It all snuck up on Bobby Rodriguez, like a linebacker waiting to meet him on a pass over the middle.
The record-setting wide receiver, who went about his business so quietly that his high school coaches dubbed him “the ghost,” had already been through the Hall of Fame Room with his kids, trying to wrap his head around seeing his plaque up there with the All-Americans, All-Pros and Olympians who were suddenly, now and forever, his peers.
Now he was at the podium, having just heard his high school coach call him one of the most loyal, dedicated players he’d ever known, as the echoes of a standing ovation ricocheted around the CYO/MIV Rec Center in Pleasant Plains.
He stood like that for a long time, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger; then he dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief, and stood some more.
The ghost was crying.
“This is so … overwhelming,” he said at last.
There was a lot of that going on at an induction ceremony where Rodriguez, a pass-catching star on Georgia Tech’s 1990 national championship team, was the only honoree going into the Hall on the strength of his on-field heroics.
All the rest … coaches Cathy Morano, Bob Steele and Howie Ruppert; orthopedist and Unity Games co-founder Dr. Mark Sherman; golf impresario Steve Zuntag; Hall of Fame baseball writer John Drebinger; and the Staten Island Little League founding fathers – Buddy Cusack, Arthur “Jiggs” Seaman, John Marino, Joe Darcy Sr., Joe “Babe” Darcy Jr., Jim Darcy and Ed Elliott – helped prepare the ground for Rodriguez and others like him.
Now it was all coming back to them, and to everybody they touched.
So, Bobby Rodriguez wept, right there in front of a full-house crowd littered with Hall of Fame alumni.
Cathy Morano’s Tottenville High School softball players rushed the stage with hugs and flowers.
And Matt Zuntag told the story of the time his father got scolded for spending all morning at a local tournament, and tried to make amends by taking the family for a ride.
And where did they wind up?
At Golf House, the USGA stronghold in Far Hills, N.J.
“He gets in trouble for spending too much time on golf,” the younger Zuntag said, laughing now at the wonder of it. “And his solution is to take his kids to a golf museum.”
Maybe that’s how somebody winds up with their plaque hanging up there with the olympians … and the Olympians … with the memories washing over them.
“It’s like what Russell Crowe says in Gladiator,” Matt Zuntag said. “What we do on earth echoes through eternity.”
He turned, looking over Bobby Rodriguez’s shoulder toward the open door to the Hall of Fame Room.
“What the people in that room did will live forever.”
A fuller version of this story appeared in “Echoes from the Hall,” the newsletter available to Hall of Famers and Friends of the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame.
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