By Gene Collier
https://www.post-gazette.com/sports/gene-collier/2019/01/27/Steelers-Chuck-Noll-50-years-Super-Bowl-Rooney-The-Chief/stories/201901270078
January 27, 2019
Chuck Noll with Terry Bradshaw in 1973 (AP)
No historical marker stands outside India Palace Cuisine on Sixth Street these days, nor along the sidewalk between there and the 7-Eleven on the corner of Sixth and Penn, but that’s a situation eminently fixable by the proper authorities.
For it was just behind these storefronts on Sixth, inside the walls of the old Roosevelt Hotel, where three Rooneys and an obscure defensive backs coach for the Baltimore Colts immersed themselves in the crucial conversation that begat the Steelers hiring Charles Henry Noll 50 years ago this Sunday.
None of the four men could imagine how momentous that meeting was, not only in the history of the football team but of the city and region it had represented often dreadfully for all of its prior history. But Art Rooney Jr., writing about it some four decades later, committed to literature the kind of details only transformative events deserve.
It happened in the hotel’s Sylvan Room, where, at a large round table, Steelers founder Arthur J. Rooney, The Chief, routinely held court, and Art Jr. meticulously re-envisioned it almost as though it should be a painting in some museum.
There’s another good idea. You’re welcome.
“There were three empty chairs at the table,” he wrote in “Ruanaidh (Gaelic for Rooney): The Story of Art Rooney and his Clan.” “On the face of a clock, I’d have been at seven, with (older brother) Dan at six, Noll at five, and AJR at four.”
Penn State coach Joe Paterno had turned the job down and Nick Skorich, the former Eagles head coach, got an interview after Noll. But if a typical process of NFL networking led the Rooneys to Noll, that was to be the last unremarkable thing about the relationship between the Steelers and the Hall of Fame coach who died in June, 2014.
“I miss him every day of my life,” said Marianne Noll, who this week so graciously remembered those moments across the fleeting half century. “In those days, the league was very rigid about approaching coaches for head jobs before the season ended. He’d get calls from people who were not ‘officially’ associated with teams, but he wouldn’t take them. After the disastrous loss to the Jets (and Joe Namath in Super Bowl III), one of his players (Rick Volk) was having seizures and we were in the hospital with him until 1 a.m. The next morning he was starting the interviews.”
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