A closer look at Pete Pihos

Eagles Hall of Fame wide receiver Pete Pihos died Tuesday at age 87 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Here is an excerpt of a chapter on Pihos from "Rugged and Enduring: The Eagles, The Browns and 5 Years of Football," from a book written by former Inquirer editor David Cohen, published in 2001 by Xlibris.

The best prospects available in 1947 were mostly players who could have come out in 1946, but who chose to go back to college for another year. The most heralded of these was Charley Trippi, once dubbed "the greatest thing to come out of the South since the invention of the cotton gin." The University of Georgia all-American, nicknamed "Golden Boy," was sought not only by the two football leagues, but also by baseball's New York Yankees. He chose to sign with the NFL's Chicago Cardinals. Shortly after Trippi turned pro, Jim Thorpe, the legend by which all other football legends were measured, called Trippi "the greatest football player I ever saw."

Being as that only one team could land Trippi, other teams had to find their talent elsewhere. Rebuffed by Cal Rossi, the Redskins did add one notable rookie in 1947, Hugh "Bones" Taylor of Oklahoma City University. He had been signed by Washington after Coach Turk Edwards read about him in a magazine. On Sept. 28, 1947, in his first game as a pro, Taylor was spectacular, catching touchdown passes of 62, 36, and 18 yards from Sammy Baugh against the Eagles. Overall, Taylor had eight receptions for 212 yards against Greasy Neale's newly unveiled defense.

The Eagles had a pair of rookie ends of their own. In 1946, Tommy Thompson's primary receiver had been former minor-league star Jack Ferrante, but when the 1947 season opened, Thompson had been given two new weapons. One of his new targets was gentlemanly Neill Armstrong of Oklahoma A&M, the team's first-round draft choice. On his first play in the NFL, Armstrong caught a touchdown pass from Thompson.

The Eagles also had added rugged Pete "The Golden Greek" Pihos from the University of Indiana. Only slightly less heralded than Trippi, the 23-year-old Pihos had finally signed with the team two years after they drafted him. Against Washington, he showed that he was worth the wait by catching five passes, two of them for touchdowns.

The rookie ends were not the only stars that day. Baugh, poised to embark on what was to be his greatest season, threw for a total of five touchdowns, and Eddie Saenz returned a kickoff 94 yards. The Eagles, meanwhile, got a 95-yard kick return by Steve Van Buren and a short touchdown run by Allie Sherman in pulling out a 45-42 victory. The Associated Press described it simply as a "super-duper thriller." It was, at the time, the highest-scoring NFL game ever.

There were not many hard-and-fast rules about locating football players in the Forties. In some ways, World War II changed them all, and in some ways it did not change any of them.

It's clear that there were any number of roads that a player could take to the NFL and AAFC at the time. During this era the only real constant, the only thing that just about all pro football players had in common, was that their lives were dramatically interrupted by World War II.

The Sports Encyclopedia: Pro Football lists hundreds of players as having served in World War II and that list only includes those who left pro football to go off to war. Hundreds more, like Pete Pihos, turned pro after the war was over. Others were stationed stateside or served in defense-related jobs. Many of those who went overseas saw extensive combat; many were decorated for bravery. Eighteen current or former pro football players were killed in action.

Much has been written about the effect the war had on these players, how it gave them a certain focus that they might have lacked otherwise. Steelers guard Nick Skorich told writer Stuart Leuthner, "I think we came back from the war more mature, with a little more perspective, and knew the direction we wanted to go." Also in Leuthner's book, Frank "Bucko" Kilroy is quoted as saying that the first question asked about a player in those days was not what school had he gone to, but what outfit had he served in. Whatever the real effect, it's undoubtedly true that the war defined this generation of players.

"I really believe that our ideas and attitudes were shaped by the three- to four-year interruption of our lives, caused by WWII," recalled Eagles back Russ Craft. "After what many of us had been through, it was great and true happiness to get back home and get our lives on track doing what most of us loved most."

Or as Browns end Dante Lavelli told writer Terry Pluto: "Just coming home in one piece and being able to play football --- that was an honor."

Service to their country aside, the professional football players of this era had widely divergent backgrounds. The colleges were a steady source of talent, but pro coaches rarely saw many college players in person, so they had to rely on recommendations and guesswork to find the best of them. There were, of course, those players who theoretically were "can't miss" talents (presuming that they would chose to turn pro). These were the golden boys of college football: Charley Trippi was one; Pete Pihos was another. They made drafting easy.

But no team was fortunate enough to be able to fill a roster with blue-chip players, so teams had to find other sources for players. And since teams spend very little money on scouting, these players often came to them. They came from colleges, big and small. Sometimes they came recommended; sometimes, like in the case of Washington's Bones Taylor, someone had read or heard something about the athlete and figured he was worth a gamble. Sometimes, too, they came from places other than colleges. There were military teams and minor league teams --- both could be sources of players. And sometimes the players came, as Philadelphia's Jack Ferrante did, from the sandlots. The trick for any franchise was in finding the right mix of each type of player, as the Eagles did when they teamed up Pihos and Ferrante at end.

