Ron Cook: With Dan Rooney’s death, Pittsburgh loses an icon

PITTSBURGH – Like everybody who had the honor and privilege of knowing Dan Rooney, saw him on television or read about him in newspapers and books, I have a lasting memory.

It takes place in the cafeteria at the Steelers’ South Side headquarters. Rooney, even into his 80s, is standing in line. It’s his lunch room at his facility, he’s a Pittsburgh icon, an NFL icon and an Irish icon, and he’s standing in line behind his staff members and media members.

Rooney always was a different kind of guy.

If you didn’t know his name was Rooney and that he was a life-long Pittsburgher, you wouldn’t know he was born into wealth, the son of this city’s all-time great icon, Art Rooney Sr. First and foremost, he was a humble man. I’m sure he would love being remembered that way. His dad always taught him and his four younger brothers, “Treat people the way you want to be treated, but never let anyone mistake kindness for weakness.” Dan Rooney lived that lesson every day. He always treated people with respect. No one ever thought of him as weak.

It wasn’t always easy being the son of Art Rooney Sr., but it never intimidated Dan Rooney. His brother, Art Jr., at 81 and nearly 29 years after their father’s death, says he still asks himself almost every day, “What would Dad do? Would he approve?” Dan Rooney shared that same respect for his father but wasn’t afraid to make tough decisions on his own. He was his own man.

That was especially true when it came to running the Steelers. Rooney gradually took control of the team from his father in the mid-1960s and, while his dad ran it like a hobby by hiring his cronies to coach and play for him, Dan Rooney operated it like a business, albeit a close-knit family business. For years, since its inception in 1933, the franchise had been known as “SOS” – Same Old Steelers. They were laughable losers. The Rooneys were known as dumb and cheap. That all changed when Dan Rooney took over and hired Chuck Noll as coach in 1969. There are six Lombardi Trophies now at the South Side headquarters, more than any NFL team.

The players loved the way Rooney treated them. They loved that he was at their facility every day, loved how approachable he was, loved that they saw him in that cafeteria lunch line, loved that he went to the locker room after each game – win or loss – to shake hands with every guy even last season when his health was failing. You think the players respected him? You have no idea. Former safety Ryan Clark talked in 2014, when the NFL considered fining players for using the N-word on the field or in the locker room, of how Rooney went to cornerback Ike Taylor and asked him if he could ask the players to stop without threat of a fine. Perhaps no player over the years was closer to Rooney than Taylor, who did indeed go to the players. No more N-word.

But Rooney also could be tough when it came to making decisions for the Steelers. Most people remember the way he cut franchise legend Franco Harris during training camp in 1984 after Harris held out in a contract dispute. Fewer remember that he fired his brother, Art Jr., in January 1987. Rooney Jr. was running the team’s personnel department and was huge in constructing the Super Steelers of the 1970s with some of the best drafts in NFL history. But the team had sunk back toward mediocrity at that time. Much as it saddened him, Rooney Sr. signed off on the firing, telling the heartbroken Rooney Jr. that only one man could run the family business. As the oldest son, that one man was Dan.

“We buried the hatchet,” Rooney Jr. said Thursday from his winter home in Palm Beach, Florida. “That was very, very difficult for me. Football was my life, too.”

Football always was Dan Rooney’s passion. Rooney Jr. tells the story of Dan Rooney getting rheumatic fever as a high school-aged boy, beating it and coming back to play football at Duquesne against their mother’s wishes. “The doctors told her, ‘If you don’t let him play football, you might wreck him emotionally.’ ”

It’s not just the Steelers who benefited from Rooney staying on in the game. No one, arguably, did more for the NFL, not even his father. Rooney was the wise head during labor negotiations with the players, pushing for peace between the two sides because it was the right thing. He pushed for racial inclusion because it was the right thing. He occasionally pushed for decisions that were good for the league as whole even if they might have hurt the Steelers in the short term. It was the right thing.

“He was always so smart,” Rooney Jr. said. “Even when he was 10 or 11, we’d count on him to come up with the right answer .

“Family was always No. 1 with him, but right after that was football and the Irish. He ended up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and as the United States Ambassador to Ireland. That’s some life.”

Rooney Jr. said he last saw Rooney on New Year’s Day at Rooney’s office. “I didn’t want the holidays to go by without seeing him. We just sat and talked for a while. His health was bad. It was so sad seeing him like that.”

The four surviving Rooney boys, ages 78-81, spend the winter in Florida. All have been married for at least 50 years. All of their spouses still are alive, as is Dan Rooney’s widow, Pat. Everyone in the family is amazed it took until 2017 for one to go.

The eight Rooneys in Florida are chartering a plane to return to Pittsburgh for what figures to be the biggest funeral in the city since Rooney Sr.’s in August 1988.

“When my dad died, it was like a big part of Pittsburgh died with him,” Rooney Jr. said. “I would think it’s the same with Dan.”

Absolutely, it’s the same.

Like father, like son.

Truly, two icons.