Dave Falco had been up on the field for pre-game festivities while his current players and his former teammates from 1983 gathered in the football locker room at Sachem North.
He was taken back slightly when he saw them all there, the men he called teammates 30 years ago in attendance for an anniversary celebration of their county title in 1983. It was time to give a pre-game speech to current Sachem athletes, while his teammates he won a championship with listened on. Fred Fusaro had given the pre-game speech to the ’83 squad the last time they were all together in the same locker room.
“It was pretty intense,” said Falco. “I talked about the tradition and why we bring guys back. I told them, ‘These guys played when you weren’t even a thought, and now they’re here to watch you.’ That’s what Sachem football is all about.”
Falco went on to lecture his team about the tradition that is all too familiar in these parts. After all, Sachem has a program that regularly honors its past championship teams, discusses former players as legends and there is a clear bar of excellence set.
“I told the team the 1983 team has been remembered for 30 years,” he said. “You want to be remembered? You have to make sure you show up every week and play and don’t have any set backs.”
Ironically the 1983 team probably had more set backs then any other championship squad in Sachem history. The list of injuries that season was immense. Starting quarterback Charlie Dixson cracked his vertebrae, tailback Jimmy Fox had a calcium deposit the size of a grapefruit in his thigh, junior quarterback Michael Johnson broke his collarbone, running back Michael Botti also had a crack in one vertebrae and Michael McMahon had a herniated trachea.
What made this team standout is its fearsome approach and blue collar mentality. They weren’t going to let any team outwork or outhit them, and if it meant playing through injuries, so be it.
“This team was so resilient,” Fusaro said. “If you consider what we did with the amount of injuries we had, it was unbelievable. Defensively we were so good. These guys were on you like a rash.”
The ’83 team is the only one in Sachem’s illustrious history to finish undefeated at 9-0-1. Remarkably it didn’t win the Rutgers Trophy as the top team in the county as selected by the coaches – that went to Bay Shore – and the only major award winner was Michael Farley, who took home the Zellner as the top lineman in the county.
VIDEO: Watch Sachem coach Fred Fusaro talk about the 1983 team
Instead the team was made up of players who could care less about winning awards and more about knocking people to the grass and winning games. There were guys like Brian Greenberg, who could bench 500 pounds in his prime, or Larry Iacono, an Honorable Mention All-American, who went on to play at Penn State, or core guys like Ron Mellon, Bob Breutsch, Chris Wirth, Glen Neimeth, Pat Armetta and Tony Nunziata.
The tie for Sachem that season came against Brentwood in a 20-20 draw. The Flaming Arrows’ fate came down to a coin toss that would choose either Brentwood or Sachem to advance to the Suffolk County playoffs. Imagine that, a coin toss and not a proper seeding system with power points.
“Finally, we got the call and I broke out in tears. I was so emotional,” said Fusaro. “To think that a football team was not going to the playoffs because of a coin toss was an absolute travesty.”
Luck was on Sachem’s side and the Arrows went on to play Hills East in the county semifinals, walloping their way to a 28-0 victory and a dance with East Islip in the finals at home.
With the game tied 14-14 and six seconds left on the clock, Sachem’s Michael Johnson hit Botti with a 34-yard pass in the end zone to give the Arrows a 20-14 lead and eventual victory for their fourth county championship in seven years.
“I was in the end zone and when I caught the pass I thought it was out of bounds,” Botti recalled. “I turned around and everybody went nuts.”
“I didn’t even see him catch it, but everybody was yelling,” Johnson told Newsday after the game. “I looked over at the sideline marker to see where I was. The East Islip guys might have knocked me back a few yards.”
PHOTOS: Check out more images from 1983 and the 30th Anniversary Reunion
History goes that East Islip thought Johnson was over the line of scrimmage when he threw the pass. East Islip coach Sal Ciampi wound up protesting the play and it was originally overturned, but Charlie McGuckin, the Section XI football chairman at the time, overruled the change and the touchdown stood for Sachem.
“The trouble is that nobody saw it, and we can’t call what we didn’t see,” head linesman Dennis Cannataro told Newsday. “We’d like to be able to say that we see everything, but we don’t. It was a broken play and we were looking for numbers [illegal receivers] downfield. It’s not like the NFL, with seven officials out there.”
And so the boys from ’83 were back at Sachem as men on Friday night watching what Sachem does best, win. Only Falco is the coach now and players like Malik Pierre, Trent Crossan and Anthony Ross are leading the way.
“I think it’s amazing that we get to play in front of them,” Pierre said. “They’re one of the greatest teams in Sachem history.”
History has a tendency to repeat itself. That’s Sachem football.
-Words by Chris R. Vaccaro