Bucko Kilroy spent a week in a Philadelphia courtroom three years after a Life magazine story described him as football’s dirtiest player. He sued the magazine for libel, claiming the accusation that he purposely injured opponents had ruined his reputation.
He was a two-way lineman for the Eagles who once played in 101 straight games. Dirty? Never, Kilroy said. A lawyer representing the magazine during the 1958 case asked Kilroy if he remembered kicking the Chicago Bears’ Ray Bray in the groin. “It is all according to what you mean by kicking,” Kilroy said.
Upton Bell’s secretary interrupted him in his office to tell the newly hired New England Patriots general manager that someone was on the phone for him. It was a collect call from a pay phone.
“I said to myself, ‘Who the heck is this?’” said Bell, whose father founded the Eagles in 1933.
It was Kilroy, who was working for the Dallas Cowboys and had scouted with Bell years earlier. He wanted to work for the Patriots.
“He was calling from a phone booth because he didn’t want Dallas to know that he was applying for the job,” Bell said. “He said, ‘There’s no way they can trace this to me.’ Typical Bucko.”
Francis Joseph “Bucko” Kilroy, who will be inducted Friday into the Eagles Hall of Fame during the game against the Bears, spent 64 consecutive years in the NFL as a player, coach, scout, and front-office executive. He grew up in Port Richmond, starred at North Catholic and Temple, and won NFL championships with the Eagles in the 1940s before helping Bill Belichick win Super Bowls as a scouting consultant in the 2000s. Kilroy was there.
Kilroy was one of the league’s first scouts and a front-office innovator who helped teach a lineage of future decision makers from Hall of Famer Bill Parcells to current Tampa Bay general manager Jason Licht. He was much more than the dirtiest player in football. And everything — from the players he was targeting in the draft to the phone calls he made — was a secret.
“I would ask him, ‘Is that for public record or not?’” said Tom Hoffman, the Patriots’ director of public relations during Kilroy’s tenure as GM. “He would tell me, well, he can always disseminate confidential misinformation.”
Battle scars
The incident happened, Kilroy told the lawyer, about 10 years earlier during a preseason game. He fell down on a kickoff and Bray jumped on top of him. Kilroy said he put his foot up and flipped Bray over. Kilroy was ejected and fined $250.
The lawyer asked Kilroy if that was a fair description of a “vicious kick in a very vulnerable spot.” No, Kilroy said. “I wasn’t trying to kick him, I was trying to ward him off. The man was trying to jump on me. How else could I get rid of him? Am I going to let him jump on me?”
Kilroy spent most of his adult life with the indention of a cleat on his cheek, a scar from his time in the NFL when face masks were rare and gentlemen were even rarer. A kick to the face may not have been a penalty, but it did leave a battle scar. Kilroy’s NFL was wild — penalties like roughing the passer were years away — and the guy from Port Richmond fit right in.
“Nothing came easy for him,” said Dan Fahy, Kilroy’s great-nephew. “He had to work hard. He had that grit and that desire and that ferociousness to succeed. He saw football as a game of toughness and that meant playing the game tough.”
An Eagles player from 1943-55, Kilroy crushed opponents’ faces with his huge hands, tripped ballcarriers, and drove quarterbacks into the turf.
When he injured a Pittsburgh Steelers player in 1951, the Steelers said they would get revenge on Kilroy when the teams played again. Bring the brass knuckles, he replied. He was a 6-foot-2, 243-pound menace who never backed down.
“I can remember my father getting a call from Bucko’s wife [Dorothy] complaining because my dad [who became NFL commissioner] had fined him,” Bell said. “I think he kicked someone in the head. I can hear the whole conversation and he’s telling her, ‘Mrs. Kilroy, if Bucko goes the rest of the season without getting in trouble, I’ll give you the money.’ Bucko had promised to buy her a mink coat with his bonus. So she was calling because she thought she was losing her coat. My dad said, ‘I won’t give him the money back, but I’ll give it to you.’ And that’s what he did. Bucko didn’t get in trouble the rest of the year and my father had the check issued to her, not him. She got her coat.
“He did have a reputation for being a dirty player. But there were a lot of guys around like that. The game was totally different. He was also a pretty damn good player. Guys were fearful of him.”
