When I was a kid I
had a book about Joe Bellino, who died a few days ago aged 81. The
star of Navy's 1960 football team, which went 9-1 and lost to
Missouri in the Orange Bowl, Bellino won the Heisman Trophy
overwhelmingly that year; the first Midshipman to win it, and what
turned out the first of two Navy players in four seasons, as Roger
Staubach followed him in 1963.
The book must've
been published after he won the Heisman, so I might have got it for
my birthday (which was the day before Joe's on the calendar) or it
might have been the following Christmas. I suspect the latter,
because although my dad was a Navy fan, having enlisted at 17 during
World War II, I think we may have spent Christmas in Boston that
year, and my Uncle Jack might have picked it up for me. Which is also
a sign of how much I loved football in my youth.
In any case, I
remember some of the book very well, especially about Bellino's
exploits at Winchester High in Massachusetts. He was, apparently,
known as 'The Wnchester Rifle' but honestly I didn't remember that at
all. Besides football, he was a baseball star good enough to get
drafted by the Pirates, and as a basketball player led Winchester to
two championships before the school was moved up a division and they
lost a third. In those days we paid attention to the Massachusetts'
large school champs, because the two (from Eastern and Western Mass)
would join two Connecticut schools and one each from the other four
New England states in an annual high school tournament at the Boston
Garden, an even dominated by Connecticut teams.
Doing some research,
I also recalled Bellino did a post-grad year, at Columbian Academy,
where he scored
three touchdowns against the Navy plebes (freshman) team in an upset
win. This was ironic, since I would go to a prep school where we took
in post-grads; my junior and senior years I would be the only one
from my class not a PG who played. He would have done that to get
his grade point average or his SAT scores up to the required level
for admission, and interestingly Staubach did the same, at New Mexico
Military Academy, in the alien-visit town of Roswell.
Of course that made
both of them a year more mature when they started college, and each
would have played on freshman teams before becoming eligible for the
varsity. You can find some film on Bellino on you tube. He was listed
at 5-9 185, and he is built low to the ground and strong-legged. You
can see him break tackles easily; he has good vision and most of all
surprising speed (he led the Navy baseball team in stolen bases).
Navy was never as
much of a power as Army—West Point's greatest teams, of course,
came toward the end of World War II, when they had older players like
Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis who were grabbed by the army from other
colleges. Navy had a great team coached by Paul Brown at the Great
Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago, but they weren't at the
Academy. But under coach Wayne Hardin (with Steve Belichick, Bills
father as a scout/assistant) Navy had a brief flowering in the early
Sixties. The service academies were beginning to shrink: Yale had
beaten Army in 1956, and Air Force had come into being and taken some
glamour away. But as the lure of professional football grew (and the
money) the four year commitment required in the service in return for
your college education became a negative selling point. Nowadays the
academies often waive the requirement to allow players into the NFL,
and cash in on the patriotic publicity: back in the day Gen. Maxwell
Taylor backed down from allowing Davis and Blanchard to go to the
NFL, and neither Bellino or Staubach seemed to hesitate with their
commitments. I can't begin to tell you how inspirational the book
made Joe Bellino appear; I recall seeing picture of young Bill
throwing a ball with Bellino and reading something about how he
idolized him, and I could understand why. For a brief while, until
Vietnam War protest radicalized me at age 15 or 16, I had a thought
of going to Navy as well.
Ironically, when I
was a sophomore at Wesleyan, we scrimmaged Army (well, mostly their
second-string) at West Point, and at lunch in the huge mess hall, as
cadets leapt onto our table screaming at us (the word 'hippie' might
have sounded) I didn't regret my decision. We won that scrimmage, and
went undefeated that season back at Division III, winning the Lambert
Cup, the small version of the Lambert Trophy Navy won in 1960, as the
top team in the East.
That Navy team was
good. They had beaten Army the year before; Bellino scored three
touchdowns in that game, no one had ever done that in an Army-Nevy
game before. They were still lightly-regarded, but early in the
season they beat Washington, with Bob Schloredt at QB, in Seattle;
Washington would beat number one Minnesota in the Rose Bowl (the
polls closed well before the New Year's Bowl Games in those days).
Washington coach Jim Owens said 'he made us look like we hadn't
practised tackling'. They beat Notre Dame, and took their only loss
at Duke 19-10; Duke wound up rated number 10 and beat no.7 Arkansas
(with Lance Alworth) in the Cotton Bowl. Goes to show you what the
pollsters know. Navy was ranked number 4 (no. 2 Mississippi beat Rice
in the Sugar Bowl; no.3 Iowa was second in the Big Ten and thus
couldn't go to any bowl game). Missouri was ranked 5, and unbeaten,
but with an asterisk, and looking that up I remembered the scandal
vividly.
Kansas beat Missouri
but had to forfeit that game (and one to Colorado) for playing Bert
Coan at halftime, because TCU had violated rules recruiting Coan, who
then transferred to Kansas. This was the Kansas team that had John
Hadl still playing halfback, but with Coan joining Curtis McClinton,
they moved him to quarterback in 1961. Coan, like McClinton, was big
(6-4 215) but ran a 9.4 100 yards. His pro career never panned out,
while McClinton had a good one with the Chiefs.
