by Dan Rooney
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!”
When the war ended in 1945, the men came streaming home and the Steelers began the rebuilding process, now under new head coach Jim Leonard. The 2-8 season convinced Dad that the team needed a real coach. In the past he had been content to hire friends and cronies, guy
s he could hang out with and who didn’t take their card playing too seriously. Now he set his sights on Jock Sutherland, the legendary University of Pittsburgh gridiron master.
Dr. John Bain “Jock” Sutherland came from Scotland, attended the University of Pittsburgh, and graduated with a degree in dentistry. The first football game he ever played at Pitt was coached by the grand old man of American football, “Pop” Warner. Jock’s real talent was not as a player, or a dentist for that matter. He was a natural-born coach. In 1919 he took charge of the football program at Lafayette College, a tiny school in Easton, Pennsylvania. In the five years he was there, he never had a losing season. In 1923, his last year at Lafayette, sportswriters named his 9-0 team the best college team in the country.
When Pop Warner resigned at Pitt, Jock Sutherland took the helm and steered the Panthers to fifteen years of dominance. Four times his teams went undefeated, and three times received the country’s number-one ranking. Sutherland’s single-wing attack overpowered defenses and the Pitt juggernaut rolled over all opposition, until the university’s administration determined to deemphasize the football program in order to focus more attention on academics. Pitt would not attain national standing again until 1976, under Coach Johnny Majors.
Jock turned to the NFL, coaching the Eastern All-Stars against the New York Giants in 1939, then signed the following year with the ne’er-do-well football Brooklyn Dodgers. In two seasons he turned the club around, finishing a strong second behind the Eastern champs, the Washington Redskins.
In late 1941, the war interrupted Sutherland’s pro coaching career. He accepted an active duty commission in the Naval Reserve and served ably until 1945. That’s when Dad and Bert Bell caught up with him and talked him into taking on the Steelers. Jock played hard to get, but the co-owners double-teamed him. He didn’t have a chance. Dad and Bert signed Jock to a five-year deal that included a big salary, options, and profit sharing. This was a turning point for the Steelers. George Halas remarked that Sutherland’s hiring was not only good for the Steelers but a great step forward for the league. The day after the newspapers reported that Sutherland had signed with the Steelers, season ticket sales went through the roof, from 1,500 the previous year to 22,000 in 1946.
Jock Sutherland’s first Steelers training camp began in mid-August, 1946, at the municipal field just outside Hershey, Pennsylvania. I was there. Already there was a fall crispness in the air enhanced by the sweet smell of chocolate that permeated everything for miles around the Hershey factory. Everyone was excited about Dr. Sutherland—that’s what we called him, no one called him Jock to his face—and the new brand of leadership he would bring to the team.
We were a little worried, too. Frank Scott, the equipment man, was in awe of the man and could barely function in his presence. Just an hour before the first practice was scheduled to begin, Frank came to me with a look of sheer terror in his eyes.
“I can’t find Dr. Sutherland’s blackboard!”
Everybody knew that the blackboard was an extension of Jock’s being, the very symbol of the man. He used it on the field to diagram every play, offense or defense.
“What do you mean you can’t find the blackboard?” I asked.
“I’ve lost it! It must be back in Pittsburgh!” he moaned. “You gotta help me—can you drive?”
Now, I’m only fourteen at the time, but I tell him, “Sure I can drive, but I don’t have a license.”
Without hesitating, Frank pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and pressed it into my hand.
“That doesn’t matter. Get to the department store as fast as you can and buy a board. There’s no time to lose!”
I took off in Frank’s old Ford and drove for town. I was a little nervous driving through the heavy downtown traffic—I’d only driven a car for short stretches in the country on family trips to Ligonier—but I found the department store okay, illegally left the car in a loading zone out front, dashed through the glass doors like a madman, and asked the first person who looked like a clerk where the blackboards were. I was directed to the basement, where I found just what I was looking for: a wood-framed blackboard about two feet by three feet, and a big box of chalk. I paid the seven bucks, threw the board in the backseat, then drove through the traffic back to camp just as Dr. Sutherland and the players jogged onto the field. Frank Scott was the happiest man I’d ever seen. He hugged me and told me to keep the change, then nonchalantly propped the blackboard up as if it had been there all the time. I’d saved the day and made thirteen dollars to boot. The Steelers used that same blackboard for the next fifteen years.
