by Dan Rooney
While I’ve always enjoyed the dinners and events, the American Ireland Fund board meetings have been even more interesting. All the board members are generous of spirit and cooperate in reaching our common goals. We’ve had many discussions over the years about Ireland, about the purpose and principles of the fund, and we’ve been careful to keep away from banners and flags and politics. Our board has successfully managed the fund, which today has an endowment of over $100 million.
Since the beginning, the American Ireland Fund board in the United States has worked with an advisory committee in Ireland, which was first chaired by Maurice Hayes, to ensure that contributions and awards go to organizations dedicated to furthering peace. In the early years, critics suggested the money went for guns. It never did. Nor have awards ever supported paramilitary purposes. We’ve worked hard to make sure the public—and contributors—understand our mission of peace. We’ve said no to guns and violence from the very start. And I’m proud to say we’ve never wavered on this principle. Tony O’Reilly guided us to keep those principles. We worked with all people to help bring peace to Ireland.
Around the time of the first banquet, Patricia and I created a special award that became known as the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Every year the award is presented to an outstanding Irish-born young writer. Jim Sherwin has chaired the Rooney Prize Committee, which continues to positively influence aspiring authors. The selection committee has steadfastly made excellent choices.
The Rooney family’s association with Ireland has been enriched by our work with the Ireland Fund. When we first visited Ireland in 1971, all the kids were young. Since then, our daughter Rita lived in Ireland for four years after she married Larry Conway, who was studying medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. Joan studied for a year at University College in Dublin. The experience inspired her and she returned home a much better student. Our son Art, who studied at the renowned Yeats Summer School, struck up a close friendship with Irish political leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate John Hume. Today, our children have made it a point to educate their own children about the Rooneys’ Irish roots, for which Patricia and I are very grateful.
The months following our Super Bowl IX victory in January 1975 were a special time for the Steelers and our fans. Expectations ran high. But we almost lost the Steel Curtain before the season even began. The newly organized World Football League set its sights on NFL stars. The WFL had already signed Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, and Paul Warfield, who had helped lead the Miami Dolphins to victories in Super Bowls VII and VIII.
Now the WFL took aim at our front four: Joe Greene, L.C. Greenwood, Ernie Holmes, and Dwight White. Greenwood bought into their salary inducements and signed a contract. Then they went to Joe Greene. But Greene told them, “I’m not going anywhere—I’m a Steeler.” They upped their offer, telling Joe he could use the WFL as leverage to get more money when he negotiated his contract with the Steelers. But Joe told them, “I don’t do business that way.” In the meantime, I had negotiated a new contract with Dwight White, and counseled Ernie Holmes to stay put.
L.C. realized he’d made a mistake and wanted out of the WFL contract. I agreed to go to court and testify on his behalf. Greenwood argued he’d been pressured into signing, and somehow the court accepted our argument.
Preseasons are always a stressful time as players negotiate or extend their contacts. Sometimes players hold out. The whole season depends on the successful resolution of these contracts. It was my job to manage these negotiations and do what was fair for the players and right for the team. All of this is complicated when a rival league, like the WFL, enters the picture. In this case, our players remained loyal to us, and the WFL folded midway through the 1975 season.
As defending champions, we felt we had to play every game during our 1975 season like it was the Super Bowl. Every man on the team believed this. We had to play our best in order to win, because every team in the league was coming after us. Joe Greene said, “Nobody’s going to get in our way,” and our offense stepped up its play and became as good as the defense. We started the season by shutting out San Diego and went on to finish the year with a 12-2 record. Franco ranked second in the league with 1,246 yards rushing. Swann and Stallworth made significant contributions to the team and allowed Bradshaw to rack up 2,055 yards passing. Our Steel Curtain defense dominated the league, and eight of our eleven starters went to the Pro Bowl—Joe Greene, L.C. Greenwood, Jack Ham, Jack Lambert, Andy Russell, Mel Blount (who led the NFL in interceptions), Glen Edwards, and Mike Wagner.
We knocked off the Baltimore Colts in the division playoff game and then faced the Oakland Raiders at home in Three Rivers Stadium for the AFC championship.
