Dan Rooney (6 page)

Our family went to church at St. Peter's every Sunday and on holy days. Mom would have gone more often but she always had little ones at home to care for. We were a Catholic family, and the church was especially important to me. I wanted to be like Father Campbell, a man who did good work and people looked up to. From the time I was in seventh grade at St. Peter's School, I thought seriously of becoming a priest myself. I started going to mass four or five times a week. No one in my family insisted, but I could tell Mom and Dad
were pleased. But they didn't push me one way or the other. It was something I'd have to figure out for myself.

 

 

After eight losing seasons as the Pittsburgh Pirates, coached by Dad's friends—Jap Douds, Luby DiMelio, Joe Bach, Johnny Blood, and Walt Kiesling—my father was desperate to win. It's not like he didn't invest in the team. He had broken the salary barrier in 1938 when he hired Byron “Whizzer” White, the great University of Colorado running back, receiver, and kicker, for the unheard price of $15,800—three times the going rate for the top players in the league. The other owners were furious. George Preston Marshall accosted Dad, saying, “What are you trying to do, ruin the league?” But as I said, Dad was desperate. His losing team was not only losing fans, it was losing money. He thought the Whizzer could turn the team around, but although his new star impressed fans and opponents, even he couldn't overcome the erratic coaching and general poor play of the Pittsburgh team. To make matters worse, the Whizzer only played one season, then went on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, then law school, and eventually to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Byron White was a gentleman, scholar, and one of the greatest athletes I've ever seen.

Having failed at finding the right coach and the best players, Dad tried a different strategy: he'd rename the team and start the 1940 season with a clean slate. A public naming contest generated “Steelers,” and Dad thought it a perfect fit for Pittsburgh's hard-working fans. But even a name change wasn't enough to turn the “same old Steelers” into winners. The team finished a dismal 2 wins, 7 loses, and 2 ties.

At the end of the season, wealthy New York financier Lex Thompson offered to buy the team for $160,000. Dad knew that Thompson would move the team to Boston, leaving Pittsburgh without an NFL
franchise. So he and his friend Bert Bell, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, and Thompson came up with a scheme whereby Thompson would buy the Steelers and move them to Boston, which was without a team at the time. Dad and Bell would join forces and make the “Keystoners” a team for all of Pennsylvania—a team that would play half its games in Philadelphia and the other half in Pittsburgh.

The league approved the sale, but a group of franchise owners led by George Preston Marshall of the Washington Redskins blocked the move of the Pittsburgh franchise to Boston. He wasn't about to allow my father and Bell to control an entire state. Thompson was miserable and so was my father, who found himself and Pittsburgh without a team.

None of the partners was happy with the situation, so before the opening kickoff of the 1941 season, Dad and Bell pulled a switcheroo and traded the Eagles to Thompson for the Steelers, which Thompson had renamed the “Iron Men.” Dad threw out the name Iron Men and kept the Steelers in Pittsburgh, which is all he ever wanted, and Bert Bell became half owner and coach.

Bert Bell was quite a character and oddly complemented my father. The son of a wealthy Philadelphia family, Bell received the unlikely name of deBenneville, which out of necessity he shortened to Bert. Like the “boy named Sue,” deBenneville learned to fight in schoolyards and locker rooms and grew up tough and strong. He excelled as an athlete, especially in football. Cut off from the family fortune once it was clear he was going to make a career of football, Bert always had money problems. He borrowed cash from his fiancée, Frances Upton (who had starred with Eddie Cantor in the popular film
Making Whoopee
) to purchase the Eagles franchise in the summer of 1933, the same year Dad bought the Steelers. Dad and Bert hit it off from the first, and I believe the whole Eagles-Steelers flip was a result of Bert's financial difficulties and my father's desire to help him out.

Now, I was just a kid when this was going on. My mother tried to explain these dealings to me, but no matter what she said, I fretted about Pittsburgh losing the Steelers.

Mother got Dad on the phone and said, “You'd better talk to Danny, he's worried you're going to sell the team.”

I listened while they talked for a while.

Finally, Mother said in a firm voice, “No, I think
you
should talk to him.”

