Remembering Bob Cifers
The greatest high school football player to ever hail from the Tri-Cities, the Dobyns-Bennett grad went on to star for the Tennessee Volunteers and play on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ first-ever playoff team.
Today at 12:30 p.m. Tri-Cities Sports NOW will interview Steve Massey, the author of Starless Steelers, which is a book on the Steelers first-ever playoff team in 1947.
The motivation for this guest spot was the fact probably the greatest player to ever play high school football in the Tri-Cities, Dobyns-Bennett’s Bob Cifers, also played for the ’47 Steelers. And with my love of sports history, as well as my friendship with Bob, Massey is a natural guest.
I got to know Bob late in his life after reading a newspaper article about him. A man who played for both Jock Sutherland and Bob Neyland? I had to meet this guy!
Cifers then pulled out his scrapbook for me. But he would tell me incredible tales- how the Steelers first playoff game was almost not played because Art Rooney Sr. wasn’t sure how to pay the players for an extra game.
Or how he was the one traded for Hall of Famer Bill Dudley. Or blocking for the Steelers’ first 1,000-yard player, Johnny “O” Clement. Or how Lindsay Nelson kept the Vols eligible as a tutor back in the day. Or how he would have dinner with a young sportscaster also known for wearing loud sport coats, Bob Prince, prior to his career really taking off to eventually win the Ford Frick Award for baseball broadcasting from Cooperstown. Or how Curly Lambeau might have a stadium named after him, but wasn’t exactly the best coach he ever played for. Or his contributions to the Steelers’ franchise record six-game winning streak, a mark that would stand for 28 years.
Or how to this day, Cifers still has the NFL record for single game punting, making four punts totaling a 61.75 yard average on a snowy day at Wrigley Field on the last game of the 1946 season for the Detroit Lions.
It is the seventh-oldest record in NFL history. It also was the Lions tenth loss of the season. Cifers had only played in seven losing games prior to joining the NFL.
For the Vols, he led them to a Top 10 ranking in 1942 and a victory against Tulsa in the Sugar Bowl. For Dobyns-Bennett, he led the nation in scoring in 1938. As a junior.
He also played in the famous 1939 Dobyns-Bennett basketball game that allegedly ended in a scoreless tie.
In perhaps the most East Tennessee sports legend of all time, the story goes people came to the game from the hills with shotguns. Both teams were afraid to score. After a half of holding the ball, Cifers merely gave the basketball to the official working the game and said he’d had enough. The game was supposedly then called.
So in 1999, after attending a Steelers-Falcons game at Three Rivers Stadium where the 1974 Steelers, Pittsburgh’s first Super Bowl champion, was honored in a wonderful ceremony, I wondered if the Steelers would ever honor their first playoff team and wrote Dan Rooney with the suggestion.
Rooney wrote back and said it was a tremendous idea! Two years later, the ’47 Steelers were honored at halftime of the Nov. 18, 2001 game against Jacksonville, with yours truly writing the feature in the game program for the event.
Unfortunately Bob didn’t make it. He died at the age of 80 that summer.
After football he worked in construction, had a family that lives in Elizabethton today, and personally cared for his wife in her last days as she suffered from both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Additional tragedy struck him when Clement died in a plane crash coming to visit Cifers in 1965.
He might not have been the best football player to ever come from the Tri-Cities, but it’s hard to argue with scoring more points than any other player in the nation. And he wasn’t exactly Al Bundy after that.
So I’m very happy to interview Steve Massey today at 12:30. I hope you enjoy.
Hear the interview archived here!
