Hacksaw: The Jim Duggan Story

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1. Growing Up

It all started on January 14, 1954, on a cold winter’s night, in a little town in upstate New York. That night, James Edward Duggan Jr. joined a proud, working-class family that was headed by the two folks who would be my biggest influences and heroes—James and Celia Duggan.

My dad, James Edward Duggan Sr., had a career as a police officer that ultimately spanned 44 years. For the last 24 years of that career, he was the police chief of Glens Falls, New York, the town where I grew up.

Glens Falls was a very ethnic community—the French lived in the west, and the Italians were all up in the north end. The Irish, which included our family, lived in the east end of town near Saint Mary’s Academy, where my dad had been a member of one of the school’s first graduating classes. That was after the school relocated into a large building on Warren Street to accommodate growing student populations.

Ours was an industrial town, with a paper mill to the south of our home and a railroad to the north.

Dad worked two jobs, as a police officer and at a freight company, providing for his family and earning the money that would put my sisters through school, while Mom ran the house, with us kids. I was the fourth child in the family—I grew up with three older sisters, Mary Ann, Angel, and Sheila.

My mom, Celia, was born in Georgia and raised in Vero Beach, Florida. Later, she moved up to New York and married my dad. Believe it or not, it was a big scandal, because he was Catholic and she was Baptist.

Growing up was a great time—I often refer to it as Mayberry, a place where our street had curbs, sidewalks, and trees, where we could play touch football and Red Rover. All the kids on both sides of Keenan Street, where my family lived, knew each other. It was just a great atmosphere, growing up. I know so many guys who had hard-luck stories from their childhoods, and some of them break my heart, but I had a great upbringing. We never had an awful lot, but we never were in need, or want, of anything. When one of us kids got a bike, it might be a used bike, but we never thought twice about it. I think we all knew, on some level, how hard our parents were working to make a home for us and to get us what we needed.

Even if there had been a problem in the neighborhood, my sisters were going to keep anything from ever hurting me. I still joke with them about it, how, since I was the youngest and the only boy, those girls carried me around like I was the Christ child—my feet never touched the ground! I was probably a little spoiled, to tell you the truth. Of course, they had a little fun with me, too. Our family had plenty of pictures of me as a small child, with my long hair, dressed up in the doll clothes my sisters had put on me.

We also had our share of pranksters in the neighborhood. On the far end of our block was an old abandoned place that kind of looked like the house from The Addams Family. The first time I was able to ride my tricycle all the way around the block, I got to the far end, when a gorilla jumped out of the bushes at me and let loose a really loud growl.

I screamed, Aaaaahh!

I started pedaling my little trike as hard as I could, screaming the whole way. Of course, there were at least 20 kids playing on our block at any given time, and they were out on my front porch when I rode up to the house, screaming, It’s a gorilla!

Next thing you know, it was like a scene out of Frankenstein, with the whole neighborhood after this guy with pitchforks and torches. I ran into our house and all the way upstairs, where my dad was sleeping, screaming, It’s a gorilla! It’s a gorilla!

My mom came up, and Dad was trying to calm me down, but also asking me what happened.

Were his clothes on?

Yeah, Dad, I said, but it could be a circus gorilla.

They caught the guy, a young guy who lived down the road named Jim Beam (yes, just like the whiskey). My sisters read him the riot act.

You go upstairs right now and apologize to him! You scared the devil out of him!

I was in my room, with my feet dangling off the bed, and I had finally calmed down a little, when my door opened…and here came the gorilla!

Aaaaahh!

The guy pulled the mask off to show me he was just kidding around, saying, Wait a minute! Wait a minute!

I was just 13 or 14 when my dad became the police chief of Glens Falls. Of course, that meant that when I was a kid, I wasn’t gonna be able to get away with anything. If I threw snowballs at someone, I could run and hide, but by the time I got to my house, the police cars would already be there, out in front.

That’s Duggan’s kid, right there!

They all knew me, so I was never able to get away with anything. Believe it or not, it wasn’t really an issue, because I was a very, very straight kid, who didn’t get into a lot of trouble. I was a Boy Scout, and I shoveled my neighbors’ snowed-in driveways every winter.

That might be where some of the patriotic side of my wrestling persona comes from. I was always proud to be an American, and anyone who knows me can tell you I’ve always been a big John Wayne fan—always loved The Duke. Of course, The Quiet Man, where John Wayne played an Irish-born boxer who returns home, was a big favorite in our Irish American household. For all I know, someone from my family might be in there—watch that movie, and you’ll hear a song called The Wild Colonial Boy, which was about an outlaw and contained the lyric, And Jack Duggan was his name!

