Classroom champions, players from Pitt’s 1963 team hold no bitterness over bowl snub
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Over the years, whenever Ernie Borghetti runs across someone bragging about his football team, he always has the same answer. Sixty years later, it still makes him laugh out loud.
“Match us in the classroom,” he says. “Not on the field.”
Academics or athletics, it didn’t matter. Pitt’s 1963 team excelled in both arenas.
Borghetti is one of two All-Americans who helped Pitt finish 9-1, No. 3 in the nation and, as crazy as it sounds, uninvited to its bowl game of choice. The team will be honored Saturday during Pitt’s game against Louisville at Acrisure Stadium, and perhaps 20 players are expected to attend.
Uninvited, but not especially unhappy about it. And, certainly, not uneducated.
That’s pretty much how Borghetti, who played offensive and defensive line at 235 pounds, and Chuck Ahlborn, a 208-pound center, remember their team, one of the best in school history.
“We were successful on and off the field,” said Borghetti, a retired Youngstown, Ohio, dentist.
Borghetti didn’t have the numbers in front of him, but he estimated a vast majority of the members of that team earned degrees.
“There were only one or two who were on the team that didn’t graduate,” he said.
There were four players who became dentists, according to Borghetti and Ahlborn, who were two of them. Also, the team spawned a couple of a physicians and at least two attorneys, including All-American running back Paul Martha, who became an executive with the Pittsburgh Penguins and San Francisco 49ers, and quarterback Fred Mazurek. Tackle John Maczuzak became CEO of National Steel and end Bob Long a minister.
“It was a highly educated team,” Ahlborn said. “That’s probably one of the reasons we were successful. Everybody there was very smart. They didn’t take any boneheads.”
Yet the team stayed home during bowl season, largely because of a 24-12 loss at midseason to Navy and eventual Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach.
Also, there was a two-week delay before Pitt could finish the regular season against Penn State. The game was postponed until Dec. 7 because of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. By the time Pitt defeated Penn State 22-21, the bowls already had set up their matchups.
”We wanted to play (eventual champion) Texas for the national championship,” Borghetti said. “We turned down some bowls waiting for the Cotton Bowl.”
Ahlborn, who lives in Brownsville, said Pitt had an opportunity to play in the Peach Bowl, a lesser game at the time, but voted against it.
“We’d rather be home with our families at Christmastime,” he said.
Uninvited, but not unrecognized locally. The Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce presented each member of the team with gold watches with the inscription, “Uninvited Pitt 1963.”
Borghetti said players weren’t bitter, only disappointed.
“We thought we were better than Navy,” he said, mentioning Pitt lost two fumbles and threw two interceptions beyond the 50-yard line in that game.
Nonetheless, it was a special team. It was 10 years before Pitt had another team with a winning record. Johnny Majors’ first team finished 6-5-1 in 1973.
Borghetti attributed his team’s success to experience.
“We had a lot of five-year players. We didn’t make a lot of mistakes,” he said. “We didn’t have a Tony Dorsett, although Paul Martha was a real good ball player. Mazurek was a good quarterback, but, naturally, he wasn’t Dan Marino. We had 11 guys who did what they were supposed to do that you could count on.”
The team practiced at a field across from Fitzgerald Fieldhouse or on a field in front of the Veterans Administration Hospital. Sometimes, in a bizarre scene, players dressed for practice at Pitt Stadium and walked several blocks through traffic to Forbes Field and back.
“We thought our locker room wasn’t much,” Borghetti said. “Then, when we went down and saw the Pirates’ locker room, we weren’t that bad.”
Borghetti’s initial attraction to Pitt was the same as Mike Ditka’s a few years before him. Both men wanted to become dentists, and Pitt had and still has a famous dental school. A graduate of a parochial high school (Youngstown Ursuline, also the alma mater of coach Pat Narduzzi), Borghetti said he turned down a scholarship to Notre Dame.
“They just about threw me out of the church. I had the bishop come and visit me,” he said.
Borghetti’s senior season also was his freshman year of dental school, but his class schedule forced him to be 15 minutes late for practice every day.
Coach John Michelosen was OK with that arrangement, but he wasn’t especially friendly with his players.
“If you had anything to say or wanted to know anything, you went to (the assistants),” Borghetti said of Steve Petro and Bimbo Cecconi. “If he came to talk to you, there was a problem.”
Michelson’s 11-year tenure is the second-longest among all-time Pitt football coaches.
“He was a Jock Sutherland man (for whom Michelosen played in the 1930s),” Ahlborn said. “During the season, he would cross the street rather than run into you and say, ‘Hi.’ He didn’t talk to his players. Now, offseason, he was as friendly as he could be.
“We were not friends. He was our coach, and that’s the way it was.”
Football, of course, was a dramatically different game in those days.
“We hit Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We went live scrimmages,” Ahlborn said. “We never lifted a weight. Back then, if you lifted weights, (the fear was) you were going to get muscle-bound.”
Despite the bowl snub, neither man has any regrets.
“I made a lot of good friends,” Ahlborn said. “That’s the best thing that came out of it.”