Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame
Relive It All Again
Adewale Ogunleye, descended from Nigerian royalty, is the only Staten Islander to play in both the National Football League Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl.
An all-city defensive end at Tottenville High School and the all-time sack leader at Indiana, Ogunleye played six NFL seasons with the Dolphins, Bears and Texans, leading the American Football Conference with 15 sacks in 2003, and helping lead the Bears to the 2007 Super Bowl.
Robin Jackson, Staten Island’s fastest woman sprinter, still holds Island records at 55 and 200 meters, and in the long jump.
Jackson was an All-American at Wisconsin, winning a Big Ten championship at 300 yards, running on three championship relay teams, while leading the Badgers to the 1981 indoor and outdoor conference titles.
Artie Evans, who ran the fastest half-mile relay leg ever posted by a New York City runner while at St. Peter’s High School, ran the anchor leg on the Manhattan College two-mile relay that set a world indoor record at the 1961 Millrose Games.
Evans went on to become a Met junior and senior champion at 600 and 1,000 yards, and finished third in the AAU national championships.
Bob Bertucci, who learned to play volleyball at the Staten Island YMCA before becoming a two-time MVP at Springfield College and a masters All-American, has won 759 games as a college coach.
Since he started the women’s team at West Point in 1978 – where the Cadets won a district title in the program’s first season – Bertucci won conference titles at Tennessee, Rutgers-Newark, Temple and Lehigh.
Matty White was an all-city basketball player – and Staten Island’s first 1,000-point scorer – at LaSalle Academy in Manhattan, and an all-time player at Georgetown, before spending 24 seasons as a high school coach and 17 as an assistant at the College of Staten Island.
He led LaSalle to a CHSAA championship game, scoring 25 points in the quarterfinal and 30 in the semis; and when Georgetown marked a century of basketball by celebrating its top 100 players, White was among them.