AMERICA AT LARGE:WHEN WE were making dinner plans the night before a boxing card in South Florida a couple of months ago, I opted for a restaurant in Palm Beach called Testa's, for entirely sentimental reasons: it was the last place I saw Art Rooney, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

The morning after a spring training game more than 20 years ago I’d stopped there for breakfast on my way back north, and came across the patrician owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who invited me to join him. “The Chief” was in the neighbourhood because he also owned the West Palm Beach Kennel Club, and we had a convivial chat over coffee and eggs that morning on Royal Poinciana Boulevard. Within a year he was dead.

Art’s oldest son, Dan Rooney, spent the week following his nomination as the United States’ Ambassador to Ireland in a sort of bittersweet victory lap, making the rounds of his friends and colleagues who comprise one of the sporting world’s more exclusive clubs – the owners of the National Football League’s 32 franchises – at the NFL’s annual meetings in Dana Point, California.

To a man, they wished him well, and to a man, they privately wished he were remaining among them. As Pittsburgh columnist Ron Cook noted a couple of days ago, “what’s good for Rooney, the Obama administration, and Ireland clearly isn’t good for the NFL.”

As Dan Rooney gears up for the confirmation process that will precede his taking up residency in the Phoenix Park, negotiations also continue apace to shore up the muddled ownership picture of the Pittsburgh Steelers – a franchise he operates but scarcely owns outright. That this task is enormously complicated in the context of a foreboding economy goes without saying.

The Steelers will survive his absence, but with the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement with its players due to expire in two years and new NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith committed to a hardline position, the league already finds itself contemplating its first work-stoppage in more then two decades in the absence of the man historically best-equipped to prevent one.

Rooney hasn’t been a “visionary” owner on the order of, say, the Patriots’ Robert Kraft, but the diplomatic skills he will be taking to Dublin have served him in good stead over the years. A consensus-builder, he almost single-handedly negotiated the conclusion of one such labour dispute a quarter century ago, and as the architect of the so-called “Rooney Rule” – which requires that minority candidates be interviewed for vacant coaching positions – he commands a respect from a union membership whose majority consists of African Americans.

With some Johnny-come-lately-millionaire owners nearly as hardline in their positions as DeMaurice Smith (“there isn’t a day that we will not prepare for war”) the ameliorating influence of a Dan Rooney would be a handy thing to have around over these next couple of years.

Dan Rooney is well known as the co-founder of the American Ireland Fund and for the establishment of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, but he wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Art Rooney was the son of a Pittsburgh saloonkeeper, and he made his money the old-fashioned way: from the bookmakers.

At the height of the Depression, Art was approached by a Pittsburgh priest seeking funds for the upkeep of an orphanage. Art surprised him by peeling off $10,000 in cash. The astonished priest felt constrained to ask if they money represented “ill-gotten gains.” “Oh, No, Father,” the Chief assured him. “I won it at the racetrack.” That would have been in 1932 – the year Dan Rooney was born.

The legend is that Art Rooney founded the Steelers off the profits of one fabulous weekend at Saratoga, but as so often happens, the legend is somewhat confused.

Art did indeed use the bulk of a modest Saratoga score to pay the $2,500 initiation fee to purchase the Steelers in 1933, but the big score came three years later, and it took place over two days at two racetracks. Rooney had John Lardner, then a Newsweek columnist, along for what he described as “Rooney’s Ride.” (The Chief revelled in the company of sportswriters: “They were all my friends. They were horseplayers, and so was I.”) By some accounts the Chief knocked off eight straight winners, but others say it may have been 11. The score for the weekend – and this was in the midst of the Depression – reportedly came to $380,000.

In About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, his seminal account of the Steelers, Roy Blount Jr described it as "probably the greatest individual performance in the history of American horse-playing".

That stake allowed Rooney to ride out a decade in which many NFL teams foundered. During the second World War, beset by attendance problems and manpower shortages, Rooney merged his team with the Philadelphia Eagles, then owned by Bert Bell. The two jointly operated a team known as the “Steagles” for the duration of the hostilities.

After the war, Rooney’s Steelers returned to Pittsburgh. Bell, his erstwhile partner, divested himself of his ownership and became the NFL’s Commissioner. One of his first acts, ironically, was to enact sweeping anti-gambling rules covering both players and owners. Bert Bell had two sons. The youngest, Upton, would become general manager of the New England Patriots. The elder, Bert Jr, became a pit boss at at Atlantic City casino.

Once pari-mutuel wagering made the bookie rings essentially extinct, Art Rooney’s interest in playing horses began to wane. Instead he started buying racetracks and those, along with the NFL team, formed the underpinnings of an empire his five sons would eventually inherit.

Given the millions upon millions wagered on NFL games at the Las Vegas sports books, ownership connections with “casino gambling” have long been discouraged. But with the advent of tele-track wagering and bet-from-home internet gambling, many smaller horse tracks and virtually every dog track in the country have been forced to install slot machines for their survival. This makes them, in the eyes of the NFL, “casinos” and included in that designation were many of the Rooney family holdings.

Another NFL guideline calls for at least 30 per cent of the controlling interest in each team to be controlled by a single individual. When Art Rooney died 21 years ago, his five sons each inherited 16 per cent of the Steelers. (The remaining 20 per cent was cut up among a group of cousins.) The result has been a two-pronged assault on the Steelers’ compliance that has seen the Rooney brothers occasionally at one another’s throats, as some members attempted to divest themselves of the “casino” holdings while others tried to consolidate them, and for a time pitted brother against brother (and sometimes cousin) in an attempt to buy up the requisite 30 per cent of stock in the team.

In this regard, Dan and Art II would appear to have the upper hand, but it is an ongoing process and one unlikely to escape the attention of the Senate Subcommittee vetting Dan’s appointment to Dublin this month.

But make no mistake about it, he will be confirmed, and the NFL’s loss will be Ireland’s gain. You’re going to love him. He is his father’s son – and I can think of no higher recommendation.