The names that once wore Dickinson High School football uniforms read like gridiron royalty. There was Al Blozis, who went from being a Dickinson Ram to playing football at Georgetown University, eventually winning the national championship in the shot put in 1942 and 1943, before becoming an All-Pro lineman with the New York Giants.
It’s the same Al Blozis who had his Giants’ No. 32 retired, after he was tragically lost in the Vosges Mountains of France, serving as a U.S. Army lieutenant in World War II. In January of 1945, Lt. Al Blozis went into the hills to look for two men in his platoon that failed to return from patrol. Blozis, the former Dickinson Ram football standout, who would later have the school’s gymnasium named in his honor, never returned from that search. He was 26 years old.
And there was Ed Franco, who went from being a Dickinson Ram football great to going on to play for Fordham University in 1937 and 1938, earning All-America honors as a guard. In fact, Franco, who would later be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, was part of the famed “Seven Blocks of Granite,” a nickname given to the Fordham front seven that also featured a young man named Vince Lombardi.
There are others like Milt and Walt Singer, Joe Sulaitis, Bobby Verlingo, Malcolm Christie, Luis Almanzar, Tyrone “Fly Ty” McClary and Travis Enix, just to name a few. There are countless others who donned the Dickinson maroon and white over the years and made a name for themselves on the gridiron.
But now, just like hundreds of other pieces of history and tradition that have been a part of the folklore of Hudson County sports but then have gone by the wayside, so will the tradition of Dickinson football.
The Jersey City Board of Education convened last week to address budgetary problems, and the powers-that-be decided to slice the entire athletic budget in half, cutting 50 percent of the entire budget that was set aside for athletics.
Among those cuts included the complete elimination of high school football at Dickinson High School.
There had been some discussion of trying to combine the district’s football programs, namely merging a struggling Dickinson with the established and successful Ferris, as well as taking a floundering Snyder program and putting it together with a solid Lincoln squad, but those ideas did not come to fruition.
The powers-that-be decided to keep the Snyder program afloat for another year at least, but pulled the plug on Dickinson.
And with that, another era comes to an end.
It’s not exactly like the Board of Ed decided to terminate a program that was doing well. Dickinson had not enjoyed a winning season in over a decade. The participation numbers were way down, fielding a total roster of only 19 kids last season. For the state’s fourth largest high school in enrollment, a Group IV school with more than 2,300 students, it’s a downright shame that the participation numbers in football had dropped so ridiculously low.
One would think that a school of that size would find enough interested kids to field a competitive football team, but that hasn’t been the case.
Local football legend Rich Glover was the last to give it a go as Dickinson’s head coach. Glover, the former University of Nebraska All-American, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame like the aforementioned Franco, and New York Giant defensive tackle, took over three years ago, thinking he could turn around the Rams’ poor fortunes of late.
But it was an uphill battle, considering the demographics at Dickinson have changed dramatically in recent years, becoming a school whose student population is made up primarily of students from Asian and Indian descent. Those students don’t necessarily gravitate toward sports like football – if they participate in sports at all. Dickinson’s overall athletic participation numbers have plummeted in recent years. The school’s girls’ sports programs barely exist due to a lack of participation. It’s not just football.
So does dropping football at Dickinson make sense? Fiscal sense, maybe. Practical sense, hardly.
Because high school football is an activity that helps teenage boys become better young men. It teaches them a sense of discipline, of accountability, of teamwork and camaraderie. Football helps them understand about what the real world is like in adult life.
Glover was working hard to keep his kids on the straight and narrow. Sure, they weren’t winning games. The Rams were 4-24 under Glover’s guidance. But they had won only three games in the five years prior to Glover’s arrival, going a dismal 3-47 during that time.
Is the life of a high school football program contingent on winning and losing? In this case, apparently so.
Now, here’s the twist that really irks the mind.
No one from the Jersey City Board of Education, not a single administrator, principal, what have you, found the time to call and tell Glover that they pulled the plug – and this was still two full days after the decision was made.
This reporter called Glover with the news – and the coach then respectfully did not want to officially comment on the record until he spoke to Board of Education officials.
“I’ll talk about it when the time is right,” Glover said. “Let me talk to the people in charge first.”
Now, how can the people in charge at the Board of Education make such a drastic decision and then not tell the man who is coaching the program?
Just chalk it up to the wonderful world of the Jersey City Board of Ed, who two months ago had no idea that there was a federal raid taking place on their five high schools, with FBI agents seizing the computers, laptops, records and files pertaining to the investigation in the Circle Systems Group equipment conditioning case, until a reporter called to inform them.
That investigation is still ongoing – with the cloud of controversy hovering over certain administrators.
Now, this situation takes place and there are no answers once again.
To get an answer or a response to a question from the Board of Ed officials, well, you had a better chance to circumvent the Berlin Wall or the Kremlin when the Cold War was ongoing in the ’70s and ’80s then to get anyone to return a phone call out of the office on Claremont Avenue.
Dickinson Athletic Director Rich Nisbet was instructed by officials not to speak about the situation.
So how do you get an answer? You don’t. Chances are that Kurt Waldheim and Mikhail Gorbachev would return a phone call faster.
One thing is for sure: Dickinson football is a thing of the past and the coach didn’t even know about it.
Good job by everyone, as another piece of Hudson County history gets tossed into the collective waste basket.
Jim Hague can be reached at OGSMAR@aol.com.