Twin brothers Tony and Carl Ruzicka joined Bob Sirott to talk about their book: “The Twins: A Journey of a Lifetime“. The book covers a wide spectrum of their experiences with Chicago sports icons, including run-ins the brothers had over the years with names like George Halas, Phil Esposito, Mike Ditka and Stan Mikita. Click to read the interview on WGN Radio 720
The anatomy of the twins’ path to lifelong relationships with their sports heroes began with the siblings’ thumbs.
Carl and Tony Ruzicka—now 71-year-old brothers, Yale University and University of Chicago Booth School of Business graduates, and retired accountants—used the digits to ring athletes’ doorbells in their hometown of Cicero and nearby Berwyn. They did it decades ago, in a bygone era when a Chicago Bear or a Chicago Blackhawk was as accessible as a friendly neighbor with a working lawnmower or a cup of sugar.
They relied on gumption, too, when they were 11 years old.
“In 1960 we saw a picture of Chicago Bears defensive tackle Bill Bishop in the local paper and read that he lived in Cicero,” recalls Carl Ruzicka, who lived in Highland Park from 1984 to 2017, before moving to the South Loop with his wife, Qian Yi. “So we looked him up in the phone book and there he was, with his address also listed. That was our first mission together as Bears fans.”
Carl and Tony got on their bikes and wheeled to the professional athlete’s house. One rang the doorbell. Bishop’s wife, Marilyn, opened the door.
“Does Bill Bishop live here?” the twins chimed.
The wide-eyed kids entered the house, and before they knew it, they were in the Bear’s den, flipping the pages of Bill Bishop’s scrapbook with Bill Bishop himself.
“Excitement. I remember how excited we were that day,” says Tony Ruzicka, who lives in Glencoe with his wife, Anne, and served the village as its president and as a trustee. “All we wanted was his autograph. But we ended up spending nearly an hour with him and getting to know him.
“We discovered Bill and all these other great Chicago athletes were regular people. You can be famous and a meat-and-potatoes guy at the same time.”
That story essentially kicks off the pair’s debut book, The Twins: A Journey of a Lifetime, published in September. They also formed a tight bond with genial Blackhawks forward Chico Maki (a Hawk from 1960 to1976), interacting with him and his wife in the couple’s attic, and they even battled in touch football games with Hall of Fame centerman Phil Esposito, who played for the Blackhawks from 1963 to 1967.
“The good ol’ days—we tried to capture those simpler times to let readers know what it was like back then,” Carl notes. “We were fortunate to have grown up when we did. For the book, we settled on the concept of a journey and how everything fell into place for us. Countless friends had suggested we write such a book. Those friends would hear us tell a story about a Chicago athlete to a group and then urge us to tell another story about this athlete or that athlete.”
Perhaps the best story in the book is about the twins’ connection to National Football League founder and former Chicago Bears coach George Halas. None other than Marilyn Bishop had suggested the twins write a letter to Halas and offer their services as the team’s clubhouse boys/ball boys for a season.
They ended up toiling joyfully for the franchise during their Morton East High School years, including the Bears’ 1963 NFL championship season.
“My job was to take care of the players on the sideline, help them with anything they needed on the bench,” Carl says. “Tony ran around with extra footballs and would often kneel (on one leg) alongside George Halas, who’d also kneel, near the field. George would use Tony’s left shoulder to help him stand up after plays.”
The twins stood together in the summer of 2005 to applaud Chicago Cubs great Ryne Sandberg at his National Baseball Hall of Fame induction in Cooperstown, New York. The former Gold Glove second baseman had fun with the 5-foot-5 brothers back then, nicknaming them “Twin Towers.” They accompanied longtime Cubs clubhouse manager Yosh Kawano to the Hall of Fame ceremony.
The twins first met Kawano in the 1960s, when they were Bears clubhouse boys at Wrigley Field, the football team’s home facility before Soldier Field, and Kawano— sporting his t r a d e m a r k white, floppy fishing hat— w a s b u s y getting the quarters ready for the baseball season.