Few players personified the collegiate golden boy better than Pete Pihos. This Army veteran was the kind of player who left college coaches and sportswriters gasping for adjectives.

Pihos came to Indiana University from Chicago's Austin High School in 1942. He had played his first two years of high school ball in Orlando, Fla., before moving to Chicago, where he was an all-city end for two years. After hearing coach Bo McMillin speak at a banquet, he opted to go to Indiana.

At that time, Midwestern football, particularly that of the Big Ten (which was then also called the Western Conference), was probably as good as it has ever been. A Big Ten school, Minnesota, won the national championship in 1940 and 1941, followed by Ohio State in 1942 and a Midwestern independent, Notre Dame, in 1943 Among the other Big Ten schools, Michigan, Northwestern, Wisconsin, and Purdue all made the Top 10 in those years. The pros were loaded with their alumni; from 1937 to 1944, Green Bay used eight straight first-round draft choices on players from the conference.

With its pageantry, enthusiasm and majesty, Big Ten football was perceived as being a purer and grander version of the game than the one played in the NFL. This was a league of student-athletes, one whose athletes were expected to take academics seriously and be good citizens. Pihos majored in business administration at Indiana and later spent more than two years in law school, though he never became a lawyer. At Indiana, he met and married Dorothy Lansing, who was on her way to becoming a doctor.

Pete Pihos played his first two seasons with the Hoosiers at end, garnering some all-American honors in his sophomore year. "He's the best pass receiver of the year," raved noted writer Grantland Rice, who selected him to his 1943 all-American team in Colliers magazine.

Then Pihos went to war, serving in the Army's 35th Infantry. He went in a private and came back from Europe a second lieutenant with five battle stars, having seen significant action in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945, he returned to Indiana, where Bo McMillin shifted the rock-solid 205-pounder to fullback and told him to call the plays.

The 1945 Hoosiers team was loaded: Back George Taliaferro would be good enough to play seven seasons in the NFL, center John Cannady would play eight years for the Giants, and others would also make it to the pros. End Ted Kluzewski chose baseball over pro football, becoming one of baseball's top sluggers during the Fifties. But it was Pihos who is best-remembered from that squad. Coming out of the service, he joined the team after it had pulled off an opening-week upset of Michigan. Arriving on a Tuesday, he played 56 minutes against Northwestern on the following Saturday. In the final minutes of the game, he bulled his way through an army of tacklers to score the touchdown that tied the game at 7.

The game ended at that score and Indiana went on to win the conference with a 9-0-1 record. The team climbed all the way to fourth in the Associated Press polls; the Hoosiers have never finished a season ranked higher than that. Pihos ended up as a second-team all-American, finishing behind Army legend Doc Blanchard in the voting.

"Pete is the most complete football player I've ever coached," McMillin said. "Pete could play any position on the team better than the person we had playing it --- in fact, in most cases better than anyone else in the country." A caption in The History of American Football, published in 1956, says Pihos "can be classed as one of the truly remarkable football players of modern times. He was a first-rate tackle and a powerful fullback at Indiana." Years later, Pihos would be named the best player in Indiana history.

Neither Pihos nor the Hoosiers had as good a season in 1946, but Pihos was still a hot property. The Eagles, who had drafted him in 1945, signed him for the 1947 season. It was a coup for the team, which had a poor record when it came to signing the players it drafted.

When he arrived, Pihos was brash. Vic Sears, by then an All-Pro tackle, remembered that Greasy Neale had him room with Pihos in order to be a calming influence on the rookie. One Saturday night, Sears recounted, they were in their room when Pihos got a hankering for the early edition of Sunday's newspaper. "Sears, go get the paper," he told him.

"Pihos, why the hell should I go get the paper?" the veteran tackle replied.

"I'm Pihos, that's why."

"I'm Sears, that's why I'm not going."

Still, it was clear early on that the brash rookie had talent. He played end in the pros, but Pihos gave his teammates and opponents the feeling that he could play just about any position. "Pete was a technician, a hard worker. He felt every play, he had to make every play. And he was awfully good at it," recalled Gordy Soltau, a San Francisco end who in 1952 would be named to the same All-Pro squad as Pihos. (Pihos was selected six times in his nine-year career.)

On offense, Pihos was sure-handed, fearless, and hard-to-tackle; on both offense and defense he was rugged, aggressive, and prone to make big plays. "He was the sort of guy," commented a columnist of the day, "you'd expect to buy a piano and promptly carry it home."

In selecting Pihos as the greatest tight end of all time, coach George Allen wrote, "He was no giant, but he was big enough. He was no sprinter, but he was fast enough. He was extremely tough and durable and determined, and he seemed to me an exceptionally smart player. He was the kind of player coaches like me wanted to captain their clubs."

"Pihos," said The Sports Encyclopedia: Pro Football, "blocked like an avalanche, hugged every pass like a falling baby, and joined Jack Ferrante in the toughest end combination in the league."