Detroit --  About half of the 44-man roster from the St. Ambrose High School 1961 Goodfellows championship squad reunited at the CHSL Prep Bowl at Ford Field. While they acknowledge that today’s kids playing football are stronger, faster and better than they were in their teens, you wouldn’t want to bet that yesterday’s kids wearing the maroon and white colors of St. Ambrose could still hold their own.

“It was all business,” they exclaimed in an interview huddle. “We wanted to do well.” And “well” they did.

Dave Vitali, co-captain and starting right guard, described what football practice was like under the tutelage of the legendary coach, Tom Boisture, who passed away in March at the age of 79 after 20 years as director of player personnel for the NFL New York Giants.

“We’d run plays over and over and over until we’d get them right. Tom would tell us, ‘I’ve got all the time in the world.’”

Vitali recounted one particular practice routine where players would have to carry teammates on their back and run the length of the football field.

“Then it escalated. We went to Balduck Park and we had to do the same thing running up hills.”

For about seven years, from 1959 to 1966, running uphill was a challenge anticipated and accepted by the Cavaliers from the tiny east side school bordering Detroit and Grosse Pointe. St. Ambrose won the Goodfellows Game in 1959 and 1961 (under Boisture) and in 1962 and 1966 (coached by George Perles).

St. Ambrose defeated Royal Oak Shrine, 14-6, in the Soup Bowl, which was the ticket into the 1959 Goodfellows Game featuring Catholic League champ against the Detroit Public Schools champion.

The football world in southeastern Michigan was stunned beyond belief when St. Ambrose with a student population of around 300 upset Detroit Cooley (enrollment of about 3,400) in the closing minutes, 13-7.

Norman Cure, who played at St. Ambrose in 1956-57-58 and teaches economics at Macomb Community College, said the 1961 team was much better than the 1959 one, “but didn’t get as much press.”

The ‘61 team had a spotless 9-0 record and scored 276 points while limiting the opposition to only 75 – including zeroes in the final two games of the season: a 37-0 whitewashing of Detroit Catholic Central in the Soup Bowl before 20,000 people at University of Detroit stadium, and a 20-0 throttling of Detroit Pershing in the Goodfellows Game in front of 37,000 spectators at Briggs Stadium.

“After the games,” the ‘61 golden anniversary players recalled, “parents and hundreds of people would greet the players back at the school. Moms were giving kisses to the coaches. Even the nuns (Dominicans staffed the school) were there. They couldn’t come to the games; they stayed in the convent. We were like conquering heroes.”

They remembered how the sisters showed their support by placing an Infant Jesus of Prague statue on the school’s window sills until the freezing weather set in.

They remembered how “every game started on the church steps and every game ended on the church steps.”

And they insist, with a wink and nod here and there, that, in spite of “complaints we still hear today about recruiting,” the majority of players came from within five blocks of the school. The exceptions were kids who attended elementary schools that didn’t have their own high school. “It was all home-grown talent.”

The Dads Club financed locker rooms and “great equipment. Why, we were the only school with ultrasound.” Speculation has it that the Dads Club’s “financing” covered the tuition for players whose families couldn’t afford it.

But, no matter. It’s all a glorious chapter in the history of high school football in this part of the country. The St. Ambrose Cavaliers were Goodfellows Champs in 1961, and they are still good fellows a half-century later. No one can deny them that.