Collier: How to find diamonds in the rough
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Matt Freed, Post-GazetteWillie Parker, left, would not be in Detroit this week if not for Dan Rooney Jr. Parker was such a dark horse prospect that he actually played for the Clinton Dark Horses.
Click photo for larger image.
PONTIAC, Mich. -- The Dan Rooney Jr. Airport Shuttle got pretty busy yesterday, with the son of the Steelers' chairman presumably accepting no tips from friends and family arriving for Super Bowl XL just IV days away.
The tedious drive from the Steelers' hotel to Detroit Metro Airport is long enough that, if prodded, Rooney could reflect on the longer ride, the one that's taken him from the defensive backfield at Washington & Jefferson some 20 years ago to this, his ninth year as a college scout in the family business, and more importantly, to reflect on some of the people he's brought with him.
Among those, Steeler fans might least know but most appreciate his wife, Allison, who'll be on the shuttle tomorrow night. It had better be running on time.
Without Allison, more formally known as Dr. Allison Evanoff Rooney, one Willie Parker would not be a Steeler today, but that's a long story that we're not about to start in the middle.
So let's go back to school.
As a safety and special teams guy at W&J, Rooney's particular specialty, long catalogued in Rooney Family folklore, was, um, getting ejected. Two decades have passed, and no one's ever really refuted that history.
"I had a problem keeping my temper," he said yesterday on the way back to the hotel. "I wasn't too interested in listening to the referee or somebody on the other team running his mouth. I'd always make sure I could shut them up if I could. It was a selfish thing. We laugh about it now, but it was bad then. Fifteen-yard penalties, getting thrown out. Bad for the team.
"I guess I figured that if I was always fighting or getting thrown out, people wouldn't notice that I wasn't any good."
But as Rooney would come to learn, and later to prove, who's good at this game and who's not isn't always terribly obvious. When his fledgling coaching career took him to North Carolina, he met Allison, who was completing medical school at the University of North Carolina, after which she found a family practice with an opening in Clinton. Had she found it anywhere else, Rooney, by this time a part-time scout for the Steelers, might never have shown up at Clinton High School, mostly out of curiosity, and gotten interested in Parker.
Parker was such a dark horse prospect that he actually played for the Clinton Dark Horses.
How could I make that up?
"That was a very, very serious football program," Rooney said. "I was a college scout, so I really wasn't round a lot of high school kids; but I'd go over to watch practice there, and they worked very hard at it. When Willie went to North Carolina and he wasn't getting many plays there, I always thought he'd hang on; he wouldn't quit because of the work habits he had from high school. He could really run.
"I thought he could be a good [training] camp guy for us. He would give our guys a good look because he had speed. When nobody drafted him, I explained the situation to [Steelers director of football operations] Kevin [Colbert], and we signed him. I can't believe he's in his second year now, and he's going to start in the Super Bowl."
Indeed on Sunday, the Steelers will line up for a frothing global audience what Rooney calls "The $8,000 backfield." That's the combined total signing bonuses the club paid Parker and fullback Dan Kreider, another unheralded back first eyeballed by Steelers scouts Phil Kreidler and Rooney. If you include Ben Roethlisberger in this part of the backfield's payroll history, the combined signing bonuses are $9,008,000 -- $4,000 for Parker, $4,000 for Kreider, $9 million for Big Ben.
"Dan Rooney was the first person ever to talk to me about pro football," Parker said appreciatively the other day. "He just kept telling me that I would have somewhere to go, that when it's all said and done that I would have somewhere to go."
Obviously, Rooney had a specific somewhere in mind, as well as a specific someone: Steelers running backs coach Dick Hoak.
"Coach Hoak really refined Willie," Rooney said. "Really showed him how to play to his abilities. The interesting thing with both Willie and Dan, from my perspective, is here we have these two running backs who didn't even get drafted, and Dick Hoak has really turned them into quality players."
Quality players have been the family business since Franco Harris was a pup, but Harris and Rocky Bleier, the starting backs in the first four Steelers Super Bowls, were famous before
they got to Pittsburgh. Still, the raw material for quality football still turns up in the darndest of places, and this organization has a long tradition of finding that as well. Dan Rooney Jr. thus takes his place in the estimable scouting lineage of his uncle, Art Rooney Jr., and of Bill Nunn, who beat the bushes for Super Bowl talent long before a lot of NFL organizations fully understood the landscape.
First Published February 2, 2006 12:00 am
