Warwood’s Chuck Howley Inducted Into Pro Football Hall of Fame
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WHEELING -- Mike Beatty remembers the phone call that changed his cousin Chuck Howley's life forever.
Howley was a blue-chip football prospect, a three-time All-Southern Conference pick at West Virginia University and the seventh overall selection of the 1958 NFL Draft, taken by the Chicago Bears. Yet his career came to a sudden halt.
A training-camp knee injury in 1959 was believed to be a career-ender. So the Warwood native came home. He opened a gas station in Wheeling's Fulton neighborhood. Beatty and his brothers helped out there.
Yet his play in a 1961 WVU alumni game made him think he still had something to give to professional football, a thought confirmed one day at that Fulton gas station.
Beatty remembers Howley bounding in one day, clad in his blue Sunoco shirt, and bounding right back out.
"I've gotta go," Beatty remembers his cousin saying. "The Dallas Cowboys are trying to call me."
Howley answered and rewarded the Cowboys by becoming one of the best players in franchise history.
He was a five-time first-team All-Pro and a six-time Pro Bowler, a Super Bowl MVP and a Super Bowl champion.
And Saturday, he took his place as one of the greatest football players of all time when he is inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 50 years after his final season.
It is an honor that family and admirers alike say is well-deserved, not just because of the way he played, but also because of the man he is, someone who loves family, appreciates his hometown and lets his actions speak loudest.
Those family members and admirers also say his Hall of Fame induction is an honor that should have come a long time ago.
Chuck Howley, right, stands with his former Warwood High School football coach, Jim Foti. (Photo Courtesy of Mike Beatty)
A FIVE-SPORT STAR
As an athlete, there was very little that Howley couldn't do, and it showed in the sports in which he excelled. He is the only five-sport letterman in WVU history, earning letters in football, track, wrestling, gymnastics and diving. In a modern era where two-sport standouts are now uncommon, what does it say when one person can compete in five? And how many could ever say they were both an all-conference lineman and a conference champion diver, which Howley was when he won the Southern Conference crown on the 1-meter springboard?
Howley's family knew from his childhood that he had a special brand of athleticism. That was evident in the nickname the family had for him - "Bunny."
After one of his youth football games, Howley's father remarked that he was fast as a bunny rabbit. The family started calling him "Bunny," and the moniker stuck. Howley even signed his Warwood High yearbook "Bunny."
His agility shone through when his gymnastics career began with the Wheeling YMCA as a child. Beatty remembered watching Howley on a gym trampoline as he wowed the small children who stood and watched.
"He just keeps bouncing higher, higher, higher until he touched the beams across the gym ceiling," Beatty said. "We were just in awe."
Beatty's younger brother Tom recalled an afternoon when Howley came to the house to fell a dead tree in the Beattys' backyard. Howley was a young WVU athlete at the time, and that day, he demonstrated the strength that came with his athleticism.
"So he went into the backyard and I watched him," Tom Beatty said. "He pushed that sucker over, with roots coming out of the ground and everything. I couldn't believe it."
John Antonik, WVU's director of athletics content and the athletic department's historian, said that Howley belongs on the very short list of best overall athletes in WVU history. The old guard might stump for Ira Errett Rodgers, but Howley is solidly in the conversation.
Howley's combination of size - his 6-foot-3, 228-pound frame was huge for his era - strength and speed was ahead of his time, Antonik said.
"Put it this way: he could play today," Antonik said. "Everything that he did back then, well, he could do today."
Howley dominated during his time. He intercepted 25 passes at linebacker, which still puts him among the top 25 all time at his position. He recovered 18 fumbles and returned them for 191 yards, which remains seventh-best on the NFL career list.
Mike Beatty saw it first-hand one day when the family got him tickets to watch Howley and the Cowboys play the Browns in Cleveland. On one play, he remembered, legendary Browns running back Jim Brown broke into the open field. But he couldn't outrun Chuck Howley.
"Jim Brown broke over the middle at their 20-yard line," Mike Beatty said, "and there was nobody around him. But Chuck Howley caught him right at the 40-yard line."
Former Dallas Cowboys player and Ring Of Honor member Chuck Howley before a halftime ceremony during an NFL football game against the New York Giants, Sunday, Sept. 20, 2009, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Donna McWilliam)
The LONG, LONG WAIT
The respect Howley gained during his playing days was evident in his All-Pro and Pro Bowl berths. Yet, for decades, it didn't translate into Hall of Fame enshrinement.
Different people have different theories as to why. The "Doomsday Defense" on which Howley starred featured multiple Hall of Famers - Bob Lily, Mel Renfro, Herb Adderley and Cliff Harris. And while the Dallas Cowboys became "America's Team," Howley was one of the players who helped build that foundation. In the Cowboys' inaugural season in 1960, the year before Howley joined, they went 0-11-1 and didn't record a winning season until 1966. Some of Howley's prime years weren't spent in NFL epicenters like New York or Chicago.
