Early Life and High School Career
Lavelli was born and grew up in Hudson, Ohio, a small town in the northeastern part of the state. Both of his parents were Italian immigrants. His father Angelo Lavelli was a blacksmith who made shoes for horses on nearby farms. As a child, he practiced catching by throwing baseballs against walls and trying to catch them when they bounced back. He liked to have friends throw ping-pong balls at him to see if he could catch them.
Lavelli was a standout as a running back at Hudson High School and developed a reliable set of hands. Lavelli's Hudson High Explorers football team had three undefeated seasons and won three county championships. He also played baseball and basketball in high school.
Notre Dame offered Lavelli a scholarship, and he committed to attend the school. After he had a chance encounter with Eddie Prokop, however, an able running back who was a fifth-string player for Notre Dame, Lavelli was convinced to look elsewhere. "If Eddie Prokop were a fifth-string player, I was not one to sit on anyone's bench," he later said. Lavelli enrolled at Ohio State University in 1941 after learning that Paul Brown was appointed the football team's new head coach. Brown had developed a sterling reputation as the high school coach at Massillon Washington High School in Massillon, Ohio, losing only eight games in nine years there. Lavelli's catching ability had made him a star infielder in high school, and the Detroit Tigers of Major League Baseball recruited him to play second base in the low minor leagues. He refused the invitation, opting to concentrate on football.
Read more about this topic: Dante Lavelli
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, high, school and/or career:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”
—Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
“Oh high is the price of parenthood,
And daughters may cost you double.
You dare not forget, as you thought you could,
That youth is a plague and a trouble.”
—Phyllis McGinley (20th century)
“Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums ... who find prison so soul-destroying.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)