Football has had a place of prominence in the annals of Jersey City sports history for almost a century. Although the game took a while to capture the fancy of sports enthusiasts and participants, it has produced its fair share of historic moments.
While college football was becoming all the rage throughout New Jersey at the turn of the 20th century – especially on campuses like Rutgers and Princeton – the Jersey City colleges refrained from fielding competitive teams, only offering football as a club sport. St. Peter’s College didn’t begin fielding varsity football teams until the 1960s, right after New Jersey State Teachers College (now New Jersey City University) fielded its first varsity team in 1965.
So football on the amateur level was limited to the high school set. In the early 1930s, Dickinson High School was the perennial powerhouse.
Coached by Charlie Witkowski, an All-American performer at Villanova who later became the mayor of Jersey City, the Dickinson football team of 1930 became the second-ever champion of the Hudson County Interscholastic Athletic Association, then defeated a highly regarded Passaic team to win what was known as the Tri-County title.
The Rams were 9-0 that season and led by lineman Ed Franco, halfback Al Barabas and standout twins Milt and Walt Singer. Milt Singer was a running back while Walt was an end. The team also featured All-State running back Mickey Albers, one of the first Jersey City athletes to ever earn All-State honors.
Dickinson was blessed to have other standouts in the early 1930s like Paul Berezny and Leo Morchauser, both of whom went on to have solid college football careers after leaving Dickinson. In 2003, the 1930 Dickinson team was ranked as the eighth best team in the history of New Jersey high school football.
After leaving Dickinson, Al Barabas had a fine career at Columbia University, leading Columbia to a 7-0 upset victory over Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl, scoring the game’s lone touchdown on a 17-yard run, a play that became known as “The Hidden Ball Trick,” because Barabas ran with the football tucked under his jersey.
With the game appearing to be headed for a scoreless tie and being played in pouring rain in Pasadena, legendary Columbia coach Lou Little called for the KF-79 play, which required the entire team to make it look like it was running right, except for Barabas, who picked up the ball, put it under his shirt and ran untouched to the left for the game’s lone score.
Barabas was later drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in the first-ever NFL Draft in 1936. But Barabas never played professional football. While Barabas gained fame for his brilliant play in the Rose Bowl, his high school teammate Ed Franco earned immortality.
Franco went on to play at Fordham University and was part of the Fordham offensive line in 1936 that earned the nickname “The Seven Blocks of Granite,” along with Leo Paquin, Johnny Druze, Al Babartsky, Natty Pierce, Alex Wojciechowicz (who later had a brilliant career with the Detroit Lions) and another fellow by the name of Vince Lombardi.
Franco was an All-American tackle for two seasons at Fordham, culminating with the 1936 team that was undefeated and considered the best college football team in the country. A school publicist came up with “Seven Blocks of Granite” to offset Notre Dame’s “Four Horsemen” and focused on the seven players up front: the center, two guards, two tackles and two ends. Franco was perhaps the best of the blocking bunch, even better than Lombardi, who went on to become perhaps the greatest coach in the history of football.
Franco was named the captain of the famed East-West Shrine Game in 1938. Franco was also drafted by the then fledgling NFL and taken by the Cleveland Rams in the 1938 draft. Like Barabas, he also chose not to play pro football, because the salaries at that time were ridiculously low and nothing comparable to pro baseball.
Franco went back to Fordham as an assistant coach and later worked for teammate Lombardi as a scout for the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s. Franco was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1980 and at the time of his death in 1992 was still an active employee in the Jersey City Department of Recreation. An athletic facility in downtown Jersey City, near where Franco grew up and just down the hill from Dickinson, was named in his honor while Franco was still alive.
IN 1938, the Jersey City Little Giants of the American Football Association, the minor league affiliate of the NFL’s New York Giants, won the league championship. It remains the only professional football championship won by a Jersey City-based team. The team remained in Jersey City for seven seasons and featured future sportscasting legend Marty Glickman on its roster.
On Nov. 24, 1940, Paul Tagliabue was born at Jersey City’s Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital. Nearly 49 years later, the Jersey City native would become the fourth man to serve as commissioner of the National Football League. In 1989, Tagliabue, who was a basketball star in high school at St. Michael’s of Union City and in college at Georgetown, took over as the league’s commissioner, after serving as the league’s top attorney for several years. He remained as the league’s top honcho for 18 years, retiring in 2006.
In the pre-World War II era, Al Blozis was a sight to behold. A behemoth of a man, Blozis stood 6-foot-6 and weighed 245 pounds, dwarfing the opposition that he faced as a student at Dickinson High School.
Blozis was a standout in football and track and field. He was a dominating football player and threw the discus and the shot put to distances never before seen.
After earning All-State honors in both sports at Dickinson, Blozis went on to Georgetown University, where he was the national indoor and outdoor shot put champion in 1942 and 1943. He also set the world indoor record for the shot put in 1941.
