Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  Though early crowds were sparse and skeptical, the first half of the season was still unlike anything Aschman or Aliquippa had ever produced, a culminating triumph of the town’s ad hoc “system”: each Plan’s elementary school funneling talent into the all-encompassing hopper of Aliquippa High. The kids—with names like Gill, Tomko, Metropoulos, Monahan, Trbovich, Pitts, Sarris, and Passodelis—had played against, and with, each other all their lives. The familiarity bred far more comfort than contempt. “Once we got to high school we all came together,” Willie said. “It was like a family. That’s what made that ’52 team as great as it was.”

  But as idyllic as memory can make such things, that team—now dubbed the “Indians”—flirted with danger, too. Late in October, ­seventeen-year-old Willie Frank took the wheel of his brother Albert’s packed Studebaker after a night at the V-2 Club in Aliquippa. Heading up windy Monaca Road, Willie veered onto a soft shoulder, panicked, tried to wrench the wheel back. “The car flipped twice,” he said, “right over my head.” Frank insists that he didn’t start drinking alcohol until the following year. Nobody was hurt; the Studebaker was totaled. “I’m still paying for that,” Willie said, laughing. “Every time Albert wants to give it to me, he still lets me know.”

  Aschman visited him in the hospital, but Frank was clearly fine. Nine thousand people crowded into Aliquippa’s stadium to see him open the scoring against Beaver Falls and its star halfback—and future New York Jets head coach—Joe Walton with an 80-yard run; the Quips won 28-7. The next week, Frank rushed for 102 yards and scored two touchdowns against New Castle and Aliquippa won its ninth straight, 18-7. Eight thousand fans filled the stadium for that one, and not even a five-car pileup in the ensuing traffic jam—two dead, eleven injured—could dampen the excitement. An estimated 12,000 filled Ambridge’s home to see Aschman get back at the Bridgers, with Ernie Pitts, the gimpy workhorse Nick Passodelis, and Frank all scoring in a 27-13 comeback win.

  Aschman had his superstitions. He was Catholic, and if the meatless dinner he ate—macaroni and cheese, fish—before the first game of the season resulted in a win, that was the family’s meal for every game night the rest of the year. He wore the same uniform—khakis and a rumpled brown Army parka—on the sidelines, his movie star hair and lined face captured always by photographers in an expression of harried sadness. He didn’t dare change a thing for the 1952 WPIAL Class AA—then the league’s largest—championship game in Pitt Stadium.

  Some 8,000 showed up in the 32-degree cold on November 29 for the Quips’ battle against Washington’s Little Prexies, Charlie West’s old high school team. The chill air and rock-hard field made it anything but the expected blowout; Aliquippa dropped easy passes, found it hard to move the ball, and headed for the locker room at halftime with the game tied, 6-6. Midway through the fourth quarter, fullback George Trbovich, on his third straight rush at the slot over right guard, bulled into the end zone for the go-ahead score. Then Ernie Pitts—the team’s best all-around athlete, a 6-foot-3, 205-pound track and baseball star who ran a sub-10-second 100-yard dash and would turn down offers from the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies to play college football—caught the conversion that sealed the game, 13-12, ensuring the town’s first WPIAL football title.

  And with that, Aliquippa’s singular take on success began to surface. Because it is neither those scores, nor the fumbles recovered by Aliquippa tackle George Hrubovchak and center Dick Fusco, nor the last-minute, game-tying extra point attempt that Hrubovchak and Fusco broke through to block, that townspeople recall and celebrate now. Instead, when you ask about the ’52 team, someone always mentions Willie Frank and how, in the second quarter, he took a handoff on Washington’s 28-yard line, ran right, and churned through at least five tacklers to score Aliquippa’s first touchdown. It doesn’t matter that Frank’s ensuing mistake—a bobble while taking the snap on the extra point attempt—prevented the Quips from taking the lead. The idea of unalloyed toughness, of one man fighting off a gang almost single-handedly, jibed best with the town’s burgeoning self-image. One-on-five? We’re Aliquippa. We’ll take those odds. But you might need a little help.

  “On film I saw eight guys absolutely make solid contact,” said Evasovich, who was a twelve-year-old watching in the stands that day. “They couldn’t hold on to Willie. Eight guys, we know for sure, hit him. I don’t know how the hell he got in the end zone.”

