Athlete

ATHLETE

CALLAGHAN AS A CHILD and as a young man was a natural athlete. He started in baseball as a pitcher and as a batter hitting clean-up. In high school he played football as a quarterback, played hockey (but couldn’t skate worth a damn), and settled into becoming an all star basketball player by the age of fifteen when he became known as the Iron Man Kid, playing one night for the midget, junior, and senior teams in three games back to back – being high scorer in all three games. The more successful he became as a basketball player, the less successful he was as a student. He has the distinction of being the only professor that anyone knows of who never graduated from high school, but ended up being Professor Emeritus of a major university.

In 1956 – 1957 he went to Assumption College, Windsor, Ontario – an institution known only for its basketball team - for reasons he has described in his memoir Barrelhouse Kings – and though he was high scorer and leading rebounder for his junior varsity team in his first year, within two months of his second year he quit playing basketball and didn’t enter a gym again for ten years.

As an amusing asterisk to those days, in 2002, St. Michael’s High School held a large banquet to celebrate the fifty Athletes of the Year since the school’s founding. Callaghan, who was teaching in Venice when asked if he would attend as Athlete of the Year for 1954, at first demurred but then leapt home like a school boy when told that Dick Duff was the Athlete from ‘53 and Frank Mahovlich from ‘55.