So she handed the phone to me, and Dad said, “Don't worry, Danny. We're not going to sell the team. This is just something we have to work out.”

To this day, the complexity of this crazy deal makes my head spin. But I can tell you, I was sure relieved when Dad told me he wouldn't sell the team. Then and there, I realized just how much football meant to me.

I was nine years old when all this happened. I played football every day after school. In fact, we called our sandlot team the “Rooneys.” Joe Goetz, the man who sold Dad uniforms and equipment for the Steelers, fixed us up with brown jerseys with “Rooneys” printed on the front and a big number on the back. I can't tell you how excited we were when the jerseys first arrived and we pulled them from the box. The first one out was number 98. This was Michigan all-American Tommy Harmon's number and we all wanted it. Then Art pulled out a second shirt, and it had the same number: 98. The kids began pulling out the jerseys—all had 98 on the back. Every single shirt had the number 98 printed on it. Did Goetz's supplier make a mistake? No, there was no mistake. Goetz had an oversupply of Tommy Harmon shirts and he just wanted to get rid of them. At first we didn't know what to do. But then it came to us. We'd call ourselves the “Rooney 98s.”

In the off season I worked out by hitting the tackling dummies my father stored in the basement, along with all the other Steelers equipment. One day, I got a little rambunctious and dove for an
overhead pipe, intending to swing into the dummy feet first. But I missed my grab and came down hard on the cement floor. Off to Mercy Hospital we went, where the doctor set my broken left arm. My mother was nearly in tears, but I got her to take a picture of me, my arm in a sling, bruises all over my face, and a leather Steelers helmet on my head. I looked like a pretty tough customer, and it's still my favorite picture.

During the season I spent every available hour as the team's water boy. I'd do anything and everything I was asked: carry water, sweep the locker room, paint helmets, run errands.

 

 

For the 1941 season, Bert Bell coached the Steelers. It was a disaster. After four losses in a row, Bert called my father and said, “We gotta do something drastic!”

Dad said, “I know, Bert, did you ever think of changing coaches?” Dad knew this would be a hard decision for his friend and partner—football was his life.

The next day, though, Bert made a little speech to the press. “I believe it to be in the best interests of the Pittsburgh fans that I resign.” With that, he moved into the front office with Dad and together they hired Duquesne University head coach Aldo “Buff” Donelli. But Donelli didn't leave Duquesne—he split his time between the two teams. NFL commissioner Elmer Layden got wind of the deal and voiced his displeasure in no uncertain terms. While Buff's Dukes racked up victory after victory, his Steelers suffered defeat after defeat. The Steelers began to question Donelli's allegiance. On one game day, the players asked, “Where's the coach?” The response came back, “He's out of town with the Dukes!” This was the final straw for Layden, who demanded that Donelli make up his mind. “Either coach the Steelers or Duquesne, you can't do both!” For
Donelli the decision was easy: he'd stay with the winning Dukes. So Dad turned again to his old pal Walt Kiesling. Kiesling won only one game that season. Oddly enough, it came against the Brooklyn Dodgers, coached by famed University of Pittsburgh head coach Jock Sutherland. Somehow Kiesling's Steelers prevailed, 14-7, playing in brutal conditions on an iced-over Forbes Field, home of the baseball Pittsburgh Pirates.

 

 

In 1942 the Steelers drafted Bill Dudley, an unconventional player but a real talent. Behind big tackle Ted Doyle, who spent his days welding navy landing craft at the defense plant on Neville Island, Dudley led the Steelers to a 7-4 record, the franchise's first winning season. Dudley did everything wrong—he couldn't throw, he couldn't kick, he wasn't fast, and he wasn't very big—but he hated losing and led the league in rushing yards and interceptions. Dudley was intelligent and explosive and could have led the Steelers to more winning seasons, but he was lost to the war effort.

People wondered whether the NFL would survive World War II. So many men were called up for active duty that the teams were soon stripped of their talented players. Those left behind were generally 4-F, while others received deferments as strategic “war workers,” men who worked in steel mills and defense plants.

