Dan Rooney

by Dan Rooney

  I buzzed Mossy on the walkie-talkie and said, “Listen, you’re going to get us both canned if you don’t cover her up!” The next thing I see is Mossy’s scooter putt-putting across the field, blue smoke trailing behind, straight for the golden girl. He jumps off the scooter and covers her with his raincoat. The poor girl is draped in Mossy’s tent of a coat, baton in hand, not knowing what to do. Finally, with coat dragging, she high-steps off the field, much to the crowd’s disappointment. It had been quite a show, but I knew such a performance wouldn’t sit well with Dad. There had to be limits on how far we’d go for the sake of entertainment.

  People often ask me why the Steelers don’t have cheerleaders like other teams in the league. The truth is we did have cheerleaders once, in fact, the first in the NFL. In 1961 Mossy recruited a whole squad of girls from Robert Morris College. He dressed them up in pleated gold vests, short skirts, and natty caps. Equipped with black-and-gold pompoms, they performed the kinds of cheers you’d see at high school and college games across the country. They were nice young women, but we felt they unnecessarily distracted players and fans. Television cameras liked them, but we take our football seriously in Pittsburgh. We just didn’t need them. By 1969 the Steelerettes were history, and today the Steelers are one of the few NFL franchises without exotic dancing girls on the sidelines.

  As the league changed, so did the team. Pittsburgh was changing, too. The smoky city of my youth was undergoing a transformation, a renaissance of sorts. In 1948 the industrial smoke had turned deadly. Just a few miles up the Monongahela River from downtown Pittsburgh, a cloud of smog smothered the small mill town of Donora. Fans at the high school football stadium couldn’t see the players on the field. By afternoon you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The next day eleven people were dead and scores more rushed to area hospitals.

  This tragedy prompted local officials and steel industry executives to get serious about air pollution. For the next decade Pittsburgh led the nation in reducing emissions from mills and coal-powered plants of all kinds, and pioneered federal legislation that today allows all Americans to breathe easier. As smoke-control ordinances took effect, Pittsburghers washed decades of soot and grime from the stone facades of municipal buildings, libraries, museums, and churches, uncovering hidden beauty.

  In 1958, as Pittsburgh renewed itself, the city celebrated its bicentennial. It had been two hundred years since George Washington and General John Forbes arrived at the Point and found the smoldering ruins of Fort Duquesne, the French stronghold designed to keep the Three Rivers from the British. Forbes and Washington named the new British settlement “Pittsburgh” in honor of parliamentary leader William Pitt.

  Now city leaders pulled out all the stops and hosted a yearlong celebration. They cleared the Point of industrial waste—rusty railroad tracks, empty warehouses, and abandoned mills—to create a beautiful urban park. They erected a festival city, a world’s fair, and invited dozens of celebrities, from Gene Kelly and Perry Como to Gun-smoke ’s James Arness, to join in the festivities. Parades and oratory entertained crowds of people who flocked to the reborn city. State and local dignitaries laid the cornerstone for the civic arena—no small feat considering the round building had no corners. It was the first retractable domed arena in the world, known locally as the “Igloo” (where the Penguins won the Stanley Cup in 1991 and 1992).

  Unfortunately, the process of urban renewal impacted the rich history and culture of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Since the 1920s this African-American community had produced amazing talent: Clarence “Pinetop” Smith pioneered boogie-woogie, jazz legends Mary Lou Williams, Billy Strayhorn, and Billy Eckstine played the Craw-ford Grille, and Kenny Clark originated bebop. The stories of this neighborhood are immortalized in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Series, a ten-play collection that captures the vitality and spirit of the Hill District’s golden age.

