A Different Cardinal (Chicago) Story

Motts Tonelli

Perhaps one of the greatest football stories of all time concerns a man named Mario “Motts” Tonelli who grew up in Chicago and went to Notre Dame. Even though he had been in a serious fire as a child, suffering third degree burns over 80% of his body, he played fullback for the Fighting Irish for three years in the late 1930’s.

After graduation, he spent 1940 with the Chicago Cardinals, the original home base of this year’s Super Bowl team, the Arizona Cardinals. The following year he joined the Army and was stationed in the Phillipines. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Tonelli was captured and forced to endure a sixty-mile trek through the jungle known as the infamous Bataan Death March.

10,000 American soldiers started this journey but only 4,000 survived. Because of the brutal treatment at the hands of the enemy, men who could no longer walk were left to die. Soldiers carried their buddies as far as their strength would let them and then had to abandon them to save their own lives.

At one point, an enemy soldier demanded the graduation ring Tonelli was wearing and threatened his life if he didn’t give it up. Tonelli was told by his fellow prisoners to surrender it or be killed. Motts surrended the ring, but shortly thereafter, a Japanese officer came up to him and asked, “Is this your ring?” Tonelli nodded and the man went on to tell him how he had attended USC the same year Tonelli had made a 70-yard run against the Trojans. The enemy officer was aware of the history of Notre Dame football and gave Tonelli the ring back, telling him for his own safety to guard it carefully.

Tonelli never let the ring out of his possession for the rest of his life.

After suffering in a rotten, fetid POW camp for three years, Tonelli was placed below deck in a hell-hole of a ship and forced to endure a sixty-day journey to Japan as the Americans were approaching the Phillipines. The men’s voyage was in the hold of a ship with a small opening at the top. That small hole let in a ray of sunshine and the opening was just large enough for a bucket used for both lifting the men’s feces and urine upward to be dumped overboard, and the pail washed and cleaned with the briny salt water, filled with rice for the return journey once again to the starving soldiers down below.

When he arrived in Japan in early 1945, he weighed a skeletal 100 pounds, full of malaria and dysentery. Then one of those strange ironies of life occurred, giving him great hope and inspiration. Issued a cap to be worn as part of his prisoner of war uniform, Tonelli was amazed to see that he had been issued the same number he had worn in high school at DePaul Academy in Chicago, then at Notre Dame and finally with the Chicago Cardinals, Number 58.

Seeing this as a sign that he was indeed going to make it through this hell that he was in, Motts hung on until he was liberated at war’s end. Returning to the United States, Tonelli saw little hope of ever playing football again. But while recuperating in the hospital, he was visited by the Cardinals’ owner, Charles Bidwell, who said to him, “Mr. Tonelli, you and I had a contract that said you were going to play professional football for the Chicago Cardinals and I want you to know that I expect you to keep your word.”

Bidwell had found out from the NFL that Tonelli had to play in just one game during the upcoming season to qualify for a pension. Tonelli got better, put on some much needed weight and as the end of the season rolled around, he suited up and carried the ball twice for a net loss of four yards. The yardage mattered little, for Tonelli had already gained back a lifetime, back from the captivity of Bataan and Japan to a good, long life as a responsible member of government in Chicago spanning a career of over fifty years and becoming the youngest elected City Councilman in the city’s history.

For the rest of his life, he would wear the ring he had hidden from the soldier until he died at the age of eighty-six in 2003.

Motts Tonelli, a credit to the Fighting Irish, a proud soldier of his country, and a hero for the ages.

And present owner Bill Bidwell, 75, son of the former owner and a ball boy with the Cardinals in Tonelli’s final season of 1945, will be looking for his team’s first championship in 62 years when the Arizona Cardinals play the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl here in Tampa on January 29th.

Motts Tonelli’s nephew and former Chicago high school basketball player Tommy Tonelli, formerly the highly successful head basketball coach at Wharton High School in Tampa and presently the Director of Basketball Operations at the University of South Florida, has a son, Matthew, who plays in the Pee Wee Football League in North Tampa.

Matthew and his teammates recently lined up to receive their brand new football uniforms and guess what numbered jersey Matthew, an aspiring fullback and linebacker was given, totally by chance?

You guessed it!

Number 58.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

This article was written by Jim Reese. Jim was a quarterback and assistant coach at the University of Minnesota and is now retired and lives in Tampa, Florida, where he reports on sports for a local newspaper.

Learn about and download Jim’s eBook, How to Win at Flag Football