Dan Rooney

by Dan Rooney

  Cornerback Mel Blount was bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter than anyone who played against him. His dominance at his position and his physical style of play caused the NFL to change the rules for pass defense. His fifty-seven interceptions stand as a Steelers record to this day. He played in five Pro Bowls, was named All-Pro four times, and earned the title of NFL defensive MVP in 1975. Like Joe Greene, Mel was a leader and contributed in a big way to the team closeness that won Super Bowls. After he retired in 1983, Mel went on to become director of player relations for the NFL and founded the Mel Blount Youth Home, with a facility in Vidalia, Georgia, and one near Pittsburgh. I was proud and honored to present Mel at the enshrinement ceremony as he entered the Hall of Fame in 1989, his first year of eligibility.

  When Franco Harris came to the Steelers in 1972, we started winning. His departure in 1983 marked the end of an era. With 11,950 yards rushing, Franco is the team’s all-time rushing leader. I believe his Immaculate Reception is the single greatest play in NFL history. He was a team leader and in his quiet way motivated other players. But Franco impressed me beyond the football field. He’s one of the finest, most thoughtful and caring human beings I have ever known. I’ll always regret that his career didn’t end in Pittsburgh. He played one season for the Seattle Seahawks after we couldn’t come to terms on his contract. Looking back on it now, I wish I’d taken money out of my own pocket to seal the deal. The good news is he returned to Pittsburgh after retiring in 1984 and has become an active and important part of our community. He’s a successful businessman and serves on a number of nonprofit boards, including the Heinz Endowments and the Senator John Heinz History Center/Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum. He entered the Hall of Fame in 1990, his first year of eligibility.

  An exceptional middle linebacker, Jack Lambert was a two-time NFL defensive player of the year, eight-time All Pro, and nine-time Pro Bowler. He led the Steelers in tackles in every season except his last, when a broken toe that just wouldn’t heal kept him benched most of the year. Lambert intimidated opponents. He looked like a wild man—who can forget that image of him, his front teeth missing, intensity etched on his face, his feet drumming in anticipation of the snap? But at the same time, he was one of the smartest guys ever to play at that position, and he had a great sense of humor that kept the team loose at critical times and for big games. He was different. His leadership stemmed from his expectation that everybody in the organization—players, coaches, office workers, even me—do their jobs. He wouldn’t back down. He’d let you know if you weren’t pulling your own weight. He was that kind of a leader. He could get away with this because he had earned the respect of his teammates, the coaches, and me.

  One time, later in his career, our new strength coach had decided the players needed to start eating health foods, and so he started replacing things the players enjoyed, like steak and potatoes, and went with more whole grains and nuts and things like that. Well, some of the players had been complaining, and so one day Lambert walks into Chuck Noll’s office and puts a paper cup on his desk. Chuck looks at the cup, and sees it’s filled with twigs and acorns and stuff he must’ve scooped off the ground under a tree.

  “What’s that?” Chuck asked.

  Lambert answered with a stone face, “Lunch.”

  We changed the menu back to the way it was.

  It’s a shame that the toe injury ended his career in 1984. The Hall of Fame inducted him in 1990, his first year of eligibility. He ended his acceptance speech with this: “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a professional football player, and you can be sure I’d do it as a Pittsburgh Steeler.”

  Mike Webster was a model of hard work and consistency. His record shows that he played more seasons, 15, more games, 220, and more consecutive games, 177, than any other Steeler in the history of the franchise. Not large for a center, he was crafty and smart and anchored the offensive line through four Super Bowls. He was a seven-time All Pro and played in nine Pro Bowls. He retired in 1988, and the selectors voted him into the Hall of Fame in 1997. Sadly, he passed away in 2002.

