Dan Rooney, the longtime Pittsburgh Steelers chairman who helped shape the modern National Football League and was one of the last surviving links to its founders, died on Thursday in Pittsburgh. He was 84.
Dan Rooney, the longtime Pittsburgh Steelers chairman who helped shape the modern National Football League and was one of the last surviving links to its founders, died on Thursday in Pittsburgh. He was 84.
The Steelers announced his death on their website.
“My father meant so much to all of us, and so much to so many past and present members of the Steelers organization,” said Rooney’s son, the team president Arthur Rooney II. “He gave his heart and soul to the Steelers, the National Football League and the city of Pittsburgh.”
Rooney’s health had deteriorated in recent weeks. Uncharacteristically, he missed the league’s annual meeting in Phoenix in late March. In a speech there to the other team owners, Commissioner Roger Goodell praised Rooney for his decades of service, and he flew to Pittsburgh to see him soon after the meeting concluded.
Except for a stint as ambassador to Ireland in the Obama administration, Rooney was part of the Steelers almost from birth, having been born the year before his father, Art, bought the team.
Rooney started out as a water boy and held nearly every job in the team’s front office, eventually becoming chairman. During his nearly eight decades with the team, the Steelers became one of the league’s most successful franchises, winning six Super Bowl titles — more than any other team.
Rooney was also a powerful force in the NFL and a confidant of commissioners going back to Bert Bell, who was himself once an owner of the Steelers. Rooney worked to settle the often-tumultuous labor disputes of the 1970s and ’80s. Without the bombast that characterized some other owners, he was a consensus builder who could work with players to hammer out differences.
Among his many roles, Rooney was on the expansion committee that helped put teams in Seattle and Tampa, and he helped engineer the merger between the NFL and the American Football League, in part by persuading his father to let the Steelers join the new conference that would be home to many AFL teams.
Rooney also played a central role in selecting new commissioners, including Goodell. It was Rooney who was chosen to go to Goodell’s hotel room in August 2006 to tell him that he had been elected.
Long a supporter of progressive causes, Rooney recruited the league’s first black executive and pushed for the adoption of what has become known as the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for a head coach or general manager opening. The rule has since been expanded to include the consideration of women for front-office positions.
Few owners wore as many hats or were as universally admired as Rooney. Nor have many of them spanned as many generations as Rooney, who worked with some of the original architects of the league, including George Halas in Chicago and Curly Lambeau in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“In some ways I think of myself as the Last Steeler, the last of the founding generation of the NFL,” Rooney wrote in “Dan Rooney: My 75 years With the Pittsburgh Steelers and the NFL” (2007).
Daniel Milton Rooney was born in Pittsburgh on July 20, 1932, a year before the Steelers entered the still-fledgling NFL. His home on the North Side of Pittsburgh, he would note, was just three blocks from where the first professional football game is thought to have been played, 40 years before he was born.
“I guess you could say the game is in my blood,” he wrote.
The oldest of five sons of Art Rooney and the former Kathleen McNulty, Rooney lived almost his entire life in Pittsburgh. In his memoir, he recalled playing football with friends and his brothers — Art Jr., Tim, Pat and John — in the shadows of the steel mills that powered Pittsburgh’s economy.
“Family, faith, football — those are my priorities,” Rooney wrote.
A year after he was born, his father, a boxing promoter who hoped to own a baseball team, paid $2,500 for the Steelers, who were then named the Pirates. The NFL was struggling to survive during the Depression, but Art Rooney saw potential for the team in western Pennsylvania, a football hotbed.
Most years, the Steelers were little match for the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers. But Dan Rooney was hooked. When he was 9 years old he became the Steelers’ water boy. He ran errands, cleaned the locker room and painted the team’s helmets.
“I loved being out there, loafing with the players and working with the team,” he wrote. “I did whatever needed to be done and didn’t get paid much to do it, but I felt part of the team — I was a Steeler.”
Rooney played quarterback and halfback at North Catholic High School in Pittsburgh, and thought seriously about becoming a Roman Catholic priest.
Instead, he earned a degree in accounting from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. In short order, he was handling the team’s logistics and negotiating contracts.
In 1955, he pushed the team to draft Johnny Unitas, another western Pennsylvania native. To Rooney’s lasting regret, the Steelers’ coaches released him before the season. Unitas went on to have a Hall of Fame career with the Baltimore Colts.
During the Steelers’ playoff drought, from 1948 to 1971, Rooney and his wife, Patricia, built a family, with nine children.
His survivors include his wife; his brothers; his daughters, Joan Clancy, Patricia Gerrero and Mary Duffy; his sons, Arthur II, John, Jim and Dan Jr.; and grandchildren. His daughter Kathleen died in 1987, and his daughter Rita died in 2012.
The Rooney family has been inextricably linked to the Mara family, which owns half of the New York Giants. Dan Rooney and Wellington Mara continued the friendship of their fathers, Art Sr. and Tim, and members of the families have also married.
The Steelers’ fortunes began to turn around in the late 1960s. The Steelers became the first NFL club to hire an African-American executive when Bill Nunn, the sports editor of The Pittsburgh Courier and an expert at scouting talented players from traditionally black colleges, began working part time for the team in 1967. (Nunn died in 2014.)
Not long after, the team hired Chuck Noll as its coach after interviewing the Penn State coach Joe Paterno. Rooney and the Steelers then drafted players who became the nucleus of their championship teams of the 1970s: Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Jack Lambert and many others.
Rooney took over the Steelers after his father died in 1988, although he owned only 16 percent of the team, the same amount as each of his four brothers. In 2008, Rooney bought out his brothers’ shares to comply with NFL rules mandating that one person own at least 30 percent of a club, and that no owner be directly involved in a gambling enterprise. (The Rooney family owns stakes in horse and dog racing tracks.)
Rooney received his pilot’s license in 1975 and earned the nickname Crash after an accident in 2000, the same year he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (He and Art Rooney, who was inducted in 1964, were the second father-son combination to be enshrined; Tim and Wellington Mara were the first.) Three years later, Rooney handed the job of club president to his son Arthur II.
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