  There was a parade for that first-ever football championship, of course. “That one year turned it all around,” Lou Mott said. Aschman never worried about his job again; that’s how it worked in Western Pennsylvania. His was now the biggest name in town. “He was untouchable after that,” Yannessa said.

  As a baby, as a toddler, into his early teens, Mike Ditka was scrawny. He was the oldest child, and in his first years at the St. Titus Catholic school his mom, the former Charlotte Keller, doted on him, gave him free rein, dressed him like a little lord. The family lived in a four-room row house, an early version of what would later be called “projects,” or government-subsidized housing. The joke in the Linmar area was that you visited your neighbor by opening the medicine cabinet.

  The kid didn’t know how good he had it. Because then World War II ended, and the force that would make Ditka into the football legend, Da Coach, the Hall of Famer, hit his world like a cyclone: His father returned to Aliquippa. “I didn’t even know him until I was five years old,” Ditka said. “Then when he came home? Shit, I really got to know him with that Marine belt.”

  The family revolved around the man. Big Mike, just 5-foot-9 but bearing a chippy authority that would serve him well in his thirty-one years as president of Local 1432 of the Transport Workers Union of America, worked daylight shift repairing cars for the Aliquippa & Southern Railroad, the mini-line dedicated to servicing J&L’s seven-and-a half-mile-long facility along the Ohio. He’d stop for a drink at Savin’s on his way home, and Charlotte kept dinner—and the two boys, Mike and little Ashton, two years younger—waiting. No one sat down to eat until Dad sat down. Little Mike would take in the scars on his father’s hands, the burn holes on his sleeves and pants, the daily round of soot on the neck of his T-shirt.

  “When he got done, he got up,” Ditka said. “We didn’t leave: We had to do the dishes, wash and dry. Then we were allowed to go out, but had to be home asleep by seven o’clock. The neighbors would be outside hollering and we’d be up in the bedroom. That’s just the way it was. Those were his rules.”

  But Little Mike had this quirk: he knew the rules. He respected rules. He felt better in a world with rules. Yet he was constantly breaking the rules anyway, seeking out mischief, taking beatings in return. He went to St. Titus for elementary school, served as an altar boy—but there was also the time he stole a Christmas ornament off a tree at the nearby library, the day he beaned a buddy over the eye. Blood, six stitches: The nuns found out, Big Mike found out, the belt came out. Tomatoes thrown at houses, garbage cans turned over, a kid’s glasses broken: Big Mike always found out.

  “Nearly burned the woods down,” Ditka said. “My dad smoked Luckies, so I stole a pack and with a couple of my buddies, we were in a cement cul-de-sac, woods all over, and we were sitting in there. Smoke Lucky Strikes when you’re seven years old and you’re dizzier’n . . . So that goes into the weeds and there go the woods. We tried to put it out, the wind’s blowin’ . . . Finally they did get it out. . . . Firemen came.

  “My dad’s sitting there having dinner and looks up and says, ‘What happened to the woods?’ My mother said, ‘You’ll have to ask your son.’ That was it. Boy, I got my ass whipped. That was the worst one I ever got. I don’t think I’ve smoked a cigarette since.” Ditka paused. “But I do smoke cigars.”

  The safest place for such a soul, one needing a bit of mayhem mixed into the comfort of defined parameters, is sports. It was a perfect fit: Anything that smacked of competition, Little Mike played with a bottomless fury. Little Le
ague officials announced that they’d bestow a ball autographed by Pirates legend Pie Traynor to the first kid to hit a home run? Ditka smacked one in his first game. During a Pony League game, brother Ashton was pitching and Mike catching; after a few walks Mike stalked out and made them switch positions. Then when the shortstop made an error, he took that kid’s place, too. Another time, playing Legion ball, Ashton—who’d go on to a fine college baseball career at Bucknell—dropped a game-winning fly ball in center field. Little Mike chased his little brother out of the stadium, jumped the center-field fence, ran him down, and thrashed him before they got home.

  “I tell you: It was bad,” Ditka said. “And I never felt like I was doing anything wrong—never, ever. I knew others didn’t feel the way I felt, but I had tunnel vision. I don’t know where you get that competitive feeling; I don’t know where it came from. But growing up it started with marbles and all that stuff, playing tag, touch football, stickball—and I hated to lose at whatever it was. You know why? I expected to win. I didn’t ever expect to lose. Never. That’s why losing was so hard.”

