Dan Rooney

by Dan Rooney

  My father came to the speaker’s stand. He had applauded every one of the players who had been recognized, sometimes with tears in his eyes. Now it was his turn to speak. Even the waiters and bartenders stopped to listen.

  “I thought maybe they weren’t going to ask me to say something,” he said, laughing. Dad went on, “I guess I’m kind of dumb. I didn’t even know this was being planned. I wasn’t for all of this. I thought we’d bring the old ballplayers in and introduce them to the fans. But this has made me very happy.

  “Yesterday, Danny told me there would be very little to say. There would be movies and Howard and Myron Cope and Joe Greene would be here and the players would have something to say. So I figured, good. But I thought I could tell them something about myself that they didn’t know. I wanted to say that I was a baseball player and a manager, a football player and a coach, a boxer and a promoter, and a horse player. And I enjoyed every minute of it. Sports have been my life. The present-day ballplayers that came to this affair really made me very happy.

  “I spend a good bit of time with our ballplayers, in the training room, in the dressing room, and our offices. I enjoy it. I never had a ballplayer play for me that I didn’t think was a star. And I never had a ballplayer play for me that I didn’t like.

  “I would like to take this opportunity to introduce somebody who the sports world has rarely seen or heard of. But someone who is very important to me, has been a wonderful wife and mother, Mrs. Rooney.”

  My mother, Kathleen McNulty Rooney, was sitting beside me at a round table directly in front of the dais. She was such a graceful lady, and that night she looked beautiful in her midnight blue lace dress. Around her neck she wore a glittering Super Bowl XIV pendant. As my father introduced her, she smiled shyly and half rose from her seat to wave to the crowd.

  Neither my mother nor my father had been privy to the details of the fiftieth anniversary banquet planning. They both enjoyed the evening, seeing old friends and telling stories of the old days. The love that filled the hall that night is almost impossible to describe. But they felt it, and it meant a lot to them both.

  On November 28, 1982, a week after the players strike had ended, we played the Seahawks in Seattle. In the middle of the game I received a phone call from Patricia, who was at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh with my father. My mother had died at the hospital following a heart attack. Patricia gave me the details—my father was too grief-stricken to speak. She told me that my mother had died in our daughter Kathleen’s arms. We had named Kathleen after Mom, and they always had a special relationship. As a young woman, Kathleen had been diagnosed with lupus. She would stay with my mother, who would care for her. But in a strange twist of fate, it was Kathleen who cradled my mother in her arms after she suffered her heart attack.

  Some weeks before her death Mom had broken her leg. She had a difficult time maneuvering her oversized cast around the house. Under the strain, her heart just gave out. It was hard for me to believe she was gone. She had always been so strong, the glue of the family. She kept us together and always administered love and wisdom and discipline in the right amounts. Imagine what it must have been like for her, raising five athletic and high-spirited boys on Pittsburgh’s North Side, as my father worked hard at his various enterprises and built the Steelers from the ground up. We’d been to a lot of funerals, but this one hit us hard, my father, especially. Pete Rozelle, Wellington Mara, Stormy Bidwill, Rankin Smith, Gene Upshaw, and many of our NFL friends attended the funeral service at St. Peter’s.

  But it was the presence of our nine children—Art, Pat, Kathleen, Rita, Dan, Duffy, John, Jim, Joan—that gave me strength and hope for the future. Like my mother, Patricia had played the greatest role in raising our children. I helped, but she was with them every day. And, also like my mother, she kept all of us—including me—on the right path. Like my father, I often traveled and worked away from home, especially during the football season. I’m happy to say our four boys and five girls grew into fine young men and women. They were baptized and attended Catholic grammar schools and high schools.

  Usually, after the football season ended, we took our whole family to Seven Springs in Pennsylvania or to Vail or Beaver Creek, Colorado, to ski. While Patricia watched the younger kids I hit the slopes with the older ones. I found the high mountain snow and clear, dry air invigorating and became quite passionate about skiing—that is, until I broke my leg. After that Patricia tried to slow me down. She urged me to take up cross-country skiing instead of black diamond downhill racing. To humor her, I tried cross-country once, but I just couldn’t get into it.

