Word: semipros
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Yankee Error. By the time he was 16, Rocky was a star for the semipro Mohawks playing out of Crotona Park, and major-league scouts were nosing about. Rocky quit high school ("baseball was the only thing I really cared about") and waited to be courted. Yankee Stadium was just a couple of miles away, and Colavito idolized Joe DiMaggio. But the Yankee scouts fretted so long about his slow running (he has inverted arches) that Cleveland got him for a cut-rate $3,000 bonus...
...great Walter Johnson 53 years ago. At high school Killebrew starred in football, basketball and baseball, was spotted as a promising native son by Idaho's laie Senator Herman Welker. At Welker's urging, a Washington scout traveled west in 1954 to watch the youngster play semipro ball in the Idaho-Oregon Border League. Killebrew promptly went 14-for-14 (five homers, four triples), belted one homer over a fence 435 ft. away. The tightfisted Senators unbuckled their bankroll, paid out $30,000, and Killebrew became Washington's first bonus player...
...tryouts ("I only weighed 145 then," he explains). Unitas settled for the University of Louisville. The Pittsburgh Steelers gave him a brief tryout, sent him home. Disappointed, he got a job with a pile-driving crew, played football on the side (salary: $6 a game) for a Pittsburgh semipro sandlot team. Baltimore picked him up there in 1956 with a telephone call...
Time was when college football was devoted to the classic commandment of sport: play to win. From Slippery Rock State Teachers to the semipro squads that are the pride of the country's largest universities, players and coaches alike were devoted to a single statistic, the final score. Few teams made more of a business of winning than the powerful platoons of the Big Ten, and few Big Ten teams had a better reason for trying to win last week than the husky Hawkeyes of Iowa...
Until he was 27, Walker earned his living mainly by playing professional football, studied art and did commercial work on the side. He was a semipro at 15, a $40-a-week halfback on Goodyear Tire & Rubber's team at 25, later played for the Cleveland Panthers under the late great Jim Thorpe. About all Walker got out of it was a mashed nose (later straightened) and a fistful of broken fingers. Walker decided to quit and try art fulltime. "I wanted to keep my hands and my head in one piece, and not become a bum like...