  The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation bored the Ft. Pitt Tunnel through Mt. Washington at the confluence of the Three Rivers. With the opening of this tunnel in 1960, the world discovered Pittsburgh in all its glory, as if a curtain had been raised on a stage. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and native son David McCullough says, “Pittsburgh is the only city in America that makes an entrance.” And he’s right. You come through that tunnel and see skyscrapers of glass and steel and aluminum crowded onto the Golden Triangle, where the rivers converge. Towboats push coal barges, and cars and trains cross black-and-gold-painted bridges, the soothing green of the hills and parks contrasting with the hard urban landscape. I feel proud every time I drive into the city.

  The sporting world also focused its attention on the city in 1960, when the Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the defending world champion New York Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. Bill Mazeroski’s ninth inning walk-off homerun electrified the nation and made Pittsburghers believe anything was possible. I remember the city went wild—horns honking, church bells ringing, streetcars clanging. In the streets strangers hugged and danced and sang. It was a public celebration on a scale I hadn’t seen since World War II and wouldn’t see again until the Steelers won their first Super Bowl.

  The decade of the 1960s ushered in a new era for the NFL as well. On October 11, 1959, cross-state rivals, the Eagles and Steelers, faced each other in Philadelphia. Commissioner Bert Bell, who once owned a stake in both teams, sat in the cheap seats with the fans—he never liked special treatment or VIP boxes. With two minutes to go in the fourth quarter, the Eagles ahead 28-24, Bell suffered a massive heart attack. At the age of sixty-four, the most influential commissioner in NFL history up to that time was dead. Although a closely guarded secret, some of his close friends knew Bert was planning to resign as commissioner in order to reacquire the Philadelphia Eagles and return to the ranks of NFL owners. He always felt like one of the boys, and he was a real football guy, never entirely happy with the burden of responsibility that came with being the league’s chief executive. His passing took us all by surprise and left a big leadership hole in the emerging NFL.

  In January 1960 the owners met at the Kenilworth Hotel in Miami to select a new commissioner. Behind the scenes, owners jockeyed for position, lining up their candidates before the meeting convened. Two men, Austin Gunsel and Marshall Leahy, quickly emerged as front runners. By and large, the eastern owners, including George Halas and George Marshall, backed Gunsel, Bert Bell’s former assistant, thinking he was someone they could control. The westerners, like Dan Reeves (Los Angeles) and Tony Morabito (San Francisco), wanted Leahy, a San Francisco lawyer and the league’s chief outside legal counsel. Some people say the easterners didn’t want a commissioner who lived on the West Coast. But I know for a fact that wasn’t the case. The two Georges didn’t care where Leahy lived—they just didn’t like the guy. As I said, they wanted someone they could control.

  The balloting seemed to go on forever. The winning candidate needed a two-thirds majority, or nine votes. Those owners supporting Leahy thought they’d made a deal with George Halas. If they got eight votes, he would provide the ninth. They thought they had the election in the bag.

  “What do you think about this?” my father asked me.

  “Let’s vote for Leahy and see what happens,” I said.

  So my father voted for Leahy. But Halas didn’t deliver his vote. The other owners slapped their foreheads and pounded the table. “But you promised us your vote.”

  George wouldn’t give in. “No, I just can’t do it,” he said. He wanted to expand the league and feared losing the support of either the West Coast or East Coast faction if he backed one candidate or the other. He remained stubbornly indecisive.

  “But you promised,” they pleaded.

  “I can’t do it,” he answered, “I’m not going to do it.”

  My father saw George’s plight. “Then I’m not voting for Leahy, either,” he said, and joined Halas in his holdout.

  Dad told the owners, “We need a
nother candidate.”

  Then out of thin air they started pulling out names. I was there when they suggested my father be the commissioner. But he was too smart for that.

  “I’m not running for commissioner,” he emphatically stated. “Do you think I was born yesterday?”

  Next they proposed Detroit Lions president Edwin Anderson, who sat right next to me. When they put his name up, he thought he was going to get the job, but only two or three votes went his way.