Howley wasn't a showy player, either. Self-promotion wasn't his game. Antonik once asked Howley if he'd be OK with being best known as the answer to a trivia question - Who was the only Super Bowl MVP from a losing team?
"He said, 'Listen, I did the best I could. And if that's not good enough, then maybe I should have tried harder,'" Antonik said. "He played in an era where you didn't draw attention to yourself. You didn't put your hands in the air and celebrate things like that. You just went out there and you did your job. In West Virginia, that's how people did their jobs, took pride in what they did, and let their actions speak louder than their words."
As years passed, the hope Howley's family had of him making the Hall of Fame began to fade. They tried on their own to keep his name and memories alive. Mike Beatty made a presentation at an Ohio County "Lunch With Books" in 2022 making his cousin's case for induction.
The frustration continued to build. Howley's cousin Bill Beatty recalled a conversation he had with Howley's sister Mary Ann after Howley was named a senior committee finalist for the Hall of Fame.
"She said, 'I just can't get excited about it. So many times in the past, it's just been a big letdown for me and for the family,'" he said.
Yet, this time, the disappointment finally disappeared. The senior committee placed Howley along with former New York Jet Joe Klecko and former Cincinnati Bengal Ken Riley among the 2023 Hall of Fame class.
The news overjoyed his family, who said Howley is more than worthy.
"He's just a wholesome man," Tom Beatty said. "He did almost everything right."
Those who knew him best with the Cowboys agree with that assessment.
"I don't think there was ever a better pound-for-pound player in the National Football League than Chuck Howley," former Cowboys personnel director Gil Brandt - who was in the Dallas front office when the team picked Howley - told The Associated Press. "As a pass rusher, as a linebacker, as a defensive lineman, as a person."
This is the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, Friday, Aug. 7, 2015. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
A BITTERSWEET HONOR
As happy as those around Howley are that it finally has reached the Hall of Fame, that joy remains shaded with disappointment. They're not exactly sure how much Howley understands that he's being inducted.
Howley has struggled with late-stage dementia for years. The YouTube video chronicling the moment Howley was told of his induction showed his friend and neighbor in Texas, Hall of Fame Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubauch, giving Howley the news. Howley smiled at Staubach and offered a quiet, "Thank you."
The family hopes there are points where the fog does lift and Howley realizes that he has reached a pinnacle on which so few professional football players have tread.
"I'm hoping he does have these flashes that he's in the Hall of Fame," Tom Beatty said. "And I just saw a photograph of someone showing him his Hall of Fame golden jacket. He was reaching out and touching the jacket, and I'm hoping he knows what that was."
The memories of Howley's feats and personality remain strong. When Tom Beatty was hospitalized with diabetes as a child, Howley was playing in the East-West Shrine Game in San Francisco. Howley wanted to give his cousin his jersey from the game, but realized it was so big, it may never fit.
So Howley combed the rest of the game's roster to find a jersey closer to Tom Beatty's size and presented him with it at Wheeling Hospital. Beatty kept that jersey ever since, wore it a few times, too. That jersey, now frayed from the passage of time, has been donated to the Hall of Fame.
This weekend's induction caps a lifetime of honors for Howley. He is a member of the West Virginia and Texas sports halls of fame, the West Virginia University Athletics Hall of Fame, the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference Hall of Fame, the West Virginia University Academy of Distinguished Alumni and was in the inaugural class of the Wheeling Hall of Fame.
Retired Intelligencer sports editor Doug Huff was there when Howley was inducted into the Wheeling Hall of Fame.
"He said, 'I've just seen my life flash before my eyes,'" Huff said. "And I was like, holy cow, he's really impressed by this. The guy was so humble."
Howley's hometown loved him. Tom Beatty said there was a Sunday Mass at Corpus Christi Church where Howley quietly attended during a Cowboys offseason. Beatty didn't even know Howley was there until the priest introduced him to the congregation. That congregation rose in a standing ovation.
He loved his hometown right back. Cousin Sally Beatty would invite Howley to talk to her classes at Corpus Christi School. He would come in and answer questions from the children, urging them to do well in their studies. He sponsored the Chuck Howley Award for Warwood High School's top athlete, which was given out from 1970 until 1976, when Warwood was consolidated into Wheeling Park High School.
Sally Beatty believes that her cousin's story, though it started more than a half-century ago, is still one that can resonate with today's youth. She recently spoke before Wheeling City Council requesting that the ball field at Warwood's Garden Park be named for Howley, which the council unanimously approved this past week.
She said that Howley's life of hard work, humility and ability to clear life's hurdles makes him a proper role model.
"It's the willingness to persevere and to push through every part of life, and to go for it," she said. "I don't mean just in football. There's swimming and music, it can be in anything. If you work hard and persevere, and you really push for what you want, you can achieve it. There's just a lot, a lot to his life that you can get out of it. And that's what I want kids to do."