Dan Rooney missing first Steelers camp since ’30s

Dan Rooney missing first Steelers camp since ’30s

LATROBE, Pa. (AP) — There hasn’t been a Steelers training camp like this since the year Max Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis, “Gone with the Wind” was published and Jesse Owens won four Olympic gold medals in Adolf Hitler-controlled Germany.

There’s no Dan Rooney around.

The Steelers players reside in Rooney Hall during their three weeks at Saint Vincent College, an hour’s drive east of Pittsburgh. A Rooney remains in charge of the Steelers, the only six-time Super Bowl winner.

Only it’s not Dan Rooney, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, a full-time position that allows him little time for football and none for training camp.

Time enough, however, to place a weekend phone call to find out how his football team is doing.

“Burt [Lauten, a team publicist] told me he called and asked how things are going,” defensive end Brett Keisel said Monday. “It’s different not having him here. We’re missing him.”

Dan Rooney, one of the most successful and influential team owners in American pro sports history, has been part of a football family almost since the day he was born in 1932. His father, Art, founded the Steelers a few months later and began taking the oldest of his five sons to camp when Dan was 5. Some of Dan Rooney’s earliest memories are of catching gingerly thrown passes from one of his father’s employees.

A Steelers training camp without Dan Rooney, who first began negotiating player contracts for his father while attending Duquesne University, seemed unimaginable — at least until this summer, Rooney had attended every camp for a remarkable 71 consecutive years starting in 1937.

Several players said it hit them that the Pro Football Hall of Fame owner wouldn’t be around when they sat down for their annual start-of-camp team meeting last Friday and Dan Rooney didn’t address them. Instead, Art Rooney II, Dan’s son and the team president for six years, gave the talk.

“Mr. Rooney’s such a big personality who’s really encouraging to everybody,” safety Troy Polamalu said. “For him to not give us a speech, that was different.”

It was the first time since the Steelers were founded during a time when pro football badly trailed college football in popularity that their players haven’t begun a season being greeted by either Art Rooney, who died in 1988, or his son.

Dan Rooney calls himself the NFL’s last throwback, the only remaining link to the days when NFL ownership was essentially a mom-and-pop business and even a few hundred tickets sold might mean a profitable weekend. Now that Dan Rooney is effectively retired and his title has been changed to chairman emeritus, even those days are gone — although he hopes to attend the Titans-Steelers opener on Sept. 10.

“I’m missing him, but I’m sure he’s missing us a little more,” coach Mike Tomlin said.