By Allen Barra, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
It would seem like scant praise to call "Rooney" the best book ever written about the owner of a football team.Let's call it instead one of the best books on football written so far this century, largely because Arthur Joseph Rooney Sr. was the most interesting of owners.
Born of Irish-Catholic parents from County Down, Ireland, in 1901 in Coulterville, a mining patch outside Pittsburgh, Mr. Rooney grew up on the North Side.
In 1933, he paid a $2,500 entrance fee for a National Football League team with money he had won in a parlay of long-shot winners at the Saratoga Race Course. (That is merely one of the many seemingly mythical stories about Mr. Rooney that, happily, turn out to be true.)
Until his death in 1988, he was the soul of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the heart of the NFL. "How come nobody's ever written your biography?" Rob Ruck, one of the book's co-authors, once asked him.
"It's been written a hundred times," Mr. Rooney replied, referring to the hundreds of interviews he had given and scores of histories of pro football he had contributed to over the years.
But in truth it had never been told and probably wouldn't have now except for three amazingly energetic writers:
Mr. Ruck, a senior lecturer of history at the University of Pittsburgh, his wife, Ms. Patterson, an associate professor of journalism at Rooney's alma mater, Duquesne University, and the late Michael P. Weber, author of "Don't Call Me Boss," a biography of longtime Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence.
The handsomely packaged, lavishly illustrated (with more than 40 photographs, including everyone from Byron "Whizzer" White, Mr. Rooney's first great player acquisition in 1938 to "Mean" Joe Greene and Terry Bradshaw in the 1970s) and assiduously researched, "Rooney" is more than a biography.
It's a virtual cutaway view of the growth of development of professional football and its relationship to its communities. There must be thousands of people from Ireland to New York to Pennsylvania who have great stories about Mr. Rooney, and the authors seem to have tracked all of them down.
The result is the story of, as they write, "A different era, when a salon keeper's son could ditch his image as sport's all-time loser and become Pittsburgh's favorite son, the nice guy who finished on top."
Along the way, he was a superb amateur boxer, played baseball against two of the greatest players of all time, Honus Wagner and Josh Gibson, and helped steer the NFL into the best managed and most profitable league in professional sports.
That his team was the laughingstock of the game for more than four decades seemed like the ill humor of God. That it won win four Super Bowls for him (beginning with the 1974 triumph over the Minnesota Vikings) seemed like a divine reward for a lifetime of dedication to his team, city and sport.
Mr. Rooney's life would have been a rich enough read if it had ended in 1969 before he hired a colorless but brilliant defensive coordinator from the Baltimore Colts named Chuck Noll. For Steelers fans, the last 140-odd pages of "Rooney" will seem like a rich dessert, covering the creation of perhaps the greatest dynasty in football history.
He was a model owner, allowing his coach to implement his own plans while working behind the scenes to boost the morale of his players.
"He took a kindness to me," said Terry Bradshaw after Mr. Rooney invited his No. 1 draft pick into his office and offered him a cigar, "a simple kid who didn't really know what he was getting into."
Mr. Rooney never forgot his roots because he never strayed far from them. One day, while lunching with Catholic nuns at the Three Rivers Allegheny Club, he got a call from a friend. "Sisters," he said as he excused himself, "I have to grab this call. It's Mr. Sinatra." The nuns were in awe. When Mr. Rooney returned, one asked, "Can you get us his autograph?"
When he died in 1988, flags in Pittsburgh were flown at half-staff; waitresses, truck drivers and school teachers mourned. The Post-Gazette, writes the authors, "captured the extraordinary degree to which Pittsburgh identified with Rooney ... Pittsburgh's transformation into what Rand-McNally had called the nation's most livable city underscored its protean nature. But Art's passing created a void."
He had "become the story that many Pittsburghers would use to tell about themselves to the world."
Allen Barra's latest book, "Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee," is now available in paperback from W.W. Norton.
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