It was all there for Brian Buckley during his senior year at Marblehead High.
He was coming off a junior season in 1973 in which he’d thrown two touchdown passes to help the Magicians beat a Swampscott team that hadn’t lost since 1970.
But life is funny sometimes, though Buckley probably didn’t think so.
That Thanksgiving game had been one for the ages. There were reporters from all the papers, locally and the Bostons. There were TV cameras everywhere, recalls former Channel 5 sports anchor Mike Lynch, who was there.
Overnight, Brian Buckley ― who died earlier this month ― became “Broadway Brian” for his love of Joe Namath (with whom he shared the nickname) and because he had tremendous self-confidence.
Then …
“First day of workouts the following summer, first play, and he falls down and separates his shoulder,” said teammate Bobby Jackson. “He didn’t throw a pass all year.”
“I think he kicked three extra points and that was it,” said his coach, Alex Kulevich.
Buckley’s confidence, Lynch said, wasn’t off-putting.
“Oh, no,” said Lynch, who broadcast his games at Harvard and played a key role in his athletic career. “He had a lot of confidence. But that’s OK. He was such a likeable kid at the same time.”
And while Buckley played other sports, football was his true love. As a baseball player, his coach, Roger Tuveson, recalls, he could hit some titanic shots.
“He put some across the street into the police station, playing at Seaside Park,”: Tuveson said. “There’s a white house that’s actually in fair territory down the left field line. He put a few over that house.
“Then, he went to a clinic down in Florida that his father used to send him to every March. When we got back, he came up to batting practice and turned around to hit left handed. He put a few in the parking lot (at the old Star of the Sea School).”
Buckley played, at different times, both hockey and basketball for the Magicians as well as baseball, but always came back to football. And it was Lynch who convinced him to do what he did and study at Exeter for a post-graduate year.
“I’d done a PG year, and after what happened to him, his brother Andy thought that maybe that would be a good thing for Brian,” Lynch said. “So I talked to him about it and he went.”
That turned out to be one the best things Buckley ever did. He played well, got into Harvard, and played so well his senior year for the Crimson that he got invited to play in the Blue-Gray game. And all he did there was win the offensive MVP award in a talent pool that included defensive MVP Howie Long, who later starred for the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders.
That performance paved the way for him to be a late-round draft choice of the New England Patriots, but that’s as far as he went. He later went into the sports-promotion business.
“He was very, very good,” said Mike Jauron, the quarterback on the other side of the field in the old Spanish Memorial Stadium (“It was our last year there, and the place was packed,” Kulevich said) when the Magicians won that Thanksgiving Day game.
“He was definitely the MVP of that game,” Jauron said. “We had a casual friendship, but he was a really, really good guy. I hate having this kind of conversation.”
Jackson, who coached Marblehead to a state Division 2 hockey title 10 years ago, said that Buckley never minded tweaking the noses of opponents and taking some trash along the way.
“Some of the things he said about the rivalry with Swampscott probably raised a few eyebrows,” saidi Jackson. “But he and Mike Jauron had a good relationship, and we got some nice messages from some other Swampscott people when he died, too.”
“He was a great athlete, no question about that,” said Kulevich. “He was phenomenal in that win over Swampscott. At one point in the second half, he completed 11 straight passes. He was 22-for-28 all told. He became an overnight sensation.”
