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Sank played, talked a good game

By Mike Ciarochi mciarochi@heraldstandard.Com 11 min read
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When you hear the name Tom Sankovich, you probably think of the crusty old guy who coached Connellsville’s baseball team to a state championship back in 1989.

Of course, you would be spot on with that assessment, although he may argue with the adjectives that precede the word “guy” in the first sentence.

What you may not know about Thomas E. Sankovich, the man with a field named after him at Connellsville High School, is that he was one heck of a football player at North Union Township High School and at the University of Maryland. In fact, “Sank,” as he is universally known, was the smallest starting tackle in Division I football in 1960.

It was because of his football playing career that Sank was inducted into the Fayette County Sports Hall of Fame with the organization’s seventh class that was inducted on June 20. He was inducted from the 1900-1959 era.

“It’s a terrific honor, one of the best I’ve ever had,” Sankovich said. “I played in what they called the Golden Age of sports in Fayette County and it’s just a great honor. People don’t realize just how many great athletes there were in Fayette County, how many kids went to play big time football. Just to be mentioned with guys like that is a tremendous honor.

“I played at North Union High School and both of my coaches also played Division I football. Nick Bubonovich was the head coach and he went to George Washington. My line coach was Steve Pollach who went to Pitt and played. So, I had good coaching in high school, tough, old-time, hard-nosed coaches.”

They were coaches who helped define Sankovich as a player first, but later as a coach of many sports, including football.

“I learned a lot of lessons about how not to treat kids from my college coach,” Sankovich said. “One example: We were preparing to play Clemson and on Oct. 13, 1960, what happened that’s famous. Mazeroski hit the home run that beat the Yankees. Well, we’re practicing as a group. There were probably 12 of us and 10 of those 12 were from Western Pennsylvania. Some kid walked by, it’s about 4:15 in the afternoon, and he says, ‘Mazeroski just hit a home run, the Pirates won the World Series.’ We started jumping up and down cheering, our line coach at that time was cheering with us. Our head coach came running down and chewed us out, made us do extra running because we were making a mockery out of practice. When you are a young kid, you respect your coach. But I’m thinking, how would we have felt if he came down and started cheering with us.

“That’s only one example, but I learned a lot of lessons from my coach at Maryland on how not to handle kids. Now, he was an innovator. He was the first coach that ever ran the I formation, we ran wildcats and spreads back in 1959. In 1960, we were the first team in the world to have our names on the back of our uniform. So he did a lot of things as an innovator, but I learned things from him on how not to coach. His name was Tom Nugent and he died a couple of years ago in his 90s. A very religious man and I don’t mean to say ill things about him, but I learned things from him on how not to coach.

“Then, when I started coaching at Dunbar, Stan McLaughlin was the head coach and I learned a lot of lessons from him on how to treat people and how to handle kids. I knew when I was getting ready to finish my career at Maryland that I had no career in football because I was too little to play anywhere, so I played baseball my senior year at Maryland. I was the starting third baseman. The football coach came up to me and said, ‘Hey, if you want to keep your scholarship, you gotta go help be a grad assistant for spring training, so I had to give up baseball my senior year because I wanted to graduate. After that, I just studied the coaches, I stuck around Fayette County my whole life.”

Did we mention that Sankovich is the kind of guy who will fill a notebook and still not be done talking? Even at the induction ceremony, Sank was upset by the five-minute limit he had for his speech. At the after party at the Highland House, Sankovich was approached as he sat at a table.

“I didn’t get to tell any of my stories,” was the first thing out of his mouth. Above is one example, below are many more.

He was asked how he came to be recruited by Maryland and the following story came out.

“This is hard to imagine, but until three weeks before you had to report to football for college, I didn’t know whether I was going to go to West Virginia, Arizona State or North Carolina,” Sankovich said. “I played in an All-Star game in Pittsburgh, the Jaycee West Penn All-Star Game. It was a real big all-star game. After the game was over, I had three or four college coaches coming up and talking to me. One of the coaches who came up who was impressed with me was from Maryland. Maryland had been national champs a few years before that and in 1955 they were undefeated. I wanted to go to a college that had a nice campus and I had heard that Maryland had a real good campus.

“This game was played on a Wednesday and he said, ‘Can you come down to Maryland this weekend?’ and my parents drove me down to Maryland. The first place I walked into was Cole Fieldhouse. Back in 1958, Cole Fieldhouse was a 12,000-13,000 seat basketball gymnasium and there was no place like it in the world. I said, my God, what a place! Then, the campus was just beautiful. It was like out in the country, nice facilities. So I signed to go to Maryland and two weeks later, I’m down there getting a physical getting ready to play freshman football.

