“I had no idea until sadly, at his funeral, when I saw all these famous people coming in to pay their respects,” she said. “My dad kept whispering in my ear, ‘That’s Wellington Mara, the owner of the Giants. That’s Frank Gifford.’ That’s this guy and that guy and on and on.
“I remember being overcome with emotion and thinking, ‘Wow, my Uncle Jim really was a big deal!’”
That message she got in a Philadelphia-area funeral home 29 years ago will be amplified far more this coming weekend when Jim Katcavage is highlighted during the Giants’ 100th Season Celebration that will take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., and is part of three days of festivities that culminate with New York’s season opener against the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday.
To mark the historic occasion, the Giants assembled a panel of football experts who chose the franchise’s Top 100 Players from the over 5,000 who have worn the team’s jersey.
Katcavage — a 6-foot-3, 240-pound defensive end who became one of the NFL’s greatest pass rushers of all time — was named No. 22.
Although sacks weren’t an official NFL stat back then, league researchers scoured game films and amassed totals for players from those days.
In 13 seasons — during a time when quarterbacks threw far less than today — Katcavage registered 96 ½ sacks.
He led the league with 17 sacks in 1962 and a year later had a whopping 25. And that was in a 14-game season.
Katcavage, who won All-Pro honors five times, terrorized quarterbacks game after game after game. And that’s meant quite literally.
He was an Ironman. He never missed a game — all but one of them a start — in his final eight seasons.
He played the second half of the 1957 campaign — his second year in the league — with a dislocated shoulder.
He teamed with fellow defensive linemen Rosey Grier, Dick Modzelewski and Andy Robustelli and they became known as the Giants’ Fearsome Foursome. And right behind their bruising front was the hard-nosed middle linebacker Sam Huff.
The Giants defense allowed the NFL’s fewest points in 1958, 1959 and 1961.
Even with such heady numbers, Katcavage’s family — especially his wife Kathie, son Jim Jr. and daughter Kathleen — was surprised by his high ranking among the all-time Giants’ greats.
“We were alerted that he was going to be in the Top 100, but we had to keep that quiet and we weren’t given his final ranking,” said Jim Jr., now a well-known Philadelphia-area florist.
“As a buildup, every Tuesday they would announce another 10 names and each time we were astonished that they still hadn’t gotten to him. He just kept moving up and up in the rankings.”
As his dad surpassed many well-known Giants — guys like Saquon Barkley (No. 95), Modzelewski (63), Victor Cruz (59) , Ottis Anderson (51), Odell Beckham Jr. (37), Grier (35), Justin Tuck (30), Leonard Marshall (26) — Jim Jr. said they went from very pleased to “floored.”
Thirteen family members are going to attend the Giants’ weekend festivities and Jim Jr. will represent his dad on the field.
Karen — who played four sports at Chaminade Juliene and won 11 varsity letters — will be there, as will be her mom, Pat (Lozan) Katcavage, who grew up in Dayton, graduated from Julienne High School and met Bob just after his UD career had ended and he’d begun teaching at Chaminade.
They had been married 53 years when he died Jan. 1, 2020.
After working many years in Dayton and finally retiring after 21 years in accounting at Wegerzyn Gardens, she and Bob moved to Grand Blanc, Mich.
She and Karen, a project manager and procurement buyer for a paper manufacturer, now live together and she serves as the vice president and treasurer of their condo association.
“Mom is turning 80 next Friday (Sept. 6) and I wanted to plan something really special for her birthday,” Karen said. “I know she likes to gamble, and I happened to watch a Hallmark movie based in Niagara Falls.
“I thought, ‘That looks like fun. Maybe we’ll go to Niagara Falls and gamble and invite any family that wants to come to join us.’”
She was formulating the trip when Jim Jr. and Kathleen informed them about the Giants’ festivities this weekend. And that’s when Karen reversed course better than Tiki Barber or Ahmad Bradshaw ever did.
“My mom was like a kid at Christmas when the idea developed,” Karen said. “She’s never been to New York City and she’s very excited. She was almost in tears over the whole thing.
“We’re going to go a few days early and she’ll get to take in some of the New York City experience. Jim Jr. will be the tour guide, and my mom will get to see things like the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Empire State Building and Central Park.”
While health and mobility issues are preventing Jim’s wife from attending, she’ll be there in spirit say family members who are meeting with her before and after.
“And I’ve got to say, on behalf of my dad — and he always looked up to Uncle Jim — he’d just be so proud of him,” Karen said. “We’re all so proud.”
NFL commuter
The Katcavage brothers — Jack, Mickey, Tom, Jim and Bob — grew up in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Jim went to Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia and later he and Kathie raised their children in Maple Glen, a Greater Philadelphia suburb 21 miles north of the city.
Throughout his life, Jim remained tied to the Philly area and lived there during the entire 13 years he played for the Giants.
Jim Jr. said, every day — from training camp to practices and games — his dad would drive to nearby Trenton, New Jersey, and then take the train to Madison Square Garden and another train to Yankee Stadium.
Every day the commute was close to four hours round trip.
“Needless to say, we’d have our family dinner late,” Jim Jr. said with a chuckle.