  The balloting went on. Round 20, Round 21, Round 22. If Bert himself had been there, by this time he would have taken out his teeth and started crying. When the discussions grew tedious, Bert Bell Jr., who worked in the league office, and I retreated to a palm-tree-shaded shuffleboard court outside the hotel. At first we played for a dollar a game, then for a dollar a shot. It turned out I was pretty good at shuffleboard, though it hardly counts as a sport in my book. I started playing with only a couple of bucks, but by the end of the day my wallet was a good deal fatter.

  When we returned to the smoky meeting room, Dan Reeves put forward the name of the thirty-three-year-old general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, Pete Rozelle. The nomination took us by surprise, and no one in the room was more surprised than Pete. He attended the meeting just as I did, at the request of the team owner.

  Reeves said, “He’s young, but he’s very bright, and he’s very good.”

  Dad leaned over to me and asked, “Who is this guy? Do you know him?”

  “Yeah, I know him,” I said. “He’s a good guy. I think he can do the job.”

  Pete and I were nearly the same age and had worked together on NFL marketing issues. We had spent some time together, and I found him to be bright, articulate, and most important, honest.

  “He’s all right,” I said to my father. “He’s someone we can get along with.” So my father told Reeves and the others that we’d back Rozelle if he were nominated.

  The owners asked Rozelle to leave the room, and while he was killing time in the washroom we elected him without much debate on the twenty-third ballot. My father helped break the logjam. He didn’t speak often at league meetings, so when he did, the other guys listened.

  The press called Pete the “boy commissioner.” He was six years my senior and in some ways seemed like an older brother. After the meeting, we had a good talk. I asked if I could do anything for him, if he needed anything. Although he didn’t need much help from me then, as the years passed we formed not only a close working relationship but a friendship that spanned the rest of his career (1960-89) and until his untimely death in 1996. Pete Rozelle was a man of honor, and more than any other commissioner, he is responsible for the NFL we know today.

  But the Rozelle era got off to a rough start. At the Warwick Hotel in New York—the very first meeting following his election—the agenda called for Pete to lay out for the owners his plans for the league, and especially our future relationship with television networks. Even at this early date, the owners recognized television was the key to future profits, so a lot was riding on the commissioner’s leadership. George Marshall, however, had his own self-serving television agenda, one that would allow him to cut deals without league interference. He was definitely not on the same wavelength as Rozelle. Marshall told us he didn’t think the kid was up to the challenge—and he set out to prove it.

  When Pete called the meeting to order, Marshall was absent. Just as we dispensed with the preliminaries, the door opened and in strode Marshall in his pajamas, robe, and slippers. I tell you, it was bizarre, though no one said a word. With a flourish he plunked himself down in a chair at the end of the table, right next to Rozelle.

  When Pete began his formal presentation, George interrupted him: “That’s not right!” Pete continued. George interrupted a second time: “You’re wrong there!”

  Without emotion, Pete turned to his rude antagonist. “Mr. Marshall, would you give me the opportunity to complete my remarks?”

  “Go ahead, be my guest,” George replied with a wave of his hand, then stared at Pete, never moving, not taking notes, as the commissioner finished his report.

  When Rozelle concluded, George stood and attacked every point, one by one. To emphasize his argument, he wagged his finger in Rozelle’s face. There he was, ridiculous in his bathrobe and slippers, and the owners listening to him as though this was nothing out of the ordinary. But it was extraordinary, even for Marshall. He was deliberately attempting to unnerve and intimidate our young new leader. As goofy as Marshall looked and behaved that day, it would have been a mistake to underestimate him. He had a mind like a steel trap and a personality like a pit bull. George really did a number on Pete. Some men would have broken down under such pressure, but Pete never flinched. By the end of the meeting, everyone knew Rozelle was going to make it as commissioner.

  I knew television would be a contentious issue. The twelve teams had all cut their separate deals with the networks. The Colts and the Steelers went with NBC. Marshall had an independent network called Washington South. Cleveland also had its own independent network, sponsored by a beer company, stretching from Texas to the eastern states. The majority of the teams went with CBS, but each had negotiated a different fee schedule, from $75,000 (Green Bay) to $175,000 (New York). The big market clubs, like New York and Chicago, refused to share their revenues with the smaller market clubs, like Green Bay and Pittsburgh.

