So Long, Rooney: An Ode To Man's Best Friend

I'm going to let you all in on some inside baseball. When I'm writing an OutKick article, 98% of the time I go into it knowing exactly how it will look and what I'm going to say.

Today is not one of those days and this is not one of those articles, so bear with me as a fire from the hip.

Yesterday morning, around 3 am, I had to say goodbye to my best friend, Rooney.

Rooney was an 11-12-year-old labrador retriever rescue, and he meant everything to me.

If you've ever had to put one of your pets down, you know how painful it can be, but if you haven't (lucky you), the best words I can use to describe it are "soul crushing."

These past 36 hours have been some of the hardest of my life, so I wanted to take some time to remember Rooney and let you all know what a wonderful, gentle soul we just lost.

Before I go any further, I wanted to give a shout-out to my friend/coworker/OG mentor, Amber Harding. Her story about her dog and best friend, Lucy, gave me the idea to memorialize my four-legged companion.

Meet Rooney

My wife and I adopted Rooney (then named Spike) from the Fort Worth Humane Society in May 2020, at the height of COVID insanity.

We were still living in Texas and dating at the time, and she thought it would be fun to introduce ANOTHER animal into our lives after already owning another dog (Elle) and a demon for a cat (Thor).

I was opposed to adopting him. I thought we had enough wildlife for our cozy little one-bedroom apartment, but when "Spike" kept showing up on the "Pet of the Week" lists and no one would take him, I felt like fate was trying to tell us something.

When we met Rooney, it was fairly obvious why he wasn't being picked by a potential owner.

I don't mean he was ugly – far from it, in fact – but he was a little older (they said six years, but he may have been even older than that), and he was terribly shy, to the point where we had to stand on the opposite side of the room from him just to make him comfortable.

That all changed when we let him play with Elle in the Humane Society's designated outdoor area.

The once shy and timid introvert suddenly became a social butterfly around his new sister, and although he was never a big fan of other dogs throughout the rest of his life, Elle became Rooney's rock and the two were inseparable soul dogs from then on.

In case you're wondering where we got the name "Rooney" from, my wife is a Pittsburgh sports fan and her dad's entire side of the family is Yinzer.

She wanted to name him Crosby, but every Penguins fan I know names their dog Crosby, so we settled on Rooney, after the ownership family of the Steelers.

You may disagree, but I think no dog has ever looked more like a Rooney than our guy did.

Anyway, things got off to about as bad a start as they could have for us as new dog owners, when we took Elle and Rooney on a hike in suburban Fort Worth the day after adopting him, only to have our little escape artist slip out of his leash and lead us on a multi-hour chase through poison oak-clad forests and snake-infested rivers.

When we finally caught him after cornering the ungrateful little turd in a kind stranger's backyard, we loaded him up in our car, where he promptly unleashed a nervous stream of dog crap all over the back seat of my wife's Dodge Dart.

I'm not proud of this admission, but there were times throughout Rooney's life where I wished we had never found him that day he got off his leash, because I knew losing him after 24 hours of owning him would have been a lot easier than losing him after six years.

But, even as I am grieving my loss while writing this, I realize how foolish that is, because it would have robbed us of knowing and loving one of the sweetest and most gentle creatures I have ever met.

Life Events With My "Soul Dog"

Rooney was with us through everything. So many life events happened with the Roonster right by our side.

My wife lost her dad in November 2021 from lung cancer, and Rooney was there for her when she needed him the most.

We got married in 2023, and both Rooney and Elle were big themes at our wedding, their faces adorning our party favors and artwork.

That same year, we all loaded up and moved halfway across the country to my childhood hometown of Fort Lauderdale, and they made the 20-hour car ride with us.

And, of course, perhaps most importantly, he was there for the happiest day of our lives, May 9, 2024, when my son Hudson was born, and it was at that moment I knew Rooney was the perfect dog for me.

When we brought Hudson home from the hospital, it could have been easy for Rooney to be resentful of the newest member of our family, considering he was the new kid on the block and the "baby" of the group for the longest time.

But Rooney could not have been more thrilled to welcome Huddy into our home, and the two were steadfast buddies pretty much from the word "go."

Hudson learned how to crawl, walk, talk, and more all with his best bud by his side (whom he affectionately refers to as "WeeWee," presumably because it's hard for a kid who hasn't even turned two yet to say "Rooney").

I'm sure to Rooney it may have seemed like my wife and I started loving him less when Hudson came along and became the focal point of our lives, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

We loved him even more after seeing how he cared for our son as if he were his own.

It crushes me to think that Hudson won't have any concrete memories of the dog who loved him so fiercely, but I will be making sure that he remembers who his "WeeWee" was for the rest of my life.

So Long, My Friend

As Rooney aged, he did so gracefully.

Even as recently as January, at the ripe age of 11 or 12 years old, the vets remarked on how young and healthy he looked.

He would run around my parents' backyard in the hot South Florida sun with Elle for hours, and the two were always up for long walks around our apartment complex with my wife pushing Hudson in his stroller.

All of that made what happened these last few weeks even harder to accept.

What started with a limp in his right paw in early March turned into severely limited mobility in his extremities, and the night I had to say goodbye to him, he had completely lost the ability to stand on his back two legs.

His last few nights on Earth were ones where I would wake up in the middle of the night to find him wandering around trying to find a comfortable place to lie down, so I would place him on our pullout couch and go back to sleep.

If I had known what was coming, I would have spent every night on that couch, soaking up the fleeting moments I had left with him.

When I carried him into the emergency vet at 1 o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, he couldn't even stay upright as he collapsed onto the floor of the waiting room.

Though they couldn't confirm anything without thousands of dollars of scans and weeks of testing, with how quickly it sprung up and how aggressively it robbed him of his strength and faculties, the vets theorized it was some combination of a degenerative spinal disease and cancer that had gone undetected and was now rapidly spreading throughout his body.

His lifespan was being measured in days at that point, and those days would have been filled with pain, anguish, and confusion on his part, wondering why he all of a sudden couldn't stand up anymore or run around the backyard with his best friend.

By the time they were even able to come up with a concrete idea of what was wrong, Rooney probably would have already died.

The decision was a simple but difficult one; one that I had come to a few days earlier, be it subconsciously or otherwise.

It was time to let Rooney go.

As I sat there and talked him through his final moments, I told him how special he was, how much we all loved him, and how we would miss him so dearly.

I was filled with sadness but also with relief.

I had to watch his once confident and strong stride turn into a two-legged, knuckle-dragging and laboring effort, and I couldn't stand putting him or me through that any longer.

As he drifted away, I could tell he was at peace with his favorite person in the world (besides Elle) ushering him into the afterlife. He locked eyes with me and never looked away, even long after his heart stopped beating.

These past few days have been brutal.

Seeing Rooney wither away and be snatched from us in such a swift manner is a hard pill to swallow, so I'm choosing to remember him as he was in these pictures I'm sharing: forever young and strong. Forever pure and innocent.

Forever our Rooney.

So long, my friend. I love you more than you'll ever know.