So, I’ve added a new section to Joe Blogs called “Quick Hitter,” which will just be the occasional short story about some bit of news that might have broken that day or some interesting little tidbit I heard, etc.
We’ll use our first “Quick Hitter” for a correction — hopefully you have read the latest Football 101 on Jonathan Ogden — lots of fun stuff in there. And in there I talk again (as I did in the Football 101 essay on Walter Jones) about how my friend Peter King has been trying for years to get Tony Boselli into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Well, I wrote the Ogden piece at the same time that I wrote the Walter Jones piece — a few weeks ago. And since then, well, as most of you probably know, Tony Boselli actually was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Kudos to Peter and the Hall of Fame voters for getting that done; I truly believe Boselli belongs.
And so, I thought I would do this quick hitter congratulating Boselli for his overdue election … and retell my favorite Boselli story, one that I included in the Ogden piece.
It’s from Boselli’s college days at USC. Early in 1994, he began dating Angi Aylor, who was Miss Teen California (Tony and Angi have been married now for more than 20 years and have five children).
On July 4 that year, Aylor went to an Independence Day party, and there were a couple of Stanford football players there. They found out she was dating a USC football player and asked who he was.
“Well,” she said, “he doesn’t really play. He’s just on the team.”
“Who is it?” they asked again.
“Tony Boselli.”
And their eyes about popped out of their heads. Tony Boselli? Didn’t play? Didn’t she know that Boselli was perhaps the best football player in America? They told her to go to the store and buy a Pac-10 preview magazine. And when she did, she saw that Boselli on the cover. And that’s how she found out he was a superstar football player.
I love everything about this story, love how Boselli was so modest he left her with the impression that he wasn’t even a starter. But here’s the funniest part of all — the reason she went to the party alone was that at the time he was at the Walter Camp All-America awards ceremony. He did tell her that, but she didn’t quite get it.
“He just told me he was at Walter Camp,” she said. “I thought that was some sort of football camp where people try and get better and try to make the team.”
My wife was actually like this. We met at a half marathon. We didn't actually end up running together in the race, but connected again later. I asked her time, and she said she hadn't really run a good race & had hoped to catch up to me. Well, they used to print out the detailed time results to this race, and when I looked at it, she had beaten me by 15 minutes. When I told her that, she kinda brushed it off. Then when she was collecting some stuff from her parents house, I came upon a box of trophies. Obviously a lot of trophies are garbage, but I looked at them. She was a league champion runner in High School (the trophy was for first place in the cross country league finals. She also had one for 3rd in the state tournament) & had actually won her age group (teen group, which is a fast group) in the biggest local 10K event. I was blown away. She again brushed it off and told me not to tell other people. She still doesn't like to talk about that stuff. She was also kinda mad that she came in 3rd in the state race. It still bothered her that she hadn't won it. So, it wasn't like she wasn't competitive.
Fantastic story! Just wondering if the timing was wrong--All American ceremonies are usually in the spring, aren't they? Walter Camp awards this year are in March. Maybe he was away in July for a preseason AA photo shoot?