University Times

It’s Dec. 23, 1972. One of the most iconic moments in sports history is about to take place in the final 22 seconds of an NFL playoff game at Three Rivers Stadium.

The Steelers trail their hated rivals, the Oakland Raiders, 7-6. It looks like another season without a league championship — the 40th in a row since the team’s 1933 founding.

Then it happened, and sports fans will remember the immortal call of radio play-by-play announcer, the late Jack Fleming: “And there’s a collision. And it’s caught out of the air! The ball is pulled in by Franco Harris! Harris is going for a touchdown for Pittsburgh! … I don’t even know where he came from!”

That moment with Harris catching the winning score forever will be known as the Immaculate Reception.

Beloved Steelers owner and native son Arthur J. Rooney did not witness the famous play; at that moment, he was riding on an elevator to the locker room, as was his custom after every game, this time to console what he thought were his losing players.

As the authors write in “Rooney: A Sporting Life,” the definitive biography of the man they called “The Chief”:

“Art saw none of it. ‘We heard a wild scream from the crowd,’ Art said. ‘It could only mean one thing but no one in the elevator dared believe it.’ He had waited a long time for this moment, only to miss it.”

“Rooney” was co-authored by Rob Ruck, Pitt senior lecturer in history; Maggie Jones Patterson, associate professor of journalism at Duquesne and Ruck’s wife, and Michael P. Weber, who died in 2001 shortly after the Rooney biography project was launched.

Ten years in gestation, the book, published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press, is information-crammed — but an easy and enjoyable read — with 521 pages of text, along with another 75 pages of endnote documentation and more than 40 illustrations of the Rooney family and the Steelers, Art Rooney’s professional family.

The authors began the book in media res for a reason, Ruck told the University Times.

“Early on we understood that was the moment, because that crystallized in a moment the prior 40 years of losing,” Ruck said.

Even though the team did not win the NFL title that year, the play became the watershed moment when the Steelers shifted from perennial losers — with Art himself often dubbed the “world’s most lovable loser” — to consistently winning seasons and multiple championships, and ultimately signaling the moniker “City of Champions,” appropriately applied to Pittsburgh, he said.

Ruck has published four books including “Rooney” and the just-released “Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game,” in addition to serving as writer, producer or historical adviser on a number of sports-related documentaries.

But when he started working on “Rooney,” Ruck hadn’t delved into biography for nearly 30 years. “I thought a biography would be easier. It turned out to be much more difficult,” he said. “It took a lot longer than we expected, for a number of reasons. One was the breadth of this man’s life: from the Catholic Church and politics, to the race track and boxing; his advanced age — he was 87 when he died, and also simply that for something like this, you have to spend a lot of time with newspapers, and you do hundreds of interviews. To digest all of that, to reconstruct his life was a huge undertaking.”

One advantage the authors had was the full cooperation of the Rooney family, Ruck noted.

“Also, I teach sports history, and Art Rooney is a part of that course. I’ve been lucky to be able to write about subjects that I teach,” he said.

Ruck’s association with Art Rooney actually dates back to the author’s days as a Pitt graduate student researching material for his 1983 PhD thesis, “Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh,” which was published in book form in 1987.

Ruck credits “Rooney” co-author Mike Weber, then a historian at Carnegie Mellon, with helping him understand Pittsburgh’s racial and ethnic complexity.

For the thesis, Ruck interviewed Rooney about his close associate, the late Gus Greenlee, the local illegal-numbers king who owned the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the Negro National League. At that point, Ruck broached the idea of writing Rooney’s biography, but Rooney, then 79, demurred.

As Ruck began interviewing elderly African Americans, many of them former Negro League players, “I kept hearing unsolicited stories about Art Rooney. I said, ‘My god. I never heard a white person spoken of so highly, so often.’”

Mike Weber knew Art’s son Dan (now ambassador to Ireland) and persuaded him to consider whether a biography of the elder Rooney was a good idea.

“Five years later, Dan gave Mike the green light for the two of us to write a biography of his father,” and provided access to Rooney family and Steelers material, with the understanding Rooney would have no editorial say in the final product, Ruck explained.

Following Weber’s death, Ruck pressed on with the book. He and Patterson “lived” with the Rooney biography for most of the next decade. “You have to work at it. Any vacation I took, chapters, drafts would come with me. I’d work at night, I’d work on weekends. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it, it’s just that’s the only way to get it done. So I would say it was a pleasurable obsession — not that I ever want to spend 10 years on a project again!” Ruck said.

How did the collaboration work?

“I would write a draft and Maggie would change it (laughs) — not really. I’m sure we changed a few things that the other person didn’t want to lose, but in the end the book came out stronger because of it,” Ruck said.

“I probably did more of the legwork. When it came down to the writing, I think Maggie was critical in the shaping of the story, in personalizing Rooney. I bring a certain skill set having studied and written about sport in Pittsburgh and I’ve spent a lot of time absorbed in sport,” he said.

