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Mike Tomlin Proves Rooneys Truly Rule

Feb 2, 2009 – 3:13 AM
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Kevin Blackistone

Kevin Blackistone %BloggerTitle%

Mike TomlinTAMPA, Fla. – It wasn't only that Mike Tomlin and his troops had just won the ultimate football game Sunday night at Raymond James Stadium that led him to walk into a calamitous celebration at midfield with arms raised overhead in exultation. It was also, he said, that he'd proved the few people who saw something in him worth believing -- something worth dreaming about, something worth embracing -- right. They were the Rooneys, the family of visionaries who've owned the Pittsburgh Steelers forever and, just two years ago, plucked Tomlin from the pile of humanity that makes up head-coaching aspirants for the NFL.

Tomlin was just 34 then. He was a rookie coordinator running Minnesota's defense. There were six other teams then that joined the search for a new coach. The only club, the only front office, the only owners, however, who took notice of Tomlin were in Pittsburgh. Thus came Tomlin's reaction and first words in the glow of Sunday night.

"All I wanted to do," Tomlin said, "was prove them [the Rooneys] right."

He did that and more in steering the Steelers to a 27-23 come-from-behind victory over the upstart Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII.

The Rooneys' and Tomlin's success also proved how wrongheaded so much of the rest of the NFL has been for a long time and remains so.

After all, coming into this Super Bowl a lot was made of the Steelers as being the model franchise in the NFL, if not all of sports. Only the Rooneys owned them since the '30s. Only three men had coached them since 1969. They'd been to six Super Bowls coming into this season and won five. Only the Dallas Cowboys had made it to more Super Bowls and won as many.

But no matter the Steelers' success, they never became a model that most of the rest of NFL franchises attempted to replicate. Instead, the Steelers stood as proof that the league's reputation for being comprised mostly by owners, front offices and coaches who are only as creative as the most-recent formula for success is a misnomer.

Indeed, the Steelers have run their operation independently minded, open to radical thinking and blind to arbitrarily created prerequisites for as long as they've been around. They've run themselves as a meritocracy rather than as an oligarchy as so many of their competitors.

For example, the Steelers' patriarch, Art Rooney, hired a fellow named Lowell Perry in 1957 as an assistant coach. It wouldn't have been noticed except for the fact that Perry was black and the NFL had never before witnessed in its ranks a black coach of any rank. At the time, the league still hadn't even conquered segregation in its locker rooms, allowing an all-white team in Washington to participate.

In 1969, when teams were still more likely to turn to paternal or avuncular former NFL players with lots of NFL skins on the wall, Rooney handed the team to a 37-year-old named Chuck Noll, after he couldn't convince Joe Paterno to leave Penn State. Noll brought Rooney and Pittsburgh four Super Bowl trophies.



In 1992, the Rooney family in the hands of Art Rooney's son, Dan, turned the coaching reins over to a 34-year-old assistant named Bill Cowher rather than mimic the rest of the league that seemed to prefer retread head coaches. Cowher managed a pair of Super Bowl appearances and won one before stepping away a couple years ago.

His departure opened the door for Tomlin, although no one, not even Dan Rooney, realized it at the time. He employed two able assistants from which he thought he would pick Cowher's successor. But one departed -- Ken Whisenhunt who, ironically, led the Cardinals on Sunday night -- and the other, Russ Grimm, didn't measure up to an interview Rooney granted a young man he'd only heard rumor of in Minnesota, Tomlin.

Rooney and his lieutenants brought Tomlin in for a second round of interviews and they refused to allow his youth or skin color to blind them to his intellect and strong will. Tomlin was a triple threat in the phraseology of late blues-and-jazz songstress Nina Simone: young, gifted and black.

So, coincidentally, as Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith prepared to kick off as the first black head coaches to meet in a Super Bowl, Rooney announced the signing of Tomlin as his family's team's new coach. Tomlin's ascendency made him no less an underdog to win the NFL's biggest prize Sunday night than the Cardinals.

But at just 36 years old, Tomlin did just that, becoming the youngest coach to take the Vince Lombardi Trophy. No less significant, he also became the second black coach to win the Super Bowl, following Dungy, his original NFL mentor when Dungy headed up Tampa Bay.

Tomlin also cemented for some time the Steelers' reputation as the best NFL franchise, what with a record six Super Bowl titles now.

"I'm very blessed to be hired by the Rooney family," Tomlin said Sunday. "They [the Rooneys] took a chance on a 34-year-old coach with not a long resume. They took a lot of criticism for it, and I took it personally."

How ridiculous.

The NFL would be a lot better place with a lot more thinking like the Rooney's. So would our society, for that matter.

- Kevin B. Blackistone is a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, and a frequent sports opinionist on other outlets. A former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News, he currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.

Filed under: Sports

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