“Back then, you could sign with different schools and it wasn’t binding. I actually signed at Arizona and I signed at GW. The rule back then was if you signed with a school, no one else from that conference would recruit you. Had I signed a letter-of-intent to go to North Carolina, Maryland wouldn’t have recruited me because they were both in the ACC at that time. But it was actually three weeks before we started practicing that I decided to go to Maryland.”

And, what was it like to play at Maryland?

“It was a great experience, one of the greatest experiences of my life,” Sankovich said. “We had some unbelievable talent there. What most of us didn’t know, I didn’t know, but Jim Tatum was a legendary coach at Maryland and the year before I got there, he left and went to North Carolina. He was the one who recruited me to go to North Carolina. They built him a new house and everything. The reason he went to North Carolina was that Maryland had hired a new president. He was a Rhodes Scholar and the requirements went from one extreme to the next. I went in with 50-some freshmen and only seven or eight of us graduated from that crew, guys were flying out of there left and right.

“But we had a lot of talent. Our freshman team only lost one game. We had winning seasons all three of my years at Maryland. The unique thing was that in 1960, that would have been my junior year, there were five players from right outside of Uniontown who played at Maryland. Richie Novak and Tom Rae from South Union, I was from North Union and Bernie Manor from German Township and Joe Hrezo from Uniontown. None of us were redshirted, we all played right off the bat. That really says something when one major college has five players from the immediate area of Uniontown all playing ball. The thing that’s unique about this is we all get together every year for a Maryland game and we just have good times.

“When I was in school, you played both ways. My freshman year, I started on the freshman team, my sophomore year, I was a back-up but I played in every game and got a letter. My initial baptism into college football, I’ll never forget this, we played West Virginia the first game of the year and we beat them, 27-7. Richie Novak was the starting quarterback and I still say Richie Novak was one of the best athletes to ever come out of Fayette County. He threw three touchdown passes in that game. The next game we played, we played Texas in Texas then we played at Syracuse and we played them both tough. At the end of the year in 1959, Syracuse and Texas played for the mythical national championship at that time. So we got broken in with some top-notch competition, so I was fortunate.

“My sophomore year, we played against a Heisman Trophy winner, we played against Joe Belino from Navy, Navy was pretty good that year, they played in the Orange Bowl. He was the Heisman winner that year and I played against a Heisman winner my senior year, Ernie Davis. The thing I remember about that game was I played between John Mackey and John Brown. Mackey, obviously, the Mackey Award is named after him. And I kind of handled them, we beat them and we kind of controlled the whole game. At that time, we were both in the top 10 and we were both undefeated, it was like the third game of the year and it was one of the first games that was ever televised regionally on ABC. I had a good game and we beat them and that was probably one of my proudest moments of my life. The thing about it is I got that game on a CD. A lot of the old films that Maryland could recover they put on CDs and I have a couple of the games that I played in at Maryland on CD.

“When I played, most of the tackles were 240-250. There were some articles in a couple of the D.C. papers. In 1960 I played tackle, offense and defense, and I was the smallest starting tackle in Division I football. I weighed 195 my junior year. There were three guys — and I’m proud of this, too — that played behind me, couldn’t beat me out, who ended up playing at least 10 years in the NFL. I used to go to bed at night, praying, ‘God, could I be 6-4 or 6-5 and weigh 240?’ But I’m six-foot tall and 195 pounds. The thing is, I don’t like to talk about myself, but I could run, I was quick, I was kind of strong.”

And he was pretty tough, too, right?

“I guess,” Sankovich admitted. “We had four kids in my family and we had to fight to eat.”

OK, so that’s the Thomas E. Sankovich story, beginning to end. But there is one more story that he wanted to tell at the banquet and it’s a pretty good one, in a nostalgic sort of way.

“I wanted to make a little money, so between my junior and senior year at Maryland, I got to host a recruit who came down to Maryland on a visit,” Sankovich said. “I don’t know if we ever got close to signing this kid or not, but he was from Pennsylvania. We had a coach who ended up leaving Maryland to become an assistant to Bear Bryant at Alabama the next year and that’s where this kid ended up was at Alabama. It was Joe Namath. I take a lot of pride in that, too, that I hosted Joe Namath on a recruiting trip.”

Now, that is the complete Thomas E. Sankovich story.

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