Even though the Hacksaw Duggan that everyone knows looks like a far cry from that straight kid, the way my folks raised me has stayed with me. To this day, I always try to be polite and courteous to folks, wherever I am. It’s just the way I was raised.

Once, when I was 16 and had just gotten my driver’s license, a Glens Falls cop stopped me for speeding. He told me he was taking me to the station, so I could talk to the captain.

I wanted to tell him, But I already know the captain! Just give me the ticket!

But I didn’t. Of course, the officer and I knew each other. Glens Falls wasn’t that big a town, and they only had 40 to 50 men on the force. I knew every one of them.

The officer took me to Captain Emerson, who told him to take me to Chief Duggan. We went into my dad’s office, and my dad went off!

He barked, Why’d you bring him here to me? Next time, give him a ticket, like you’d give anyone else a ticket!

When the officer left, my dad turned to me and said, Don’t worry, I had to say all that for his benefit.

He knew these guys were trying to get one over on him, to see if he’d show favoritism to his son. He wasn’t gonna let that happen, but as soon as they left, he changed right back into the supportive father I’d always been blessed with. He was comforting to me, because he saw I was devastated by the thought that I’d disappointed him.

My dad ran a tight ship—in his department, there were no sideburns below the ears and no mustaches over the lips. When the department was buying new cars and the officers asked for air conditioning, my dad said, You know, we need air conditioning here about one month out of the year. Besides, ride around with your windows up, and you won’t hear screams for help, you won’t hear glass break.

As you might guess, he had a little heat with the union.

My sisters all graduated from Saint Mary’s, and I went there until 10th grade. I played football, and when I wasn’t playing, I was watching football pretty much every waking moment. I was a big Green Bay Packers fan, and loved Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, and Ray Nitschke.

But I gotta say, while I’ve had favorite players over the years, my biggest hero, my role model, was always my dad. I still remember him coming home, back when he was a detective, and he’d have this .38 snub nose, which I thought was really neat. To this day, I have a nice handgun collection, and I remember how my dad would talk about how important it was to be safe with any weapon. I started young, because I could basically get my ammunition for free, and Dad taught me how to shoot at the police firing range.

For me, football was big ever since I was a young kid. Back then, the practice field for the Saint Mary’s football team was less than two miles from my house. Every day, the players would carry their cleats in their arms as they ran down to Maple Street and crossed the railroad tracks. All of us kids would wait for them and then carry their cleats and run with them the rest of the way. When I was little, that was a big deal for me, to be able to carry a player’s cleats! Mrs. McKee, our next-door neighbor, would leave her garden hose running so the players could get a drink, if they needed one…but sometimes one coach would catch them and start yelling at them, Hey! Get out of there! No one said you could drink!

I was a big kid for my age, and I really loved football. My dad knew I might have a future, but Saint Mary’s Academy was a very small school. Glens Falls High School was a major high school, and he pulled me out of Saint Mary’s so that I would benefit from the bigger sports programs at Glens Falls High.

It really caused a big stir, because we all went to Saint Mary’s Church, and I was going to be the first Duggan kid not to graduate from the academy there. My dad was a faithful Irish Catholic, and he and my mom had raised all us kids Irish Catholic. Dad was almost the perfect stereotype of the Irish cop, except that he didn’t drink or smoke. He was a real straight shooter, and we were always at church, every single Sunday.

Playing at Glens Falls High meant getting more exposure and playing for a bigger team. There I met a football coach who would become one of my first mentors in athletics, Putt LaMay. He was a great coach, and when they built a new, fancy-dan stadium many years later in Glens Falls, they named it after him.

You’d never recognize me back then, because I was a real straight-arrow kid with very short hair, and when I first got to Glens Falls High, I stuck out like a sore thumb. At Saint Mary’s, we had always worn uniforms, so I walked into Glens Falls High wearing a sports coat and tie. I got some funny looks!

All through school, I was never too hard to figure out. I had my family, my girlfriend (Tina Hopkins), and I played football, and if you didn’t like it, we’d fight! Of course, it was a different time, and no one went to jail for that kind of thing back in the early 1970s.

My first year, I played football and then basketball in the fall, and in the spring, I ran for the track team. In my junior year, I joined the wrestling team. Everyone kept telling me how much bigger I was than anyone else in the school—at 16, I weighed 250 pounds. I had no idea about amateur wrestling technique, but we had a very good coach named Bob Carty. My first year, I won my section, but lost the first match of the state tournament. My senior year, I fared much better.

I ended up with 10 varsity letters—four in football, three in track, two in wrestling, and one in basketball.

