Mel Bashore

George Terlep:   I got interested in sports at a very young age.  I can recall being only five or six years old and my mother and brother took me to Notre Dame to see the Notre Dame stadium and get inside of it.  I can remember running around that.  I said to my mom, “Someday I’m going to play football here.”  Of course, that was a big, big dream.  I lived in the town of Elkhart, Indiana, only twenty miles from Notre Dame.  I was small in stature.  I was only about 5'8" in high school.  In my freshman year, I only weighed about 125 pounds.  The Lord blessed me with a very strong arm.  I can throw a football 65 or 70 yards.  He blessed me with some quickness, but not much size.  I got by with those two, but it was a struggle because it always appeared that I was competing against somebody for my position that was much bigger and usually a lot stronger, but usually not quicker.  So I was fortunate just through working hard to make it there at Elkhart High School.  We had a real good football team.  We won our conference championship and played for the state title.  I made All State in high school in football and was fortunate enough to have several offers to go to college.  I always wanted to go to Notre Dame and I was offered a full scholarship at Notre Dame when Frank Leahy was the coach.  Of course the competition there was unbelievable.  On the team when I started in 1943 as a freshman—and I played there until I went in the service—there were seven different quarterbacks that made the first team in the All American Football Conference or the National Football League later in life, just to tell you how tough that competition was.  I played my freshman and part of my sophomore year and was called into the service right in the middle of the football season.  I remember we were playing a Navy team in Philadelphia and I had to go right from Philadelphia to report.  In the Navy at that time, I was in the V12 program.  As life went on, I was in the Navy and I was later transferred to Great Lakes Naval Training Station.  This was in 1945.  I was with the company at that time and we were going to be shipping out for San Diego.  The word was we were going to Japan.  The afternoon when we were called in the ranks, the company commander told me to report to a gentleman by the name of Lt. JG Paul Brown on the double.  I mean on the double!  which I did.  I got there and the officer said to me, “Are you the Terlep that played quarterback at Notre Dame?”  I said, “Yes, sir.”  He said, “Well, you’re not going with your unit.  Report for football practice tomorrow at 13:00.”  I was shocked.  I didn’t hardly know what to say.  I asked the question again.  He repeated it.  I turned an about face and I got on a telephone to call my fiancé.  I was engaged to her at that time.  I had just called her and said goodbye because we were leaving the next morning.  And I stayed and played for him.  That was Paul Brown who was the head coach at Ohio State and the head coach of the Cleveland Browns.  That’s who he was.  I didn’t know it at the time.  We had a great football team.  When I started in ‘43, Notre Dame won the national championship under Leahy.  We had a great ball club.  In that Great Lakes game which I quarterbacked against Notre Dame, we defeated them 39-6.  I hated to play against them.  I played against some of my great friends and buddies at Notre Dame.  That was really a great thing for me to do.  We had some great players at Great Lakes.  Guys like Marion Motley that later played for the Cleveland Browns.  We had five or six All Americans.  There was Marty Wendell, played at Notre Dame, was an All American.  And Grover Clemerer from California.  Bud Grant was our starting end.  He was later the head coach of the Minnesota Vikings and coached up in Canada for years.  We just had a great team.  After that I had four pro offers.  I had two more years at Notre Dame.  I decided I’ll never have a better chance to go into pro football than this so I gave up my junior and senior year and went and played pro football.  I signed with the Buffalo Bills [Bisons].  I was their starting quarterback in ‘46.  We had an excellent ball club at that time.  That was in the All America conference.  We won our division title.  Later I was traded in ‘48 to the Cleveland Browns.  I got back with Paul Brown who I played with at Great Lakes when he was head coach of the Browns.  I was just very fortunate for those things to happen.  While I was still with the Browns, I got a phone call one day from Frank Leahy.  He asked me what I hoped to do.  I said, “Some day I hope to be a college coach.”  He said, “That’s why I’m calling you.”  He said, “There’s an opportunity at the University of South Carolina”— with Rex Enright who was a fullback under Elmer Layden at Notre Dame years earlier.  