This time, there were no politicians on the podium. This was a big day for that big stadium on the North Side, but this was not a celebration for the public sector.

This time, only one of the two men who will coach the teams that will play in that big stadium was on the podium, and just two former players. No one asked any of them to speak.

One of the two main speakers was the son of a former pro football head coach, but he was introduced merely as being the son of a former offensive coordinator. No one felt any need to set the record straight.

Friday morning a handful of men dressed in nice suits stood and talked in the sunshine in front of a rapidly emerging stadium built specifically for football, but this had nothing to do with the game. This is business.

So it had to be for Heinz Field, so it had to be for the Steelers. A corporate sponsor was needed and, understandably, that sponsor had no desire to pay for any name that would be shared with anything or anybody. No Heinz Stadium at Rooney Point. No Rooney Field/Heinz Coliseum combination. Nothing personal, mind you. This is business.

How much it would have meant to the Rooneys to have the family name included in any sort of deal we never will know. Not that it matters. That would have been pride. This is business.

Art Rooney II made a point yesterday to tell his audience that his grandfather, the legendary "Chief," (whose statue will be located in a plaza outside the stadium, alongside a road named for him) would have accepted the arrangement.

"My grandfather understood the business of pro football as well as anyone," said Rooney. "He often said meeting the payroll on Monday was just as exciting as winning the game on Sunday."

The Steelers do not have to sweat out Mondays any more like Art Rooney Sr. had to back in the team's formative years. The popularity of the NFL product is one reason, but popularity is cyclical. No, the stability is more a result of the solid connection between the league and corporate America.

So, while it might pain you a bit when Bill Johnson - the CEO of Heinz and the son of the former Cincinnati Bengals coach Bill "Tiger" Johnson - talks about "having fun" with this corporate sponsorship and hints that the famed "red zone" might be rechristened "the ketchup zone," you have to understand, this is how things work now. This is business.

The Heinz sponsorship was "a piece of the puzzle that had to be in place," said Art Rooney II, who quarterbacked (can I still say that?) the deal for the Steelers. The piece of the puzzle that will produce $57 million in revenue over 20 years and help defray the cost of the new facility. A new facility that will transport the Steelers into the glorious ranks of big-revenue teams.

The only piece of the puzzle that didn't make sense was why the Steelers waited so long to announce it. In contrast, the Pirates got two years of revenue and PNC got two years of naming-rights benefits before that stadium even opened. Heinz barely gets two months.

"It came down to negotiation," said Johnson. "We indicated to them what we were prepared to pay and they searched alternatives."

The Steelers came back to Heinz because, in the end, the deal made the most sense for Heinz, which is a local company with national and international tentacles. The NFL connection works on several levels for Heinz.

In contrast, for local big-timers (such as UPMC), the naming rights could not have been worth as much. What would "UPMC" possibly mean to a West Coast TV audience? Perhaps the Steelers were hoping for a better deal from a national sponsor with no local connection, but the attraction of such things are not what they were before corporate stadium names became so commonplace.

So, in the end, we were left with a match of "naturals." A merger of two long-time North Shore neighbors. A corporate name that carries with it a trace of the corporation's agricultural roots. Not that neighborliness or agriculture had anything to do with it. This is business.

Bill Modoono is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

denny