Aging Boonton Bears football veterans hold semipro reunion: 'We were all gladiators'

Roaming black bears are a common sight in rural Morris County these days.

But there was a time when the burly bears of Boonton were better known for prowling gridirons − from North Jersey to the outer boroughs of New York and beyond.

"We were all gladiators, wanting to play football," said Jim Hawkins, 72, one of several former Boonton Bears semipro football players who attended a recent 60th-anniversary team reunion in Butler.

Long before football surpassed baseball as America's favorite spectator sport, semipro pigskin leagues operated from coast to coast, often competing on beat-up athletic fields for a few hundred spectators at a time. For the most part, players were not paid and often found themselves banged-up and out-of-pocket for their trouble.

"Sometimes we got travel expenses, but there was no structured salary or anything," said Bill Smith, a retired union ironworker who organized the rare reunion. "It was purely for the love of the game."

About 15 former Bears attended the reunion on Sept. 16 at the Butler VFW. They ranged in age from Smith, 70, to the original Bears quarterback and team captain, Dick Longo, 84.

"I hadn't seen some of those guys in 50 years," said Nick Sena, a Madison High School graduate and U.S. Marine veteran who played for the Bears between 1971 and 1975.

The Boonton Bears: From sandlot to semipro

The documented history of the Boonton Bears "franchise," which competed in various leagues from 1963 to 1976, is spotty at best. Longo, a retired police officer, is the unofficial record-keeper and brought a pile of old photos, programs and newspaper clippings to the reunion.

Some of them chronicled the early years of the team, which grew out of a group of locals who frequently squared off in "sandlot" games, some played in a bowling alley parking lot.

"We had a number of those altercations that took place there," said Camillo Leone, an original 1963 Bear. "It was full contact. And we didn't even have helmets."

Longo said that when they learned of other freelance semipro teams in North Jersey, they organized the six-team North Jersey Professional Football League, including teams from Parsippany, Wharton and Hackettstown. The Boonton Bears started in that inaugural 1963 season playing most of their games at Boonton High School, where some of the players had starred years earlier as students.

"I was playing sandlot in Parsippany but I was born and raised in Boonton, so I went to play for Boonton," Longo recalled. "We won the league in the first year."

The talent-laden Bears won five league championships before Longo retired in 1972, as he worried about getting hurt and losing work with a young daughter to care for.

Longo would go on to working as a Boonton police officer in 1975 before moving to the Morris County Prosecutor's Office, where he worked with future Sheriff James Gannon. Longo retired as a detective sergeant leading the Major Crimes division.

"We had a player who sold insurance and what we did, we took out an insurance policy and paid quarterly," Longo recalled with a laugh. "We would cancel it after the season."

The hard-fought games on hard fields, with limited equipment, took their toll on the athletes, many of whom appeared on both offense and defense.

"Playing both ways, that's a lot of physicality," Smith said. "You're banging every play."

"I tell you what, there was no fooling around out there," Leone said.

"I got my head handed to me many times," said Netcong native Frank Francomacaro, 73, who played from 1973 to 1976. "But it was fun."

A different game

The Bears' championship reputation lured players from all over North Jersey and Pennsylvania to Boonton, where tryouts and regular weekday practices were mandatory. The rosters often included former high school and college stars and others who had been cut from NFL teams, but still wanted to play.

"We would have like 300 players try out," Smith said. "Half of them never came back. And once we distributed pads and started hitting, there were about 50 guys left."

"It was a different game in a lot of ways than it is now," added Sena. "It was a lot more physical than it is today. It got brutal. Dirty. Guys would be punching and all kinds of stuff."

Nobody got paid. "We kept a low profile as far as money goes," Leone said. "We got donations. We did fundraisers. My mother and grandmother washed uniforms after every game."

At the reunion, Longo produced a 1969 Boonton Times account of the team's move from the North Jersey Football Association to the New York Football Conference under sponsor Gene Mini, who owned an electrical supply business in town.