This game on January 4, 1976, became known as the “Ice Bowl” and escalated our rivalry with Oakland to a new level. On the night before the game, the NFL hosted a traditional playoff party. It was held at the Allegheny Club inside the stadium. Looking out the giant picture windows, I began to worry about the weather. Pittsburgh winters can be bitterly cold, especially when the wind sweeps up the Ohio River. Three Rivers was a big concrete bowl, and that evening the frigid wind swirled through the sleet-soaked stadium. I could see the Tartan Turf begin to freeze up as the temperature dropped. I called Dirt DiNardo, the head of our grounds crew, to get a tarp to cover the artificial surface before it turned into an ice rink. Working in the dark, the crew stretched a huge tarp over the field and blew hot air underneath with a powerful heater. But during the night the howling wind lifted the tarp, splitting it down the middle. Water got underneath and ice formed, especially along the sidelines where the heaters couldn’t reach.
The Raiders claimed we intentionally tore the tarp so their receivers, who favored down-and-out patterns, would slip and slide on their routes. I still laugh when I recall those Raiders’ claims. After all, everyone in the league believed it was the Raiders who intentionally soaked their own home field week after week. They did it to slow down the opponents’ fastest running backs and because a wet field favored their slower, heavier fullbacks like Marv Hubbard and Mark van Eeghen. But we didn’t have any control over Mother Nature. We didn’t sabotage the field as Davis and Madden thought. This just goes to show how intense and irrational the rivalry between the Raiders and the Steelers had become. We played on that same field. Our guys couldn’t run on ice any better than theirs could.
Turnovers ruled the game. The windchill turned the sixteen-degree stadium into a twelve-below freezer. With the snow falling and the field iced over, both teams slipped, slid, and fumbled. We suffered eight turnovers, including three Bradshaw interceptions. But they had as many problems as we did. It was a hard-hitting, defensive battle. The outcome wasn’t decided until the last play of the game when the clock finally ran out on the Raiders. We prevailed, 16-10.
The brutal conditions of the game stand out in my mind, but even more brutal was the hit Raiders’ defensive back George Atkinson delivered to Lynn Swann. The blow knocked Swann unconscious. Almost before the whistle sounded, Joe Greene bolted onto the field, ran over to Lynn’s motionless form, and by himself picked him up and carried him off the field. Swann, it turned out, had suffered a serious concussion and spent two days in the hospital. The doctors worried he wouldn’t be able to play in the Super Bowl against Dallas two weeks later. Swann himself wondered if he’d ever play again. The doctors warned that another hit like the one he took from Atkinson could leave him permanently disabled. This incident was just the beginning of a growing controversy over unnecessary roughness in the NFL. The week before the Super Bowl, Swann stayed on the sidelines during practice, and Noll listed him as a doubtful starter.
But Swann did return for Super Bowl X. Not only that, he became the game’s MVP. On January 18, 1976, at the Orange Bowl in Miami, before more than eighty thousand fans, we faced the Dallas Cowboys in our second straight Super Bowl. A television audience of more than eighty million—the largest in history at that time—watched at home.
This Super Bowl was a great match-up—a game for the ages. Though at halftime we trailed 10-7, I thought the most memorable play came in the second quarter when Lynn Swann made a 53-yard circus catch—he seemed to levitate horizontally stretching to catch a tipped pass—an impossible feat that had the Cowboys shaking their heads as they went into the locker room.
The halftime entertainment celebrated America’s bicentennial. The popular singing group Up With People performed “200 Years and Just a Baby.”
But the party atmosphere of halftime didn’t carry over to the intense play on the field. When our kicker Roy Gerela missed a field goal, one he normally would have made, Cowboys safety Cliff Harris patted him on the helmet and thanked him for his help. This taunting of a teammate enraged Jack Lambert, who ran over to Harris, picked him up, and slammed him to the Astroturf. I worried he’d be tossed out of the game, but he wasn’t. Instead, his action gave our players a real morale boost just when they needed it. “I don’t like the idea of people slapping our kicker or jumping in his face and laughing when he missed a field gold,” Lambert told the press after the game. “That stuff you don’t need.” Chuck Noll obviously agreed, because he told the writers, “Jack Lambert is the defender of all that’s right.”
