Boys Town Sports Legacy
How Father Flanagan’s barnstorming sports teams gained national fame.
Story by Leo Adam Biga, Photos courtesy of Girls and Boys Town
"I didn’t know a jock strap from a toothbrush,” said alumnus George Pfeifer of his arrival at Boys Town from a Kansas farm in 1939. Like some of the finest athletes at Rev. Edward Flanagan’s home for “lost” boys, the future coach had never played organized sports before coming there. Most of the boys were either poor inner city or rural kids who’d played only sandlot ball or street ball. They came from all parts of the country, boys with different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds, and on their shoulders was built an athletic dynasty that became the envy of the nation.
From the Great Depression through the 1960s, the Boys Town football team played
elite Catholic prep schools and military academies in Los Angeles, Chicago,
Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, Miami and other cites. The games attracted dignitaries
and made headlines. Playing against the nation’s toughest competition
in large stadiums before tens of thousands of fans, the Cowboys won more than
twice as often as they lost.
During the same era, Boys Town won multiple state championships in football and basketball, and produced scores of all-state athletes and individual champions, even some high school All-Americans. Its great track-and-field athletes include two-time Olympian Charles “Deacon” Jones (1956 and 1960) and quarter-miler Jimmy Johnson, who won the Pan Am Games only a few years after graduating.
It began with the dream of Boys Town’s founder, Father Flanagan, who was a fair soccer and handball player in his day, and a vocal champion of sports. He made sports an integral, even compulsory part of residents’ experience at Boys Town. Intramural athletics became a big deal. In those days, the boys lived in dorms and staged competitions between their respective buildings to see who were kings of the field or the court. By the mid-1930s, Flanagan hired a coach and pushed for Boys Town to compete in sanctioned interscholastic events.
Born and raised in Ireland, Flanagan
made his long-held dream for Boys Town a reality through conviction, blarney
and bluff. With his silver-tongued brogue and big sad eyes, he elicited sympathy
and loosened purse strings for the plight of America’s orphaned. With
his politician’s ability to build consensus, he got people of all persuasions
and faiths to contribute to the home.
It didn’t hurt that Flanagan
harbored a bit of P.T. Barnum in his soul. Almost from the start of the home
in 1917, he made use of the media to further the cause of children’s care
and rights. In the 1920s he hosted a nationally syndicated Sunday radio program,
“Links of Love,” broadcast from the old WOW studios in Omaha. On
a larger scale, there was the 1938 MGM box office smash “Boys Town,”
starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. Tracy won the Best Actor Oscar for
his portrayal of Flanagan.
The movie made Flanagan and Boys Town
household names. He used his and the home’s growing reputation to bring
national figures, including sports stars, to “the city of little men.”
The Boys Town archives detail visits by such sports icons as Babe Ruth, Lou
Gehrig, Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. Hollywood celebrities were also frequent
visitors. “Deacon” Jones, then learning the barber trade at Boys
Town, recalls being summoned with his clippers to the quarters of Flanagan’s
successor, Rev. Nicholas Wegner, where he found Spencer Tracy in need of a haircut.
Jones complied.
Just as Flanagan earlier made the
school band and choir ambassadors for Boys Town, so he did with football. The
same year the movie “Boys Town” was released, the football squad
boarded the Challenger super liner at Omaha’s Union Station for a trip
west, where they played a benefit game against Black Foxe Military Institute
of Los Angeles. The film’s producer, John Considine, Jr., made it happen.
Among the 10,000 or so in attendance at Gilmore Stadium were numerous Hollywood
stars. Boys Town won, 20-12.
The good turnout seems to have convinced
Flanagan to take his football team on the road as a gypsy, bring-on-all-comers
sideshow featuring orphans from the world-famous Boys Town. The bigger the stage,
the tougher the opponent, the more Flanagan liked it.
He would often wend his way to wherever
the football team appeared, posing for photos, making pre-game or halftime on-the-field
speeches, and generally getting the Boys Town name in the press. A big banquet,
often in his honor, usually preceded or followed the game, giving Flanagan another
chance to spread the gospel.
Boys Town alumnus Ed Novotny of Omaha,
who played for Boys Town in the early 1940s, recalls the time Flanagan was on
the field during pre-game festivities in New Jersey. Novotny said a press photographer
asked to snap a few pictures of the famous priest doing a mock kickoff. Sensing
a good photo op, Flanagan obliged. As he lined up for the kick, Novotny turned
to an opposing player and said, “He’s in a bad spot” –
meaning the photographer crouched in front of the ball, holding a Speed Graphic
camera overhead.
“What do you mean?” the
other player said.
“Father Flanagan can kick. He’ll
blast that thing right over the goal post.”
“Really? A priest?”
Novotny will never forget what happened
next. “No sooner did I say, ‘Yeah,’ than he kicked that ball
and knocked that camera right out of the guy’s hands.”
Novotny recalls Flanagan as an enthusiastic
presence on the sideline or in the locker room. The priest stood in the players’
circle to lead pre-game prayers. At basketball games he sat on the end of the
bench with players and coaches. He greeted guys by name or with his favorite
terms of endearment, “Dear” or “Laddie.”
“When you were in his presence you were the most important person in that room,” Novotny said. The padre fired up the troops and fussed over injured players. “He would tell us, ‘good job’ whether we were winning or losing.” More than a spectator, Novotny said, “he was a participant.”