  Eventually all of our children would graduate from college—with law degrees, master’s degrees, and degrees in special programs—and several would graduate from Catholic colleges, something that Patricia and I had always hoped for. All of them went on to marry and have families of their own. We are proud of each and every one of them.

  The day before the Steelers beat New England and won a place in the AFC playoffs, and exactly a month to the day after my mother died, my daughter Pat and her husband Bob presented us with our first grandchild, a beautiful baby girl named Laura. On Christmas Day 1990, my son Art and his wife Greta brought us our first grandson and named him Danny (who in the Rooney tradition has turned out to be a good football player). It seems in this life whenever a door closes another opens.

  By 1982 the NFL had evolved into a twenty-eight-team partnership that spanned the nation. Although the league was now big business— revenues from gate receipts, television, film, ventures, and endorsements totaled in the billions of dollars—it always had been and still was a kind of fraternity. In the early days, the owners were a close-knit group of men who cared about football and looked out for one another. When a man gave his word, he kept it. A handshake was all you needed. Sure, we had our disagreements, but we never threatened another owner or club. The rule against one club suing another is just one example. Of course, we were as competitive as we could be on the field, but no owner would ever deliberately undermine another in a way that might drive him out of business or hurt the league.

  But in 1980 the NFL rules of engagement seemed to change. Al Davis determined to move his Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles without league approval and in the process ended up suing the league, even going so far as naming individual owners as defendants. Moving the Raiders to Los Angeles was in itself a direct attack on another owner, in this case Carroll Rosenbloom’s widow, Georgia Frontiere (Carroll had drowned in a tragic accident in 1979). By moving to Los Angeles, he directly challenged the Rams’ revenue base. Rozelle and the league’s attorney, Paul Tagliabue, argued that the move would not only erode the Rams’ market but would leave the loyal Oakland fans high and dry without a team. He pointed out that the success of the NFL depended on the fans—those loyal supporters who should never be taken for granted. I supported this view completely. I thought Davis’s move was wrong for the NFL, wrong for Los Angeles, and wrong for the fans.

  The NFL is a franchise business. You have to understand that the other franchisees are your partners. It’s like McDonald’s. They wouldn’t put one set of golden arches right across the street from another. It wouldn’t make any sense. The two restaurants wouldn’t make any money, and the resulting war might even threaten the parent organization. That’s just what Al Davis’s move to the Los Angeles Coliseum amounted to. You try not to get angry about things like this, but the rules are in place for a reason—some people think the rules don’t apply to them. Pete and the owners now found themselves pitted against Davis and the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission in an antitrust lawsuit.

  The problem really started in 1978 when Carroll Rosenbloom announced he would take his Rams from the Coliseum to Anaheim, thirty-five miles away. The Coliseum then petitioned the league for a new team. When Rozelle didn’t deliver, the Coliseum sued, claiming that certain league rules violated federal antitrust laws, because any franchise move required a unanimous vote of the owne
rs. We voted to amend the rules so that any decision on expansion or movement could be made by just a three-fourths vote. Al Davis abstained from this vote, saying, “I reserve my rights.” Al later claimed to have said, “I reserve my right to move as I see fit,” although none of us remember hearing these last six words.

  In January 1980, Davis determined to leave Oakland for Los Angeles and play in the Coliseum. He joined the Coliseum Commission in their suit against the league. We rejected the move twenty-two to zero, with five abstentions. Davis claimed our vote constituted a “business conspiracy” and vowed to fight us. Things were getting ugly—and personal. Davis described Rozelle publicly as a vindictive, power-hungry social climber who spent too much time in court and in Congress, and not enough on being the NFL commissioner.

  When he first filed suit, Davis told us in no uncertain terms, “We’ll see what happens when this thing gets into punitive damages. You’ll see how many guys will back down rather than fight.” I told him, “We’re committed to go all the way on this thing. Our constitution, our whole league is at stake.”

