by Dan Rooney
Pittsburgh quarterback Jack Scarbath faked to Rogel, dropped back, and fired a long pass to Goose McClaren, who caught the ball and streaked down the field for an 80-yard touchdown. But the refs called the Steelers offsides, and the ball came back. Kiesling reverted to his old routine, and on the next play Rogel ploughed up the middle for a one-yard gain.
Drum chanted, “Hi-diddle-diddle, Rogel up the middle.”
Nothing would change on Kiesling’s watch, although he accepted the T formation and the new defenses that would allow the Steelers to be competitive in the new NFL.
The NFL had come a long way since its humble beginning at the Jordan and Hupmobile car dealership in Canton, Ohio, in 1920. The days of Jim Thorpe and Joe Carr were long gone. Carl Storck came in as the third president of the NFL in 1939. He was barely able to hold the fractious owners together. According to my father, the only contribution Storck brought to the NFL was the big box of candy he brought to every league meeting. Otherwise, the league was in a holding pattern until Elmer Layden took over in 1941. Layden, one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame fame, was a real football guy who had coached at Duquesne University and Notre Dame itself. Right out of the chute he set out to correct the league’s negative public image.
At this time college football was king, and the press corps had little respect for the professional game. Layden put an end to ill-considered player and team endorsements of liquor, cigarettes, and laxatives. He obsessed over details as minute as socks, sloppy uniforms, and the color of stripes on the officials’ shirts. The league’s tarnished image needed to be polished and protected. The owners charged Layden with holding the league together during the difficult war years when the demand for manpower stripped the teams of their best players. Try as he might, however, he failed in his effort to get President Roosevelt to officially endorse football as a morale booster, as he had professional baseball. Baseball had seen a surge of interest following the president’s call for Americans to attend games and continue with traditional recreational pursuits. He said, “The enemy will have won if we give up our American way of life.” But the president didn’t give professional football the same consideration he gave baseball, and Layden and the owners worried the league’s survival hung by a thread. The commissioner encouraged the Pittsburgh-Philadelphia partnership that gave birth to the Steagles and, later, the disastrous Chicago-Pittsburgh “Card-Pitt” union.
When the AAFC announced its launch in 1945, the owners expected Layden to combat the rival league, which threatened the very existence of the weakened NFL. Following the owners’ lead, he opposed any consolidation with the new league, but he really didn’t have the stomach for an all-out fight with the well-financed and well-organized AAFC.
By 1946 the discouraged owners—all of them, including my father, had lost a good deal of money—clamored for change. Layden was exhausted and ready to call it quits. But the Redskins’ George Preston Marshall wasn’t about to wait for Layden’s resignation. Marshall wanted him out, the sooner the better.
The owners agreed not to renew Layden’s contract and turned to Steelers co-owner and my father’s friend, Bert Bell. Bell’s personal finances had suffered during the war years. By 1945 my father had purchased some of Bert’s share of the Steelers and gained controlling interest. He did this not to control the team, but because he wanted to help Bert out any way he could. When Bert agreed to become NFL commissioner, however, he knew he’d have to surrender his stake in the Steelers to avoid a conflict of interest. Dad suggested, “Let Barney have it!” As nearly as I can figure, when the deal was done, Barney McGinley, Dad’s old friend and boxing club partner, became part-owner of the Steelers.
The details of this arrangement never mattered much to my father. When Barney died, his interest went to his four children. His son, Jack McGinley, was the most involved of any of the McGinley family in the Steelers organization. Jack had married my father’s youngest sister, Marie, the same Aunt Marie who watched me as a young boy. In many ways, Uncle Jack reminded me of my father—his love of Pittsburgh, his sense of humor, his devotion to family, his belief in the goodness of people, and his integrity.
We all got along, and it’s always seemed to work. Today, the Steelers’ board of directors is still composed of Rooneys and McGinleys.