The Steelers of the war years were a mixed crew, and it soon became evident that they would not be able to hold their own against other teams in the league. The Philadelphia Eagles were also hard-pressed to field a team fit enough to compete in the NFL. Because of the scarcity of players, the league revised its team player limit to twenty-eight, down from its prewar standard of thirty-three. This meant that many players had to play both offense and defense, with few opportunities for substitutions.

By 1943, the situation in the NFL was desperate. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and never was it more necessary to be creative if the league were to survive.

By pooling their resources, the two understrength clubs might field one competitive team. The Eagles could dress nineteen players, while the Steelers had only six players under contract. NFL commissioner Elmer Layden worried the Pittsburgh franchise might not make it. He discussed the situation with my father, and soon after Dad and Bert Bell went to Lex Thompson in Philadelphia and proposed the unholy Steelers-Eagles union. They argued that it might be the only chance for the survival of the two franchises—and possibly for the NFL itself. Although shocked by the boldness of the plan, Thompson soon came to appreciate its merits. And so the “Steagles” were born, a crazy amalgamation of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Not that bringing these two rivals together was easy. It wasn't, not for the owners, the fans, the players, and most of all the coaches. Pittsburgh coach Walt Kiesling and Philadelphia's Earle “Greasy” Neale clashed almost immediately. The hard-headed Kiesling and the flamboyant Neale successfully merged the teams, but they couldn't agree on anything—strategy, assignments, uniforms, not even what brand of coffee to drink. The whole thing would have broken apart had not Bert Bell stepped in. He proposed that Greasy run the offense, while Kies handled the defense. The men continued to battle over who would coach the guys who could play on both sides of the ball, but all in all the arrangement worked.

The Steagles couldn't even fill the twenty-eight-man roster. On a good weekend they were lucky to dress twenty-five. When tackle Al Wister came limping off the field during a close game, Greasy Neale confronted him and barked, “What's wrong with you?”

“I
think
I broke my leg, Coach!”

“Well, get back in there until you find out for sure!”

Though the Steagles didn't reach the championship game, they managed to finish the season with a winning 5-4-1 record. The problem of the merged team wasn't just with the coaches. The owners had their share of disagreements. The training camp was located in eastern Pennsylvania, and twice as many home games were played in Philadelphia. Lex Thompson dominated the partnership and insisted the Steagles headquarters remain in Philly.

This was too much for my father. He was losing his team and the Pittsburgh fans. Yes, it was true that most of the Steagles team roster consisted of former Eagles players, and Thompson had the better players when the partnership was formed, but Dad wasn't about to be maneuvered out of the business by the smooth-talking Philadelphia playboy. Dad demanded that Pittsburgh become Steagles headquarters, beginning with the 1944 season. But Thompson refused, so my father went in search of a new partner.

That's how the “Card-Pitts” were born. Pittsburgh merged with the Chicago Cardinals, a union that resulted in one of the most unfortunate team names in football history. Fans suggested that “Car-Pits” was a fitting moniker since other teams walked all over them. The miserable 0-10 season accurately reflected the talent of the combined teams. The Card-Pitts fielded medically discharged veterans, several 4-Fs, and even a few high school players. Kiesling, who promised fans that the Card-Pitts would give all rivals a “real battle,” had to share coaching duties with the Cardinals' Phil Handler and Buddy Parker. This arrangement brought even more problems than the Kies-Greasy combination of the year before, but for different reasons. Kies hit it off so well with Handler that the two spent more time at the racetrack together than they did with the team. Parker's role was unclear, and to confuse matters even more, Dad brought on Jim Leonard to keep a good Irish eye on the whole coaching staff. Leonard had been a two-sport (baseball and football) standout at Notre Dame, and then played three seasons for the Philadelphia
Eagles. After leaving the Eagles, he began his coaching career by establishing the football program at St. Francis College in Loretto, Pennsylvania, then came to the Steelers as assistant coach during the war years. But not even Leonard's oversight could bring order to the coaching chaos. My father summed up the shutout season: “Merging the two teams didn't make us twice as good—it made us twice as bad!”