"INVINCIBLE" - THERE'S A LOT MORE - AND A LOT LESS - TO THE VINCE PAPALE STORY
By Hugh Wyatt
360-834-3868
When Don Shipley wrote me to ask if I planned on seeing the upcoming Disney movie, "Invincible," I was all set to tell him, "of course." Don is now a vice-president of a major lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., but I still know him as the son of the late Dick Shipley, my coach when I played for the Frederick (MD) Falcons in the Interstate Football League, 38 years ago.
Don remembers those great days of minor league football, and he remembers some of the story which "inspired" the movie. And what he told me convinced me that I wouldn't watch the movie if they duct-taped me to a seat.
"Invincible‚" as Disney slyly tells us, is "inspired by a true story - the story of Vince Papale, who against long odds won a spot with the Eagles as a 30-year-old rookie, and managed to make a four-year NFL career out of it. He really did. That much is true.
But, as Disney tells it - and as Don Shipley warned me they would - Papale was essentially plucked off the streets of Philadelphia, a guy with no prior football experience to speak of who found himself playing in the NFL
Nothing could be further from the truth. "Inspired by a true story" may provide Disney with the cover it needs to play fast and loose with that "true story," but it really isn't the true Vince Papale story unless it acknowledges what he did, and at an advanced age at that, to put himself in a position to get that shot at the NFL.
It was the fall of 1973, the World Football League was on the horizon, and I was scouting the minor leagues of the East, preparing for the coming of the World Football League. This one particular Saturday night, I was in a suburb of Philadelphia called Aston, Pennsylvania, watching a team called the Aston Knights play the Schuylkill Coal Crackers in a Seaboard Professional Football League game.
The Aston Knights had existed for years as the Ridley Township Green Knights. That's the team I knew when I had coached against them the previous two years, as head coach of the Hagerstown (MD) Bears - but at this particular point, since they were playing at a high school stadium in Aston, they evidently thought it was wise politically to adopt that name. (Things tend to be a bit fluid in the bush leagues.)
They were a rough, hard-nosed bunch, and to tell the truth, something of an affront to most of the other teams in the league, because while the rest of us were striving to create an image of "minor-league" football, cultivating our local media, marketing our ticket plans, putting on innovative halftime shows (we once had a female skydiver in a Budweiser bikini land in the middle of our stadium) and featuring players recruited from the training-camp cuts of NFL teams, the Knights' operation was barely a step up from sandlot.
They tended to be nomadic in terms of where they played their home games; they didn't draw at home and except for wives and girlfriends they had no following on the road; and while the rest of us played in smaller towns, where we were considered something worth covering by the local media guys, the Knights, hidden out in the suburbs of a major sports market, got no media attention at all.
But they always came to play and they did have some good players. There was the night in 1972 when one of my better offensive linemen, Dickie Keats, got a working-over by a guy listed on the roster as Jimmy Jones who, we were told after the game, was a local high school dropout. Dickie, a veteran who was at least 30 at the time, never heard the end of it from teammates - Damn! Whipped by a high school kid! It wasn't until years later that we all learned that "Jimmy Jones" had gone on to Temple and an All-Star NFL career under his real name of Joe Klecko.
They were a mixed bunch, ranging from grizzled veterans of semi-pro ball to kids just out of high school to guys with solid college backgrounds. I recall a good running back from Duke named Frank Ryan, a linebacker from Notre Dame named Mike Kondrla, and a great little quarterback named John Waller, who had set all sort of passing records at Temple.
I'm not sure that they ever had a formal coach, and I sensed that their approach to practice was perhaps a bit more casual than ours. And unlike the rest of us, who had the money to actually pay our players a little something every game, they didn't even have the money for buses - they carpooled to away games, even to places as distant as Portsmouth, Virginia and Hartford, Connecticut.
On their best nights, though, they could beat the most professional of us, and even on their worst nights, they could still give any of us a physical beating.
This particular night, against the far better-organized (and seemingly more talented) Coal Crackers, from the anthracite regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania, the Knights were having one of their better games. They won, and a major reason was Waller's passing - and some incredible catches by a receiver I'd never seen before.
Not that that was so unusual. The Knights were feared for the way they could come up with some very good players who would play a game or two for them and then vanish, never to play again.
Since there was no game program - I said that they were sandlotters - I had to ask a few of the Aston people who this guy was, and I was told his name was Papale, which they pronounced "pa-PAIL.".
He wound up the season as one of the Seaboard League's top receivers.
Fast-forward a few months, to spring, 1974. I was by then Player Personnel Director for the Philadelphia Bell in the brand-new World Football League, and I had compiled a long list of prospects that our coaches were going to have to evaluate in short order before we decided whom to invite to training camp.
To shorten that list, we set up several free-agent tryout camps in different parts of the country, one of them near Philadelphia.
