Former Harvard Cup champ tackles a new challenge
Veteran of 1960 Harvard Cup title team gets honor after relearning to walk with new legs
Nothing quite says Thanksgiving in Buffalo like the Harvard Cup and good wishes from old friends.
It’s even better when you have the two together.
That’s how it was just prior to kickoff Thursday at the championship football game between Grover Cleveland and Riverside high schools, when Bill Marble walked to the middle of the field at All High Stadium to handle the coin toss.
It was a thrill for Marble, 64, not only because he played for Riverside’s championship squad in 1960, but the honor came just months after he learned to walk again on prosthetic legs.
“It was a great feeling,” Marble said. “Great!”
Marble suffered complications from diabetes last year and had to have his legs amputated below the knee.
Naturally, Marble said, he went through a period of depression.
Rich Kozak, announcer and unofficial historian for the Harvard Cup, had gotten to know Marble, who was inducted into the Harvard Cup Hall of Fame in 2007. Kozak mentioned the idea of the coin toss to Riverside coach Tony Truilizio and extended the offer to Marble as an incentive.
“If you get walking,” Kozak told him, “you can come out and do the coin flip at the Harvard Cup championship.”
At first, doctors wondered whether Marble was a good candidate for prostheses, but Marble was determined to walk on his own again, and was fitted for the new legs this spring.
Within a month, he was walking. “I was walking short distances with a cane. I’ve been steadily improving,” Marble said. “I started driving again in July.”
Marble isn’t quite back to his championship form of 48 years ago, when he was a tough 175-pound guard with a brush cut who helped Riverside go undefeated to face Burgard for the 1960 Harvard Cup.
After all these years, Marble still remembers how hard the ground was that day, how he stayed in the game after suffering a sprained knee, and how tough it was to share the city championship when the game ended in a 0-0 tie.
“We bonded as a team. We hung out together. We were good kids,” said Marble, who lives outside Sacramento, Calif. “Those were really good days.”
But Marble, a retired engineer for General Electric, was back in his native Buffalo on Thursday and was once again flanked by former teammates as he tossed the coin to start the game.
“When Rich offered it to me, I said, ‘How am I going to do it?’ ” said Marble, who would see Riverside win, 26-8. “Well, I did it.”
Kozak was glad it all worked out.
He hopes that in some small way, it helps show today’s Harvard Cup players that they are part of a storied tradition and a game that will stick with them for a lifetime.
“They have a connection to history, ” Kozak said, “whether they know it or not.”
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