By Eugene Gino Mahofski, La Nostra Voce
Art Rooney’s name should ring a bell. He was the man who brought sandlot football to Pittsburgh’s Northside and eventually transformed a semi-professional team into the Pittsburgh Steelers dynasty. Beginning with the Hope Harvey football team in the 1920s, Rooney was a player-coach, serving as quarterback while his brothers Dan and Jim played alongside him. Another brother, Vince, handled the duties of water boy.
The team would change into their homemade uniforms in the N.S. Hope Ward Firehouse. Art’s friend, Dr. Walter Harvey, tended to injured players free of charge. Between the Pittsburgh Pirates professional football team and the Steelers, there was the Rooney Reds squad in the 1930s. My father, John; my uncle, Walt Serbiski; and members of ISDA’s Northside Amity Lodge — Sam Ross, Patsy Massacci, and Jim Rubino — played on that championship team. The Steelers emerged in the 1940s, but Northside sandlot football continued to thrive.
My uncle, Eugene “Onions” Mahofski, led the N.S. Sheffield Apaches to several championships, while my older brother Jack and a few cousins played on the Squawker AC, another Northside champion team.
During my formative years, our Northside neighborhood gathered for pickup games of street football. Everyone knew one another, and boys would show up from nearby city blocks. Players were never in short supply, but footballs often were! A discarded newspaper would become our solution, rolled tightly into a 6- to 8-inch makeshift football and secured with black electrical tape.
Our first-down and endzone markers included car bumpers, telephone poles, sewer lids, fire hydrants, and street corners. The playing field was always the width of the street, and without instant replay, we relied on spirited disputes: “You were out of bounds!” or “You never crossed the goal line!”
The Northside Manchester Rams sandlot team sparked my passion for the game at age 14 in the 1950s. We sold booster cards and passed the hat at games to cover expenses, going undefeated in our first season. That year, we proudly sported white Manchester jackets, with “Manchester” sewn above a large red and white ram head across the back.
Northside sandlot football games continued even into my police career, with teams like the Northside Saints and Northside A.C. I eventually joined the Tri-State All-Stars, a semi-pro independent league. In our last season, we went undefeated, using all gate money to cover team expenses — jackets, equipment, uniforms, and banquets.
We even played long-term prisoners housed at the maximum-security Western Penitentiary and shorter-term inmates at the Allegheny County Workhouse. These convict teams never played away games, for obvious reasons, but both facilities provided lockers, showers, refreshments, and comfortable break areas at halftime. The games were always intense, with inmates rooting for our team as if we were the home team. Cheers for good play were common, and louder cheers erupted when one of their own was injured.
This is just a snapshot of Pittsburgh’s Northside sandlot football history. The competition and camaraderie take me back to The Saltworks Football Field (“Fredricks Field”), once located in Manchester’s Northside.
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