Even though I played a lot of sports, I really focused on football, because I knew of the scholarship possibilities, and by this point, my dad was getting older. He was past the point where he could work all day as a cop, then work a shift at the freight yard, and then get by on a few hours of sleep before doing it all again. I knew that if I wasn’t playing football, I’d probably be working in the paper mill.

I played many different positions, but my favorite was offensive line. I always thought of myself as the cavalry, as in, They’re trying to get the quarterback, but I’m gonna save him! Get off him!

One of the hardest things about playing football for me was keeping my grades up enough to remain eligible. I just wasn’t a great student; I struggled to keep a C average. A lot of that was that I just didn’t like to study; it’s not like I had a learning disability. But I did it. I stayed in school and stayed eligible the whole time.

And here’s something you might find surprising about the ol’ Hacksaw—I was in the chess club! I was actually pretty good, too, although I don’t play as much now as I used to. Somewhere in one of my scrapbooks is a newspaper clipping about my signing with Southern Methodist University, with the headline Chess-playing giant joins SMU. They had me photographed on one of those giant carpet chessboards with the big, life-sized pieces.

My senior year, my football team ended up playing an undefeated season and heading to Albany, to play Shaker High School, which was a giant, compared to our little school from upstate. And we won!

I guess it’s my Irish blood, but I’ve always been an emotional guy—I laugh big when I laugh, I pray, I swear, and I cry when I’m sad. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, which is why I’m such a bad card player. As I left the stadium after that last, big game, the tears just started coming down.

My senior year was a good year in wrestling for me, too. I won conference in my weight class (unlimited, for guys who weighed more than 215—and, remember, I weighed about 250), and that year, I became the first guy from Glens Falls to win a state championship in any weight class. The finals were close—I won state by one point. It was a three-day tournament in Syracuse, and while my parents were there for the whole thing, I noticed that every day, as I kept winning, more and more folks from Glens Falls showed up.

I could hear them, in the stands, cheering for Moose Duggan!

To this day, if I’m out somewhere and hear, Hey, Moose, I know it’s someone from Glens Falls. It was just a nickname that stuck—when I signed to play college football at SMU, in Dallas, the Glens Falls paper’s headline was The Moose Is Loose in Texas.

2. College Days

Being a double threat in football and wrestling in 1972 really increased my value to colleges, and I got enough letters from schools that I made seven recruiting trips, which would be unheard of today because of changes to the NCAA rules about recruitment. I eventually settled on Southern Methodist.

SMU was actually my first recruiting trip. The school sent its offensive line coach, Bob Cuthbert, up to Glens Falls, where most folks had never seen anything like him. He was walking around this little town in upstate New York with a big Stetson hat and cowboy boots—he was a walking cliché of Texas.

Coach Cuthbert stayed a few days and watched me practice, and he and my mom hit it off right away. When I went to visit SMU, I had never even been on an airplane before, had never really been far from home, at all. It was like a whole new world.

When I landed in Dallas, I got off the plane wearing my trusty sports coat and tie. Cuthbert was waiting for me at the airport with the student who was going to be my host while I was there—a little SMU quarterback named Tully Blanchard. Unfortunately, the partying that would appeal to a lot of kids was not for the straight-arrow kid I was back then.

They told me, We’re gonna go out, get some beer, get some girls.

I said, Well, I got my girlfriend at home, and I don’t drink beer.

I could see them looking at me, like, What the hell is going on with this guy?

I guess it worked out—they dropped me off at the hotel and then went off to party without me!

By the time I was choosing a school, I had also visited Ohio State, Penn State, Kentucky, Syracuse, Rhode Island, the University of New Mexico, and Iowa State. The trips were designed to impress students, and I got to meet Woody Hayes at Ohio State and Joe Paterno at Penn State. The recruiters found me pretty easy to deal with, because just like at SMU, I wasn’t looking to be taken out for a big, fancy-dan night out. All they had to do was drop me off at my room until it was time to go to the school for the big sales pitch.

At Ohio State, the offensive line coach took me onto the stadium field, had me standing right in the big O for Ohio State.

Okay, he said, getting louder and more worked up as he went. It’s the fourth quarter! There’s a minute left, and we’ve got the ball!

He kept firing situations at me as we ran down the field.

It’s third down and one, and we’re going for it!

By the time we got to the goal line, he had me all fired up!

He said, "It’s fourth down! There’s five seconds left to go for the national championship! We’re gonna run the ball! We’re gonna run it over you! Are you gonna make the block?"

I screamed at the top of my lungs, Yes, sir, Coach! I’ll make the block!

