Early Years
Rick Casares was born in Tampa, Florida in 1931. When he was 7 years old, his father was killed in a gang-style murder; his mother sent him to live with an aunt and uncle in New Jersey. At 15, Casares became a Golden Gloves boxing champion. When he was offered a professional boxing contract, his mother refused to permit it, and he returned to Tampa.
Casares attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Tampa, where his teachers introduced him to high school sports as a way to keep him in school. The Jefferson coaches discovered the 190-pound, six-foot-one-inch freshman when he picked up a javelin for the first time and threw it. Casares played high school football, basketball, and baseball for the Jefferson Dragons, and he was also a track and field athlete . He was an all-state football and basketball player, and the Dragons won the city football championship in 1948 and 1949.
The Tampa Tribune recognized Casares as one the Tampa Bay area's 100 greatest athletes of the previous century in 1999. In 2007, fifty-seven years after he graduated from high school, the Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA) recognized him as one of the thirty-three all-time greatest Florida high school football players of the last 100 years by naming him to its "All-Century Team."
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