Billy Sullivan, right, attends ceremonies in 1983 to rededicate the Patriots' stadium in Foxboro as Sullivan Stadium. With him are Howard Cosell and team general manager Chuck Sullivan.

Providence Journal-Bulletin / Rachel Ritchie

Billy Sullivan purchased the Patriots with $8,000 he had set aside as a down payment for a summer house on Cape Cod.

Daniel Snyder, who sold his marketing company for more than $2 billion, bought the Redskins for $800 million when he was only 35 years old.

Art Rooney made the money to pay his Pittsburgh Steelers during the Depression by beating the bookies at Saratoga race track.

Mark Cuban bought the NBA Dallas Mavericks for $285 million in 2000, the year after he sold his internet company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo at the height of the dot.com bubble for $5.9 billion.

With which men would you prefer to spend time? Which teams would you rather root for?

Rooney and Sullivan are long gone now, as are the sporting times in which they established themselves as two of the more likeable figures in sports.

While it must be acknowledged that Snyder and Cuban are brilliant entrepreneurs, they aren’t exactly likeable.

Art Rooney and head coach Chuck Noll with the Vince Lombardi trophy after the Steelers won Super Bowl XIV in January 1980.

AP photo / Harry Cabluck

Rooney and Sullivan came to mind last week when I was writing a column for The Sunday Journal about how the Patriots, back when Billy owned the team, hoped to achieve the status that Rooney’s highly successful Steelers had in the ‘70s – the franchise against which all others were measured.

Sullivan’s Pats never reached that goal. It wasn’t until after Robert Kraft – a combination of old-time sportsman, like Rooney and Sullivan, and modern-day businessman, like Cuban and Snyder – bought the team that New England reached the heights Sullivan dreamed of when he obtained the last available franchise in the brand-new American Football League in 1959.

The patriarch of the Patriots, who died in 1998 at the age of 82, was as loquacious as he was lovable. He also could be irascible and combative. He loved to talk, and it was a treat to listen to him tell stories about his days as publicity man for his alma mater, Boston College; Notre Dame, when the legendary Frank Leahy was coaching the Fighting Irish; and the Boston Braves, who won the National League pennant in 1948 using the famous formula of “Spahn, Sain, and two days of rain.” Had all of Billy’s stories about his beloved Patriots ever been collected in one volume, it would have made War and Peace seem as thin as a comic book.

He had hoped to obtain an NFL franchise for Boston, but lost out to Minnesota. He then turned his inexhaustible efforts – he was once described as being like sandpaper: “He wears you down,” – to landing a team in the AFL.

“At the time,” Sullivan told me, “I had $8,000 to my name. I was the only man (buying a franchise) who was not independently wealthy – or even dependently wealthy. I hustled around to come up with the $25,000 the league required.”

Rooney, who lived his whole life in Pittsburgh, was a bit of a hustler himself.

A good athlete as a young man – he was an amateur boxing champion, and played both semi-pro football and minor league baseball – Rooney knew even more about handicapping horses than Snyder does about marketing, or Cuban does about the financial possibilities of the internet.

He once told the late Red Smith –– the successor to Grantland Rice as the best sports columnist in America –– about how he won a reputed quarter-million dollars (Rooney never did divulge the exact amount) on opening day at Saratoga in 1936.

It was a rainy afternoon, but Rooney must have known how certain horses would run on a sloppy track. In those days, bets were placed with individual bookmakers, licensed to operate at the track, rather than at pari-mutuel windows, and Rooney hit one race after another.

“I was betting with Peter Blong, who was right up there with the big books,” Rooney told Smith, “and after I’d hit him for about three winners, he said: ‘That’s enough.’

“Anyway, I came close to sweeping the card. I was sitting with Bill Corum, the sportswriter, who saw what I was doing and wrote a column about me breaking the books. He did it mostly to needle George Marshall, who owned the Redskins and was a reformed horseplayer and was against anybody in the league betting.”

Marshall, a bigoted man who was the last NFL owner to sign a black player – and who also moved the Redskins franchise from Boston, where they’d played at Braves Field and Fenway Park, to Washington in 1937 – was not the sort of owner you’d root for.

Not like Sullivan and Rooney, who were sportsmen first, and businessmen second.

They don’t make ‘em like those two any more. Unfortunately.

jdonalds@projo.com