  Our dispute with Al Davis even extended into the halls of Congress. Davis, Rozelle, and I were all called on to testify regarding antitrust laws and the moving of sports franchises from one city to another. In September 1982, I testified before a congressional committee: “As one of the twenty-seven club presidents who have been deeply involved in this suit, I can tell you, this committee, that Al Davis’ fight is not with the NFL commissioner. It is with league rules to which the Raiders once fully and voluntarily agreed. Mr. Davis’ own club has contract commitments to all the other clubs in the NFL, and its partners do not believe that the antitrust laws should be used to permit a successful, well-sponsored team’s abandonment of the community where it grew and prospered.” Even Tex Schramm, usually an ally, opposed Davis. Most of us felt disputes needed to be resolved within the structure of the league, not in the courts and Congress.

  Thanks to an injunction by the City of Oakland, the Raiders continued to play in the Oakland Coliseum until 1982. When the case first went to trial in 1981, it resulted in a hung jury. Retried in March 1982, Davis won the case, and the Raiders began playing in Los Angeles that season.

  True to his word, in 1983 Davis and the Coliseum Commission sued the NFL for damages. A jury awarded the Raiders $11.5 million and the Coliseum $33 million. On appeal, however, the court overturned the award to the Raiders, because the higher franchise value the team had in Los Angeles had not been considered. Before a new trial on damages could be held, the league settled out of court for a much smaller amount.

  The precedent set by the Raiders’ successful move to Los Angeles opened the door for other teams to move. As chairman of the Expansion Committee I generally opposed franchise movement, especially when it didn’t seem to be in the interests of the fans or the league. I never thought I’d see the day the Colts would move from Baltimore. The fans there had been among the most loyal in the league. After all, Baltimore is where Johnny Unitas made history. In 1984 Robert Irsay took the Colts franchise to Indianapolis.

  I understood Bill Bidwill’s move from St. Louis to Phoenix, because at the time it seemed fan support for the Cardinals had dwindled. Years later, the Rams left Anaheim and built a strong franchise in St. Louis. But I was disturbed when I learned that Art Modell would move his Browns from Cleveland. Not only were the Browns the natural rival of the Steelers, one of the best rivalries in sports, but their fans were among the most devoted in the NFL. It was a sad day for Cleveland, a sad day for Pittsburgh, and a sad day for the league when the Browns traded in their orange and brown uniforms for Baltimore Ravens purple.

  The 1983 season did not go as we had hoped. Although we went into the playoffs with a 10-6 record, our number-one draft pick, Gabe Rivera, was involved in a terrible automobile crash on October 20. I remember that night well. Patricia and I had gone to the Blarney Stone, a Pittsburgh pub, to hear a world-renowned Irish tenor. Just as the performance was to begin, our waiter pulled me aside to answer a telephone in the hallway. A newspaper reporter informed me that just an hour earlier Gabe had been paralyzed from the chest down and was even now clinging to life. We rushed to the emergency room at Allegheny General Hospital. Pat dropped me off and I started making telephone calls to Gabe’s family in Texas, doctors, and our coaches. This tragedy changed the course of Gabe’s life. At Texas Tech, he had been known as “Señor Sack.” He played only three games in the NFL and had his whole career ahead of him. But after the accident, he never played again and today is confined to a wheelchair. His spirit remains strong, and he’s devoted to his wife and two children—and is still an ardent Steelers fan.

  We had back-to-back losing seasons in 1985 and 1986. Though 1986 was disappointing, after a 1-6 start we finished strong for a 6-10 season. At the beginning of the season, the Seahawks shut us out, 30-0, in our opener, but most of the remaining games were much closer. We lost five games by less than a touchdown. The real heartbreaker was our loss to the Cleveland Browns in overtime at home—the first time they had ever beaten us at Three Rivers Stadium. Despite the losses, Chuck Noll never lost the team.

