Free Dan Rooney by Dan Rooney Page A

up against Millvale, he suggested I play as halfback/quarterback. Even though I was technically on the JV, I was still a freshman and eligible to play on the freshman team. The game was a real mismatch, and I felt like we could run circles around the Millvale players. By the end of the game, I had scored six touchdowns.
    Standing in the end zone, Joe Thomas saw everything. As I scored the last touchdown, I saw him laughing. It was embarrassing for the Millvale team and the freshman coach should have pulled me from
the game, but both he and Thomas wanted to see what I could do. That was the last game I ever played with the freshmen.
    In fact, about three weeks after the Millvale game, Thomas had my good friend Miles Bryan and me dress for the varsity game. We didn’t get much playing time but we learned a lot. At the end of the season we wondered if we’d get our varsity letters and were a little disappointed when we didn’t. But the coaches made the right decision. They knew we could wait and that our heads would swell if we got those letters too soon. We still had our whole high school careers ahead of us.
    During my freshman year I played halfback out of the single-wing. In my sophomore year I played quarterback in the Wing-T formation, because the coaches knew I could throw. In the Wing-T the quarterback, flanked by a fullback and wingback, takes the ball from the center, and can throw or run, but usually hands off. I really enjoyed running the ball—I was fast and had good moves. Though they made me quarterback, I would have preferred playing tailback, where I could both throw and run the ball.
    We had a good season my sophomore year, going 7-1, but just as school closed for the summer, I came down with rheumatic fever. The illness really laid me low. I was confined in a hospital for two months and hated being there. I felt sorry for myself, and I know I made life miserable for my entire family, especially my mother. The only bright spot in my hospital stay was that a Steelers backup quarterback, Joe Gasparella, often visited me. We talked for hours about art and architecture. He’d been an excellent student at Notre Dame and an accomplished artist and architect, and taught me the fundamentals of drawing and design. I remember he brought sketchpads and I would refine my drawing skills, perfecting shading and perspective. I began to think that an architecture career might be in my future.
    When they took me to the hospital I was nearly five feet ten inches tall and weighed 147 pounds. When I finally got out, I found that
though I had gained weight, I had stopped growing. In fact, I never grew another inch.
    It hurt having to sit out my junior year, but I came back strong as a senior, helping lead the team to a winning season. I played quarterback, but the coaches also used me on defense, either as corner or safety. By this time I had muscled up to 163 pounds, and had regained my speed and stamina.
    In the fall of 1949 we played one of our toughest games against the Aliquippa Quips on their field, a dark hole in the ground we called the “Pit.” Now, they were pretty smart and knew that the lights only worked on one side of the field—the Aliquippa grounds crew fixed it that way. Their coaches opted to wear dark brown uniforms, while we had to wear our white jerseys. They could see us, but we couldn’t see them. When the Quips pulled a reverse on the first kickoff, I honestly didn’t know who had the ball until their runner crossed the goal line. It was a seesaw battle. I had a pretty good game and our whole team played their hearts out, but we lost by a touchdown.
    Later we played Ambridge, a mill town just across the Ohio River from Aliquippa. These guys were tough, the sons of steel workers. They had scouted us and the word was they had to stop me to win the game. We played them to a standstill, but we were short-handed—my friend Richie McCabe, a great running back, was out