MARBLEHEAD — If it’s the Monday before Thanksgiving, it must be time for the Marblehead-Swampscott Old Timers Night at the Gerry 5.
This was the 110th edition of the dinner, which serves as the appetizer for Thursday’s Marblehead-Swampscott football game, which, this year will be held at Blocksidge Field. The Magicians hold a 56-50 advantage with seven ties, and are working on five-game winning streak.
The night proved emotional on several fronts. Swampscott coach Bobby Serino got choked up when presenting the game ball from the Big Blue’s Division 5-North clinching win over Amesbury to Myron Stone, who ran the dinner from the Swampscott end for the better part of two decades, but who stepped back from some of his duties this year.
And former coach Steve Dembowski, who was the evening’s main speaker, presented the Msgr. John Carroll Award to his father, Henry, who helped run the financial affairs for the Swampscott Gridiron Club under Coach Bill Bush, his son, and Serino.
Dembowski lived the Swampscott-Marblehead football rivalry from 2000 through 2014 before leaving to coach at Milton High, mainly to be closer to his family. This season, Milton was a finalist in Division 4 South, losing to Dighton-Rehoboth. Had the Wildcats won, and had Marblehead won the North, Dembowski and Jim Rudloff — rivals for over a decade on Thanksgiving — would have faced each other in the state semifinal.
“I keep hoping we can face each other again, but we keep screwing it up,” quipped Rudloff when it was his turn to speak.
“It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” said Dembowski, on leaving Swampscott, where he played football for both Stan Bondelevitch and Bush, and coached under Bush. “But it was time to be closer to my family (he lives in Milton).”
Giving an example of what he means — and tossing one of several good-natured barbs Rudloff’s way — Dembowski said it took him an hour-and-a-half to come up to Marblehead from Milton, “and I think I drove more yards than all of Jim Rudloff’s backs gained on us when we played him.”
Dembowski said he considers himself fortunate to have started his Swampscott career when Bondelevitch, among the most celebrated coaches in Massachusetts, was winding down.
“But,” he said, “we couldn’t, today, coach our kids the way he coached,” Dembowski said. “It’s a different era.”
What impressed him most about Bondelevitch, he said, was that “Stan didn’t just talk about his football players. He’d talk about how many doctors he’d coached, and how many lawyers he’d coached too.”
He said perhaps the most memorable of his four Thanksgiving games against Marblehead occurred in 1986, when the Big Blue upset the Magicians, 14-0, to prevent them from winning the Northeastern Conference.
Rudloff congratulated the Big Blue on their trip to the Division 5 state semifinals, and said that while his team had trouble getting motivated for the next game after its playoff defeat to Dracut, he doesn’t see that happening to Swampscott.
“They’ll be looking to beat us,” he said. “They shouldn’t have any problem.”
Said Serino, “with each game, this season, more and more people came to see us play. “It was priceless seeing people back in the stands for Swampscott football.”
Both the Magicians and Big Blue head into Thursday’s game with 8-2 records.
