Super Bowl:
11/27/07
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Staten Island should be bigger. How else to make sense of a sports heritage so deep and rich it makes you want to blush, or stand up and cheer? How else to explain how one Island, about 15 miles long from tip to tip, and half as wide, could produce a reservoir of characters -- and character -- as accomplished as the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame's 2007 inductees?
Their larger-than-life stories -- the small-college lineman who earned three Super Bowl rings; the high school football coach who kept the game alive at a time when nobody else could; the bow-legged catcher who forged a path from the Markham Houses to the World Series; the baseball lifer who taught Hall of Famers to honor the game, and another who authored a revival of the game's minor leagues; and the Olympian who never got to the Games -- would read like sports mythology, if they didn't spring from the sweat of minor-league dugouts from Montana to Mexico; from the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs; and long-gone ballfields like Merrill Field and Thompson's Stadium, pieces of the Island that exist only in the memory of the people who played there.
Maybe that's why it will feel like an Islandwide celebration when the Class of 2007 -- three-time Super Bowl champ Joe Andruzzi; football architect Al Fabbri; Astro and Met coach Matt Galante; baseball executive Johnny Johnson; onetime Padre and Cardinal catcher Sonny Ruberto; and team handball Olympian Ray Rudolph -- joins the most exclusive club in the neighborhood.
Those six will be honored in induction ceremonies the afternoon of Feb. 9 at the CYO/MIV Recreation Center on the grounds of Mount Loretto in Pleasant Plains, joining the 80 individuals and four teams who preceded them to that intersection of character and accomplishment. JOE ANDRUZZI
Joe Andruzzi was the embodiment of the blue-collar
New England Patriots team that won the
Super Bowl in 2002, 2004 and 2005.
Somehow the 315-pound guard who played 10 NFL seasons with the Patriots and Browns managed to stay under the national radar at Tottenville High School and Southern Connecticut State, where he was a Division II All-American.
It took a detour to NFL Europe, two knee surgeries, and being cut by the
Green Bay Packers before Andruzzi established himself as a mainstay on the Patriot offensive line.
But when the Patriots won their first Super Bowl a few months after one of his firefighter brothers was in Tower One of the World Trade minutes before the buildings came down, Andruzzi and his family became the NFL rallying point for everything that happened after Sept. 11, 2001.
As a result of his work as a champion for firemen, sick kids, and anybody else in need, Andruzzi was named New England's 2002 recipient of the NFL's Ed Block Courage Award; and when the Patriots instituted their own award for community service, he was the first honoree.
Long before cancer cut short his career, he made himself a symbol of courage and hope, not just in his hometown, but all across the NFL. AL FABBRI