  For grace and athleticism, wide receiver Lynn Swann has no peer. He was famous for his acrobatic, leaping receptions. His gravity-defying circus catches in Super Bowl X are still talked about today, and now when a receiver makes a similar play, he’ll be described in the press as making a “Swann-like” catch. A first round draft pick, Swann was always at his best in the big games. He earned MVP honors for his performance in Super Bowl X, with four receptions for 161 yards and a touchdown. He never feared going across the middle, though he paid for it with ferocious hits that resulted in numerous concussions. Two of the worst were delivered by George Atkinson. Swann is a highly cultured man. He used his ballet and dance training to enhance his performance as a football player. One sportscaster called him the “Baryshnikov of football.” Politically active, Lynn ran for governor of Pennsylvania in 2006. He retired in 1982 with 336 career receptions for 5,462 yards and 51 touchdowns. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2001.

  Wide receiver John Stallworth leads the Steelers for most yards, 8,723, and receiving touchdowns, 63. He set Super Bowl records for average yards per catch, 24.4 yards, and for single game average (40.3 in Super Bowl XIV). He was a two-time team MVP. His great speed and leaping ability were matched only by his intelligence. Even before retiring from football in 1987, he founded a very successful engineering and information technology business, Madison Research Corporation. He was enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 2002.

  These great players and others—Rocky Bleier, L.C. Greenwood, Ernie Holmes, Andy Russell, Donnie Shell, Mike Wagner, Dwight White—made up the backbone of the Steelers dynasty of the 1970s.

  But all good things come to an end. As Chuck Noll always said, “Football is not your life’s work,” and the career of a professional football player is limited. A human body can only endure so much. Most players can endure it for less than five years. A ten-year career is rare in the NFL. And so the guys we drafted in the 1970s were nearing the end of their careers by the time of our Super Bowl victory in 1980. As Jack Ham put it, “We were old and our best days were behind us.”

  We thought we had more time to draft and find replacements for our aging players. Terry Bradshaw’s elbow had been bothering him, and our doctors knew it. But we didn’t know how serious it was, and Terry didn’t let on how badly his elbow pained him. Following the 1982 season, he went back home to Louisiana and had a local doctor perform surgery. But the elbow would take time to heal. If we’d understood his true condition, our team orthopedic surgeon would have treated him more aggressively.

  With Bradshaw’s elbow injury sidelining him, Cliff Stoudt, our backup quarterback since 1977, led the team to a 9-2 record. We then lost the next three games. Chuck Noll called on Bradshaw one last time to help us beat the New York Jets and their powerful “New York Sack Exchange” defense in the next to last game of the regular season, to clinch the division title. Noll expected Terry to protect his arm and run the ball. But he came out gunning, throwing two touchdown passes and sealing the victory, 34-7. It would be Bradshaw’s last game. When our young offensive tackle, Tunch Ilkin, asked Terry on the sideline why he was throwing the ball instead of handing off, Bradshaw looked at him and said, “Tunch, I’m a gunslinger, not a mailman.” Even injured, Terry Bradshaw had to be true to himself as a player.

  We went 10-6 that season but lost to Oakland, 38-10, in the divisional playoffs. Mark Malone was drafted in 1980 to eventually replace Bradshaw. He was another magnificent athlete—maybe too good. In 1981 we had a lot of injuries at wide receiver, and so Chuck asked Mark to help the team out there. Since back-up quarterbacks don’t get the opportunity to run many plays in practice during the season, Mark agreed and started working at wide receiver. He caught a 90-yard touchdown pass from Terry that season, but he also injured his knee and was never the same. That’s when Cliff Stoudt became our starting quarterback. Stoudt had plenty of talent, but playing in the shadow of T
erry Bradshaw—a guy who had been to the Super Bowl four times and come away with four rings—was hard to do.

  In 1983 we had a chance to draft Dan Marino. Danny was a Pittsburgh boy. We’d watched him quarterback the Central Catholic team. In his senior year there, Look magazine did a story on the three best high school football players in the country. The magazine featured Danny, a young running back from Texas named Eric Dickerson, and a kid from California, John Elway. Pretty select company for a boy from the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Danny stayed in Western Pennsylvania and led the University of Pittsburgh Panthers to four straight bowl games. He won the Sugar Bowl in his junior year with a 33-yard touchdown pass on a fourth-and-5 in the final minute of the game. He didn’t shine in his senior year, and most scouts weren’t looking at him as closely as they were Elway of Stanford, Jim Kelly (another Pittsburgher), from the University of Miami, or Dickerson, from Southern Methodist University.

