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A look back 1920s Pottsville star Tony Latone could get Hall boost from book, movie

July 22, 2007

A Canton run?

PLAINS TWP. – The best football player Red Grange ever saw came from Edwardsville.

He didn’t have anywhere near the football pedigree of Grange – a star running back at the University of Illinois who legitimized the fledgling NFL when he turned pro with the Chicago Bears in the 1920s.

Indeed, Tony Latone, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, was forced into the coal mines of Northeastern Pennsylvania before he had even managed to finish the fifth grade.

Unlike the majority of his contemporaries who followed Grange from college to the pro ranks, Latone learned the game playing in the sandlots of Wilkes-Barre and developed the raw strength that would make him one of the toughest fullbacks of his day pushing coal carts.

From that humble, hard-scrabble beginning, he went on to become the unofficial leading rusher of the NFL in its infancy.

Since then, football royalty ranging from the likes of Grange, former Bears’ owner George Halas, former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and the current owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles have sung the praises of Latone and the Pottsville Maroons team he starred for from 1925-28.

Even so, Latone is conspicuously absent from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

But a book by David Fleming, ESPN The Magazine senior writer, that is due out in October and a movie based on the book that’s currently in production may just change that.

“There will be a major impact,” said Plains Twp. resident Scott Warren, who was instrumental in getting Latone inducted into the Luzerne County Sports Hall of Fame earlier this year. “Tony Latone is probably going to get the attention that he needs to have to get a look from the hall of fame (selection committee).

“There have already been requests from me and from newspaper writers from papers like Newsday to have Tony looked at again for this upcoming class.

“With the book coming out I think it’s definitely going to shed some light on his career. And with the movie coming out – I think it’s going to be a major thing.”

Latone has been on the Pro Football Hall of Fame ballot twice before – in 1963 and 1964.

But the relative obscurity in which he played – Pottsville is the smallest city to ever host an NFL team – coupled with his lack of a college football career during an era when college overshadowed the pro game, killed his chances and has been hurting him ever since.

Just four years ago, Latone’s name popped up in a Paul Zimmerman column on Sports Illustrated magazine’s Web site, SI.com. Zimmerman, a senior writer for SI, was one of nine members of a committee that selects “seniors” to be considered for induction into the hall.

When it came to Latone, this is what Zimmerman had to say at the time: “Latone has the distinction of being the only person to have come up on a Hall of Fame list whom I’d never heard of. I had to look him up. Played for Pottstown (sic), Boston and Providence from 1925-30. Scored 26 TDs. Now you know as much about Tony Latone as I do.”

The Fleming book should go a long way to erasing such ignorance.

“Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship,” tells the story of the Pottsville Maroons team that won and was subsequently stripped of the 1925 NFL championship for breaking league rules by playing an exhibition game against Notre Dame.

Latone, the team’s star running back, who was recruited from the Wilkes-Barre Panthers, is one of the book’s main characters.

It tells his story from the time he was forced to go to work as a breaker boy at 11 following the death of his father, through his enlistment in the Navy during World War I, his return to the mines following the war and, of course, his pro football career, which lasted from 1925 through 1930.

During the six seasons he played in the NFL, Latone outrushed (2,648-2,616) and outscored (26-21) Grange – known as the Galloping Ghost – despite playing 30 fewer games.

Latone eventually relocated to Michigan, where he worked for former teammate Frank Bucher in the warehouses of A&P foods following his retirement from football. He died on Nov. 24, 1975.

“That was one hell broth of a rugged coal miner,” Grange once told a sports banquet according to the book. “And for my money Tony was the most football player I have ever seen. I simply cannot imagine who could equal this 195-pound power playing fullback whose leg drive was so unbelievably potent he simply knocked the linemen kicking. Tony only knew two things about football: get the ball and run with it. If he was stopped at the line, he’d simply run backwards and come charging back at you all over again. It didn’t pay to get in his path. I know, since he came in my direction several times.”

“There will be a major impact. Tony Latone is probably

going to get the attention that he needs to have to get a look from the hall of fame (selection committee).”

Scott Warren

Plains Twp. resident

“Tony was the most football player I have ever seen. I cannot imagine who could equal this 195-pound power (at) fullback.”

Hall of Fame running back Red Grange,

On Edwardsville native and Pottsville Maroon star Tony Latone

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