We came on strong in the fourth quarter, and a 64-yard bomb from Bradshaw to Swann upped our lead to 21-10. But Terry was knocked out of the game with a concussion on the play. Dallas scored a touchdown to make it 21-17, and then Gerry Mullins recovered an onside kick with 1:48 to play.
With Bradshaw out, we were having trouble running out the clock, and Chuck faced a big decision on a fourth-and-9 at the Cowboys 41-yard line. Punter Bobby Walden had already fumbled one snap, which led to Dallas’s first touchdown, and almost had another punt blocked. So Chuck elected to run the football one more time because the Cowboys were out of timeouts. He preferred to take his chances with his defense rather than his special teams. “We had already botched one punt, and they can score a touchdown on a blocked punt,” Noll explained after the game. “I had confidence in our defense. We were giving them the ball with no timeouts, and I figured our defense could do it.”
Our defense did it, and the outcome was sealed when Glen Edwards intercepted a Staubach pass in our end zone. The headlines in the Post-Gazette told it all: “STEELERS STILL SUPER, CHAMPS WHIP DALLAS IN CLIFFHANGER, 21-17.”
Sports Illustrated’s cover featured an acrobatic Lynn Swann catch, while the bold print read: “PITTSBURGH DOES IT AGAIN!” The back-to-back victories in Super Bowls IX and X proved to the world that the Steelers weren’t a fluke—we were the real deal.
I particularly remember the days leading up to Super Bowl X. The hardest part of winning back-to-back Super Bowls is for a team to maintain its focus. It’s easy to get overconfident or distracted by the media hype and the public attention that comes with being a championship team. Noll came to me before the Dallas game and shared his concern that the players seemed to be losing their edge. He wanted them to keep their eye on the prize, to concentrate on what they had to do, individually and as a team, to win. At the same time he wanted them to remain loose and confident.
Chuck called the players around him and told them what he thought would be a good story, but one he thought also contained a message about focus. Here’s how he told the story:
“In a game like this you have to be ready. They’re going to talk about how we’re the champs. You can’t get sucked into this hype. You have to concentrate and keep your mind on the game.
“This reminds me of the two Tibetan monks who are walking in the mountains. They come to a swift stream. On the bank they find a damsel in distress. She has her maid with her but doesn’t know how to cross without immodestly pulling up her skirts. The monks see her dilemma and agree to help her. The first monk picks her up, wades across the stream, sets her down, and continues on the journey. The monks walk in silence for another mile or so when the second monk says to the first, ‘You know, the rules of our order prohibit physical contact with members of the opposite sex.’ They continue on until the first monk turns and says, ‘That’s right, but I put the lady down on the other side of the creek. You’re still carrying her.’”
Russell, Ham, and Bleier started to laugh. But Ernie Holmes turned around shaking his head, “What’s he talking about!”
I spent a good deal of time with Ernie. Everyone called him “Fats,” but let me tell you, in his playing days, Holmes was six-foot-two, 265 pounds of muscle. He was a key part of the original Steel Curtain, along with Joe Greene, L.C. Greenwood, and Dwight White. Ernie played with fierce intensity and used his massive forearms to push opponents aside, then push and pull them off balance. When he played well, no one could stop him. Once he shaved his head leaving only an “arrowhead” on the top, facing forward—the only direction he intended to go. This hairdo made all the national sports publications, and the whole team got a kick out of it.
Holmes came to us in 1971 from Texas Southern University in Houston, another of Bill Nunn’s finds. Ernie married young and had two sons, but he also developed some serious emotional problems. He would come to me from time to time just to talk. Sometimes he thought people were out to get him and his behavior began to border on paranoia. While driving back from Ohio, after separating from his wife, Ernie worried he’d never see his boys again. On the long drive, for some reason he believed three big trucks were trying to run him off the road. He snapped, pulled a pistol, and started shooting at the trailers. Soon a police helicopter appeared overhead, and he blazed away at that, too. Eventually, he ran off the road and the state police arrested him.