“ We lost touch with Yosh after our high school years, but we saw him along the Wrigley Field concourse one day in the 1990s,” Tony says. “He remembered us. Wonderful, wonderful man. He knew everybody.”
“Yosh,” Carl adds, “knew Ted Williams, Stan Musial, golfer Raymond Floyd, Frank Sinatra, and so many other famous people. Such a loyal friend to many.”
Kawano worked for the Cubs until the age of 85 and died at 97 in 2018.
The Ruzickas are diehard Cubs fans. Their first sports hero was “Mr. Cub,” Hall of Famer Ernie Banks, and they’re still elated about the Cubs’ 2016 World Series championship, which broke a 108-year-old title drought.
Another significant theme that courses through the book is running. The twins ran distance races for track teams in high school and competed as runners at Yale, where a man named Frank Shorter also suited up for the Bulldogs’ track and field squads. Shorter was a junior at the Ivy League school when the twins matriculated in New Haven, Connecticut.
All Shorter did was win the gold medal in the men’s marathon at the 1972 Summer Olympics.
And he and the twins are still good friends.
Tony and Carl Ruzicka served as integral committee members of Chicago’s first marathon in 1977. They also introduced and guided the event’s first-ever charity pledge program.
“Developing sport skills led to simply wanting to always get better,” the 73-year-old Shorter says in the last chapter of the twins’ book. “Eventually, in what I would term a ‘Ruzicka Twins Direct Response,’ they tracked down their sports heroes, walking up to them to introduce themselves and then ask questions.
“Being twins,” adds the 1969 NCAA national champion in the six-mile run, “got them in the door, but it was their combined talent that always seemed to allow them to stay there and never be shown out.”
The Ruzickas’ book, The Twins: A Journey of a Lifetime, is available on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. Visit ruzickatwins.com for more information. Click to read the article on JWCdaily
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New book “The Twins: A Journey of a Lifetime” by Tony and Carl Ruzicka is released, sharing an in-depth personal history of twin brothers’ experiences with Chicago sports heroes
“The Twins: A Journey of a Lifetime” by Tony and Carl Ruzicka has been released worldwide. This 232-page book is both a memoir and detailed look at Chicago sports history. The narrative includes personal experiences with athletes and professional sports legends, as well as a look at how sports and the City of Chicago have changed over the years.
The Twins: A Journey of a Lifetime (ISBN: 97817355888001) can be purchased through retailers worldwide, including barnesandnoble.com and Amazon. The paperback retails for $14.99. Wholesale orders are available through Ingram.
From the back cover:
The authors developed a fondness for Chicago sports and its heroes by the time they reached six years of age. They managed to forge lifelong friendships with many sports legends ranging from George Halas, founder of the National Football League and owner/coach of the Chicago Bears for whom the twins served as clubhouse boys during their high school years of 1963 through 1967; to Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita, Hockey Hall of Fame members of the Chicago Blackhawks; and to Yosh Kawano, legendary Chicago Cub clubhouse manager. They also forged a friendship with Frank Shorter, Gold and Silver medals winner in the 1972 and 1976 Olympic marathons. These friendships led to interactions with countless celebrities in the sports, entertainment, and political arenas. Combined with a caring and supportive family, the friendships set the authors out on an unexpected journey. The authors intersperse their stories with discussions of familial, educational, and vocational experiences. They provide a narrative of an era when neighbors seemed more connected to each other and Chicago’s professional athletes seemed more connected to their fans.
About the authors:
Carl and Tony Ruzicka are twin brothers born in Cicero, Illinois, a suburb just west of Chicago. Both had the good fortune of graduating from Yale University and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Together with Tony’s wife, Anne, their certified public accounting firm proudly served numerous organizations in the Chicagoland Not-For-Profit community. They are lifetime fans of all Chicago sports teams, especially their beloved Chicago Cubs. They have attended thousands of games, first sitting in the right field bleachers, and in moving in 1976 to seats located behind the Cubs’ dugout. Tony and Anne reside in the Village of Glencoe, Illinois, a North Shore suburb of Chicago, and are proud parents of two daughters and grandparents of three children. Tony has served as both the village’s trustee and president. Carl and his wife, Quan Yi, currently reside in Chicago’s South Loop. He is a proud member of his extended family in China. Visit their website at ruzickatwins.com.
