By Michael P. Quinlin

When a six foot, four inch, 275 pound professional football player who goes by the moniker Mean Joe Greene offers effusive praise of a certain individual, it’s a good idea to sit up and listen.

“Through 31 years of trust and respect, our relationship has transcended that of boss and player,” Greene said before a packed room of sports stars, family and friends, and national media. “Dan is a best friend. He’s a man of great character and integrity. He loves and confesses God. He loves and cherishes his family.”

The recipient of Greene’s heartfelt testimony was Dan Rooney, head of the Pittsburgh Steelers and patriarch of America’s first family of football. The occasion was Rooney’s induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2000. His father Art Rooney, founder of the Steelers franchise, was enshrined in the Hall in 1964.

“You can read about Dan’s altruism through his service and through his many charitable and civic organizations,” Greene continued. “But ladies and gentlemen, you cannot read about the great friendship and kindness Dan has shown me and my family. And I know many players who have similar stories.”

Countless people from all walks of life have comparable stories to tell. For along with creating a sports dynasty – the Steelers have won five Super Bowl championships since 1974 – Dan Rooney has exemplified the highest attributes of friendship, humility and good will in both his professional and personal life. It is a standard of conduct that has inspired many others.

“Dan Rooney makes you proud to be Irish-American,” says Raymond L. Flynn, former Mayor of Boston, Ambassador to the Vatican, and longtime friend of the family. “He’s never changed, no matter how successful he’s become. He is always the same – down-to-earth, just like his father Art, who was a beautiful man. The Rooneys can walk among kings and popes and never lose the common touch.”

Flynn discovered that first-hand when he visited Pittsburgh in 1988 on mayoral business. He stopped at the Rooney home on Lincoln Avenue in the North Side to pay a courtesy visit. Soon after stepping into the parlor, Art and Dan quickly dispensed with formalities and Flynn found himself enmeshed in an enjoyable conversation about local sports heroes like boxer Billy Conn and Pirate infielder Bill Mazeroski, hero of the 1960 World Series.

They ended up shooting the breeze, as they say in Pittsburgh, for much of the afternoon.

That love of sports has kept the Rooney family in good standing in Pittsburgh, a city passionate about its sports. The town’s fortune and outlook seems to rise and fall with the success of the Steelers, which the family has owned and operated since Art Rooney bought the franchise in 1933 for $2,500.

After a mediocre start that lasted over three decades, the Steelers finally came to dominate professional football with a vengeance in the 1970s with the arrival of Greene, Lynn Swann, Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris. The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous, since western Pennsylvania was in a state of economic decline, with its industrial base – steel mills and coal mines – weakened by new environmental laws, recession and shifts in world markets.

During that decade, 150,000 jobs were lost and unemployment jumped to 20 percent. Many blue collar Pittsburgh families were forced to abandon their homes and head down to Houston to work on the oil rigs. The four Super Bowl championships the Steelers won between 1975 and 1980 were a salve of sorts for Pittsburghers unnerved by their economic woes.

In an interview with Ray Didinger of NFL Films, Rooney acknowledges the team’s inextricable connection to the Steel City.

“This is an honest, hard-working town with a lot of pride and we’ve tried to give the people a football team that reflects that,” Rooney told Didinger. “The Steelers bring all the different communities, all the ethnic groups together. People say the psyche of the whole town depends on whether we win or lose on Sunday. Having lived here all my life, I’d say that is true.”

When Didinger asked if that was sometimes a burden, Rooney answered no. “It’s a privilege,” he said.

“Friday night football in Pennsylvania is a lifetime passion,” Rooney explains in a phone interview. “Football actually started in Pittsburgh. The way our topography is, we’ve had some great high school rivalries up and down the valley and along the three rivers. The National Football League has had more quarterbacks and coaches from western Pennsylvania than from anywhere else.”

Rooney’s love of football is matched by his generosity on the charitable front in Pittsburgh. His largesse is as massive as the Steelers’ front line. He has been an exemplary benefactor and supporter of civic, charitable, educational and literary programs that enrich the human condition.

Following the tradition set by his parents – Art and Kathleen – Dan and his wife Patricia (nee Regan) have given generously to the United Way of America, American Diabetes Association, Presbyterian University Hospital and The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.

An almost-daily communicant and a deeply religious man of faith, Rooney has supported Catholic education in Pittsburgh, especially his alma maters.

“I went to Catholic schools all my life – St. Peter’s, North Side Catholic, Duquesne University,” Rooney says. “My wife Pat is extremely interested in education and teaches at one of the local colleges, Robert Morris University. Archbishop Donald Wuerl, founder of the Extra Mile Educational Foundation, is a great friend of ours.”

Bill Hill, writing in the Pittsburgh Catholic newspaper, cites a further litany of Catholic causes important to the Rooney family, including the Holy Family Institute, Catholic Charities, Catholic Youth Association, and the Bishop’s Educational Fund.