Bert Bell lifted the league to a new level. First, he set out to bring unity and collegiality to the owners. He was, after all, one of the guys. He knew them, and he knew how to work with them. United, they could take on the AAFC. Bert brokered a compromise with the AAFC strongmen, millionaires like actor Don Ameche and producer Louis B. Mayer, cutting loose the weaker teams and bringing the Colts, Forty-Niners, and Browns into the NFL. The Browns were owned by Mickey McBride, a friend of my father’s, and he had money. These well-financed teams represented big markets with growing fan bases. The AAFC was dissolved. The new NFL in 1950 comprised thirteen teams, representing cities from coast to coast: Chicago Cardinals, Cleveland Browns, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Steelers, Washington Redskins, Baltimore Colts, Chicago Bears, Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, New York Yanks, Los Angeles Rams, and the San Francisco Forty-Niners. NFL football had truly become a national sport.
Bell’s greatest contribution to the NFL was his belief that the teams had to be competitive. He often said, “On any given Sunday, any team in our league can beat any other team.” He knew instinctively that the fans weren’t going to stand for one team dominating other teams for years on end. The fans would lose interest. The lesson of the Cleveland Browns dominating the AAFC—they had dropped only four games in four years—was not lost on Bell or the NFL owners.
The answer, Bell saw, was the draft. He had realized this even while co-owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Now he could do something about it. Bell pushed for the draft system we know today. Teams with the worst records got the first picks of eligible college players. The neediest teams got the cream of the crop and could rebuild their franchises with fresh talent. In the mid-1930s when Bell (then owner of the Philadelphia Eagles) first suggested the draft system now in use, the owners thought giving the best player in the country to the worst team was crazy. Winning teams participated in the draft as well, but got the lower picks. The draft was the catalyst for the development of the modern scouting system. Teams needed good intelligence in order to make wise selections. A winning team no longer depended on coaches alone.
Scouts—those men out in the field talking to college coaches, compiling statistics, and meeting players—became increasingly important. Draft picks became a valuable commodity and could be traded just as players were traded. The team-building strategy going on in the front office became as important as the coach’s strategy in the locker room and on the field.
This change came slowly to the Steelers. I was there, helping select draft picks, and I can tell you we didn’t always make good choices. In 1956 we drafted a guy named Gary Glick with our bonus pick. Each year since 1937 one team would get a bonus pick. With it you got the very first pick of the draft—theoretically the best college player in the country. Once the team got its bonus pick, it dropped out of the lottery.
By 1956 there were only three teams left in this lottery: the Green Bay Packers, the Chicago Cardinals, and the Steelers. In April, at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, with an eager press corps hovering around, Bert Bell placed three pieces of paper, one marked in pencil with an X and the letters B-O-N-U-S, into a gray felt fedora. I stood right next to him and saw where he placed the three slips. When it came time to draw, he looked at me and said, “Danny, you pick first.” Of course, I nabbed the bonus pick. Bert wasn’t cheating. Maybe he didn’t realize I was paying such close attention, but in any case, I wasn’t about to let a gift like this pass us by. The Steelers needed all the help we could get.
But did we take advantage of this golden opportunity? No! A few weeks earlier, Kiesling had gotten a letter from the coach at Colorado A&M in Fort Collins, telling us that he had a player, a defen
sive back named Gary Glick, who he considered a great talent. Kies was a big defensive guy, and he decided we needed Glick more than anybody since Whizzer White.
From the time the coach’s letter arrived, I argued with Kies until I was blue in the face. “The guy’s okay. But we don’t need to take him as our bonus pick. He’s a sleeper. Nobody knows a thing about him. In fact, we don’t know a thing about him. We don’t have film, nobody’s seen him, all we’ve got is a letter from a coach we never heard of. We’ll take him, if you want, but we don’t need to take him with our bonus pick. We can pick him up in the third round.”
