Cranston Herald – Nov. 11, 2010
After the final seconds tick away in Friday night’s football game between Cranston East and La Salle, one team will hoist an old trophy. It’s big and heavy, and it looks the part. It’s a little tarnished. It’s been around.
They’ll lift it in celebration of a victory.
One group of people will watch and smile. They knew this trophy once. They remember the rivalry.
And they remember the man.
The trophy is the Edward L. Walsh Memorial Trophy. It was born in 1973, the year after former La Salle player and Cranston East coach Ed Walsh died from Lou Gehrig’s Disease at the age of 30. Walsh’s former teammates started the tradition.
In the 1980’s, it came an end. East was dropping to Division II in football. La Salle was staying in D-I. The historic rivals wouldn’t meet on the gridiron anymore.
Now, more than 25 years later, the Thunderbolts are back in D-I, and they’ll visit La Salle on Friday night. They’ll play for the same trophy – a trophy dug out of storage, a rivalry renewed and a man remembered.
“We’re thrilled that they’re doing this,” said Dick Walsh, Ed’s brother. “It’s a real, real nice remembrance.”
Tom Mulvey was one of the teammates who led the initial trophy charge. When he heard that East was moving back to Division I, he got the ball rolling and talked to La Salle athletic director Ted Quigley. It was determined that East had the trophy, so Quigley called Cranston athletic director Mike Traficante. He got in touch with East teacher Rick Harris, whose students had brought a host of old trophies out of storage as part of a project for a credit recovery class.
The trophies ended up in the lobby outside East’s gym. Sure enough, Harris found the Walsh Trophy in one of the cases.
For the Walsh family, the effort to bring the trophy back means a lot.
“It’s a great, great thing for my dad,” said Ed Walsh, Jr., who was six when his father died. “I’m so glad someone took the bull by the horns to bring it back.”
The stories about Ed Walsh make it easy to understand why it’s coming back – and why he had a trophy named for him in the first place.
The Warwick native was a two-sport star in La Salle’s class of 1960. On the football field he was a quarterback who moved to halfback for the good of his team. In baseball, he was a power-hitting first baseman. After playing baseball at Providence College, he got married and started a teaching and coaching career at Cranston East.
At 25, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It progressed quickly; in five years, he was gone. But in all that time, he kept teaching and coaching. Dick never heard a complaint.
“At the end he knew he was in trouble,” Dick said. “But he just said, ‘You know what? I’m going to keep on going.’”
His presence at school turned into an amazing story, one that garnered newspaper headlines. Students pulled together to help out in whatever way they could. Colleagues picked him up and drove him to school. One student cut the grass at his house.
Dick started coaching in 1970, partly to keep an eye on his brother.
“But I didn’t need to,” he said. “The players and coaches and the whole school kept an eye on him. It was remarkable.”
Ed taught history, but the lessons were as much about perseverance and courage as they were about the Civil War.
“He went to school every day when he really had no business doing that,” Dick said. “The kids said, ‘Hey, if this guy can come to school like this, I can study, I can help out and I can certainly go to football practice.’ That’s what he taught them.”
Ed was on the sidelines when East won Rhode Island’s first-ever football Super Bowl in 1972. He died on Dec. 19, two weeks later.
It was the next year that his former teammates came up with the idea for the trophy. The fit was perfect – he was a La Salle guy and an East guy. And he was a man whose memory needed to be kept alive.
“He was a great teammate and a great friend,” Mulvey said. “He showed a lot of tenacity when he was sick, and he never lost his outlook. The trophy was to be given every year to remind us of Ed and his heroic fight.”
The trophy was first handed out in 1973. The tradition continued into the 1980’s, but there was nothing anyone could do to keep it alive when East moved down.
“All too often, memorials like this get forgotten and fade out,” Mulvey said.
Not this one. Twenty-five years, and still not this one.
On Friday night, captains from each team will come together for a pre-game picture with the trophy, and the winning team will receive it after the game. Several members of the Walsh family will be on hand. Ed Walsh Jr. teaches at Warwick Vets and is an assistant hockey coach at La Salle, and his son attends La Salle.
Together with former teammates, they’ll stand on the same field where Ed Walsh once played, the field named for Jack Cronin, his former coach.
They’ll watch the trophy get raised and they’ll smile.
Dick believes they won’t be the only ones.
“I know Ed will be smiling down,” he said. “No matter who wins the game.”