Kilroy’s uncle, Matt “Matches” Kilroy, pitched in the majors (his 513 strikeouts in 1886 are still a record) and his father owned a bar on Richmond Street. He grew up in St. Anne’s parish during the Great Depression and played in the NFL with the same vigor he did as a kid against the boys from Nativity.
Kilroy started his professional career in 1943 with the Steagles, the team Bert Bell formed during World War II by combining the Eagles and Steelers.
He played on the weekends, commuting from New York while serving in the Merchant Marines. It was the start of an NFL career that spanned more than six decades without missing a season.
“Football hasn’t just been a part of my life,” Kilroy said in 1993 after joining North Catholic’s Hall of Fame. “It is my life.”
Kilroy was roommates on the Eagles with Walt “Piggy” Barnes, who later found work in Hollywood as an actor in Clint Eastwood movies. Kilroy worked during each offseason — he sold cars at night one year after working mornings in a stone quarry — and lived in a twin house on Wakeling Street in Frankford.
When the Eagles won the 1948 title by beating the Chicago Cardinals, it was Kilroy’s fumble recovery that positioned the Birds for their only score during a snowstorm at Shibe Park. A year later, the Eagles repeated as champions and were gifted $500 and cigarette lighters. If they wanted championship rings, the players had to pay $65.
Kilroy, who was later named to the NFL’s all-decade team for the 1940s, was the oldest player in the NFL at age 34 when he entered his 13th and final season. His career ended in the 1955 opener against the Giants. They were still angry at Kilroy for injuring quarterback Arnie Galiffa two years earlier. The Giants mangled Kilroy’s knee during a pile-up and he never played again.
“These guys had it for him,” Fahy said. “But his own teammates would have told you that he had it coming. He had a reputation.”
‘Ornery critters’
Kilroy and teammate Wayne Robinson — who also sued Life magazine — were described in the article as “ornery critters.” Cloyce Box of the Detroit Lions explained in court that an ornery critter was a “domesticated animal which at periods of times acts without the scope of that domestication.”
Otto Graham, the Hall of Fame quarterback from Cleveland, said in court that the Eagles were the “roughest football team in the National Football League.” And Kilroy? “Well, he was the bad boy, one of the bad boys, of the league,” Graham said.
Kilroy left that pay phone in 1971 to work with Bell in New England as the personnel director. He was the Eagles’ player personnel director when they won the 1960 NFL championship, making him one of the league’s first scouts. He later built scouting systems for the Dallas Cowboys that led to five straight division titles. He was instrumental in launching the scouting combine for the draft.
Kilroy’s Patriots hit on three first-round picks in 1973 by selecting future Hall of Fame lineman John Hannah, running back Sam Cunningham, and wide receiver Darryl Stingley. Three years later, the Pats again had three first-rounders and Kilroy drafted another future Hall of Famer in defensive back Mike Haynes.
“He was a brilliant mind,” Hoffman said.
Kilroy was promoted to GM in 1979 and later became the Patriots’ vice president before becoming a scouting consultant, a position he held until he died in 2007 at age 86. Belichick honored him the next spring when the Patriots drafted for the first time without Kilroy. He was a pillar of the league, Belichick said. Kilroy spent one year longer in the NFL than George Halas. He was more than a dirty player. And that was his best-kept secret.
“You would think, ‘This is just some big, dumb football player,’” Bell said. “But if you got to know him, you learned how smart he was. He was one of the greatest characters I’ve ever known and I’ve known most of the great characters. I once told him, ‘Bucko, you’re so secretive. Are you sure you didn’t work in the CIA?’
“Bucko Kilroy belongs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That’s how good he was. And if I don’t get a phone call from Bucko Kilroy in a phone booth, I don’t hire him.”
Kilroy won his lawsuit against the magazine and was awarded $11,600. It was more than he ever made in the NFL as his first season with the Steagles earned him just $1,300.
But the lawsuit wasn’t really about Kilroy as much as it was about the NFL, which was trying to protect its image as it grew in popularity. The league needed to respond to an article titled “Savagery on Sundays” and Kilroy’s libel case was the response. Kilroy played football with an edge, so calling him dirty was hardly an offense. “I don’t think Bucko was ever offended by anything,” Bell said.