Kies could not be moved. With the wild-eyed passion of a treasure hunter who’s just found the pot of gold, he yelled back, “No, this guy is good and everybody is going to know about him. Everybody will want him!”
I couldn’t believe it, so we went to my father. We both made our cases. My father said, “You have to let Kies take the guy he wants.”
“But, this is crazy,” I said. My father just shook his head. He always used to do that. That’s how he was with my brother Tim about Johnny Unitas.
We went ahead and used our bonus pick on Gary Glick, passing over future Hall of Famer Lenny Moore and quarterback Earl Morrall. Pittsburgh sports reporters scratched their heads over the Steelers’ draft strategy. Bob Drum wondered, “Who is this Harry Stick?”
Weeks later Mary Regan, Patricia’s sister and the Steelers’ secretary, told me the film had come in from the starry-eyed coach in Colorado. I took it up to the projection room on the eighth floor of the Union Trust Building in downtown Pittsburgh. Fran Fogarty, Coach Kiesling, and I huddled around the projector to watch Gary Glick, the number-one draft pick in the NFL. Our hearts sank. We saw a wind-swept stadium with open seats, no benches for the players to sit on, dogs running across the field. Glick and the Colorado team were okay, a half-decent team. When the film flapped to an end, we went down to see Dad in his office on the first floor. We didn’t say anything, but he could read our faces.
“So he didn’t look very good, did he?”
There was nothing for us to say. Let me add, however, Glick was a good player. He made our team and played safety, 1956-1959, and remains the only defensive back in NFL history to be drafted number one overall.
Even though I was proven right about our bonus pick, it would be years before the Steelers would figure out the NFL draft and use it to build a championship team. We had a lot to learn.
It may have been the same old Steelers, but it wasn’t the same old NFL. Bert Bell had seen to that. Bell recognized that America’s growing love affair with television would impact the game in every way. Not only would teams be earning record profits thanks to television rights, but the game’s live audience would be bigger than ever thanks to Bell’s astute management of the blackout rule.
In 1949 the league’s television rights amounted to less than $100,000, but by the end of the 1950s those same rights were worth millions. Nearly every American home had a television set as the 1960s began. Bell worried that the medium could kill football, as it had crippled minor league baseball and boxing, as spectator sports. Why would a football fan buy a ticket to a game and sit out in the cold when he could see the same game in the comfort of his living room? Bert’s solution was to black out all home games in a seventy-five-mile radius from the stadium to ensure the seats would be filled every Sunday.
This led the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether the NFL’s policy violated antitrust laws. It took two years to determine the legality of home-game blackouts, but on November 12, 1953, U.S. District Court Judge Allan K. Grim handed down a decision in Philadelphia allowing the league to impose television blackouts. Baseball continued without a blackout policy, steadily losing television market share and gate receipts, while football earned more of both.
Bell was the right guy at the right time. The son of a Pennsylvania attorney general, he was a credible witness in court. He knew how to work members of Congress, and he kept owners united on the blackout policy and other contentious issues.
I remember at league meetings how Bert would always get his way, even if he had to resort to crying. Michael MacCambridge, in his fine book America’s Game, recounts a wonderful story told by Baltimore Colt’s owner Carroll Rosenbloom:
When [Bell] wanted to get something done and he wasn’t getting his way, Bert would sit there and slowly take out his false teeth and lay ’em on the table. His face would pinch up and he would look sooooo old, so tired, and he would start to cry. He was a great crier. George Preston Marshall would be walking up and down, screaming and exhorting everybody, and finally they would see that Bert was crying and somebody would say, ‘For [Goodness] sakes, George, siddown, you’re annoying Bert.’
I remember such scenes. You never felt you had been bullied into a decision. He built consensus, and there was this “we got to stick together, boys” atmosphere that got things done, even with such strong-willed men as George Marshall, George Halas, Paul Brown, Wellington Mara, Dan Reeves, and Curly Lambeau, and, of course, my father.
