He knows a lot of people in Ohio, so the area code that had popped up on his phone wasn’t all that unusual. But the caller was.
The National High School Football Hall of Fame?
“I didn’t know anything about it,” Chuck Ealey says.
Surely the Hamilton Tiger-Cat legend who was MVP of the 1972 Grey Cup had at least heard of it. After all, it’s located in Canton, not far from his hometown in Portsmouth and Toledo, where he became a collegiate star.
“No,” he says.
You can excuse him for this one. The hall that celebrates the greatest high school players in history is only two years old. It’s unknown to a whole lot of people.
That said, the inaugural class that was inducted last May was pretty outstanding. Jim Brown, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Marcus Dupree, Bernie Kosar, Cleveland Browns’ founder Paul Brown and a bunch of others.
Now the voice on the other end was telling him he was going in as part of the second class. Along with guys like Dick Butkus, Eric Dickerson, Reggie White, Bob Golic, Charles Woodson and Doug Williams.
“I went, ‘Whoa, OK,’” Ealey says.
It’s pretty amazing, especially for a guy who just turned 74. The last thing he’s expecting is to be honoured for what he did as a teenager in the mid-’60s. Even more so when it took until 2022 to finally get an invitation into the college football hall.
But goodness, he has to be in both.
His days at the University of Toledo are well-documented. We don’t need to go into all the individual honours he claimed there. The thing that matters most is his record as starting quarterback. He went 35-0. It’s a safe bet nobody will ever touch that mark.
Less known, however, is the fact that he also won every game in high school. He was 18-0 at Notre Dame High School. Meaning he didn’t lose a game between middle school and his first start as a Ticat in 1972. Fifty-three consecutive wins.
Does he even remember the last game he lost before turning pro?
“I don’t know,” he laughs. “I’ve never gone past that.”
What made his high school success particularly unique — beside the lack of a single loss — is the same thing that made his college and pro story unique. This all happened during the civil rights era at a time Black men generally weren’t seen as quarterbacks and weren’t often given that opportunity.
He might’ve got that chance at Portsmouth High, the local public school. But at Notre Dame?
It was the rich Catholic school on the hill. Literally. Not really his world. Attending cost money and as the child of divorced parents without a father figure at that time, he didn’t have any.
“I came from what most people would want to categorize as a ghetto,” he says.
On top of that, of the 400 students, only about four were Black. Yet he says he was treated well. During the summer, he’d earn his tuition by cleaning and waxing the floors. Through the year, he’d study and play sports.
By his third year, someone had picked up his tuition. And with him now getting the chance to start at quarterback and defensive back, the team took off. In his final year, it won the state championship in its category.
That opened some eyes in the college ranks. Not a ton, mind you, since his skin colour kept him from being heavily recruited. But it got him in the door at Toledo. Which eventually brought him to Hamilton.
Now 56 years later, here we are. In June, he’ll be in Canton attending the induction ceremony. Joining the ranks of the all-time secondary-school greats.
When he hung up the phone and started looking at the list of names in the hall and about to go in with him, he was blown away. There’s some serious star power there.
If he really wanted his eyes to bug out though, he might’ve looked at who isn’t in yet. To get a sense of how good he must’ve been in school, just look at the nominees who weren’t selected.
Deion Sanders, Joe Namath, Dan Marino, Barry Sanders, Dan Dierdorf, Jerry Jones, Steve Spurrier, Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson, Emmitt Smith, Don Shula, Cris Carter, Tony Dorsett, Randy Moss and Jerome Bettis. Not to mention LeBron James, Allen Iverson and Joe Mauer, who were football stars in high school.
They’re not in the hall. Yet. He is.
“It’s pretty cool,” he says.
To join the conversation set a first and last name in your user profile.
Sign in or register for free to join the Conversation