BUILDUP AND LETDOWN IN SOUTH BEND or LOCAL BOY FAILS TO MAKE GOOD

Back in this writer’s youthful Cleveland, Ohio days, there used to be an annual city championship football game between the winners of the two major high school athletic conferences, the East Senate and West Senate. Lakefront Stadium, home field for the Indians, was always the location, which indicates the local importance attached.

We still recall a particular hero of approximately 1940 vintage known as Whitey Prokop, whose real first name has been forgotten. This sterling halfback led his Cathedral Latin High teammates to a solid championship victory for the East Senate. All three Cleveland newspapers promptly hailed him as maybe only a notch or two below Superman, in their customary overblown journalistic manner.

Unhappily, the story didn’t end there. A few months later, the local tabloids heralded the fact that Whitey had enrolled at Notre Dame University, where his gridiron deeds would no doubt soon be lifting the Fighting Irish to new highs, as they mopped up the floor with Army, Navy, Southern California, and a huge array of Big Ten adversaries.

Come the following early autumn, we’d frequently see sports page writeups on pre-season practice at South Bend, never failing to mention the powerful Prokop, sometimes supplemented by photos. Most assuredly, “our boy” was destined to knock them dead.

As things turned out, however, poor Whitey’s chief accomplishments in four years at Notre Dame were serving with maybe the tenth or eleventh team, not even being part of the traveling squad. His name never appeared on the school’s annual lists of coveted ND monogram winners.

Why, pray tell? Hadn’t young Prokop been the best football player in the entire city of Cleveland throughout his high school career? Of course he had. At Notre Dame, though, he was competing for a lineup spot with the best from Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, not to mention Fargo, North Dakota and Podunk, Kansas. Only the most select could attain starting positions. Countless and useless words of local newsprint praise had proven to be far from enough to vault the lad into gridiron immortality.

Whitey had a younger brother named Eddie, who followed in his wake at Cathedral Latin with comparable distinction. We once learned that the elder’s fraternal advice upon graduation was to steer clear of Notre Dame, for rather obvious reasons. Who could blame him for feeling this way, after falling flat in the face of such verbal blasts about his coming greatness?

Wisely therefore, Eddie opted for Georgia Tech, where he carved out a pretty fair niche for himself in that school’s annals as a single-wing tailback, guiding his team to continued success, culminating with a 1944 Sugar Bowl victory over Tulsa. It’s somewhat gratifying that the Prokop name can still be remembered, despite the unfortunate downfall from anticipated grace of Whitey Who.