Five days after the passing of George Steinbrenner, the instantaneous and therefore borderline tasteless debate over how to calibrate his baseball legacy has finally surrendered some momentum.

The Yankees' owner was fabulously successful, obviously, but the blustery Steinbrenner caricature Larry David gave us in "Seinfeld" likely didn't even approach the reality of the Boss's knee-jerk combustibility. A former Yankees front-office staffer once explained it like this.

"When the phone rings in the middle of the night, either someone has died or it's Steinbrenner. And still, I hoped it wasn't Steinbrenner."

So, if you prefer that the owners of your sports team occupy cooler climes closer to the other end of the emotional spectrum, like the Rooneys, by random example, the bombastic Bronx bully probably wasn't for you.

But, as it happens, a world where the Rooneys owned the Yankees was not always purely fantasy.

"The Chief would have loved it," Art Rooney Jr. said this week. "He loved baseball even more than football. When the Pirates used to call up players from the minors in September, the Chief and his brother, Father Dan -- they were both great minor league players in their day -- would go down to the clubhouse and talk with the new guys. Slip 'em $50 or $100, swap stories."

When the great Pittsburgh writer Roy McHugh was shepherding Art Jr.'s stories and memories into the sprawling family history that was published as "Ruanaidh (Rooney in Gaelic), The Story of Art Rooney and His Clan," the second of the Chief's five sons mentioned in passing that a list of things the Chief owned, nearly owned, or was approached about owning should probably include the New York Yankees.

McHugh's reaction -- "What?!" -- wasn't the first gasp of inquisitive exasperation attached to this little narrative over the past 40 years.

"If he was offered the Yankees, he didn't think about it for very long," said Tim Rooney, the president of Yonkers Raceway and Art Jr.'s younger brother. "He wasn't a person who would go into a bank and borrow $6 million, which is about what it would have taken. That wasn't his way of doing things."

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This was in the late '60s, when the Yankees were owned by CBS and when, for one of the few times in their history, they were as likely to lose as win. In '66, three years prior to the leagues splitting into divisions, the Yankees of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Joe Pepitone, Horace Clarke, and Hector Lopez finished 10th in a 10-team league. CBS wanted to dump them and, according to Art Jr., made that fresh information known to the Chief.

"Make a legitimate offer for the ballclub and it's yours," Art recounted in his book. "You'd know how to run it."

If the Chief didn't take long to mull it over, he regretted it for the rest of his life.

"Regretted it big-time," Art said this week. "He was remorseful. 'I didn't use my head,' he told me. 'I had three boys who weren't involved in football. I could have bought the team for Tim, John, and Pat.' "

The Chief had first seen only obstacles. He'd made his fortune as a gambler, which baseball found unsavory, so he might not have been approved. The NFL had rules against multiple ownership. He didn't have that kind of available cash.

"We could have borrowed $6 million from a small local bank," Art Jr. remembered John McCartney saying. McCartney was the family's Philadelphia-based financial adviser.

"McCartney was in a state of shock when he heard the Chief turned it down," Art said.

Again -- "What?!"

Steinbrenner finally bought the Yankees from CBS in January 1973, but even that wasn't the end of the Rooneys' interest.

"The law firm that represented Steinbrenner, one of the partners lived near me in Scarsdale, and we were pretty close," Tim said this week. "When Steinbrenner had the problems [getting indicted for illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon and suspended by baseball late in '74], I told him that, if Steinbrenner was forced to leave the game, we'd be interested."

By that time, of course, the Chief was on his way to the first of four Super Bowl titles, on his way to being the beloved figure and famous American sportsman who would have been welcomed in New York.

Steinbrenner, of course, weathered that storm and, while winning the World Series seven times, triggered 5,000 others.

It's disorienting just trying to imagine how the sports landscape here and in New York and most everywhere else would have been altered had the Rooneys owned the Yankees.

Just off the top of my head, it would not exactly have been a boon to the back pages of the Gotham tabloids, especially while the Bronx was burning:

"CHIEF TO BILLY, JAX: YER DOIN' GREAT, GOOD LUCK TO YA!"

Gene Collier's "Two-Minute Warning" videos are featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.