He said, “If you’re interested, I can get you an interview.”  I said, “Well, I’ll have to talk to Brown because I’m under contract with the Browns.”  Of course when I talked to Brown, he said, “If you want to go into coaching there’s a job at University of Miami in Miami, Florida.  A backfield coach.”  Well I interviewed and I took the South Carolina job and was the backfield coach there.  So the good Lord kind of just took care of me through the years.  Something that I’d like to tell young boys is never, never give up.  Do what is really in your heart.  Do it the best you can and your breaks will come.  If not, you’re going to learn lessons in life.  The lessons that I learned in sports were just wonderful, wonderful to me.  For example, I want to come back to Notre Dame.  Leahy insisted that all of his football players be able to be good public speakers.  So we’d have to take public speaking, speak in class, go on the radio, make speeches in public.  I don’t know whether they still do that at Notre Dame, but I don’t know of one football player that I knew that represented Notre Dame at the time that Leahy was there that wasn’t a great representative and an excellent public speaker.  This was all because of Frank Leahy.  He was a great person.  He cared about his players.  So was Paul Brown.  I’ve got to go back because I passed up my high school coach which was Don Veller.  He was a gentleman who was in seven hall of fames.  After Elkhart High School, in later years he became a head coach at Florida State.  He had a marvelous record.  He was an All American in football, but he made the college football hall of fame, two Florida hall of fames.  I can’t remember them all.  He was a gentleman who would spend time with you.  I can remember breaking my leg in my junior year.  He came up to my bedroom and spent two or three hours with me when I was so upset.  I had to stay out of school six months because then they didn’t fix broken legs like they do today.  He was a great, great influence on the way I lived, the type of person I hope to be, I hope it was good.  So all those things can happen, but don’t ever give up no matter how tough.  Even if you don’t make it, if you’ve given your all and the things you’re going to learn are going to just be wonderful in later life.  I know that most the fellows I played with in college, not all, but a large percentage wanted to play pro football.  The chances of making it are very, very slim.  So when I coached college football, I made up my that the one thing I was going to do for the players that I coached was that I was going to see that they stressed getting an education, that they learned something that they could do later in life in case they didn’t make it in pro football, and be like a second father to these boys.  I can tell you so many wonderful stories because a lot of them didn’t make it, but they made it in life.  They got good jobs.  They were successful.  They were good people.  Probably one of the most important things that I learned along in life that came from my mentors was that in order to be a good person, you’ve got to think of other people first and do things for other people rather than for yourself and you’re going to be in good stead.  Your going to make friends.  You’re going to meet wonderful people.  Just do every little thing you can, no matter how small, for somebody else.  Those are some of the lessons that later I learned.  I was fortunate to coach football at good schools.  I started at the University of South Carolina.  I got a better job at Vanderbilt and later at Marquette and Indiana and at the University of Pennsylvania.  I was offered a couple of head jobs.  I coached pro football in Canada as a backfield coach at Hamilton in the pro league.  As a head coach at Regina, Saskatchewan, with a lot of success.  And a general manager with Ottawa Roughriders.  We won the Grey Cup which is like the Super Bowl here.  I got out of football because of the lack of security even though you were successful.  I had five kids.  I wanted more time with my family.  I had majored in business administration and minored in accounting at Notre Dame.  I always worked sometime in the summer in the business world so I went in the business world to be near my family.  I loved coaching, particularly college coaching.  Even though I took a big cut in pay, things worked out wonderfully there in the business world.  I’m retired.  I’ve been married for over sixty years to a wonderful lady.  We’ve had a marvelous life.  I can look back, I still have got great friends in the football world and all over.  I’ve had one real fortunate life.  But I would say to any high school boy, give it a try if that’s what you want, but give it your all.