“Maggie, as a writer, editor and professor at Duquesne, is much more skilled in figuring out how to craft a story and present a narrative.”

Both authors avoided the temptation to psychoanalyze Rooney.

“We knew we could only assert certain things about what he thought himself and what was going on in his life. As a historian you want to stick to historical facts. We’re not novelists,” he said.

The most difficult section to write in the book — but also the most fun to research — Ruck said, was piecing together the Rooney family history, which, supported with research funding from Pitt and Duquesne, led the authors to record-hunting trips to Wales, Northern Ireland, Montreal and Youngstown, as well as in Pittsburgh.

The couple discovered via city records, for example, that, “Lo and behold, the Rooneys arrived on the South Side and Art Rooney’s grandfather Arthur probably worked at the J&L mill where the team now has its practice facilities, something wonderfully symbolic,” Ruck said.

The most problematic section of the book, Ruck acknowledged, was Rooney’s possible involvement in bootlegging or racketeering during the Prohibition era of the 1920s and early ’30s, which forced the closing of the family’s North Side saloon.

“I’ve heard stories all my life. So, you’re sort of sifting, looking for credible evidence,” Ruck said. While newspaper reports recounted that Rooney’s family members occasionally were arrested in an era when backroom speakeasies thrived, Art himself appears to have escaped such a fate.

The authors write:

“Art knew the geography of speakeasies, stills and nightclubs, and he ran with bootleggers, numbers men, bookmakers and thugs for much of his life. Nor did he repudiate any of them. … But Art was clean enough — or smart enough — to avoid being tagged out. … [A] few facts and secondhand memories construct a skeleton that has been dressed up with any number of Rooney legends. The truth can only be surmised.”

Ruck said, “But the more important question is: How did we feel about this man? I think Maggie put it best when she said, ‘You would expect that the more you got to know this person, the more you would see the blemishes and the warts. But,’ she said, and I totally agree, ‘the more we learned about Art Rooney and his dealings with other people, not only the more we liked him as a man, but the more we respected him.’”

Rooney did have a bit of an Irish temper and sometimes was tough on his children, Ruck said. “But he was loyal, sometimes to a fault. He always looked for the win-win dynamic, not wanting it all for himself. The money he won at the track got filtered back into the sports community; Rooney was skilled at promoting sports. We also saw that his skill as a politician was not only important to Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh sports, but to the NFL,” he said.

One could argue that Rooney and a handful of team owners are responsible for the NFL’s success, Ruck said.

“Art and his buddies would go to the track together, run the NFL together. These guys stuck together. They made sacrifices for the NFL. They understood that if they were going to succeed they had to protect the weakest members of the league, the weakest franchises,” he noted. “Art got [then-NFL commissioner] Pete Rozelle to put the TV contract up for bid and to share the revenue.”

While Pittsburgh sports fans most likely will appreciate the hometown-oriented anecdotes that pepper Rooney’s life story, the non-Pittsburgher, and even the casual sports fan, still will get something out of the book, Ruck believes.

“I would like to think that person would get a sense of why sport mattered to people, when it wasn’t really about money, when it wasn’t about sport being a business. Now there are accountants, lawyers, mediators, agents — everything is corporate and with television, football just becomes the handmaiden for advertising and profits,” he said.

“I would hope that person would come to understand what ultimately is a more important role sport plays in bringing people together, in allowing people to develop collective identities,” Ruck said.

“If people decide they want to engage their free time, their leisure time, in sport, that tells us that it’s something that matters to them. Because of the growing affluence in this country in the 20th century, we had more and more opportunity to spend time and money on sport. It’s an incredible part of our social life and it’s had an incredible political and social impact,” he maintained.

For example, social groundbreakers Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali are important historical figures whose impact off the playing field and outside the boxing arena exceeds their role as athletes, Ruck said.

Rooney never was involved in sports purely to make money. When Rooney was asked why, despite many lucrative offers, he never sold the financially challenged Steelers, he said, “Money has never been my god — never.”

“In fact, Art was into every aspect of sport as it evolved from community-based sandlot ball into the corporate money game that it is today. What few people know and I later came to believe, Art Rooney also was the best all-around athlete in Pittsburgh in the early 1920s — he was an outstanding boxer, baseball player, football player. What Rooney symbolically represented is why sport matters, why we cared about it before it became a ‘show-me-the-money’ culture,” Ruck said.

“It makes him so quintessentially Pittsburgh. We are hard-working people, but we play even harder. It’s about relationships with people, it’s about loyalty, it’s about trust, it’s about sticking with something,” Ruck said.

“And Rooney personified that. It’s not just symbolically because the Steelers became the team, but he’s involved in black baseball, he’s involved with the boxers, he’s involved with Pittsburgh politics and with his family,” he said.

“To me, it was a real privilege to take all these things going on in sport and try to tell the story of his life.”

—Peter Hart