  It seemed obvious to Rozelle, my father, and me that a package deal—an exclusive contract with one network—would generate more money for the league. It would also allow the smaller clubs to share in the profits and thereby remain financially solvent and competitive on the field. Halas, Marshall, the Maras, and Dan Reeves of the Los Angeles Rams resisted the idea of putting together a biddable package.

  At Pete’s election the year before, I had a chance to talk to Dan Reeves at the Seaview Hotel in Miami. Reeves said, “If there’s going to be a package deal, then the big markets should get more money. There’s a couple of ways we can do this.”

  “There’s only one way we can do this,” I replied, “and that’s to divide the money evenly.”

  He said, “You’ll never get the votes to pass that—it’s just not going to happen!”

  And I shot back, “Then you’ll never be on TV and there won’t be any television in this league!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I said, “When you come to Pittsburgh to play, we won’t put you on—the game won’t go back to Los Angeles. We have every right in the world to do this.”

  “Then you won’t get any money,” Reeves pointed out.

  “Then neither will you! You won’t get a dime, and you’ve got more to lose.”

  Reeves found this humorous and used to call me “Dirty Dan” over his shoulder. Later, I learned, he told some of the other owners, “That Rooney kid is the toughest guy I’ve ever met.” I was twenty-eight at the time, and though I wasn’t a kid, these men still called me “Danny.” They were my elders—my father’s age or older—but they did respect me, even if they didn’t call me “Mr. Rooney.”

  But a week later, in the elevator of the Roosevelt hotel in Pittsburgh, a player behind me said, “Pardon me, Mr. Rooney,” and I turned to see if my father was in the car. He wasn’t. The player was addressing me. That made an impression on me. At one of our sessions, Vince Lombardi turned to my father and said, “Danny’s talking a lot, isn’t he?” Dad smiled. Both of them recognized the young Turks—Rozelle and I—were willing to speak up when necessary.

  About this same time, we started calling my father the “Chief.” I’ve talked to my brothers about this and none of us can remember precisely when this occurred, but we all agree that the twins, John and Pat, were responsible for coming up with the name. Most likely it was Pat; he was always inventing playful nicknames.

  People think the title “Chief” was inspired by the 1950s Superman television series, which featured Clark Kent’s editor, Perry White, a silver-haired, cigar chomping
, no-nonsense guy, whose decisions were always final. It makes sense, but it just isn’t so. The twins simply used the name “Chief” to describe the top guy, the ultimate authority. It’s possible that subconsciously Superman’s “Chief” entered their minds, but it was not a direct reference.

  At first only family members referred to Dad as the Chief, but never to his face. One of my earliest memories of Pat using “Chief” was when he and my father had a disagreement over soccer. Pat and John thought it would be a good idea to get into the soccer business, and we did for a time in the mid-1960s. But Dad couldn’t see its appeal. “What do you mean, you can’t use your hands? That game will never catch on in Pittsburgh!” Pat, under his breath, said to me, “The Chief has made his decision: no soccer.”

  Over time the name caught on—it was a perfect fit. And by the late 1960s you heard “Chief” spoken in family circles, locker rooms, and even among sportswriters. Today, my father is known as the Chief around the world. But before the name was commonly used in the Steelers organization, people referred to him as the “Prez.”

  Back to the NFL and television. I was present when we discussed television at the 1961 league meeting. Rozelle led the charge. He had spent much of the past year developing a television plan that would guide the future of the NFL. He showed how the league had already used the medium to better advantage than any other sport, but without a comprehensive plan football could lose its edge. He enlisted Vince Lombardi and my father to convince the Mara brothers that a package deal was in the league’s best interest. Wellington and his brother Jack remained unconvinced. Our side wouldn’t budge either.

  The discussions grew heated. At one point, Jack turned to my father and said, “How can you do this and call yourself a Catholic?”