Jock turned the team around, all right. We went 5-5-1 in 1946, and in 1947 he led us to our best season ever, 8 wins and only 4 losses. We tied the Eagles for the Eastern Conference championship. On the off-week before the playoff game, our players struck for more pay. Jock and Bert held firm and would make no concessions. The players lost their bid for more money, and what’s more lost their focus. The Eagles beat us and went on to the championship game.
Jock brought to the Steelers not only his commanding presence and strict discipline, but also his single-wing formation. Bert Bell introduced to the team the Chicago Bears-style T formation back in 1941, and the coaches who followed him—Donelli, Kiesling, Neale, Handler, and Leonard—stuck with it. But Sutherland was a firm believer in Pop Warner’s single-wing, a run oriented offense in which the center snapped the ball to one of two backs. By 1946 the single wing was popular only with youth football and a few college teams, because most of the pros had abandoned it for the T formation. Despite the trend away from this old style of play, Jock made it work. I remember we had some great players that year: Halfbacks “Bullet” Bill Dudley and Johnny “Zero” Clement, tight end Elbie Nickel, and receiver Val Jansante.
I loved being out there, loafing with the players and working with the team. I did whatever needed to be done and didn’t get paid much to do it, but I felt part of the team—I was a Steeler.
CHAPTER 3
JOHNNY U AND ME
North Catholic Halfback Problems Are Over—Dan Rooney Is Coming
THAT’S THE HEADLINE that appeared in the Pittsburgh Press in the summer of 1946, soon after I graduated from St. Peter’s grade school. While playing both halfback and quarterback on the sandlot, our team posted a winning record. The coach always told me I was one of the fastest boys in the school, and I was big for my age, tipping the scales at more than 135 pounds and standing five feet eight inches tall in my bare feet.
But as for solving North Catholic’s halfback problems, that was a tall order. All this attention embarrassed me, and I took a lot of ribbing from my friends and teammates: “Who is this guy who thinks he’s a star?” I wondered whether one of my father’s reporter friends had written the story. As the Steelers’ water boy, I’d met and gotten to know most of the sportswriters on the sidelines during practice. I guessed these guys were just having some fun at my expense. Even if it was a put-up job, the headline made me want to prove that I really was a good football player. I wanted to show what North Catholic could do.
Let me tell you something about Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania football. More great football players and coaches—from sandlots to the pros—hail from this region than from any other place on earth. Sportswriters have named Pittsburgh the “Cradle of Quarterbacks.” More than forty NFL quarterbacks have come from the area, including such Hall of Famers as George Blanda, Jim Kelly, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Joe Namath, and, of course, maybe the greatest quarterback of all time, Johnny Unitas. Willie Thrower, the first African American quarterback to play in the NFL, came from New Kensington, just up the river from Pittsburgh.
Why Western Pennsylvania—is it something in the water? I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But I do know that the people of our region take their football seriously. They know and love the game. The hard-working people, many of immigrant stock, adopted the game and made it their own. The sport that evolved in Western Pennsylvania bore little
resemblance to the high-brow college game that came from Princeton and Yale at the end of the nineteenth century. Western Pennsylvania-style football was physically tough, straight-ahead, and hard-hitting, reflecting the often brutal and sometimes violent realities of work in the steel mills and coal mines. Dad believed the tradition here was “Jock Sutherland, rock’em-sock’em coal miner football,” which provided the people with a safety valve to blow off pent-up steam.
In this densely populated, urban industrial environment, each mill and mine forged its own self-reliant community, its own school, and its own football team. Every Friday night these schools filled their stadiums with thousands of spectators, fifteen, in fact, for every student enrolled in the school. They cheered as loud for a good block as for a good catch or run. They were knowledgeable, they understood the subtleties of the game, and God help the officials who made the wrong call.
It wasn’t just a game—it was an obsession. And from the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond, Western Pennsylvania became a football factory, turning out each year hundreds of outstanding athletes bound for colleges and universities coast to coast. For many of these sons of mill and mine workers, football was the only ticket out of the hard industrial world of their parents.