Bellino's senior season was pretty spectacular. He ran for 834 yards at 5.0 per carry, caught 15 passes for 264 yards and 3 TDs. He threw two TD passes (though he was only 5/14 passing), quick-kicked (!) 11 times for a 47 yard average (a lot of rolling involved there) returned kicks , kicked a couple of extra points and like most of the players in the game, played defense too.
He won the
Heisman in a runaway. Check out the photo at the top and compare with the Heisman pose! With points allotted 3-2-1 for first, second
and third place votes he had 1,793 points; second place went to
Minnesota guard Tom Brown, with 731. Yes, guard. Yes, he did play
both ways, but still, football was a different game then. Third was
Ol' Miss quarterback Jake Gibbs, who became a catcher for the Yankees
and Senators. Gibbs was second in the South and Southwest; Brown in
the mid-west, and UCLA tailback Billy Kilmer second in the west (he
finished fifth. Mike Ditka was sixth; Ohio State quarterback Tom
Matte (a halfback in the NFL with the Colts) was seventh, and
center/linebacker EJ Holub of Texas Tech was 10th: Holub
would be the only player to start Super Bowls on both sides of the
ball, center in one, linebacker in another, for the Chiefs. One name that I hadn't thought of in years was
Pervis Atkins of New Mexico State, who was ninth in the voting but
had an unsuccessful career in the NFL/AFL (but acted in the The
Longest Yard).
1960 was an
interesting year; I watched undefeated Yale play that year; they
wound up ranked no14 in the country. Yale's Ben Balme was the other
starting guard on the AP All-America team, but center Mike Pyle had a
long career with the Chicago Bears. The quarterback Tom Singleton got
written up in Sports Illustrated; he threw 70 passes all year, while
the fullback Bob Blanchard was the running threat; he was a local
hero from Hamden just outside New Haven.
In the rest of the
country outside Connecticut, Norman Snead and Roman Gabriel were the
'best' NFL QBs, while Ernie Davis was just starting at 7-3 Syracuse
and Bob Lilly was at TCU.
In the Orange Bowl,
Missouri beat Navy 21-14, ending Joe's career with a loss. He was
shut down completely as a runner, though he caught a touchdown pass.
And it was the end of his football glory too. Because of the
four-year commitment, he wasn't drafted until the 17th
round by Washington (pick 227); in the AFL draft he lasted until the
Pats took him in the 19th round (pick 146). He graduated
in 1961; he joined Boston in 1965. He didn't play much, and mostly as
a kick returner; he seems to have been effective as a pass catcher,
but not as a runner. The years off obviously hurt. Although, in 1963
he was stationed in Newport Rhode Island, and he played for the
Providence Steamroller of the Atlantic Coast Football League.
I knew the ACFL well
too: those were the years when the Ansonia Black Knights played in
the league, but it was a semi-pro operation. Later some teams would
join the Continental League, then a couple return to the ACFL for a
couple of pretty good years when teams were actual feeders to NFL
teams. Oddly enough, Wayne Hardin's college coaching career would
come to a screeching halt in 1966 when he went to the Continental
League and coached the Philadelphia Bulldogs to the title. Why, I do
not know, but Bill Walsh came out of the CFL too.
I couldn't find any
stat line for Bellino, but he scored three TDs, and I believe played only three games for Providence. The Steamroller went 6-6 in the league (and
won three exhibition games, two against non-league teams). They
played the Boston Nu-Way Sweepers three times (one an exhibition)
which I mention only because I love the name.
They beat the Black
Knights in Ansonia, and beat the Harrisburg Capitols in the
third-place (runner-up) in the post-season. While he was playing
before small crowds, Staubach was winning the Heisman for the 1963
season; leading Navy to another 9-1 season. They were ranked number 2
in the country, despite losing 24-22 to SMU in the Cotton Bowl
stadium in Dallas; they handed number four Pittsburgh their only loss
of the year. They suffered another post-season loss, to top-ranked
Texas in the Cotton Bowl game, meaning they were unbeaten outside the
Cotton Bowl that year.
Writing this I feel
a lot like the ten-year old kid who loved playing touch football (the
Kennedys had turned us on to that), wanted to follow in my father's
football-playing footsteps, read coaching guides from the 1930s that
advised punting on first down inside your ten, and made football
cards from magazine pictures and created a probability game,
APBA-style, after sending for their free sample then making my own
charts. It was so much fun, and so much simpler then.
Joe Bellino didn't leave the Navy after four years just to try pro football. His son was stillborn when he was on a ship in the Atlantic; his mother-in-law died while he was in Japan. As it was, he served
24 years in the naval reserve after his pro career ended (he was
taken by the Bengals in the AFL expansion draft but retired rather
than move to Cincinnati) and retired a captain. He was a successful
businessman in Massachusetts, and is a member of the College Football
Hall of Fame. RIP.
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