Blozis was also an All-American in football as a lineman, but his prowess as an athlete was amazing because he could throw a football 70 yards in the air in an era when the forward pass was unheard of.
After graduating from Georgetown, Blozis was drafted and signed by the New York Giants, where he was an All-Pro tackle for two seasons. At the time, he was considered one of the best linemen in the young history of the NFL.
In December 1943, Blozis was inducted into the U.S. Army to fight in World War II. He was quickly commissioned as a second lieutenant and in late 1944 was sent overseas. In January 1945, his platoon was in the Vosges Mountains of France scouting enemy lines when two of his men, a sergeant and a private, failed to return from patrol.
Blozis headed out alone to search for his men and never returned. For four months, Blozis was considered missing, but in April of that year, the Army confirmed his death. He was one of two New York Giant players to be killed in World War II.
The Giants retired Blozis’s No. 32 and it remains retired today. The gymnasium at Dickinson High School was named in his honor.
A HARD-WORKING, driven, enthusiastic coach took over the football and baseball programs at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City in 1945. His name was Bill Cochrane and he remained a presence at the powerful parochial school for 25 years, winning 154 games as a football coach, including four state championships – in 1946, 1951, 1955 and 1958, a team that finished the season undefeated.
Cochrane established a legacy of greatness at the Prep, and Caven Point Cochrane Stadium – where all of the Jersey City high schools currently play football – bears his name.
In 1950, a fine two-way end out of Lincoln High School named Nate Borden went to the University of Indiana to play football. In high school, Borden did a little bit of everything, playing football, participating in track – doing the shot put, the discus and the two-mile run – even toying with boxing.
But Borden became a standout at Indiana and earned All-America status with the Hoosiers. He was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1954 and became the first African-American to play for the team. He remained with the Packers for seven seasons, then was one of the first-ever players for the Dallas Cowboys, where he played for four seasons. He ended his career with the Buffalo Bills in 1964.
Borden went on to become a scout for the Atlanta Falcons for several years. He moved home and was a deputy mayor in Jersey City for a brief stint, but later moved to Las Vegas, where he died of cancer in 1992.
Jersey City’s most famous athletic facility, Roosevelt Stadium, became the home for several franchises in the famed Atlantic Coast Football League, a minor-league feeder system to the more established NFL and the old American Football League.
In 1963 and 1964, the Jersey Jays called Roosevelt Stadium home, followed by the Jersey Tigers (1965), the Jersey Giants (1966) and the Jersey City Jets (1970-1971).
The league featured some of the local heroes who couldn’t quite make the NFL or AFL, as well as reserve players from the AFL who needed some fine-tuning. Babe Parilli, who found a nice career as Joe Namath’s backup quarterback with the New York Jets, would play sporadically with the Jersey City Jets.
On Aug. 21, 1959, another famous football personality was born in the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital. Jim McMahon, who would gain notoriety later in life as the starting quarterback for the Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears, was born in Jersey City, but his family moved out of the city when he was in second grade.
A DEFENSIVE TACKLE from Snyder High School named Rich Glover went to the University of Nebraska in 1969. The undersized Glover (6-feet, 235 pounds) never let the lack of size deter him and became one of the best defensive players in college football history.
Playing nose guard, Glover was the best lineman in the country in 1970 and 1971, leading the Cornhuskers to consecutive national championships. Glover earned consensus All-America honors those seasons and finished third in the Heisman Trophy voting in 1972, the highest vote total by a defensive player to that point.
Glover is one of only 10 players in college history to earn both the Outland and Lombardi Trophies, the awards given to the best linemen in the nation. His jersey, No. 79, was retired by Nebraska after his senior year, and in 1995, he became the second Jersey City native to earn induction into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Glover was drafted by the New York Giants and played one year with that team and two years with the Philadelphia Eagles. He went on to coach on the college level for several seasons, and in April 2007 he was named the new head coach at Dickinson High School.
Roosevelt Stadium also hosted an NFL team when the New York Giants made it their daily practice facility in 1972 and 1973, while Yankee Stadium was being renovated.
Jersey City native Walker Lee Ashley, a graduate of Snyder High School, went from leading Penn State to a national title in 1982 to a fine career in the NFL as a linebacker with the Minnesota Vikings and Kansas City Chiefs.
St. Peter’s Prep returned to football glory in 1989 by capturing its first state championship in three decades. Under the tutelage of head coach Rich Hansen, the Marauders would also win NJSIAA Parochial state titles in 1994 and 2005, both times earning the distinction as the top team in New Jersey and ranked nationally.
In the 1990s, Jersey City products Elnardo Webster Jr. and Dwayne Sabb made it to the NFL, with Sabb playing in the 1995 Super Bowl as a member of the New England Patriots.
In 2005, Jersey City’s Brandon McGowan entered the NFL with the Chicago Bears. Although he was unable to play in the game due to an injury, a year after he joined the team, McGowan’s Bears went to the Super Bowl.
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