The idea of a players’ union was one of the toughest issues. And, believe me, the players had some legitimate gripes. They wanted, for example, a second pair of shoes (if you look at the Steelers locker room today, each player must have thirty pairs, with shoe manufacturers tripping over themselves to give them more). My father, being from Pittsburgh—a strong union town—supported the idea of a players’ union and the value of collective bargaining. He knew that withholding this right wasn’t fair and would only antagonize the players. The issue found its way to Congress, where several key legislators championed the cause and pressured the league to accept a players’ union. Bert testified before a congressional committee, stating publicly that the league would recognize the union. But the owners hadn’t agreed to it, and my father knew it would be a hard sell. Halas and Marshall were dead set against it. Rosenbloom was on the fence. By the 1956 fall league meeting, Bert needed nine of the twelve owners to vote in favor if the resolution was to pass.
Easier said than done.
My father thought we had the votes, but when we walked into the league meeting room (I remember because I was still in my early twenties, and just starting to regularly attend league meetings) I saw George Marshall with his arm over Carroll Rosenbloom’s shoulder. George Halas was with them.
“Uh-oh, we’ve got troubles,” my father said.
When the union resolution was advanced, Marshall slammed his fist on the table and shouted, “You can’t do that! We can’t give in!”
With that, my father stood up, and reasoned, “Listen, if we want any credibility, we have to recognize this union because Bert Bell has told Congress we would. If we don’t do it now, then there’ll be all kinds of trouble, and the pressure will be terrible. Congress will be after us every chance it gets.”
“What are you talking about?” Marshall asked. “What are you trying to do? We don’t have to recognize the union.”
“We have to recognize the union,” my father repeated. “Bert went before Congress and said that we would recognize it. And if we don’t, then he’s finished as a commissioner because they’ll say he has no clout, no authority, and can’t get the big deals done.”
By this time we had eight votes in favor. Bell took Rosenbloom aside, and after he had finished working on him, Carroll came over, too. Only Halas and Marshall voted against the union.
This is the first really important issue I faced at an NFL board meeting. My father had put forward the resolution to recognize the players’ union, and it was great seeing how Bert and Dad worked together. These old friends had been around and knew how to get things done.
Dad sent me to represent the Steelers at the first union meeting. He said it would be a good learning experience for me. Each team sent a player representative. Our players sent their teammate Charlie Bradshaw, who was later president of the union (he was replaced by Jack Butler as the Steelers’ player representative). The players not onl
y wanted a second pair of shoes, they wanted to get paid for preseason games.
These were reasonable requests and the NFL did the right thing by recognizing the union and agreeing to needed reforms. Looking back on this meeting, held in 1956, I realize now how important— and historic—it was. For the first time, owners and players from each team sat around the same table to air grievances, discuss issues, and make the NFL a stronger organization. The owners and the players realized there had to be give-and-take if the league were to be successful. We understood for the first time that we were all in this together. It’s a much different world today. The Players Union is well established; it’s a professional, well-run organization, and the owners take seriously the issues and recommendations it brings forward, doing their best to cooperate on matters of policy.
I was twenty-four years old then, and I can’t help but think that I’m the last of the NFL executives who attended that first meeting—all the others are gone.
Bell understood the importance of protecting the league’s image. He strictly enforced rules against gambling. Some people may think this odd, but my father supported him and was, in fact, his strongest ally. Betting on sports, especially where a conflict of interest might exist, went against my father’s grain. He knew gambling by players, owners, and insiders could ruin the NFL just as it had almost ruined baseball. With Bert, he worked diligently to ban it. Bell came down hard on known gamblers with fines and suspensions. If a player knew of illegal gambling but didn’t report it, he’d be suspended, too.
Bell believed the game had to be kept clean and fair. During televised games, he made certain that network cameras would not focus on fights between players. Gratuitous violence had no place in professional football, and no player should have his career ended by a cheap shot or unnecessary roughness.