About MindStir Media:
MindStir Media LLC is an award-winning book publisher. To learn more about publishing a book with MindStir Media, visit http://mindstirmedia.com or call 800-767-0531.
Sayers ‘was unlike anyone we’d seen before’
The words of Gale Sayers that made every Chicago schoolboy cry were actually delivered by Billy Dee Williams, who played the Bears great in the TV movie “Brian’s Song.”
“I love Brian Piccolo, and I’d like all you to love him too.”
Delivering a speech in New York while accepting the George S. Halas Award for courage, the movie version of Sayers paid tribute to his dying friend and teammate in a scene that crushed me and my brothers as we quietly watched in our living room and hoped Mom and Dad didn’t notice the tears falling down our cheeks.
Even to this day, just hearing the theme from the movie gets me verklempt.
As with many others who grew up here in the 1960s, Sayers was my first hero, an athlete so incredibly talented and enjoyable to watch, it made us forget just how bad some of those Bears teams were. He was unlike anyone we’d seen before, and more than five decades later, we still can say the same.
The “Kansas Comet” was an obsession with Bears coach George Halas, who made him the fourth pick of the 1965 draft, right after selecting homegrown linebacker Dick Butkus at No. 3.
“I couldn’t stand to let Gale go elsewhere after I saw him make a totally unique move in a Kansas game film,” Halas said. “Gale started one way, left his feet and seemed to change direction in the air. When he landed, he was running the opposite direction. When I saw that move, I knew we had to get that young man.”
I never got a chance to see Sayers play in person at Wrigley Field, but we were fortunate enough to have a giant antenna for the roof of our house so we could watch the blacked-out home games from a South Bend, Ind., TV station.
The picture was a little grainy at times, but it didn’t matter. You didn’t need high-def to watch Sayers waltzing around defenders as if the laws of physics did not apply to him.
“I can’t define my running style,” Sayers once told former Tribune reporter Cooper Rollow. “Really, I don’t know where I’m going. I go where my feet take me. I like to think that if my blockers can get me 18 inches of clearance, I’ve got a shot at breaking a long one.”
That “18 inches of daylight” theme became a mantra of those NFL Films highlights that remain popular to this day on YouTube. While many other running backs put up better numbers, including the legendary Walter Payton, Sayers’ unique running style put him in a class by himself.
Sayers’ best day of running may have been at Lambeau Field in 1968, when he rushed for a career-high 205 yards. But his record-tying six-touchdown performance against the San Francisco 49ers at Wrigley in his rookie season is the one most Bears fans point to when trying to explain his greatness to nonbelievers.
Cutting in the mud like he was skating on ice, Sayers made Dec. 12, 1965, a day no one in Chicago would ever forget. Amazingly, Sayers could’ve had one more touchdown and the record all to himself, but Papa Bear took him out late in the game with the Bears on the 49ers 3-yard line.
Sayers was low-maintenance as well. In their book “The Twins: The Journey of a Lifetime,” former Bears ball boys Carl and Tony Ruzicka recalled that one of Carl’s jobs that afternoon was to clean the players’ spikes when they came off the muddy field.
“As the players sat on the bench extending their legs, Carl would go down the line scraping all the shoes he could,” the Ruzickas wrote. “One player motioned to Carl not to clean his spikes but to service the next player. That player was Gale Sayers … (who) scored six touchdowns with mud caked at the bottom of his shoes.”
As with Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, a stellar career shortened by injury could not prevent Sayers from being a no-brainer Hall of Fame pick, and in 1977 he became the youngest player inducted at age 34.
Despite Sayer’s unparalleled success and his popularity in Chicago, it took the Bears another 17 years to retire his No. 40, a decision that still boggles the mind. During the players strike in 1987, the Bears actually let a scab defensive back named Steve Trimble wear No. 40 because of an alleged “emergency.” They didn’t want to give out the numbers of Bears stars who were on strike, so they handed him the number that no one had worn since Sayers’ retirement.
