The bus carrying dozens of kids from The Lower Naugatuck Valley pulled into West Point, N.Y, and the youngsters who had won a ticket in playground competitions that summer bunched together to watch, wide-eyed and slack-jawed as the heroes they’d heard and read about started marching into Michie Stadium.
Rich Marazzi, 13, maneuvered close enough to see his hometown hero, Bob Kyasky, up close.
“I remember seeing Bob come off the bus and he had a band around his wrist with all the plays written on it,” said Marazzi, historian and author of several books, including “A Bowl Full Of Memories” on the history of Yale Bowl. “It wasn’t often we had a kid go to West Point to be a football star. Around here in Ansonia, he was a popular as Mickey Mantle or Elvis Presley back in the 1950s.”
Coming from a part of the state that, then as now, was exceptionally avid for high school football, Kyasky was that big, and so was Army football. This was Nov. 3, 1956, three days before the most consequential former Army player, halfback, Five-Star General and America’s 34th president, Dwight Eisenhower, was to be re-elected by landslide. And it was still the era when Army football was as big a stage as there was to play the college game, still bigger for many than any in the NFL.
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Army occasionally cracks the rankings in modern times, finishing 21st in the final AP Poll of 2024. This season will end for Army (6-6) in Boston, where the Cadets will play UConn (9-3) in the Fenway Bowl Saturday at 2:15 p.m. There figures to be a good crowd, with both campuses in driving distance, and perhaps an atmosphere evocative of the glory days when the Cadets were usually in the national rankings, their players were Heisman hopefuls and household names and, for one season, a phenomenal athlete from Connecticut was their biggest star.
Marazzi’s and Kyasky’s fathers had worked together at the American Brass Company in Ansonia. Bob Kyasky, an inspiration to his blue-collar region, returned home with Army to play Yale in 1954, when he played a big part in a 48-7 victory, and 1955, when he was injured and Yale pulled a 14-12 upset.
A halfback earlier in his career, and a track athlete when healthy, Kyasky was a multi-sport standout at Ansonia High. At 5 feet 7 and 184 pounds, he was timed at 9.7 seconds in the 100-yard dash when he arrived at West Point, but missed most of his first three college seasons, breaking his collar bone as a Plebe, re-breaking it as a sophomore, tearing up his knee during a preseason photo shoot as a junior. When an early-season injury left coach Earl “Red” Blaik, who had won two national championships during the 1940s, without a quarterback for 1956, Kyasky, now a senior, jumped into the breech and led them to wins over VMI and Penn State to start the season.
“He is an athlete, he can throw,” Blaik told syndicated sportswriter Jimmy Breslin in October. “He is the finest college football player in the nation now. And when he came, we considered him the finest back West Point had seen since Glenn Davis (the 1946 Heisman winner).”
That’s why Kyasky had the plays written on his wrist band, but for the Colgate game, in which Army won in a shootout, 55-46, but by then he was able to move to fullback and he scored three times, including a 70-yard breakaway, using his combination of speed and power and the threat to throw a “jump pass” at any moment, to make the Cadets’ offense complete.
“This will keep Navy’s defense tight,” Blaik told reporters before the game that mattered most. “They will not dare widen it for the outside stuff because they know Bob’s aways ready to take advantage of any opening inside.”
Kyasky also handled the punting, kick returning and played on defense. Against Navy, with more than 102,000 in the stands in Philadelphia on Dec. 1, the folks back home thrilled, Marazzi recalled, to hear famous announcer Lindsey Nelson call Kyasky’s name and hometown over and over, Kyasky faked a punt in the second quarter and raced 21 yards to keep a possession alive. He recovered a controversial Navy fumble deep in Army territory to keep the game scoreless at halftime.
Kyasky swept into the end zone standing up after a 4-yard run late in the third quarter to give Army the lead. “The way Kyasky was running on this cold, gray day,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer, “no one armed with anything less than a Sherman tank was going to deny him those four yards.”
He rushed for 77 yards, and in a game decided by field position, he punted effectively, one kick traveling 52 yards, another pinning Navy back at its 4-yard line. Navy, heavily favored, tied the game in the fourth quarter, but Army out-gained the Midshipmen and missed two chances to win, on a missed field goal and a fumble in the fourth quarter, and the game ended in a 7-7 tie that knocked both teams out of bowl consideration.
Navy coach Eddie Erdelatz said Kyasky was the best back his team faced all year. “Kyasky’s a great football player,” Blaik said. “His kicking was superb.”
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How good was Bob Kyasky in 1956? After gaining 707 yards, 5.5 per carry and scoring 11 touchdowns, and throwing for 253 yards and a touchdown — no one threw the ball much in those days — he was named to the backfield of the All-Eastern teams picked by all three wire services, AP, UPI and INS, along with Jim Brown of Syracuse.
So good was Kyasky, after he served his three-year military commitment as lieutenant, including a stint as commanding office of the Cold War-era Nike Missile base in Simsbury, he got a letter from Vince Lombardi, who had been one of Blaik’s assistant coaches at West Point when Kyasky got there, offering him $10,000 to return to the gridiron and join the Packers in 1960. Lombardi loved to run the power sweep and the halfback option pass, plays he perfected with versatile Frank Gifford when he was the Giants offensive coordinator and Paul Hornung after taking over in Green Bay, and likely envisioned Kyasky as the ideal fit. Kyasky’s widow once showed Marazzi the letter Lombardi had sent, but Kyasky turned it down to sign with Montreal in the CFL.
Injuries dashed his hopes for a pro career and he got into coaching, then returned to Connecticut to work in the defense industry. Ansonia’s short-lived minor league football franchise (1962-63) was named The Black Knights as an homage to Kyasky’s West Point career. He died in 1982.
“He was our idol, everybody idolized him around here,” Marazzi said. “We would play ball on the streets and everybody would make believe they were Bob Kyasky. He was a great role model, that we could look to as possibly something we could do that in the future.”