"Gene spent a lot of money out of his own pocket on uniforms and things for many years," Smith said,

Smith, a 1970 graduate of Morristown High School, joined the Bears in 1972, after early coaches like John Connolly and Ralph Diamond had given way to Longo's uncle, Alex Longo. By then, crowds in excess of 1,000 who paid modest admission to the league games had gradually dwindled into the hundreds, according to published accounts about various teams.

But the Bears continued to thrive, winning three more championships after a switch to the New York Professional Football League, which included teams like the Brooklyn Mariners, a squad comprised mostly of New York City firefighters.

Smith said the Bears disbanded after the 1976 season. At age 24 and married with his own roofing business, "I'd had it." He announced he was done just prior to the last game that year. Other core Bears quickly followed.

"I got hurt a lot on Sundays," said Smith, who had been invited to a free-agent tryout with the New York Jets the previous year. "I separated my shoulder one Sunday and the following day, I was using it to nail gutters up. I couldn't sleep on my right side for six months. You get beat up if you're playing that hard."

City toughs vs. 'country boys'

The Bears and the Plainfield Jersey Oaks were the only New Jersey teams in the New York league. Smith said they tired of long drives into the outer boroughs every other weekend to play on bad fields in the Bronx and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. "Some of it was really depressing," he said.

"They hated us because we were from Jersey," Sena said of the New York teams. "Most of the refs were from New York, too."

On other occasions, the Bears would play on modern surfaces, including one of the first collegiate AstroTurf fields in the United States at Hofstra University in 1968.

"It was blue, not green," Sena recalled.

The Bears also took on a rival Paterson team at the old Hinchliffe Stadium, where a disgruntled local fan once ran onto the field during a game and pulled a gun after his brother took a hard block. Hinchliffe, once home to Negro League baseball teams, recently underwent a multi-million-dollar renovation.

Hawkins, a retired New Jersey probation officer, recalled absorbing some hard hits and cheap shots from the New York teams, but said the Bears gave as good as they got.

"They would come into town tough, being from the city, and we considered ourselves the country boys from Boonton," said Hawkins, a scholarship defensive back in college who was inducted in 2016 to the Western Colorado University Hall of Fame. "And we would put a whuppin' on them. We lost some of those games, but we won a hell of a lot more than we lost."

Hawkins could not quite break into the NFL, however.

"The scouts came out to look at me when I was in college," he said. "I stepped on the scale and was 155 pounds. They said 'yes,' but 'no.' Too light in the pants."

By 1994, when the Plainfield Jersey Oaks folded, there were just two semipro football teams left in New Jersey: the Lyndhurst Jersey Raiders (rechristened after the Bronx Rams moved there from across the Hudson River) and the New Brunswick Panthers.

Other semipro, developmental and minor league football teams have come and gone in the Metropolitan area even as the Jets and Giants played for national audiences and multimillion-dollar paydays in the Meadowlands.

In 2022, cable channel truTV launched a new series, "Semipro," that followed area semipro teams in the reality-sitcom style of MTV's "Jersey Shore." Those teams included the New Jersey Sharks and the New Jersey Stags, who played at Newton High School.

Reunited, reliving the old days

While tracking down players to invite them to the reunion, Smith was sad to "find a lot of them in the obituaries."

But about 15 graying gridiron veterans made it to Butler for the event. They reminisced, shared "war stories" and recalled before-and-after-game gatherings at Boonton's Parkhouse Tavern and the Sokol camp, a community hall where the beer flowed freely.

"It was fun," Sena said of the reunion. "It just took a while to figure out who was who because everyone changed. Once we did that, the stories started flowing."

"We had a nice group of guys," Smith said. "We had a lot of transients over the years, players who would come and go, but our strength was we had a solid corps of guys who stayed around. A lot of those guys came to the reunion."

"I had a ball," Longo said.

One absence was keenly felt. Leone, 80, drove from Texas to attend the reunion, but never made it after falling ill and heading back home,

"That broke my heart," he said by telephone. "When am I ever going to see them again? [Smith] is talking about organizing another reunion. I hope so."

William Westhoven is a local reporter for DailyRecord.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: wwesthoven@dailyrecord.com Twitter: @wwesthoven

This article originally appeared on Morristown Daily Record: Boonton Bears semipro football team reunites after 60 years