A Pittsburgh gentleman
Dan Rooney defined decency in all of his works
Professional football is all about violence on the field, adulation in the community and hard-nosed business decisions in the front office. How many gentlemen have been forged in that environment? At least one. Dan Rooney.
Mr. Rooney, who died Thursday at 84, never let the money, the prestige or the power of owning the Steelers go to his head. He was low key, polite, respectful of others and a voice of reason for his team, his community and the National Football League. He was a person of great privilege who reached great heights, but he never strayed from his North Side roots. He loved his neighborhood to the end, like true Pittsburghers do.
“It was a grand place,” he wrote in 2013. “We had a backyard and played all the sports. During World War II, we pretended the yard was a battlefield.”
The son of Art Rooney Sr., the Steelers’ founder, he began leading the organization in the 1960s, making the hires and other business decisions that turned a losing franchise into one of the most successful and storied. By 2003, when he turned over the presidency to his son, Art II, and assumed the title of chairman, the team had won the Super Bowl four times. It won two more titles after that, one of them in 2009, months before Mr. Rooney was sworn in as U.S. ambassador to Ireland. The appointment was a reward for his support of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, but it was also an appropriate recognition of his decades working and funding reconciliation efforts in Ireland.
Yet Mr. Rooney’s football legacy should not be measured simply by the number of trophies his team has won. A richer measure would be the thousands of exciting Sunday afternoons he provided to fans, for whom identity with the Steelers is an important part of life, or the extent to which his demeanor set the ethos for the team and lent a certain righteousness to the Steelers’ gridiron triumphs.
Mr. Rooney’s presence burnished an entire city. Because Mr. Rooney comported himself as a Pittsburgher, not royalty, Pittsburghers treated him as one of their own.
All NFL owners bring something to the game. Seldom is it Rooneystyle civility — “Success without swagger” as the headline on one Post-Gazette story about Mr. Rooney’s death put it. Civility in a loud man’s game gave him gravitas. Little wonder that he played a role in settling two players strikes or pushed the league to adopt the so-called Rooney Rule, requiring teams to interview at least one minority candidate for head coaching and other senior positions.
Everyone in the Steelers organization respected Mr. Rooney. No one wanted to disappoint him. That’s probably one reason most of his players have toed the line off the field. Plus, if they misbehaved, there was a good chance they’d get the boot. A visitor to the Steelers’ South Side training complex could sense the same reverence from employees who helped the elderly Mr. Rooney navigate the busy cafeteria.
“We will celebrate his life and the many ways he left us in a better place,” Art II said. The challenge — the debt owed Mr. Rooney — will be to keep his gentility alive in the franchise he constructed and the city he loved. The ball will not be easy to carry.