I was hooked. When I got home, I told my parents I was going to Ohio State. My mom softly said, Well, now wait a minute…

She and my dad wanted me to consider SMU, because, as they put it, at Ohio State, I’d just be a number. SMU, on the other hand, really wanted me, and I knew that at a smaller school like SMU, I had a better chance of being able to start on the football team as a freshman. Just a couple of years earlier, the NCAA had changed the rules to allow freshmen to play. I knew going to Ohio State or Penn State would mean I wouldn’t be able to play varsity right away. Instead, I’d be sitting on the bench for a year, maybe two.

On my signing date, I had people from Penn State, Kentucky, Ohio State, and SMU at our house. I felt really bad, because I really had liked Kentucky, and I hated turning anyone down. These were schools where people had treated me awfully nice, showing me around campus, being nice to my family, and I now had to tell all but one of them, I’m really sorry, but I can’t come.

The college reps were in the living room, and we called them into the kitchen, one by one, to tell them. I actually cried when we were turning down Kentucky.

I’m so sorry, I said, with tears streaming down my face. I feel really bad.

Penn State was a different story, because one of the coaches, John Nolan, had coached at Saint Mary’s Academy, right there in Glens Falls. Nolan seemed really pissed, probably because he had figured his background at Saint Mary’s meant he had me locked up. If anything, it might have worked against him, because I’d had him as a coach at Saint Mary’s my freshman year and I didn’t like him. Even at that age, I understood the difference between a good coach and a great coach. Putt LaMay had been a great coach. Nolan was a good coach, but he was also a bully, and I don’t like bullies. Never have.

Remember the story about Mrs. McKee leaving her hose on for the Saint Mary’s players? Nolan was the coach who would yell at them for taking a drink.

The Ohio State guy’s reaction showed me that my parents were right—that school did not value me as an individual who could be an asset. He said, Hey, it’s okay—we’d win with you, and we’ll win without you.

Now, I completely understand what my parents were saying, because my wife and I just went through the exact same thing with our older daughter, Celia. She was weighing scholarship offers from several different schools.

Any lingering doubts I might have had about my decision vanished the first time I walked into the SMU locker room as a player. The whole place was first-rate, with big wooden lockers, padded seats, and great facilities, way beyond anything I’d known at Glens Falls.

We played our conference games in the Cotton Bowl and nonconference games in Texas Stadium. I first walked onto those fields during my SMU recruiting trip, and it was like entering another world for this big kid from the little town in upstate New York. I still have the picture of me shaking Coach David Smith’s hand, while the Texas Stadium scoreboard was lit up with SMU welcomes Jim Duggan in the background.

My family support stayed as strong as ever, even though geography separated us. My first big game in Texas, we played Texas Tech. My parents were there to see it, and knowing they were coming to see it had me so pumped up that I had maybe the best game I ever played. The newspaper headline in Dallas the next day read, Duggan Shows Off for Folks.

Even though they lived on the opposite end of the country, my parents attended a lot of my games at SMU. Once, during a game against Texas A&M, I took a hit and ended up with a hip pointer, an injury that’s a lot more painful than it sounds. It’s basically a pelvic bruise caused by a hard impact to the hip bone.

I was in so much pain, but of course, I had that tough-guy mentality of never be carried off the field, so I got up and tried to make it off the field under my own power. I made it as far as the sideline before I went down.

The doctors and trainers were working on me, cutting off my shoulder pads, when, all of a sudden, I heard a voice that kept getting louder…

"Jim! Jimmy! Jimmy!"

God bless her, my mom had come all the way down to see how I was.

I managed to gurgle out, I’m okay, Mom. Please go away. I’m okay.

I went home to Glens Falls every summer and worked as a fireman. I enjoyed it enough that I probably would have ended up doing it for a living, had I not gone into wrestling. As much as I loved my dad, I knew I didn’t want to be on the police force. I just couldn’t see myself wearing those white police gloves and directing traffic around the town square.

I started off driving the fire chief’s car, a big white station wagon with a siren on top. Glens Falls had two fire stations—the newer one was on Broad Street, a one-floor building that almost looked like something out of that old TV show Car 54, Where Are You? The other station, on Ridge Street, had two stories and looked like a classic firehouse, with three poles, dorms, and a little living area upstairs.

I’m embarrassed to admit it now, but a few times, I had my girlfriend, Tina, call in false alarms just so I could drive the chief’s car around town with that siren blaring! Tina, if you’re reading this, it’s okay—the statute of limitations ran out years ago. I’m pretty sure it did, anyway.

Later, I rode on the back of a pumper truck. I had to drag the hose to the hydrant, and then the truck would take off, so I had to get the hose hooked up to the hydrant, quick!

Once I was going by the fire station, not even on duty, when I saw the trucks taking off. I ran in and grabbed my gear. The fire was at a restaurant, a big building, and by the