When asked that year why they didn’t retire the numbers of Sayers and Butkus, Bears President Michael McCaskey said: “It’s a difficult thing to retire a jersey on this team because of our long history and how many numbers have been retired.”
It was a bogus excuse, and the Bears finally rectified that injustice in 1994, when they retired Sayers’ No. 40 and Butkus’ No. 51 on a rainy night at Soldier Field.
“It’s about time,” former Bears linebacker Doug Buffone said. “I thought those numbers should have been retired a long time ago.”
While Sayers’ highlights will always be must-see, I’d love to rewatch the TV movie about his friendship with Piccolo. Back in the day, a TV movie about a Chicago athlete you loved was enough to make the school day drag as you counted down the hours until it came on the air.
Like today, there was much racial strife at the time, and the film taught us lessons we never got to learn in school.
“In 1970 we were having some race problems, and the Vietnam War was going on and a lot of things were happening,” Sayers later told the Tribune’s Don Pierson. “But I think people saw that a black and a white could get along together, could have a good time together and maybe be friends.”
The legacy Sayers leaves us is about much more than numbers or highlight reels. He taught us how to love one another.
Yosh Kawano’s old Chicago friends buy him a Cubs World Series ring
One of the best things I saw over the weekend at Wrigley Field was a photo of Yosh Kawano wearing a replica Cubs championship ring.
Kawano was the longtime clubhouse man at Wrigley, frequently mentioned by announcers Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray during broadcasts from the 1960s to the ’90s. His white, floppy fisherman’s hat is in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and he was the last link to the Cubs teams from the 1940s.
Now 96 and living in a nursing home in Los Angeles, Kawano is unable to communicate.
But two brothers from Chicago, Tony and Carl Ruzicka, decided last year that Kawano deserved a World Series ring like everyone else connected to the organization. So they bought a ring from Jostens, had the name “Kawano” engraved, and presented it to him during a trip to Los Angeles in May.
“He continues to mean a lot to us,” Tony Ruzicka said. “He lived with Carl his last 10 years in Chicago, and Carl and I took him everywhere. We’ve known him since 1963, when we were ball boys at Wrigley Field.”
The Ruzickas also accepted a plaque for Kawano during spring training this year when he was voted into the Cactus League Hall of Fame. Tony said they loaned the plaque to Ferguson Jenkins for a museum he plans to open in Canada.
Kawano spent nearly 65 years working for the Cubs, first in the home clubhouse and later in the visitors’ clubhouse. He began in 1943 and ’44 before being drafted into the Army, then returned to the team after the war, serving under 37 managers, 12 general managers and two owners.
I’ve known Kawano for over 30 years, and for years I’d ask him on the first day of spring training if this finally was “the year.”
Kawano would laugh, shake his head, give a dismissive wave of the hand and walk away. Then “the year” finally happened in 2016.
The Ruzickas didn’t want Kawano’s long tenure in the organization to go unrewarded, so they decided to do something about it.
Article can be found at https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/cubs/ct-spt-cubs-yosh-kawano-world-series-ring-20180430-story.html
Twin ball boys for ’63 Bears developed lifetime relationships
By DAVID HAUGH SEP 01, 2013
One spring day in a much simpler time in Chicago, a photo appeared in the Cicero Life newspaper that helped create a picturesque childhood for Tony and Carl Ruzicka, twin ball boys for the 1963 NFL champion Bears.
It was a shot of good ol’ No. 73, former Bears defensive tackle Bill Bishop, who the twins heard lived a few blocks away. Sure enough, they found Bishop’s name and address listed in the phone book: 1842 S. 61st Ct., Cicero. So Tony and Carl rode their bikes over to Bishop’s house, rang the doorbell and changed their futures.
“We had audacity,” Tony recalled.
Bill Bishop not only answered the door but talked about the Bears for an hour and invited the boys back for a barbecue where the Ruzickas met a bunch of gracious players including Willie Galimore and Doug Atkins. A friendship developed and Marilyn Bishop, Bill’s wife, suggested the twins write George Halas to ask about serving as Bears ball boys.
