“Pittsburgh’s Going to the Super Bowl!” Pitt Sports Historian Rob Ruck Is Available to Discuss the Steelers’ Storied History Under the Leadership of the Rooney Family

PITTSBURGH—Rob Ruck, University of Pittsburgh faculty member and sports historian, is available to discuss the Pittsburgh Steelers football team and its historic success under the leadership of the late Art Rooney, legendary owner of the Steelers. Ruck, with Maggie Patterson and the late Michael Weber, is author of Rooney: A Sporting Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), which portrays the history of professional football and the role Rooney played in shaping that history. 

Ruck’s other work includes the documentary The Republic of Baseball: The Dominican Giants of the American Game released on PBS in 2006-07. The documentary is based on Ruck’s book The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic (Mecklermedia, 1991; Carroll & Graf, 1993; and University of Nebraska Press, 1999), which received the MacMillan-Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) Award in 1991. He also was project director, producer, and writer of Kings on the Hill: Baseball’s Forgotten Men, a documentary about the Negro Leagues and the role of sports in the Black community, for which he received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Cultural Programming in 1994. 

Ruck has served as guest historian for sports exhibitions at the Senator John Heinz Regional History Center in Pittsburgh. 

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