Sport magazine once had a short story about the lineman’s travels — entitled “Katcavage the Commuter” — and included kicker Don Chandler jokingly telling his teammates before practice:
“Hey everybody, hustle today. Kat’s got to catch a train!”
Yet, as the story noted, those daily train rides weren’t Katcavage’s “longest trip” to the NFL.
He came off a Dayton team that had gone 3-6-1 his senior season and was 11-16-2 during his varsity career (freshmen weren’t eligible) and had been outscored every season.
A fourth-round draft pick, he made an instant impact with the Giants, who won the NFL title his rookie season.
He would end up starting 160 of his 172 NFL games.
Once he took his helmet off, Katcavage’s always flat-topped visage and chiseled smile made him a popular pitchman. He did endorsements for everything from Royal Pudding and Post cereal to Salada Tea and Kahn’s wieners.
His name was printed inside Coca Cola bottle caps, which kids collected.
Street and Smith’s 1964 Pro Football Preview — a newsstand bible for followers of the NFL — featured him on the cover with a ready-to-pounce pose in his blue No. 75 jersey.
Two years later, Katcavage would be inducted into the University of Dayton Hall of Fame and today he remains the greatest pro football player the Flyers ever produced.
Yet, for all his production and popularity, he never made the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a slight that many tried to correct, none more so than his brother Bob.
“He wrote so many letters to them trying to get that corrected,” Pat said.
After he retired, Katcavage coached for several seasons with the Giants and then became a scout for the Eagles. In the mid-1980s he returned for a season on the Giants sidelines. Pat said he later oversaw officials at college games.
He was just 60 when he died in 1995.
When he was visiting colleges, he’d often stop by Penn State where Bob had started his college career before becoming homesick and then opting to play in Dayton.
“Joe Paterno would always pull Jim aside and ask, ‘How’s Bobby doing?’” Pat said,
Bob did well and for 44 years he was a teacher, administrator and coach at Chaminade and Chaminade Julienne high schools and with the Mad River Local Schools.
As for Jim Jr., he had been just four months old when his dad retired from playing. Although a Giants fan at heart, he also gravitated to the Eagles since his family always had lived in the Philadelphia area and his dad worked several years for the club.
Yet, right up until the Giants built their new stadium which opened in 2010, Jim Jr. had season tickets for their games and he — like Karen did years later — learned the respect that came with the Katcavage name.
He told of going to Giants games and bringing along some of his Philadelphia pals who’d wear their Eagles garb.
Although the two teams were rabid rivals, he said once Giants fans saw him in his New York jersey with “KATCAVAGE” on the back, they gave the Eagles fans safe passage “without much hassle.”
‘A gentle giant’
Growing up, Jim Jr. was a ballboy for the Eagles during the summer at their training camp at Widener College.
“I got to be really close friends with a lot of the Eagles players,” he said. “Ron Jaworski taught me to throw a football and Tony Franklin taught me how to drive a car, things like that.”
Eagles’ fans are notorious — they once booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs when he appeared on the field — and Jim Jr. got a glimpse of their Grinch side at the 1980 NFC Championship game.
Tom Landry was the Cowboys coach. He had played for the Giants and then was a young coach with the team when Katcavage came in from Dayton. The two became friends and they renewed their friendship before that championship game at Veterans Stadium.
“Tom came across the field and wanted to see my father because they were close,” Jim Jr. remembered. “They met almost at the 50-yard line. I have a picture of it that NFL Films took. And in the background, you can see the Cowboys warming up.
“My dad and Tom had their arms around each other and then Dad calls me out there. I was working the sideline cords and when I came out, they both had big smiles.
“And that’s when all the fans just went nuts and were booing,
“The NFL Films picture shows me looking up at the fans and it looks like I’m scared. But my dad and Tom were like, ‘Who cares!’
“That’s what I most remember: How close people were back then.”
That said, he recounted how he and his sister got marching orders from their mom when they’d go to the visiting owners’ box at The Vet to meet Wellington and Ann Mara.
“My mom and Ann were good friends, and my mom would always tell us beforehand, ‘No cheering for the Eagles when you’re in there. Keep it quiet!’”
As we talked the other evening, the things Jim Jr. remembered most about his dad — just as Karen and Pat had done when we spoke earlier — was how different his dad was off the field compared to on.
The guy who made life miserable for quarterbacks, was, in Jim Jr.’s words: “A gentle giant. I never heard him speak a curse word or talk badly about someone.”
Pat agreed: “Off the field, he was a softie.
“He used to take his dogs to McDonald’s and get them each a hamburger,” she laughed.
Karen recalled how her Uncle Jim had come to Dayton on one of his scouting trips and stopped by a CJ soccer practice when she was the Eagles’ goalkeeper:
“I remember being so proud that my uncle had been a pro athlete. After our practice ended, he told me, ‘Boy, with a leg like that, I should sign you up!’
“I know he was just trying to make me feel good and he did. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, my uncle thinks I hit the ball well!’
“With him, you always felt that love and affection. He was just a kind, loving, nice man.”
And that’s who the Katcavage Family will be celebrating this coming weekend.
That’s why they’re all looking forward to it, especially Pat.
Going to Niagara Falls would have been fun, but it was about a gamble.
This is a sure thing.
Jim Katcavage was one of the best New York Giants there ever was.
And off the field, they all say, he was an even better man.
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