Mooney celebrates 40th anniversary of first title, best player

By Joe Scalzo

scalzo@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

“We had over 20 basic plays in our playbook, but 80 percent of the time we ran just four:

Power to Ted Bell,

Sweep to Ted Bell,

Belly to Steve Komara,

Iso to Ted Bell.

Once in a while, Coach [Don Bucci] would call a pass play and I’d start to run it in. Then he’d yank me back by my shoulder pads and say, “Make that Belly Right on two.”

I’d be thinking, ‘Yeah, big surprise.’ But with those four plays, we went undefeated and won the championship.”

• Excerpt from George Farris’ marketing column and blog, comparing high school football to marketing. Farris was a left guard on Mooney’s 1971 Steel Valley Conference championship team.

“He’s right.”

• Bucci

Forty years after Bucci won his first state title, one that came on the back (well, legs) of the greatest football player in Mooney — and possibly Mahoning Valley — history, the legendary coach still comes to work every day as the Cardinals’ athletic director.

He’s 80 now. Still has that unmistakably gruff voice, although 13 years away from the sidelines have mellowed him. And he hasn’t had a cigarette in eight years, not since his aortic valve replacement.

“I stopped cold turkey,” he said. “It never bothered me.”

Bucci hasn’t seen Bell in more than two years, not since Bell retired and moved from Lansing, Mich., to Las Vegas. But his memory is never far away.

“As soon as someone mentions that 1973 team, the first thing they say is, ‘Geez, that’s the team Ted Bell played on,’” Bucci said. “Then they say it was the first [Mooney] team to win a state championship.”

Mooney entered the fall of 1973 fresh off a 5-5 season that included losses in three of its last four games. But while the the Cardinals didn’t have the talent of some of Bucci’s later teams, they had two things going for them: great chemistry and Bell.

“We were a close bunch,” Bell said. “We socialized after practice and after games and spent the night at each other’s houses.”

“That team had chemistry that seemed to fit as good as any team that ever played at Mooney,” Bucci added. “The way they meshed was just unbelievable.”

Like many coaches, Bucci borrowed his philosophy from Packers legend Vince Lombardi — the fact that Lombardi was Italian didn’t hurt either — believing execution mattered more than innovation. The 1973 team ran a simple pro-set offense with two tight ends — Bucci ran a little of his famous stacked-I but not as much as in later years — and the biggest difference between that team and Farris’ 1971 team was David Handel was now the fullback getting belly handoffs.

“We said we’re going to work on it until there comes a point where we don’t care what you line up in, you’re going to have to stop it,” Bucci said.

The Cardinals weren’t the biggest team — one of the players started the season as a defensive back and ended it as a defensive tackle — but with Bell and legendary defensive coordinator Ron Stoops (whose sons Bob, Mike and Mark all became head coaches at BCS teams), they posted shutouts in their first three games.

Mooney’s only defeat came in Week 6 against defending Class AAA state champion Warren Western Reserve, 6-0. (Forty years later, Bell still fumes about getting stopped on a fourth-and-1 just outside Reserve’s 1, believing he at least got enough for the first down.) The Cardinals then rolled over their final four opponents to set up a showdown with Ohio powerhouse Cincinnati Moeller, whose coach, Gerry Faust, would go on to win five state titles with the Crusaders before leaving for Notre Dame in 1981.

Mooney rolled, winning 34-7.

“That was a real feather in our cap because back then, a lot of coaches in Ohio said the brand of football they played in southwest Ohio, the Cincinnati-Dayton area, was better than northeastern Ohio,” Bucci said. “I think we proved the football in northeastern Ohio was pretty good, too.”

That set up a rematch with Reserve at the Akron Rubber Bowl in front of 29,720 — still the largest single-game total in Ohio state history. Thanks to a 33-yard TD by Bell, the Cardinals led 7-3 in the final two minutes and were driving for a game-clinching score when Bell injured his knee. Handel followed with a 1-yard TD run and the Cardinals won 14-3, but Bell’s knee never recovered.

A few years ago, Bell’s doctor gave him the choice between a knee replacement or a diet. He dropped 30 pounds — he’s down to 180 — and fled the cold Michigan winters along with several members of his former church, who started a new ministry in Las Vegas.

“It doesn’t seem like 40 years but my body tells me it’s been 40 years,” said Bell, who finished with more than 4,000 yards rushing at Mooney, including 2,145 yards and 31 TDs as a senior. “Life goes by in a flash.

“But I’ll never forget those days. Those were the best days.”

Bucci won three more state titles — in 1980, 1982 and 1987 — before retiring after the 1999 season. His successor, P.J. Fecko, has won four more, giving the Cardinals the second-most titles in Ohio history. (Cleveland St. Ignatius is No. 1 with 11.)

That 1973 team also gave the Mahoning Valley a sweep of Ohio’s first three “Big School” titles, with Warren Harding win its first crown in 1974.

Hampered by his knee, Bell rushed for just 63 yards and two TDs in one season at Michigan State. But his legend lives in Youngstown, whether it’s through grainy YouTube highlights, dusty newspaper clippings or awed witnesses.

Four years ago, in a Vindicator readers survey, that squad was named best state championship team in Mahoning Valley history.

It probably wasn’t.

But it may have been the most special.

“Everyone says, ‘That’s Ted’s team,’ but that’s not true,” Bucci said. “Ted was an outstanding running back, no doubt about it, but it wasn’t Ted’s team. It was the 1973 group’s team.”