Hansen's Top Teams, No. 62: Tucson High's dominant 1952 football team 'didn't have a weakness'

Across a three-week stretch in October 1952, the undefeated and defending state football champion Tucson High Badgers team drew 26,322 fans for home football victories over Phoenix North, Yuma and Phoenix St. Mary’s high schools.

Those attendance totals have probably never been topped in Tucson prep sports history. And it only grew from there. The Badgers then drew 15,000 at Arizona Stadium for a Thanksgiving Day victory over rival Amphitheater High, 25-7, which gave THS the state championship.

Amphi, which was in its fourth year of varsity football as Tucson’s second high school, was coached by ex-Arizona Wildcat standout Murl McCain, who knew a good football team when he saw one.

A day before the Thanksgiving showdown, a Star reporter asked McCain if the ’52 Badgers were as good as Tucson High’s state champs of 1942. 1943, 1944 or 1945. “Now is not the time for praise,” he said. “Tucson has a great ballclub, probably the best in the school’s history.”

The Badgers outscored their opposition 258-68 that season and drew large crowds wherever they played. In a season-opening victory at Bisbee, an estimated 4,000 filled the stadium. In November, more than 6,000 showed up for Tucson’s victory at Douglas High School.

The ’52 Badgers had a bit of “showtime” in them before “showtime” became an overused sports term.

Coach Jason “Red” Greer’s club had five players who accepted scholarships to big-time schools: Quarterback Pat Flood went to Notre Dame; running back Joel Favara to Oklahoma State; lineman Guy Barrickman to Missouri; lineman Dick Nordmeyer to Illinois; and running back Mike Morales played at Army, then a Top-10 program.

In 2002, the Badgers held a 50th reunion at the DoubleTree Hotel. Flood, Favara and about 25 other players from the ’52 team attended. Jerry Lee, a top contributor on the club, told me: “We were terrific, if I say so myself. I don’t know if any local team has been better. That would be difficult to imagine.”

Flood, a straight-A student who ultimately transferred from Notre Dame to Top-25 power Navy, had a strong perspective on the ’52 Badgers.

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“Oh, we were good,” he told me that day at the DoubleTree. “But it’s difficult to compare teams from generation to generation. In the ’40s and ’50s, I would’ve liked our chances against anyone.”

Flood knew the difference between good and very good in football. His 1957 Navy team finished No. 5 in the year’s Final AP poll, beating Top-10 teams Notre Dame, Army and Rice along the way. He returned to Tucson after his years at Navy and graduated from the UA Law School. He soon began a 35-year officiating career in which he became a crew chief in the Pac-10, officiating Rose Bowls, Territorial Cups and everything in between.

The ’52 Badgers were coached by Red Greer, who grew up in rural Arkansas, played a year for the Arkansas Razorbacks and transferred to Arizona when his mother’s asthmatic condition forced her to seek a drier climate.

He became an All-Border Conference lineman at Arizona and a two-year baseball starter for Wildcat baseball coach Pop McKale. After teaching and coaching for a year at Prescott High School, Greer returned to Tucson, hired to coach the THS tennis team and teach history.

Greer became the Tucson High football coach from 1948-55, winning state titles in ’51 and ’52 before leaving the coaching profession to become the school’s athletic director. He was inducted into the UA Sports Hall of Fame in 2006.

Favara, who was the state’s player of the year in 1952 — he was referred to as the “Tucson Terror” for his willingness to initiate contact with opposing ball-carriers — graduated from Oklahoma State and returned home to Tucson where he would become the head football coach at Sunnyside High School.

“I’ve seen a lot of football over the years,” Favara told me at the ’52 reunion, “but our ’52 team didn’t have a weakness.”