First, tell me about the status of The Chief now?

The play is going on at the Pittsburgh Public Theater through November 7th. It’s the first time back there since 2014. The Pittsburgh Public Theater selected The Chief as it’s first play to perform there after the pandemic. So it’s a great honor.

What surprised you most as you and Rob Zellers wrote the play?

There weren’t many surprises in the play itself. It’s more that I was just new to the theater, as was Rob. Maybe the biggest surprise was that when Rob said The Chief would make a really good one-man play, that I agreed.

It felt preposterous to try it. It was a long writing process. We shared it with Dan Rooney and Myron Cope at first, amongst others, and they didn’t really like it at first. It changed over time in many ways. When the Pittsburgh Public Theater decided that they wanted to put the play on, it felt like being an astronaut and being told your going to space.

One thing that’s important to note is that the play isn’t based off of a book. Back then there wasn’t a book on Art Rooney. I know there are some now, but there weren’t any then.

What changed over that process to get it to the point where people really felt good about it?

We just hadn’t really captured who he was. One problem was that I didn’t know Art until his last five years, and Rob never knew him.

In the time I got to know him, I knew there really was no one like him. He made such a tremendous impression on me. He was so selfless. He was one of those rare people that when they asked how you were doing, they really wanted to know how you were doing.

At the start, I think it was just a bunch of stories on paper. It was too stilted. We didn’t capture him – who he was – but we kept plugging at it. We got a lot of help from a lot of people. Dan, Myron, and Roy McHugh too. Roy would give us good advice – he’d tell us the Chief would never say something like this or that…

I spoke with Jim Rooney who said that Art’s “Passion for fairness” was the driving factor in him. Did you get any sense on what instilled that in him?

Jim was really valuable in helping us understand more about what the Steelers meant socially to the city of Pittsburgh at the time of the dynasty. Pittsburgh was really struggling – the steel industry was declining. It used to be the city could count on the Steelers losing and on the steel industry for jobs. It all got inverted. The Steelers were dominating the world but people were losing hope as the steel industry suffered. That dynamic was critical for us to capture in the play.

I think the Chief was into a lot of sketchier things early on in his life. He was a fighter, a promoter – a showman. I think that gave him an awareness of what was going on around him. He understood the kind of people that make up a community – who lived in the shadier areas, who went to church, who the people were that were the heart of the community. He had an unreal awareness of people. Any time we had a chance in the play to show that, we tried to do it.

There’s a spot where he talks about growing up in World War I – he talks about who you had to be careful around. It’s like he had 20-20 vision for those sorts of things.

How did the writing process work?

It was an odd writing process. Rob and I never sat together to write the play. I’d write stuff and he did his stuff and we’d send it to one another. When the Pittsburgh Public Theater looked at it again they realized we weren’t far away from a legitimate script. They also realized it would be a way to bring people to the theater that wouldn’t normally come before. They had people tailgating before the play and coming in wearing Steelers jerseys. People would would never have done anything that before! And you don’t normally see Rocky or Franco sitting there either.

What was the hardest part of the process?

The most difficult thing I took away was that I had a broadcast journalism major in college. I was aware that writing for tv and radio was different than writing for a newspaper. But writing The Chief – it was difficult writing for something that was meant to be said, not read. I had to learn to write around that. To write for how it sounded versus it being read.

As a performer in your own right, did you prefer writing of performing?

As you know, writing is hard work. Performing is more of a high-wire act. When I did stand-up, I realized you either win big or lose big. Ultimately that wore me down. That’s why I recently retired from performing. It was giving me nightmares – of not being able to get places, not being able to remember stuff and audiences facing the wrong way. They were happening regularly. When it’s good stand-up is great – it’s a narcotic. You feel like you are commanding an audience and hearing them laugh.

What is it like for you to see your work come together and being performed? Surreal?

Oh yeah. I had this conversation with Ray Didinger who wrote Tommy and Me, about the Eagles’ Tommy McDonald that became a play as well. It’s petrifying when you see it performed on stage. Especially when it’s just one guy – as a one-man play. Tom Atkins was the first to perform it and he is terrific. But what if he can’t remember a line? It’s 88 minutes of just him – there’s nobody to play off of! But it’s a great experience watching the crowd as they watch him.

Why did Tom agree to do it at first?

Tom was in a number of plays at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. He was one of their go-to guys in their stable of actors. We wrote it with him in mind though we never dreamed he would do it. But we kept after him. Now we’re grateful to have Phil Winters doing it who is also a terrific actor.

Steelers Takeaways fundraising drive!

Help keep these free interviews coming! If you can, please donate as little (or as much!) as you like by contributing to Steelers Takeaways here:

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/pittsburghsports

Read more by former Steelers via the book Steelers Takeaways: Player Memories Through the Decades.  To order, just click on the book: