Mel Bashore

 

Mel:   Can you tell me about when you first played football as a kid.

 

Dave:    That would have been back when I was probably in fourth or fifth grade.  The grade school that I went to had a large area. All the klds in the grade school that were interested in sports would play football at recess.  Tackle football without pads, of course.  Then we'd come back at lunch time and play tackle football.  Then we'd play at recess in the afternoon and sometimes we'd stay after school.  If it was no school, on Saturday, we played on Saturdays at the grade school.  They had a large area that we could play in.  It was probably sixty or seventy yards by thirty or forty yards wide.  I started playing then.  I seemed to always be the quarterback that was on the team.  But really at that age, there wasn't as much passing as there was running.  At the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, if you had a kid that was faster than anybody else or bigger than anybody else, that's who carried the ball.  I was always fairly fast and larger than most of the kids in my grades.  Then I continued on.  In junior high I played football in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades.  We had a regular junior high football against other junior highs in the area.

 

Mel:    Where was the area, Dave?

 

Dave:    I grew up in a town called New Philadelphia, Ohio.  If you don't know where that is, it's about thirty miles due south of Canton, Ohio, and about seventy-five miles due south of Cleveland.  It's 112 miles east of Columbus and about 112 miles, same distance, west of Pittsburgh.  That sort of gives you an idea.  Are you familiar with Canton, Ohio, at all?

 

Mel:    It sounds like it was football country.

 

Dave:    Yes.  The Pro Football Hall of Fame is in Canton, Ohio.  So anyhow.  I continued playing football.  I was the starting quarterback as a sophomore and junior.  Then I came down with polio.  Not paralytic polio.  The same as, and I can't remember his name now, there was a player [Vic Wertz] that played for Cleveland Indians, who had the same deal a few years before I did.  The ambulance driver that took me to the hospital, he told everybody, he says, "Well I took him over to the hospital, but I'll never bring him back."  So I went to Akron Children's Hospital for like twenty-one days.  I got out of there the week before the first football game.  I was back to what I thought was normal, but the coach and the doctor said no.  So I sat out the first game.  Then I started the rest of the games. When I was in high school, I would say my most successful sport was basketball. I started and was the high scorer for all three years. In fact my senior year, does the name Alex Groza mean anything to you?

 

Mel:    Yes. He was a college basketball player who was involved in a scandal, I think.

 

Dave:    That's him. He was from Martin's Ferry, Ohio.

 

Mel:    He was Lou Groza's brother, wasn't he?

 

Dave:    Brother, now you got it right.  Alex had set a record for the most points scored in one year.  It had stood for thirteen years I think.  As a senior, I broke his record by twenty-four points. I scored 642 points. Averaged about twenty-eight points a game as a senior.  So Ohio State recruited me as a basketball player. Then they had fired their coach [Wes Fesler]. A guy from Minnesota who was an All-American at Ohio State. So then Woody Hayes accepted the job.  About January or February of 1951.  Woody Hayes started recruiting me.  But back in those days, the Big Ten didn't have scholarships.  Did you know that?  They had what they called a job program. When I went to Ohio State, they offered me a job earning $110 a month, which after taxes amounted to like $98. You were allowed to earn free $100. Because of that, Woody said, "Well you go ahead and go to Ohio State on a basketball scholarship," which is the job.  "I want you to come out for football, too."  So I went to Ohio State.  I was second-string quarterback my freshman year, and second-string my sophomore year. Then the starting quarterback got hurt in the third game of my junior year. I was a fullback because Woody said I was a good enough runner that he wanted to get me in the backfield. So I played fullback for three games. Then the starter broke his finger and I started the rest of the games in my junior year. I got married just before my senior year. Evidently Woody didn't like that although their were several guys on the team, five or six, that were already married.  One of them happened to be Hopalong Cassady, the Heisman Trophy winner. He was married either his senior year in high school or his freshman year at Ohio State. But anyhow, when I went back after starting all those games as a junior, I went back to Ohio State for my senior year.  I started out as the seventh-string quarterback. Anyhow, we kept working out and working out. Finally, Wednesday before the first game, Woody said, "You will start Saturday."  We'd had a scrimmage on Wednesday. Back in those days, we had to play both ways. Did you know that? I was a safety on defense. I went back as a safety for kickoffs, punts. Anyhow, to make a long story short, as a senior, we played sixty minutes for ten games including the Rose Bowl. I played like 558 of those minutes. Of course, we were undefeated. Because we were undefeated, Woody wasn't going to take a chance. I remember one time when I was a sophomore, we were beating Washington State like 28 to nothing with four minutes to go in the half. Doyt Perry was the backfield coach. He said, "OK. You second-stringers get ready. You're going in when we get the ball."  Woody turned around and says, "I've seen leads bigger 'n this lost, therefore you're not going in." So anyhow, we started out.  By the way, Woody Hayes, when he came to Ohio State, the first two years I think it was, at least the first two years, I guess it let up a little my junior year, which would have been the season of '53. The fans would sing a song, "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You." It was aimed at Woody because he wasn't winning enough. When we started out my senior year and started winning, I got to play, even back then before the second-string quarterback, the one who had gotten hurt as a junior, before he would get in the game, we had to have a three or four touchdown lead. If we were up by one or two touchdowns, I stayed in the game. As you can imagine, 558 minutes out of 600, and that's going both ways. But let me tell you, I enjoyed that much more than what they do now. Now they have an offensive team and a defensive team. I really enjoyed that. Woody and I and Doyt Perry would meet Wednesday night and go over the game from the previous week and the game coming up. We would get to certain situations in these games from the previous week or the one coming up and he would say, "Now what would you have called in a situation like that? Why did you call such a play?"  And I said, "Well. I have a good rapport with the offensive linemen."  We had a lineman called Big Jim Parker, who went on to become one of the greatest linemen in NFL history. He was one of the guys I depended on. I'd say, "Jim, what can you do to the guy over you?"  He'd say, "I can move him to the inside, but not out."  Or "I can move him to the outside, but not in." Woody said, "When I call a play, you better run it or have a damn good reason why."  Woody would only call three or four plays in a whole game. I would say out of every time he called one, I would refuse it. I'd call something else and I'd come out of the game.  One time he sent in for a quick kick on third down.  And hell, we only had like four or five yards to go. It might have been six.  I refused it and called a short pass. Completed it and we went on and I don't know whether we scored or not, but when I come out of the game, he said, "Why didn't you quick kick?" I said, "I thought that you had misjudged the distance we had. I figured you thought it was third down and sixteen instead of third and six."  He says, "You're right." Like I said, some games he would never call a play. Other games he might call two or three or four plays. That would come down from the press box normally. He and I got along great. Woody Hayes was just a great coach. There was not a guy that ever played for him that didn't respect him. As similar to Bear Bryant at Alabama, Bobby Dowd at Georgia Tech, Frank Broyles at Arkansas, some of these guys. To me to be a good coach, you don't have to be a friend of everybody on the team, but you have to be respected by everybody. We went on to the Rose Bowl. I played like 58 minutes of the game. We were ahead 20 to 7 with two minutes to go. He offered to put the second-string quarterback in who was a senior also. He told Woody, let the third-string quarterback go in because his dad played in the Rose Bowl. He let the third-string quarterback go in. We won the game 20 to 7. It was great to play in the Rose Bowl. I'll never forget it. I can remember at least fifteen or twenty of the plays that we ran. I also remember, I think it was an 85-yard touchdown that, it might have been Aramis Dandoy. But anyhow the Southern Cal guy got a punt I think on his fifteen yard line. It was one of the best punts that a punter had kicked all year, but it was also the longest run back against us that year. Then after my senior year, I was going to play basketball, but the baseball coach came to me and said, "Hey," I was only 6'1 1/2 or 6'2".  I wasn't very big for basketball. So the baseball coach came to me and said, "Hey, I know you were a catcher for the summer of every year since you were about in the sixth or seventh grade."  He says, "I want you to come out. We lost our catcher. I want you to be the catcher this year." I said, "OK. I'll do that." Then along came the Chicago Cardinals. My wife was pregnant at the time. I did tell you, I got married before my senior year. She was pregnant and we needed some cash. The Cardinals offered me a very nice contract with a $2,000 bonus which back in the '50s was a lot of money. It's not like the 25 or 30 million they get nowadays. I was the seventh-round draft choice of the Cardinals. Back then there were only twelve teams. So seventh round wasn't too bad. So anyhow, as soon as I accepted the $2,000, I was ineligible for college sports. It's been changed since then. Nowadays, if you're a pro football player, you can play basketball, baseball, track, or anything in college.  But if you signed a pro contract, you're ineligible for football, but you're eligilbe for the other sports. Anyhow, I went on to Chicago and was the second-string quarterback on the Cardinals as a rookie and then got called to active duty. I was in the ROTC. I got called to active duty and went to Dobbins Air Force Base in Georgia, after six games in the season with the Chicago Cardinals. I could apparently have got deferred to the end of the year, but I wanted to get it out of the way because then I could go in the Air Force for twenty-one months and get out in time to go back and play two years later in Chicago.  Well, I got out of the Air Force and went back to Chicago and started and I was doing OK until the week before the first game.  And I got cut. It was too late to sign on with any other NFL team, but I got a call from Regina Saskatchewan and I went up and played with the Roughriders until the end of the season. After that I took a job in Colorado Springs as sports director for the Air Defense Command. We had like fifteen different sports that I ran. I went back in the Air Force in 1961. In '65 I was transferred to Germany. They have an American league of all the bases in Germany. Being the sports director for the base, I also became the football coach. On a team like that, you have about 35-40 guys. One or two may have had college experience. I had a young quarterback from Oklahoma who was a good runner and an average passer and a fairly good play caller except when he got down around the twenty yard line. My job was to let him run the team until he got down around the twenty, and then he understood that I was going to take over and try to score. The first couple times I let him stay and he would mess up somehow, but a great kid.  We become great friends. For a couple of years after I got out of the Air Force and he got out of the Air Force, I had contact with him. But I haven't talked to him in many years now. Anyhow, that brings me up to date on football.

 

Mel:    I have just a couple of questions. When you got the contract with the Cardinals, was it a make-good contract or guaranteed?

 

Dave:    It was a $2,000 guarantee, which $2,000 to me and my wife was a lot of money in 1955. The contract was not a guarantee. It was just $2,000 up front. You go to training camp.  Back then I think we got $50 a week or something like that. It was some ridiculously small figure. But they housed you and fed you. $50, if it was that, was sort of like spending money. I turned down a guaranteed contract with the Toronto Argonauts for $25,000 for two years. Maybe going back now, I wished, but I have no regrets. Oh, by the way, playing football in the Air Force was as much fun as ever. It was fun because I was the head coach and a player and all these young guys. It was really great to install in them my kind of coaching. I was probably the first coach in Air Force football and maybe even in college football where my quarterback called all the plays from the line of scrimmage. He would go in the huddle and say, "OK. Flanker right, split left." Meaning one of the backs flanks to the right. Split left means the ends split out. Then he'd go up to the line of scrimmage. He'd look at what the defense showed and then he'd call the play.  He called every play that way and really did a heck of a good job.  Then when I would go in the game down around the twenty yard line, I would do the same thing.  Although when I went into the game, it was mostly for running the Split T fake to the halfback up the middle and then option on the end, one back to pitch to or I'd cut up and run the ball myself. When my tour was up over there, I got a young lieutenant, he was the officer assignments guy, I was a captain at the time, he said one day, "Let's go to lunch." So I went to lunch with him. He'd never asked me to go to lunch before. We're sitting there and he says, "I got some bad news for you." I said, "What's that?" He says, "You're going to Knob Noster, Missouri."  Have you ever heard of that place?

 

Mel:    No.

 

Dave:    One stop sign in the whole town. Knob Noster, Missouri, was the site of a missile silo. He says, "You're going to be down in the missile, in the silo in charge of missiles."  I says, "Oh, my God."  I says, "I better do something about it."  So I went to the base commander and said, "I want to go back to the States and go to the Air Force Academy."  I knew the coach at the Academy from when I lived here and when he first started coaching there. So this base commander said, "Well I'm going back to Washington next week. You can ride back with me."  On an Air Force plane it doesn't cost you anything. So we got back to Washington and I caught a hop on another Air Force plane to Colorado Springs. I went out and talked to the coach and asked him if I could possibly get on his coaching staff.  Let me call San Antonio and see if I can get your orders changed. So he says, "I'll let you know." He told me, "They're going to change your orders. You're going to go to the Air Force Academy." So I went back to Germany and had lunch with the lieutenant again. I said, "Guess what I found out? I'm not going to Knob Noster. I'm not going to silos. I'm going to the Air Force Academy on the coaching staff." He says, "It's not what they tell me in Wiesbaden," which was the headquarters in Europe. So I said, "Oooh, I better check this out." So I jumped in a car and drove up to Wiesbaden, about 35-40 miles and talked to the people there.  They said, "Yes, we got the change. We just haven't notified Rhein-Main Air Base yet. But you are going to the Air Force Academy."  So I came here and coached football for three years. I got out of the Air Force and went back to my home town. Then I came back out to Colorado Springs as the sports director for the Air Defense Command. So that's the story and I'm sticking to it.

 

Mel:    When you played up in the CFL, were their any other guys from the United States on the team with you?

 

Dave:    Yes. Frank Tripucka was the quarterback. I'm trying to think. There was a limit to the number of American players they could have. Four, five, or six. Something like that. They had a guard from Wisconsin. I can't remember his name. But Frank Tripucka was the quarterback up there. Frank Tripucka, after leaving up there came down and was the quarterback for the Denver Broncos. In fact, the coach [Frank Filchock] at Regina Saskatchewan also came down to the Broncos and was the head coach for a couple of years. There were some good players up there, but not like there have been in the last eight or ten years when some of the best . . . Warren Moon went up there and was great. The guy from Boston College, Doug Flutie. Flutie was up there for four or five years. I think he was the outstanding player almost every year. They get some of the better football players now. The other guy from Miami and Texas, he came back from Canada. He was suspended for one or two years for drugs. So he went up and played in Canada. Up there, I didn't get to play very much. I also was working out as a receiver because in my first year of playing football in the Air Force was at Hamilton Air Force Base. That was shortly after I went in the Air Force in 1955. We had a quarterback from Georgia Tech by the name of Pepper Rodgers. Pepper was a quarterback and a quarterback only. So I became a flanker. I caught a lot of passes that he threw to me. That was one year. When I went to Germany, then I started being a quarterback again, but I only played in like fifteen or twenty minutes a game at the most, because over there I wasn't going to play any defense over there. I just played offense.

 

Mel:    Did you ever have any serious injuries football?

 

Dave:    Yes. As a junior in spring practice. Right after my junior year, I should say. Football in '53, in spring practice for the '54 season, our undefeated season. I was running an option and as I turned to make a cut up the field, on my left leg, a guy hit me knee high and just tore some . . . I shouldn't say tore. He stretched some of the ligaments in my left knee. So the doctor says, "Wear a brace."  I says, "Well, I'm going to be playing baseball this summer."  "Wear a brace the whole time."  Actually it was not a brace like they wear these days with the metal and everything. It was simply a large Ace bandage wrapped around my leg. It was taped underneath it. I played baseball all summer. Didn't have any problem. I went back to football. They would tape it before each game, but I never had to wear a brace or anything. Luckily I never had another injury. That's the only one I had in all the years I played football or basketball or baseball. I was lucky. I'm sort of big-boned. As a freshman, I was one of the largest quarterbacks ever playing in the Big Ten at 6'2", 198 pounds. They're several guys here in Colorado Springs that I play golf with, two of them are from Iowa, another one is from, oh where in the hell, Purdue or . . . and they were talking about the big quarterbacks in the Big Ten.  Kenny Ploen was at Iowa, after him it was another quarterback who might have been 6'3" or 6'4". But back in those days, the little quarterbacks were the starters on most of the teams. The Davey O'Brien award was given to the small quarterback in college football.  That was usually somebody around 5'8" or 5'9".  Michigan State, when I was playing, they had something called the Kitty Backfield or something like that. The tallest guy was about 5'7" and weighed about 155 pounds. And the linemen. Jim Parker, the one I told you about. He was about 6'3", 247. But he was fast for thirty yards. He could run sprints with the backs. The rest of our line probably averaged, oh I guess maybe, 210 to 215 pounds is all. That was a pretty good-sized line back in the mid-50s. Early '50s up to the mid-50s. So anyhow, we had nobody over that 247. We had nobody over 250.  And nowadays, they have nobody under 250.

 

Mel:    Did players like Parker play both ways?

 

Dave:    Oh, yes. He was offensive guard and the middle linebacker. He may have saved our undefeated season. We were ahead of Michigan 14 to 7. Michigan had the ball on our four yard line, first and goal. They ran four plays. They had a good fast back, a running back that weighed about 200. They ran him into the line four times. Parker must have stopped him three times. The last one he stopped him on the six inch line. Had they have scored, there was no overtime back then. We might have been held to a tie or might even have lost. But anyhow when he stopped him on the six [inch] line, we went 99 and 2/3 yards and scored to make it 21 to 7 and that's how the game ended up.

 

Mel:    It sounds like your bout with polio, you overcame it so much, that you did very well.

 

Dave:    Yes. I can't think of that guy [Vic Wertz]. This guy was an outfielder for the Cleveland Indians and he got non-paralytic polio. He had to lay out for half a season or something like that. He come back the next year, starting outfield right again. I only really know hundreds or thousands or maybe even millions throughout the world who had non-paralytic polio and maybe some of them didn't even know that's what they had. When I came home before my senior year in high school, I went to see a buddy play in the high school all-star game. Then after the all-star game on a Saturday night, we went over to Cleveland and watched a double header with the Cleveland Indians. Going home that night, like I said, about a 75 or 80-mile ride, when we first started, I was so hot that I had to get all my clothes, my sweater, and everything taken off. So then I got out of the car and walked around a little. I got back in the car and we went another thirty or forty miles and I was freezing. So the other guys in the car gave me their jackets. I had three or four jackets on. I got home and I remember my brother-in-law says, he told my sisters, "Dave's drunk."  Well I was out of it, you know. My doctor was out of town so the nurse came out and she was something else. She checked me out and says, "You're going to the hospital right away." So I went to the hospital and they ran a bunch of tests. They says, "It's polio." That's why that ambulance driver says "I took him over, but I'll never bring him back." The polio never has really affected me except . . . in '81 I went on a trip to Arizona. A golf trip. A business trip and golf trip. And I came home and I was sicker than a dog. My wife took me to the hospital. After seven days, they said we don't know what your problem is. We've done all kind of tests and we don't know what is wrong. We're going to send you home and hope you get better. The only thing I remember about that. I had a headache so bad. I told my wife, "I've had this headache for four days. You'd think they could at least give me something to get rid of a headache." Like on the fifth or sixth day in the hospital, all of a sudden it snapped. The headache went away. Not for anything that they did. It just snapped and I didn't have a headache any more. That's when they said I could go home after a couple more days. My wife and my daughter and some other people think it was a reoccurrance of polio, but it can never be proven. When I went home, I was weak for probably three or four months. I could barely walk when I went home. I was hallucinating all the time. I was a stock broker at the time. I was told by my brain or however that happens that I had inherited a billion dollars. Or fifty million I think it was. When I was on this trip, there was a marble in sort of a creek bed. I picked up that marble. They said that marble was worth $50 million. You know, I'm hallucinating. I told this one kid that was an expert golfer at our club. I said, "You're going out to try for the pro tour." I said, "If you need any money, I'll back you." He said, "Well, it's a lot of money."  I said, "Don't worry."  I remember telling the brokerage company I worked for. They said, "Where do you want the money?" I said, "Pick out five banks and put 10 million in each." After about three months it came back and it was all in my mind.  When I first started playing golf after that, probably three months, after I got playing golf again, I couldn't hit it more than fifty to one hundred yards. When I used to hit it three or four times that far. But anyhow, it took me a year to get over it completely because my wife and I used to go to a lot of dances. A year from that time, we went to a dance at the country club. She says, "I think you're better because you're dancing like you used to." Then I was never bothered again for ten years, something like ten years, or maybe a little less than that. I came down with type 2 diabetes. I was on pills. For the last four or five years I've been on insulin. I control it decently. Not real well but not real bad. I'm still playing golf. Live on the golf course. Play golf Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, if the weather's good. In fact, I played today.

 

Mel:    It sounds like a fulltime job.

 

Dave:    A fulltime job playing golf. That's right. I was what they call an independent broker from the time I started being a broker. I was an independent broker. If I went to the office, it was me earning the money. If I wanted to go play golf, I just take off that afternoon and my secretary would handle all the phone calls. I retired on December 31st of [20]04.

 

Mel:    Just a while ago.

 

Dave:    Yes. I retired at age 71.

 

[Note:  Regarding Leggett's "stint" with the CFL Roughriders, football historian Tod Maher (who co-authored the Canadian Pro Football Encyclopedia with Bob Gill in 2013) wrote me on Jan. 7, 2014: "Leggett was cut by the Cards on 8/26/1957.  He was then apparently given a tryout with Saskatchewan on 9/3/1957.  I have all the lineups for Saskatchewan that year and he does [not] appear in any games."]