Combing through the ‘Stew’ notes

Baseball had its ultimate sad tale of a career cut short in the Lou Gehrig story. Football had a similar story about running back Brian Piccolo as was chronicled in Brian’s Song. Locally, a fine basketball player from Mon Valley Catholic High found his career finished before his senior season. That player was Donora’s Ron Salsovic.

Teammate Ed Tabish, the Spartans top scorer in the 1968-69 season, said, “Ron would have been our second-leading scorer. He was a hell of a shooter and would have been a star if he didn’t have a health issue that prevented him from playing his senior year. He was a sharpshooter from deep.”

“I had lung and kidney problems throughout high school so that limited my play,” Salsovic said. “I played a lot of basketball one-on-one with Dennis Lomax and I played with Dino DeBerardinis. When Dino graduated, he gave me his jersey – No. 4 – for my senior year, but I could not play because of my health issues.”

Even as a freshman, Salsovic showed signs of being a prolific scorer, averaging 18 points per game. In a game against North Catholic he led all scorers with 22, nearly half of the team’s 45 points.

Mon Valley Catholic basketball coach Don Douds said Salsovic was “the best I’ve ever seen.”

A story in the school’s newspaper called him “the most outstanding sharp-shooting guard in Pennsylvania, and praised his “set shot from 30 feet.” The article added, “He possesses the moves of Calvin Murphy, coupled with the jump shot of Dave Bing,” and hoped he could overcome his health problems.

“I think it’s important to mention how sports helped me and others to overcome health or emotional issues by developing resilience, responsibility, and the ability to deal with adversity,” Salsovic said.

Basketball was his game, but he can also look back at his Little League days with pride. He recalled one game in particular when his Merchants outlasted the Elks, 1614, in extra innings. The game was knotted at 11-11 entering the eighth when the Elks surged ahead, scoring three times to seemingly put the game on ice. The Merchants put five runs on the board with Salsovic nailing down the win with a bases-loaded, walk-off triple.

Incidentally, Salsovic and Tabish also played basketball at MVC with another Donora native, Bill Herk. Tabish complimented his teammate, saying, “Bill was a very smart player, always in the right place at the right time.”

Another item from the Mon Valley Catholic High’s newspaper cited Herk’s play underneath the bucket, calling him the team’s big man, one who was “cool under pressure.”

The story, which listed Tabish’s nickname as “Spider,” predicted he would be one of four Spartans to do very well in college. The others were Herk, Salsovic and John Hogan, an athlete which the article stated 50 colleges expressed an interest in.

For the record, Hogan played three seasons as Pitt’s starting quarterback, completing almost exactly half of his passes (49.7%), including 14 touchdowns as a senior in 1972.

Cox started with soccer

Monongahela’s Fred Cox had quite a bit of soccer experience as a youth and it helped him when he was with the Minnesota Vikings.

“I used to kickoff soccer style on occasion whenever (head coach) Bud Grant would want me to.

“When he was coaching football in Canada, he had a soccer kicker. During practice one day he said, ‘Is there any chance that you could kick the ball low, driving the ball down into the corner?’ The idea was to get the ball down on the ground so the other team couldn’t make a long return,” Cox said. “I told him, ‘No problem. I played soccer. If you want me to, when I kick off I will kick the ball like I’m kicking a soccer ball.’

“We were the first ones in the NFL to do that. After that a lot of teams started doing it. I would literally use a soccer-style kick and boot a line drive that probably never got over 8-feet high. The idea was to kick it hard and get it to roll and bounce — hopefully it would take crazy bounces so people had a hard time picking it up.”

Cox was such a great all-round athlete, the Pittsburgh Pirates invited him to attend a tryout camp.

“At that time, I was already signed up to go to the University of Pittsburgh, so I told them I really wasn’t interested,” Cox recalled. “I played everything: baseball, basketball, football and soccer, but a lot of kids did that in those days. Today, they make you pick one sport.”

Despite his having retired from the NFL after the 1977 season, he remains the Vikings alltime leading scorer with 1,365 points, more than double the total points recorded by Cris Carter.