  The coaches and scouts were a little frustrated. Art and Chuck Noll had had different opinions on the draft ever since Chuck arrived in Pittsburgh. But Chuck had proven himself to be a great coach—a teacher, a perfectionist, dispassionate and methodical, even scientific in his approach. He had shown what he could do and had built the team with draft picks and won Super Bowls.

  After our second Super Bowl, Art and Dick Haley came to my office to discuss the role of coaches and scouts in the preparation and selection of the draft choices. It was the ongoing complaint of scouts, especially the heads of personnel, that the coaches had too much say in this process. My position was, the scouts and the coaches, especially the head coach, should all be involved in the discussions about the players who would be drafted. Chuck Noll had made it very clear when we first hired him that he and the coaches expected to be involved with the draft—we all had to be in it together. I knew from experience this was the right way to do it.

  All of the great teams of the 1970s were built through the draft, and those drafts were a collaborative effort between scouts and coaches: Bobby Beathard and Joe Gibbs with the Washington Redskins, George Young and Bill Parcells with the New York Giants, Jim Finks and Mike Ditka with the Chicago Bears, Eddie DeBartolo and Bill Walsh of the San Francisco Forty-Niners, Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson of the Dallas Cowboys, Scott Pioli and Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots. It could not be all scouts, or all coaches. I learned that in the Parker era. What’s more, Chuck had just won two Super Bowls. He was the main reason for our success. We had to stay together.

  Art and I disagreed. He and the scouts always felt they should have more control over the draft. I was very firm and said we had to work together. We got through the 1980 draft, and the next November Art and I discussed it again. This time the discussion was more heated. We tried to settle our differences, but couldn’t. I could see the separation between the scouts and coaches would only get worse. We couldn’t go another year like this. Art and I went to Dad’s office and explained the situation. I insisted to Art and Dad that we must listen to Chuck Noll and keep the coaches involved. “This is the way it has to be,” I said. Dad understood and agreed. He knew I wouldn’t budge on this issue.

  Art now heads up our real estate division as Steelers vice president. Our relationship is fine and, in the end, everything worked out well.

  The year 1987 remains firmly fixed in my mind. This is the year we lost our daughter Kathleen to lupus. This disease has no cure and primarily affects women in their child-bearing years. Doctors diagnosed Kathleen with the disease shortly after the birth of her daughter Caitlin in 1986. Kathleen was strong of heart, and as a girl always looked out for her younger brothers and sisters. She taught school and made a real difference in the lives of the people she touched. Though the third in birth order of our children, Kathleen bla
zed the trail back to Ireland. And it was Kathleen who renewed our relationship with our Irish relatives. It seemed almost impossible that this strong, intelligent, caring young woman could be brought down by this debilitating disease. I know she suffered, but she never complained or gave in to self-pity.

  On August 29, 1987, we were holding a press conference at the top of the U.S. Steel Building in downtown Pittsburgh to announce the signing of Rod Woodson, our first draft pick. Looking out the window I could see Mercy Hospital in the distance, where Kathleen spent her last hours. Patricia and I were at her side when she died, as were her brothers and sisters. She was only thirty-one years old.

  I can’t question God’s plan. Kathleen’s life meant something and she had fulfilled her life’s work in the short time she was with us. Kathleen walked without fear and defended others who could not stand up for themselves. She was a devoted Catholic and did God’s work. Had she lived, she would have been a major force in our family.

  Two years after Kathleen’s death, our entire family returned to Ireland to honor her. The people of Cloontia and Patricia’s relatives had restored an old church as a community center. A beautiful stone wall stretched from the church to a nearby creek. And near the wall, Tommy Regan and our Irish family members had planted a beech tree in Kathleen’s memory. The dedication was an emotional experience for me and our entire family. I return to this lovely and hallowed place whenever I’m in Ireland and think of Kathleen. She will forever remain young and full of life in my memory.

  It had been five years since the last collective bargaining contract had been signed with the NFLPA. This time we expected a players’ strike. Tex Schramm and Hugh Culverhouse pushed hard for the teams to recruit replacement players in the event the strike occurred. We had found in 1982 many veteran players would have crossed the line if there had been a viable alternative to the strike.