  That was a new attitude for a town that, by the time Ditka entered high school in ’53, had just had its first taste of football glory. Baseball had brought the school’s first WPIAL crown, and its basketball teams would regularly compete for WPIAL titles. But Aschman’s pulverizing style—the gridiron call for manic, fist-in-the face toughness—resonated with mill families like no clean single or give-and-go ever could, and winning made it irresistible. Football was now preeminent. Just making the high school team became a badge of honor.

  “Why? Because that was part of what you were and part of what you were meant to be,” said Evasovich, who played a year behind Ditka. “Why would a guy my size be a starting guard in Division III football? I’m not that goddamn good. It’s because if you weren’t, you’d be embarrassed to come home. I would not come home and tell my father I didn’t make first team. Whatever it took—and it took me until my senior year in high school, my senior year in college—that’s what had to be done. And there were many of me out there.

  “You didn’t dare embarrass your family, your uncle, your friends, or your neighbors. And they didn’t care if you got your ass kicked: Johnny got his ass kicked, but boy he gave that kid all he had! That’s what it took. And you still hear that, all the time: ‘That kid’s tough.’ ‘Tough player.’ ‘That’s Aliquippa.’ That’s the difference between Aliquippa and Hopewell and Center and some of these other schools. And it’s a big difference.”

  Then again, if you were a skinny, unimposing freshman like 5-foot-7, 135-pound Mike Ditka, no one was really pushing you to join the football team. Little Mike was projected to be a baseball player. But come Friday nights, he could see the stadium lights blazing from his row house on the hill at Linmar: football players were the town’s biggest winners. Ditka played third string on the freshman squad. Sophomore year, he was one of the last players chosen to go to camp at Raccoon Creek State Park, and on one of his first series a lineman leveled him so brutally that his helmet went flying. Aschman, sure that he was going to get hurt, didn’t let Ditka practice the rest of camp. He spent his time cleaning the latrines.

  That season, Little Mike played jayvee or on the Ghost Battalion, “getting run over like dirt,” Ditka said. He’d get up crying, but they weren’t tears of surrender. “He cried a lot,” said Marocco, a senior star that year, “but when he cried he got meaner.”

  Ditka would rise up snarling, “Come on, hit me again!” He didn’t have to ask them twice.

  Aschman liked that. “You could tell,” Marocco said. “When ­Aschman liked you, he would chew you out every day.” But Ditka hadn’t been around long enough to know the signs; in the spring, he told ­Aschman that he was quitting to focus on baseball. Aschman responded by saying that he saw something special in him. “You can play,” Aschman said. Coming from King Carl, that was encouragement enough.

  Ditka worked out endlessly the next eight months, running the hills to and from school, gulping down wheat germ, shaking the house with push-ups. He added thirty-five pounds, pulled some size from Charlotte’s side of the family, and pushed past six feet. His curfew was 9:30 p.m. now, and he circled his dad warily—less from fear than a growing distaste. He would later write that Big Mike “was tough with my mom . . . rough with me and my mom. When you see that as a kid, it bothers you. But then in retrospect you understand that he was raised like that, and that’s what he knew. I blamed him for a lot. I didn’t like him, basically, until I went off to college and lived away from home.”

  Charlotte didn’t like Big Mike’s heavy hand, either. “I would’ve stopped it more if I could,” she said. “I would always hope that there was less ‘correcting.’” It bothered her just as much when, in the summer of 1955, she saw Aschman lashing into her boy at football camp.

  Ever after, Charlotte would be remembered as one of the few in Aliquippa to publicly take on the coach. “What are you always yelling at my son for?” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” Aschman replied. “You’ll find out someday.”

  It didn’t take long, actually. By junior year, Ditka had improved enough to become a starter at offensive end and linebacker—an ­Aschman project made good. “It was all him: he was a magnificent coach, a magnificent man,” Ditka said. “When he switched me to end, I hadn’t caught balls. So he took me out, made one of those quarterbacks come, and we’d go for half hour to an hour after practice, and he’d throw me routes and teach me how. But it wasn’t all catching balls. I was on that two-man sled, the one he called the ‘cropper machine.’ And I had to block that thing. I blocked it and blocked it, because he ran the ball a lot. He taught me how to block, how to use my body, how to cross-body block—put the dummies up and go.