Mel Bashore:   It sounds like you’ve had a rich life and are grateful for it.

 

George:   I am.  Very, very much so.  I’ve been fortunate.  I couldn’t have had a better life.  And blessed with five wonderful kids that are good kids and very successful.  The good Lord’s been good to me.

Mel:   Have you written your life story for your kids?

George:   No.  I haven’t.  I did have a sister who surprised me.  She kept scrapbooks from my freshman year in high school through my college and my coaching days and general manager days.  My history’s kind of there with all the things she put into those things.  If the kids want to know, they kind of look at that.  I was shocked when she gave me that.

Mel:   How wonderful.

George:   Yes.  Just very nice.  I don’t know what else to tell you unless you have any other questions.

 

Mel:   When you were a little kid, did you ever play football with the boys in the neighborhood?

George:   Oh, gosh, yes!  I started playing neighborhood football about the age of nine or ten.  We used to make up our own games.  I lived in the south side of Elkhart.  A little in the north side were a lot of Italian boys.  They formed their football team.  We used to play against each other and have the greatest times.  They were grudge games.  They were fun games.  We made a lot of friends.  It started way back then and from there, I went into high school.

Mel:   Did you play tackle football?

George:   Oh, yes.  We had no pads, but we played tackling all the way.  We tackled with no pads and nothing at all.  We didn’t have any helmets.  Things were so bad we were lucky sometimes to have a football because most people were poor back then.  You’re talking a long time ago.  You’re talking early 1930s.  I’m 83 now.

Mel:   You just sound as chipper as ever.

George:   Well, thank you.  I still work out five days a week for two hours a day.  That’s helped a lot.  I have a son whose a chiropractor and nutritionist that has made me eat the right things, thanks to my wife.  She’s the one that’s in charge.  Between the two, I’ve had a lot of help.

Mel:   What kind of equipment did you have when you played high school ball?  A helmet?
    
George:   We had still had the leather helmets then.  As I recall, the plastic helmet started about my freshman year at Notre Dame in ‘43.  It may have started before then, but the first time I wore a plastic helmet was 1943 as a freshman at Notre Dame.

Mel:   Did you have shoulder pads in high school?

George:   We had the shoulder pads and all that.  They have been refined to give you better protection.  They’re lighter weight, stronger material.  I think those improvements have been made.

Mel:   Were you not aware that they had that football team there when you went to Great Lakes?

George:   I was aware of it because in 1943 when I played for Notre Dame, we played Great Lakes at Great Lakes when I was a freshman.  From that time on, I didn’t follow it very much because I went in the service.  I kind of forgot about it.  I was in the service.  Then a year and a half later, I was shipped out there and I come back, but I didn’t have the faintest idea that I would be called to play there.  We were so intense about going to San Diego and Japan and getting ready for that.  Football wasn’t on my mind, I’ll be honest with you.  It just wasn’t because it was a serious time.  That was just one of the most marvelous breaks that ever happened to me because I stayed later and trained recruits at Great Lakes until when I got out.  Some of the people in the company that I was with, they had some tough times and some of them had passed away.  The good Lord just gave me a big break.

Mel:   Did you see any difference in Paul Brown’s coaching in the service and then when you played under him on the Browns?

George:   He was the same Paul Brown.  He was way ahead of his peers in organization.  His organizing of the complete football program was copied by the best coaches in the country.  He was so intense.  The only difference that I could see was that he could do more of what I call advanced football with the pros than he did with the college guys.  He opened up his offense more.  He was the same person.  He was a great guy, a lot like Leahy.  Both of them very intense, both of them marvelous coaches in different ways.  Some people thought he was too hard.  I found him hard and fair.  If you paid the price, he treated you great.

Mel:   I think it was the Buffalo Bisons that first year when you broke into pro ball.

George:   Yes, it was.  That’s correct.  At that time, it was the Bisons.  Then they changed it to the Bills.

Mel:   Did you have any guarantees that you would make the team?

George:   Oh, no.  Not back then.  There weren’t any guarantees.  You had to make it back then.

Mel:   What was the competition like?

George:   The competition was tough.

Mel:   Did you go to a training camp?

