you think as opposed to what they want to hear. Dan had employees who told him what he wanted to hear, but he eventually got tired of that.

 

 

Nunn: The thing that always impressed me about Dan was that I never heard him complain about illness or any problems. In some ways, we were brought up the same way. I was under my father and trying to prove that I really belonged on the newspaper. I worked for my father, and Dan worked for his father. But even though his father was the boss, Dan worked as hard as anybody.

A lot of times in the off-season, I'd come over on a Sunday. I wouldn't be doing much, so I'd come over and read books. Dan was the same way. I've often wondered if I had the money to control the ball club and everything that he has, if I'd be that tied up with the team, like making all these road trips. It's admirable.

Back when I was negotiating contracts to sign some ballplayers, I'd be fighting with an agent and I'd say, “Look, I can't go any further. This is it.” It would be three-thirty in the morning. I'd say, “I'll call Dan Rooney, and he's not going to go any further.” The agent thought I was bluffing. But I called Dan, and he would answer the telephone and was coherent right away. At three-thirty in the morning. This happened numerous times. He'd just say, “How are you doing?” I'd give him all the cue words. Then Dan might say, “Take it up a couple of thousand dollars.” I'd give the agent the phone and let him speak to Dan, then I'd get back on the phone. I'd hang up and tell the agent, “You won him over. I don't know how you did it. He said take it up $3,000.”

Dan's approach was always upbeat. When I ran training camp, Dan and Chuck were both the same. They would want some furniture or other stuff moved, so I'd say, “I'll call someone.” But they would just do it themselves.

 

Greene: Taking care of what you can control, and not getting weighed down by things beyond your control. Paying attention to instructions and then asking the right questions all the time. If you don't understand, then ask. Don't pretend you do know when you don't know. Be honest with yourself.

That's the first thing I used to tell the young men I coached. In order to get from A to B, first you have to be truthful with yourself. You have to fess up. If you did something wrong in terms of trying to have success on the football field on a particular down, in order to get rid of that—as Chuck always said, “You have to replace bad habits with good habits”—you first had to know it was a bad habit. A lot of times those things are trivialized by calling them clichés. To us, they weren't. They were a way of life.

Chuck practiced what he preached. That was his lifestyle. Over all those years, he was solid and stable and didn't waver. When you look back at those teams, a lot of us learned well. The questions asked of me right now, you could probably ask twenty other guys on those teams, and the answers would be the same. That's because we got it all from the same guy.

 

Greene: I think he's acknowledged when his name comes up, because they have to acknowledge the winning and the tradition and the style of play he put together. That's why the fondness for the Steelers of the 1970s has had such a long life—because we played with a style that was his. It was amazing to me that people would confuse Chuck Noll with another football coach named Chuck [Chuck Knox of the Buffalo Bills and the Los Angeles Rams], and that they would spell Chuck Noll's surname with a K. Maybe it was because he didn't cater to the media. He was respectful, and that's what he always told us: that the media had a job to do even though it was different than our job, and we should respect them. He had an appreciation for the media, but he never played up to them, and maybe that's why he's underappreciated.