  “He did everything, and he did it over and over. I think about it, and I don’t know if there was anybody else with us, just him and I and one other quarterback sometimes. He didn’t have to do that. But he did. Whatever he saw in me? I’m glad he saw it.”

  Still, on a team that sent virtually its entire starting lineup to Division 1-A schools like Kentucky, North Carolina State, Toledo, Arizona State, and Southern Illinois, Ditka was considered average. He stood 6-foot, weighed 160 pounds, and didn’t score once all year. The star receiver on the ’55 team was 6-foot-4 Bob Rembert, who had stepped in to save the freshman Ditka’s hide once when a teammate tried to punch him out; and anytime Aschman needed variety, he had quarterback Johnny Sakal fire the ball to the more agile Willie Smith. Ten Aliquippa players would be recognized as all-WPIAL: every starter, that is, except Little Mike.

  Publicly, Aschman didn’t expect much from the ’55 season. With just nine letterman back from a 6-3 campaign, he called out his Indians as “terrible” in the local paper before the opener against Westinghouse, and dismissed their character. “They haven’t the desire,” he said. Or maybe that was just good coaching. Aliquippa tore Westinghouse apart, 35-0, then beat McKeesport in the rain when Rembert caught a flea-flicker—“32 Crossfire”—touchdown pass from halfback Johnny Moore with ten seconds to play. The Quips cruised from there: 32-6 over Ellwood City, 23-6 over unbeaten Rochester despite a mid-game blackout at Aliquippa’s stadium, easy wins over Sharon, Beaver Falls, and Duquesne to set up the usual showdown.

  Ambridge came to Aliquippa Stadium on November 11 with all the elements in place for the Bridgers to ruin everything: the WPIAL’s leading scorer in Joe Guido, an 18-10 series record against the Quips. But Moe Rubenstein wasn’t there anymore. Ten thousand fans jammed in to see the Indians score nineteen straight points in the 26-12 runaway, then lift Aschman up and carry him off the field. All that was left was a meeting with Mt. Lebanon for the WPIAL championship.

  It took a while getting there. A three-inch snowfall dropped on the area and postponed the game a week, past Thanksgiving to November 26. Though Mt. Lebanon had been rated higher than Aliquippa all year, the delay gave everyo
ne enough time to figure out that Aschman’s roster and his shuttling of two quarterbacks and what he termed an “eight-man backfield” was now unstoppable. Aliquippa was named 131/2-point favorites. Which only made it that much more stunning when the Mounties took a 13-0 lead into the fourth quarter.

  Sakal then engineered the team sixty yards in five plays, and Ditka had his big chance. He caught a short pass near the end zone but was tackled at the 1-yard line; six decades later he was still hearing his teammates’ catcall: “Why didn’t you score?” But Jimmy D’Antonio grabbed that prize with a 2-yard run, and the rest of the day’s heroics unfolded in a most predictable way. Down 13-7 with three and a half minutes to play, the Quips lined up at their own 22-yard line. Six thousand Aliquippans filled the stands at Pitt Stadium, many of them sharing the same thought: McKeesport. Sam Milanovich, coach of Aliquippa’s ’49 basketball champs and now the town’s superintendent of schools, peered down from the press box.

  “This is the time for the ‘Crossfire’ pass,” he said.

  Aschman complied. Again Rembert took off streaking down the left sideline, again Sakal pitched, again Johnny Moore took the ball, ran right, stopped, and hurled it across the field. Estimates figured the pass for at least fifty-five yards in the air. Rembert gathered it in at the Mt. Leb 39-yard line, shrugged off two defenders, and rumbled into the end zone. Willie Smith coolly kicked the point-after for the 14-13 lead. Fans flooded the field and tore down the goalposts, with time remaining on the clock. They had it right, though. Play resumed, Aliquippa’s defense held, and the undefeated Quips had their second WPIAL title in four years.

  “I don’t think I have a fonder memory of high school,” Ditka said.

  The team rolled home from Pittsburgh on a bus through all the river towns, all the accompanying cars with their lights on, beeping away. As they passed through Ambridge, en route to the bridge and the river separating it from Aliquippa, the players hung out the windows to rub it in, shouting, “We’re the champs!”