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The Champions of St Ambrose
Rick Gosselin
August Publications
May 15, 2009 / ISBN 978-0-9752706-8-4
Sports history / Football
Amazon
Reviewed
by Dennis Collins
Goodfellows is a story about the unlikely success of the
football program in a high school that boasted an enrollment of
two hundred students. That school was St. Ambrose, a parochial school,
and in the nineteen fifties and sixties it straddled the border
of Detroit and Grosse Pointe Park.
At one time, the city of Detroit held an annual city championship
football game that pitted the Parochial League against the Detroit
Public School league. The game was called the Goodfellows game because
the proceeds supported the Old Newsboys Goodfellows “No Child
without a Christmas” fund. It had historically been dominated
by the public schools with their thousands of students. But St.
Ambrose had a dream.
Saint Ambrose didn’t really have any support facilities for
a football team. They didn’t have a football field or locker
room. The coach’s office was a converted coal bin in the basement
of the school. But they had a strong Dads’ club and a desire
to be great. They began by hiring a top notch coach and then evaluating
their talent pool. The belief was that average athletes could perform
at higher levels if they were well coached. It was like developing
a business plan. They began with a mission statement and then filled
in the holes. Within three years they produced a winner outscoring
their opponents by an average of over twenty four points a game
during the regular season and then beating the public school powerhouse,
Cooley, in the championship game.
In a ten year span tiny St Ambrose produced five All-America high
school players as well as twelve All-State players. Two of their
head coaches during that time, Tom Boisture and George Perles, would
move on to the NFL and eventually accumulate six Super Bowl rings.
It’s a wonderful David and Goliath type book and extremely
entertaining. This feel-good story is told by nationally recognized
columnist Rick Gosselin of the Dallas Morning News with forward
and introductions written by former NFL head coach Tony Dungy, and
current Detroit Lions head coach Jim Schwartz.
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