  Being a local boy, Danny Marino stopped by Three Rivers Stadium one day and tossed some passes around to some of our second-string receivers. We looked at each other and said, “Hey, this kid can play.”

  When the 1983 draft came around, an astute newspaper reporter from the Pittsburgh Press, John Clayton (who currently works for ESPN), buttonholed me right outside our draft room. “I’ll tell you what you should do with your draft.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You should take Danny Marino on your first pick.” Remember, we’d been in the playoffs so we were drafting pretty late.

  He said again, “You should take Marino as your first pick, then trade Cliff Stoudt for a high second pick. You’ll probably get the same guy in the second round that you want in the first because you’re drafting twenty-sixth.” Now, Noll and the scouts wanted a big defensive tackle from Texas Tech named Gabriel Rivera. Chuck thought he could build a new team around Rivera—just as he built the team of the 1970s around Joe Greene.

  I respected Clayton’s opinion and thought it was a great idea.

  We should have done it. But I made a mistake. When I went to Noll, my brother Art, and Dick Haley, they said, “That’s a good idea! How did you come up with that?”

  Instead of saying I thought it up myself, I truthfully told them it was John Clayton’s idea. With that they threw up their hands and shouted, “Clayton? You gotta be kidding!” And that was the end of it. We could have drafted Marino, and I believe if we had we would have won more Super Bowls in the 1980s. Dan Marino has proven himself to be one of the best quarterbacks of all time. I’d put him right up there after Johnny Unitas and Terry Bradshaw. It’s a shame he never won a Super Bowl with the Miami Dolphins.

  The year 1982 was one of change for Pittsburgh, the Steelers, and for my family. The American steel industry continued to struggle, and unemployment in Pennsylvania rose to 12 percent, its highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With the economic downturn, workers sought job opportunities wherever they could find them. No longer were Steelers fans confined to Western Pennsylvania. The Steelers Nation now stretched from coast to coast.

  The Steelers celebrated our fiftieth anniversary during the 1982 season. We had accomplished so much since my father had founded the franchise fifty years earlier. The original charter was dated July 8, 1933, marking 1982 as our fiftieth season. Joe Greene served as general chairman of the anniversary activities. Special parades, publications, and programs were scheduled throughout the year to call attention to this milestone in football history.

  On August 28, at halftime during our preseason game with the Colts, we honored eight members from the original 1933 team—the football Pittsburgh Pirates. On October 8, we set up a “Steelers 50 Seasons” exhibition at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. This ten-thousand-square-foot show included players’ jerseys, game balls, NFL films, photographs, and artwork. The four Lombardi trophies were dramatically mounted on a rotating platform, while strobes bounced light off the glittering silver. The visitors’ eyes widened when they saw four diamond-studded Super Bowl rings.

  A separate theater showed highlight films from Super Bowls past, and special galleries were dedicated to the Chief and Chuck Noll. Other displays included Man of the Year trophies awarded to Franco and Lynn Swann, Bradshaw’s Sports Illustrated Man of the Year award, and the eight bronze busts of Steelers inducted to the Hall of Fame—Art Rooney, Bert Bell, Johnny Blood, Cal Hubbard, Bill Dudley, Walt Kiesling, Bobby Layne, and Ernie Stautner. Fans from all over the country paid a dollar apiece to see the exhibit, with the proceeds going to Dapper Dan Charities.

  McDonald’s and Coca-Cola were the principal sponsors of the anniversary celebration. We distributed more than 1.5 million All-Time Steelers Team ballots at Pittsburgh-area McDonald’s and all stores where Coke was sold. More than a hundred thousand fans voted for their favorite players. Memories came flooding back as I reviewed the fans’ picks.