Ernie contacted me, and I assured him I would personally get him the help he needed. The authorities released him into my custody. Ernie pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and received five years probation. We sent him to Pittsburgh’s Western Psychiatric Hospital, where I visited him regularly. After two months of treatment, he returned to the team and helped us win two Super Bowls. Ernie was a special guy. Regrettably, he was no longer with the team when we made our Super Bowl runs in the late 1970s. But I’m happy to say today he’s an ordained minister, and his sons have graduated from college (one is a college professor) and are both fine young men.
Injuries to key players plagued us from the very beginning of the 1976 season. We opened—if you can believe it—in Oakland. Passions ran high on both sides. Remember, Swann had been mugged by George Atkinson in the AFC championship game against the Raiders. That hit was very much on our minds.
From the opening kickoff, we knew it would be a no-holds-barred kind of game. But then, just before the half, George Atkinson struck again. He threw a vicious forearm at the back of Swann’s head, knocking him unconscious. I know as well as anyone, hard hits are a part of the game of football, but there’s no excuse for cheap shots like that. The play in question was a third-and-5 from the Oakland 44-yard line with 1:24 left in the first half. Terry Bradshaw dumped the ball to Franco Harris down the left sideline. Swann was coming across the field from the right side, completely out of the play, as Franco was running down the left sideline. Atkinson came up from behind and slugged Swann. It seemed like a replay of the shot he had taken from Atkinson the last time we played the Raiders in the AFC championship the year before. With Swann out of the game, we ended up losing by a field goal, 31-28.
Few of us actually saw the hit on Swann at the time it occurred. I was following Franco as he turned a broken play into a big gain. But the next day when I watched the game film with Chuck Noll, we both got angry. Chuck told reporters, “You have a crimina
l element in all aspects of society. Apparently we have it in the NFL, too.” Those words would haunt us for over a year.
We lost four of our first five games, and we hit bottom with a loss to the Browns in Cleveland, a game made infamous by a frightening hit Joe “Turkey” Jones put on Terry Bradshaw. After the whistle, with Bradshaw in his grasp, Jones flipped Terry over his hip and spiked him into the turf headfirst. A lesser man might have suffered a broken neck, and a lesser team might have packed it in for the season. But in that cramped visitors’ locker room in Cleveland Stadium, Joe Greene said, “If we have to be in this position all I can tell you is I’d rather be in it with this team, with these people, and particularly with the man running it.”
Of course, the man running it was Chuck Noll, and he was able to hold the team together and get it going on what would end up being a nine-game winning streak. This achievement has to be one of the greatest coaching jobs in the history of professional sports.
That streak got us into the playoffs, which opened for us that year in Baltimore against the Colts. That was a wild game. Some crazy pilot decided to pull a stunt and land on the field. He came in low, pulled up, stalled, and crashed in the stands that thankfully had emptied early because we had sent the Colts fans home by rolling up a big lead. No one was hurt, not even the pilot, but that game did produce injuries on the field. Our two running backs, Franco Harris and Rocky Bleier, as well as Gerela, our kicker, suffered injuries that knocked them out of the game. We still won the game, 40-14, but the injuries would take a heavy toll the next week.
During the regular season, our defense had really come together. Bradshaw was out six games, and with the only other quarterback on the roster being rookie Mike Kruczek, our defense had to crank it up a notch. In this instance, words really don’t do justice to the way our defense played, so I’m going to rely on some statistics to tell the story. During the nine straight wins that took us from 1-4 to 10-4 by the end of the regular season, our defense posted five shutouts and allowed a total of 28 points. We had five sacks in the 27-0 win over the Giants; the defense allowed only seven first downs and had five takeaways in a 23-0 win over San Diego; it was six more takeaways and 34 rushing yards allowed in a 43-0 win over Kansas City; in the 42-0 rout of Tampa Bay, the defense allowed only 11 net yards passing and eight first downs; and in a 21-0 victory in Houston, the Oilers finished with more punts than first downs, 11-9.