Halas responded in July 1962 saying the team was set for the upcoming season but if the Ruzickas made “the golden honor roll” again, he would try to add them the following year. True to his word, Halas delivered the best news the 14-year-olds could imagine in a letter dated May 18, 1963.
“I am pleased to know that you have maintained your honor roll status,” Halas wrote. “We will be glad to have your help as clubhouse boys.”
Whenever you hear that happiness was born a twin, think of the Ruzickas.
For the four years they worked Saturdays and Sundays of home games for $5 a weekend, both brothers answered whenever anybody shouted for “the twins.”
“I don’t know how many players knew our first names, to be honest,” Tony said.
They stood close enough to the action to hear Mike Ditka groan to Halas about not catching enough passes or Atkins complain about the offense not scoring enough points. Carl’s job was to clean mud off cleats and drape players in parkas once temperatures dropped. Tony had the more enviable task of carrying an extra ball around as he followed Halas. At times, the legendary coach leaned on Tony’s knee and shoulders for support when he crouched — but never on him for advice Tony offered freely.
“(Quarterback) Billy Wade would come to the sidelines and say to Halas and the coaches, ‘What are we going to do?’ and I might say, ’63 South Mo Lens Brown Right would work here,”’ Tony said. “Coach would look at me but never be critical.”
Acceptance from the 42 players on the ’63 team came after the first day on the job when linebacker Bill George made the twins feel welcome talking to them. Ditka often asked the twins about running cross-country at Morton East, which they chose over football to keep weekends free. Mike Pyle would write them a letter of recommendation to Yale, his alma mater. They played flag-football with Bennie McRae and traded jokes with Roosevelt Taylor. They teased Ed O’Bradovich about his postgame primping and enjoyed Atkins’ outbursts when somebody changed his favorite station on the locker-room radio.
Amazingly, the twins were interacting with players they idolized, creating the kind of bonds unforgettable experiences form.
Before games at Wrigley Field, Rudy Bukich, Richie Petitbon and other Bears liked to sneak a smoke in a hidden area. The players enlisted the twins to watch out for Halas. Once the teens grew more at ease, they would scare the players by shouting, “Here comes the old man.”
“He wasn’t but they started scrambling like school kids,” Tony said. “They fell for it every time.”
Slowly, the Ruzickas gained respect from players evident during one pre-game frenzy after Halas ordered the ball boys to change the players’ cleats following warm-ups on a wet field. With only 20 minutes until kickoff, players got restless — and loud.
“Then Doug Atkins yelled, ‘Leave the twins alone, we can count on them to do their jobs,”’ Carl said. “I never forgot that.”
But the coolest part came in the rapport the twins established with Halas, who they maintained contact with after graduating from Yale and settling back in Chicago to build successful careers in accounting. They used to drop by the Bears old headquarters at 55 E. Jackson to visit Halas and felt comfortable enough to call him at home in 1982 to recommend hiring Ditka over George Allen as head coach.
“We said, ‘Coach, when we were there one guy had the guts to stand up to you, Mike Ditka, and you know how much he cared so isn’t that someone you would want to follow in the Bears tradition?”’ Tony said. “He listened and said, ‘Thanks for the input boys.”’
For their input during the ’63 championship season, Tony and Carl received $10 tips from Taylor and George. Richer rewards came from life-long friendships and memorable encounters such as the 25th reunion party in 1988 when Galimore’s widow told the twins they were “two of Willie’s favorite people.”
They were just two kids whose curiosity took them on the ride of their lives.
Twitter @DavidHaugh Article can be found at https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/bears/ct-spt-0901-haugh-1963-bears-chicago-20130901-column.html
Inside the Bears | Chicago Bears
Jan 07, 2014
Twin boys were offered a dream job with the 1963 championship team after George Halas responded to their letter. Hear how they developed lifetime friendships with players and even advised Halas to hire Mike Ditka as coach.
Watch the Video https://www.chicagobears.com/video/itb-halas-twin-ball-boys-12378974
