McCurdy | Ohio football greats profiled in new book
MANSFIELD - His inspiration was nothing more than newsroom banter. Six years later, Larry Phillips has turned that kernel of an idea into not one, but two books.
That's how "Ohio's Autumn Legends: Volume I" came to be.
A former sports writer, sports editor and news editor at the Mansfield News Journal as well as group sports editor for the Media Network of Central Ohio, of which The Marion Star is a part, Phillips was merely having a conversation with longtime NJ sports writer Jon Spencer about some mutual friends who were going to be on a TV show to talk about the greatest Ohio high school football players and teams.
"Spence and I started kicking around the names and I said they don't need to start anywhere else than with (Mansfield legend) Pete Henry. Most people don’t even know who Pete Henry is and that he's the only charter member of the pro and college football halls of fame from Ohio. There’s only eight of them, and he's one of them," he said.
As so often happens, the banter turned into a column. Only Phillips wasn't content with just one column looking at Ohio's vast football history.
"That’s what triggered it," he said. “I thought there were some great stories here that haven't really been told."
Phillips thought it would make good fodder for a book. So over the course of the next few years, he hit the road, going to public libraries across the state, researching every high school game these all-time greats played. Well, almost every game.
One of the 10 profiles in the first volume is on Cincinnati's Roger Staubach. When he was a youngster at Purcell High School, he played strictly defense until his senior year. The most pivotal game for the future Heisman Trophy winner and Super Bowl winning Hall of Famer came in his first game of that season, his first as a quarterback. Trailing in the fourth quarter, Staubach led a late-game scoring charge on the road at Dayton Chaminade-Julienne to win the game, cementing his feeling that he could be a big-time QB.
But Phillips couldn't find any account of the game when he went to the libraries in Cincinnati and Dayton.
"I have no details of that game other than Staubach’s telling me about it," he said. "That's the kind of research I did do. I looked at every specific game and if there was something noteworthy to it I made sure to dive into it in detail."
While researching Canton McKinley's Marion Motley and talking to the late Motley's family, he learned just how happenstance Motley's hall of fame pro career was.
When World War II broke out, Motley was working in a Canton steel mill. When he went to enlist, he had a choice of Army or Navy and he picked Navy because he was told the living conditions were cleaner and the food was better. While training at the Great Lakes facility in Chicago, he just happened to run into Paul Brown, who had coached against Motley when Brown was the high school coach at Massillon Washington.
Never one to give away talent, Brown recruited his former foe to the team he was coaching. The rest is history as Motley would later follow him to Cleveland, where they won championships together and Motley helped integrate the NFL for good. And if he had said "Army" during the enlistment, it's hard to say what would have happened.
"It's stories like that that I'd never heard of that I thought somebody ought to share those kind of things, and I'm the only one stupid enough to go back and look at every single high school game every one of these guys played," Phillips said with a laugh.
The first volume, which is available at Amazon.com in Kindle ($9.99), paperback ($21.99) and hardback ($31.11) versions, gives 10,000-word mini-biographies on how these all-time greats came to be.
Phillips profiles the obscure like Henry, a dominant lineman and kicker who helped the early Canton Bulldogs to NFL titles in the 1920s, as well as Charles Follis, the Wooster man who broke pro football's color line in the early 1900s playing for a team out of Shelby, and forgotten Ohio State standout Chic Harley of Columbus East, also of the early 20th century.
Others are more famous: Brown, Motley, Staubach, Vic Janowicz (Elyria), Paul Warfield (Warren Harding), Archie Griffin (Columbus Eastmoor) and Chris Spielman (Massillon Washington).
Upon its completion, Phillips shopped his material to publishers. Oddly two publishers in Ohio turned him down, not understanding the concept that it's not a book just about the Browns or Ohio State, but about the men from Ohio who helped make the game grand. Keith Publications in Arizona loved the idea and green lit the project, turning it into a two-volume set, with the second book coming in August.
Phillips feels the artwork of illustrator Oscar Hinojosa is what sets the project apart. Hinojosa, who lives in Florida and has done work for the U.S. Olympic Hockey team and the PGA, graduated from Bowling Green State University. He has color portraits of all 10 players profiled in the book.
"The book is worth buying just for the art," he said.
The publisher is happy with sales, and Phillips has enjoyed positive feedback from the book.
“I’ve had a couple of people come to Mansfield and have me sign it. That's flattering," he said. "A lot of people are buying it as a gift for somebody. That's where the market is right now. People are buying them as Christmas gifts for others."
And those gifts all started with newsroom banter six years ago.
Rob McCurdy is the sports writer at The Marion Star. He can be reached at rmccurdy@gannett.com, work 740-375-5158, cell 419-610-0998 or Twitter @McMotorsport.