George:   Oh, yes.  Just like they do now.  We went to a training camp for about five to six weeks, just like they do now.  We didn’t play as many exhibition games.  But the training camp was hard and long.  You had to make it there.  It was a tough go.  The competition was tough, just like it is today.  The difference in football today is the player is bigger and I think he’s quicker.  Not always, but that’s what I would say.  The players are faster as a rule and they’re bigger.  Not necessarily better though.  In some spots, yes.  I can’t say they’re always better.  No.  Bigger and quicker and in a lot of cases, better.  Not overall.  There were some great football players back then.  The best players then would compare with the best players today.  Very definitely.  I’d take them man for man and they’d stand up very strong.

Mel:   Did you play both ways?

George:   You didn’t play a lot of both ways.  We played some defense, more than they do today because they only play offense.  If you played defense, you only played about ten per cent of the time.  If you were starting offensively, you played practically no defense.  If you were second or third string and you were a good defensive guy, then you played more defense if you were capable.  Not everybody was capable to play both ways, as you well know.  The two-way playing was very minimal when I played.

Mel:   Who were the players that you played with that stand out?

George:   We just had some outstanding people.  Back when I was with Buffalo we had a halfback by the name of Chet Mutryn who was unbelievable.  We had a linebacker by the name of Buckets Hirsch from Northwestern who I thought was one of the hardest hitting football players I’ve ever known in my life.  We had Steve Juzwik who was an All American halfback at Notre Dame and who played for us there.  I could go on and on.  For the Browns, Otto Graham was as good as passer as you’re ever going to see in pro football.  Mac Speedie and Dante Lavelli were a couple of ends.  Marion Motley at fullback would go with the top three in my book in the world.  Bill Willis, our captain at the time.  Lou Saban, linebacker and captain.  That ball club was great because I think we won seven titles in ten years.  They were unbelievable.  I could go on and on.  They would measure up to anybody playing today in their positions.  Easily.

Mel:   Mac Speedie grew up in Salt Lake.

George:   I’ll tell you, Mac Speedie was not only a super person, but he could run.  He was quick and he could catch a ball.  The same way with Lavelli.  That’s probably as good a pair of ends as I’ve ever seen.  I’ve seen individuals that compare, but two guys on the same team.  They were as good as I’ve seen.  There’s some great ones today.  There were just so many.  Some of those guys made All Pro for years and years.  I couldn’t begin to tell you.  I’d be talking all day.  I’ll tell you a football player that I think was the best two-way football player I’ve ever seen.  That was a guy by the name of Cookie Gilchrist who played with the Buffalo Bills when he was about 39 or 40 years old and made All Pro.  He came out of high school, went into Canada, and made pro football his first year.  He was an All Pro up there about seventeen or eighteen years.  He was the most powerful, most beautiful built, he was about 6'4", about 240-245, ran the 100 in 10.1, 10.2.  He would average 50 to 55 minutes a game all the time.  I was the backfield coach at Hamilton and then he played there and then I got him, I bought him from Hamilton when I was the head coach at Regina.  He played for me at Regina.  That’s the most beautiful body and the best two-way ballplayer of anybody.  He was as good offensively as guys like Marion Motley, Jimmy Brown.  He compared to them every bit.  But he played down here when he was 38, 39, or 40.  He was really over the hill and still made All Pro down here.  I wanted to mention one thing.  I think one of the things that I find young boys don’t do as much of, I think one of the things that helps you get ahead is to really do the proper exercising programs hard and harder than anybody else and to practice long and hard.  I’m not exaggerating, even in high school and before starting high school, I used to throw a football through a tire standing at about ten yards and go back to fifty or sixty and then run all the way down and get the ball full speed to stay in shape.  Run it through again.  I did that by the hours practicing my passing techniques.  It takes that type of thing and particularly if you’re at a disadvantage size wise or ability wise, you got to make up for it some other way.  And even if not, it just makes you better, even if you’ve got all those talents.  The greater condition you are, you’re playing against somebody of equal ability and you’re in better condition, you’re going to beat that guy.  I think that’s a real, strong point that I think is forgotten.  Just don’t do enough.  Go out there and do more.  You’ve got to do it on your own.