The Tony Boselli Story

So, I’ve added a new section to Joe Blogs called “Quick Hitter,” which will just be the occasional short story about some bit of news that might have broken that day or some interesting little tidbit I heard, etc.

We’ll use our first “Quick Hitter” for a correction — hopefully you have read the latest Football 101 on Jonathan Ogden — lots of fun stuff in there. And in there I talk again (as I did in the Football 101 essay on Walter Jones) about how my friend Peter King has been trying for years to get Tony Boselli into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Well, I wrote the Ogden piece at the same time that I wrote the Walter Jones piece — a few weeks ago. And since then, well, as most of you probably know, Tony Boselli actually was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Kudos to Peter and the Hall of Fame voters for getting that done; I truly believe Boselli belongs.

And so, I thought I would do this quick hitter congratulating Boselli for his overdue election … and retell my favorite Boselli story, one that I included in the Ogden piece.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2022, from L to R: Tony Boselli; LeRoy Butler; Richard Seymour; Dick Vermeil; Bryant Young. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

It’s from Boselli’s college days at USC. Early in 1994, he began dating Angi Aylor, who was Miss Teen California (Tony and Angi have been married now for more than 20 years and have five children).

On July 4 that year, Aylor went to an Independence Day party, and there were a couple of Stanford football players there. They found out she was dating a USC football player and asked who he was.

“Well,” she said, “he doesn’t really play. He’s just on the team.”

“Who is it?” they asked again.

“Tony Boselli.”

And their eyes about popped out of their heads. Tony Boselli? Didn’t play? Didn’t she know that Boselli was perhaps the best football player in America? They told her to go to the store and buy a Pac-10 preview magazine. And when she did, she saw that Boselli on the cover. And that’s how she found out he was a superstar football player.

I love everything about this story, love how Boselli was so modest he left her with the impression that he wasn’t even a starter. But here’s the funniest part of all — the reason she went to the party alone was that at the time he was at the Walter Camp All-America awards ceremony. He did tell her that, but she didn’t quite get it.

“He just told me he was at Walter Camp,” she said. “I thought that was some sort of football camp where people try and get better and try to make the team.”