In truth, very few of the free agents at any of our tryout camps literally walked in off the street. Despite our depiction by some in the media, we were not rag-tag. Most of the players had been pre-screened, based on my scouting and that of others in our organization, or on recommendations of former coaches; tryouts were by invitation only. (The NFL had fewer teams then, and far smaller rosters, which meant there were plenty of respectable free agents.)
For this particular camp, we made sure that we issued an invitation to this guy Papale.
Overall, it was a reasonably productive camp. We looked at upwards of 150 guys and wound up inviting perhaps a dozen of them to come back later for another look. One of the dozen was Papale. In fact, he was the big hit of the tryout.
Afterwards, our head coach and general manager, Ron Waller (no relation to quarterback John) shook his head in wonderment at what he'd seen. Papale was big (6-2, 190), he was very fast, he ran good patterns and he caught everything thrown near him. Waller (the coach), who'd spent the previous season as head coach of the Chargers,said "F--k, (roughly every tenth word out of his mouth was "F--k"), we didn't have anybody that good in San Diego!"
Right then and there we signed him to a WFL contract, calling for a flat $16,000, with nothing guaranteed. It wasn't bad money then, but to earn any of it he had to make the team, and he could be cut at any time. Oh - and we found out how to pronounce his name. ("pa-PAL-ee")
His biography revealed that although he didn't have a lot of organized football in his background - he attended a college that didn't have football - he had solid credentials as an athlete. A very good athlete. He'd been captain of the track team at St. Joseph's College (now University) and had been a decathlete, a triple-jumper, a pole vaulter and a high-hurdler.
But until the previous season with the Aston Knights, he'd never played organized football. And he was now 28 years old.
He had been substitute teaching and coaching track in the Philadelphia suburbs.
The guy proved to be intense - fiercely driven to succeed - and he had the brains and the talent to go along with the drive. And now he had caught the coach's eye. I really think that Waller took something of a mentor's interest in seeing that his discovery would make it. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. Coaches do it all the time. And this guy really was good.
Surviving all the cuts, he made it all the way through our training camp at Glassboro, New Jersey, and onto the final 37-man roster - and the payroll. Competing neck-and-neck with some pretty good receivers, including former Kansas star Don Shanklin, Vince started several games at wide receiver for The Bell. Being a local "kid", he had a large and very enthusiastic following, who wore tee-shirts with his face printed on them to all our games. That was 1974.
In 1975, with a new Bell head coach (Willie Wood - first black man, incidentally, to coach a modern-day pro football team), he played the entire season - all that there was, since the league folded about halfway through - but he didn't play that much offensively and he caught just one pass. He backed up the Bell's starting wideouts, former Eagle Ben Hawkins and former Montreal Alouette Ron Holliday, as well as the tight end, former All-Pro Ted Kwalick, and he played on a lot of the special teams.
Following the folding of the WFL, he became a free agent, and at some point was signed by the Eagles. I have no doubt that Vince's persistence - his absolute belief in himself and his refusal to take no for an answer - had a lot to do with it. I can picture him walking into the GM's office and demanding a tryout.
Once he made it with the Eagles, he became a classic special-teamer, epitomizing the hardnose, blue-collar football that Eagles' fans appreciate. More than one reporter noted the resemblance to "Rocky," another Italian-American success story set in Philly.
But Vince's story is not Rocky. Nor is it Rudy, a story, heartwarming though it may be, that's been challenged as phony by some of Rudy's contemporaries at Notre Dame.
Vince Papale's story is real.
But don't believe for one minute that he was hiding under a rock until his "discovery" by the Eagles. I was no fan of Ron Waller, my boss, but he knew talent, and he was the one who first saw NFL potential in Vince Papale and gave him his chance to prove himself.
And it was the World Football League that gave Vince the opportunity to show he belonged on the field with professional football players (yes, we had them, and plenty of them. Vince Papale was not the only former WFL guy to go on to a career in the NFL).
And the Aston Knights and the Seaboard Football League (of which I was a co-founder) deserve a little credit, too, because without them Vince Papale would never have been able to go out at his age and play real football with real football players.
Without Ron Waller, without the WFL, without the Aston Knights and the Seaboard League, the Vince Papale story would be totally unbelievable - which is the way Disney would prefer it to be.
But they didn't have to monkey with the story. It's good enough story told straight.
THE PHILADELPHIA BELL ANNOUNCES VINCE PAPALE WILL BE GIVEN A FURTHER LOOK
THE PHILADELPHIA ROSTER AS TELEXED TO THE LEAGUE OFFICE
A PAGE FROM THE PHILADELPHIA-BIRMINGHAM PROGRAM, 1974
A PAGE FROM THE PHILADELPHIA-PORTLAND PROGRAM, 1975
ARTICLE IN THE VANCOUVER COLUMBIAN