  More than twenty-six hundred people paid $100 a plate for the Steelers 50 Seasons banquet at the Convention Center on October 9. Some said we should make this a black-tie affair, but I wanted every fan to feel welcome. This extravaganza was really the highlight of the anniversary. It was as much a tribute to my father as it was a celebration of the Steelers’ fifty seasons.

  But an NFL players’ strike threatened to mar the celebration. The NFLPA called for a walkout beginning September 19. Though we had played and won the first two games of the regular season—one over the defending AFC champion Cincinnati Bengals—the fifty-seven-day strike broke our stride and hit right in the middle of our festivities. The next eight games were canceled, and we wouldn’t play again until November 21.

  Some people wondered whether we should cancel the dinner, but the fans wanted a celebration. Most of the striking players told me they would come to honor the team and my father, strike or no strike. True to their word, Bradshaw, Franco, Lambert, and the others were there. Only ten of the 1982 team failed to show. And, of course, scores of former players from every decade, including every one of the twenty-four named to the All-Time Steelers Team, came to the banquet.

  Franco Harris spoke for the Steelers’ offense, saying, “One, two, three, four Super Bowls. We’re going after the fifth one—this year. One thing that will never change is Pittsburgh’s tradition of hard, rough, tough football.”

  Andy Russell spoke for the defense. He said to the striking players, “We want to see you come back, but we’ll let you make the decision when.” People in the audience shouted, “Now! Now!”

  The Count Basie Orchestra provided musical entertainment, while rookie running back Walter Abercrombie sang the national anthem. The dinner menu included everything from filet mignon to chocolate cups filled with amaretto mousse.

  Howard Cosell emceed the evening, reminding everyone, “This is still the City of Champions. The cheering has stopped for now, but here, in Pittsburgh, the Renaissance City, the cheering will never stop. Being here is one of the greatest moments in my life. I have very deep feelings about this city. This is the City of Champions, not because of the Pirates winning the World Series and not because of the Steelers winning the Super Bowl . . . but when you have Joe Greene and Willie Stargell in the same city in the same era—that’s what makes Pittsburgh the City of Champions. When you play Pittsburgh, you play the whole city. Yes, it’s still the City of Champions. It has nothing to do with victories. Pittsburgh has a winning character.”

  Howard was at his best that night. His encyclopedic knowledge of the game and the players amazed me and everyone in the audience. His thoughtful introductions of players hit the mark every time.

  “The most productive quarterback in the entire history of the National Football League . . . Terry Bradshaw.”

  “The most graceful, the most acrobatic wide receiver in football . . . Lynn Swann.”

  “If there ever was an authentic hero, it’s this man . . . Rocky Bleier.”

  “There are no words and there never will be any to talk about Joe Greene. He was the best there ever
was at what he did.”

  This went on for three and a half hours, but nobody complained or left the hall.

  Co-hosts included our game announcers Myron Cope and Jack Fleming, and anniversary chairman, Joe Greene. Joe said, “This is a hard town, an honest town, a tough town. That’s what we’re all about.” Mean Joe got choked up as he looked at the twenty-four members of the All-Time Steelers Team on the dais. He continued, “I like to think of these people as my people, my boys. Yes you are. My coach too. Learned an awful lot about life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything—things like Mr. Rooney telling me about the good old days. Loved it. I do. Thank you so much.”

  Pete Rozelle presented my father with a special award. “You have to love him,” Pete said of my father, “he’s so honest and down to earth. He has a heart of gold, and that was the Steelers’ problem once upon a time. He has a feeling for the tradition of this league, and that’s so important in these times.”

  Pittsburgh mayor Richard Caliguiri commented, “It is easy to get emotional about Art Rooney. He’s gone through good times and bad times and enjoyed them both. The Rooneys and the Steelers of the last fifty years are a tremendous source of pride to Pittsburgh.”

  Other speakers included Supreme Court justice Byron “Whizzer” White, Chuck Noll, Senators Arlen Specter and John Heinz. Senator Heinz said, “I want to thank Art Rooney and the Rooney family for the love and loyalty they have given this city.”