The Rooneys’ nine children have followed in their parents’ footsteps in the important matters of family, faith, philanthropy and football.

Star of The County Down Pittsburgh and Ireland – these two places have endeared themselves to Dan Rooney for reasons of fate and fortune. Newry in County Down was the town his grandfather – also named Dan Rooney – left to make his way to America in the 1880s, in a decade during which home rule, land reform and political unrest characterized daily life in the busy Ulster market town.

Rooney ended up in Pittsburgh, an industrial hellhole in the 19th century which commentator Willard Glazier called The Great Furnace of America when he visited it in 1882. Along with thousands of immigrants – Irish, Poles, Germans and Slavs – the family worked in the steel mills and coal mines. By the turn of the century they had opened Dan Rooney’s Saloon in the North Side, where Art Rooney was born on the second floor of the building in 1901.

Dan Rooney has spent his adult life reconciling the two places with each other, connecting the dots between his family’s humble origins and its current successes. In 1976, he and Tony O’Reilly co-founded the Ireland Fund, which merged in 1987 with the American Irish Foundation to form the present-day American Ireland Fund. To date the Fund has raised over $300 million to support peace, culture, education, and community development in Ireland.

Also in 1987, Rooney initiated an annual Prize for Irish Literature, awarded to promising Irish writers under the age of 40 that continues today. The award has helped the literary careers of emerging writers like Desmond Hogan, Kate Cruise O’Brien, Glenn Patterson, Colm McCann and others.

Rooney is also a big supporter of the Ireland Institute of Pittsburgh, an innovative program founded in 1989 by the late Sister Michelle O’Leary to promote mutual understanding between the Catholic and Protestant traditions of Northern Ireland and to contribute to Ireland’s economic development.

James Lamb, president of the Ireland Institute, credits Dan Rooney as one of the original visionaries “who looked to find ways to get the two communities together” in Northern Ireland.

The Institute has put together a dozen trade missions to Ireland with Rooney’s help. He has also supported the Institute’s work on the Walsh Visa Program, which brings young people from Northern Ireland and Ireland to learn job and inter-personal skills in Pittsburgh, Boston and other cities.

“When we were lobbying for the Walsh Visa extension a few years ago, Mr. Rooney took the time to send letters to his friends in Congress on our behalf,” Lamb said, adding that the effort was successful.

This fall the Institute is leading a life sciences delegation to Dublin and Belfast as part of its mission to create more strategic partnerships between Ireland and the United States.

“It’s a win-win initiative for both Ireland and Pennsylvania,” Rooney says.

“We’ve had a lot of economic exchanges through twinning programs,” he continues. “You’ll remember Pittsburgh hosted the White House Conference for Trade and Investment in 1996. Not only did we have speakers, but we organized it so that the people of Ireland would get involved with the people of Pennsylvania.”

Rooney mentions Irish activists he has worked closely with over the years – Paddy Doherty from Derry, and Father Myles Kavanagh of Belfast, founder of the Flax Foundation and Development Trust. But he has been particularly attentive to Newry, County Down, Northern Ireland. He helped form the Newry/Pittsburgh Partnership in 1990 to stimulate American investment in the area.

Working with local partners like Feargal McCormack, Jack O’Hare and MP Seamus Mallon, he has led several trade missions to Newry, and helped place hundreds of teenagers from Newry and Mourne in job and educational programs through the Wider Horizons program.

He established the Rooney Fellowship, which grants fellowships for Newry students “to attend college in Pittsburgh. They go to Duquesne or Pitt, and then they work for us during the football season and for Heinz Company in the off-season,” Rooney explains.

The 2006 Rooney Fellowship went to Stephen Ferris. Dan Rooney presented the award to young Ferris in Newry last summer while visiting with his wife Pat.

“Dan Rooney is one of the greatest living Irish-Americans and he has made an outstanding contribution to Ireland and indeed to the regeneration of the Newry area,” says businessman McCormack. “He became only the third person to receive the Charter of Newry, which was established by the King of Ireland in the 12th century.”

But perhaps the most unusual tribute to Dan Rooney is the Pittsburgh Bar and Restaurant in the Ardoyne section of North Belfast. Replete with the Steelers logo above the front entrance and football memorabilia inside, the restaurant is operated by Father Kavanagh’s Flax Trust, which works to empower the local community through business and job initiatives.

There is even a Dan Rooney lounge in the place, where patrons catch the Steelers games on satellite television, and where the town gathered to cheer on the team’s Super Bowl victory last February.

A new outpost of Steeler Nation in the heart of Northern Ireland that pays tribute to one of the true stars of the County Down? Joe Greene would have no problem believing it, nor would anyone who knows Dan Rooney.