Success on the gridiron before rise on the bench

At the University of Notre Dame, Gus Cifelli played for three of the four teams that went undefeated from 1946 through 1949.

He helped lead the Detroit Lions to the 1952 NFL title before playing for the 1954 Eagles.

And he turned his philosophy major at Notre Dame into a career as a lawyer and judge in Michigan.

But Philadelphians might best know him as a member of the La Salle College High School Alumni Hall of Fame.

On March 26, August B. Cifelli, 84, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., died of renal failure at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich.

Born in Port Richmond, Mr. Cifelli graduated in 1943 from La Salle, where he was a starting tackle on the 1942 football team and an all-Catholic selection.

After joining the Marine Corps, he was wounded while a gunner on the aircraft carrier Intrepid in the South Pacific.

Mr. Cifelli went to South Bend, Ind., with a full academic and athletic scholarship and graduated cum laude in 1950, according to a 2006 profile in the Explorer, the quarterly magazine of La Salle High.

During his seasons, Notre Dame's football team went 9-0-0 in 1947, 9-0-1 in 1948, and 10-0-0 in 1949. A Notre Dame Web site states that in each year, the team averaged more than 30 points a game while its opponents averaged fewer than 10. Two of his teams were national champions.

The Explorer reported that in the 1949 Blue-Gray Football Classic between college seniors from the North and the South, his Blue teammates elected him captain.

Mr. Cifelli almost went to Villanova University.

In a 1954 Inquirer interview, he said, "I was just about to, too . . . when Moose Krause [a Notre Dame assistant coach] telephoned me at the corner drugstore and invited me to enter Notre Dame."

In a 1953 Inquirer interview, Mr. Cifelli said his brothers had teased that he chose Notre Dame only to play under coach Frank Leahy.

"I decided to show them I also had some brains. I talked with several professors and decided philosophy was the course where I'd get the [best] chance to think and probably have the toughest time getting through.

"I'm really truthful when I say that by my junior year, football was just another subject on my roster," he told the interviewer. "I used to get up in the morning really anxious to get to my philosophy class and do some real thinking."

The Detroit Lions drafted him in 1950. In September 1954, the Green Bay Packers traded him to the Eagles, for whom he played half a season.

Those were the years before million-dollar salaries for athletes, when off-season jobs were essential. Between 1951 and 1964, the Explorer reported, Mr. Cifelli was a labor- and industrial-relations representative for the Ford Motor Co. and then an insurance agent.

Named an assistant line coach for the Notre Dame football team in 1963, he earned a degree from the University of Detroit Law School in 1965.

In 1973, Mr. Cifelli was elected to a six-year term as a district judge in Bloomfield Hills. He was chief judge in his district from 1976 to 1989, then reverted to district judge and retired in 2000, a court administrator said.

The Detroit Area Italian-American Club named him man of the year in 1994, and the United Jewish Federation of Detroit gave him its Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitarian Award.

Mr. Cifelli is survived by his wife of 43 years, Gladys, a son, Stephen; daughters Deborah Brownlow and Shelley Czeizler; two brothers; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His first wife, Marguerite, died in 1956. A Funeral Mass was said March 31 in Bloomfield Hills, followed by a Mass on April 1 in South Bend, where he was buried.