Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame
Relive It All Again
Heyward Dotson, an All-Ivy and All-Met guard at Columbia, was the first Staten Islander to score 1,000 points in both high school and college.
Drafted by the NBA Phoenix Suns and the ABA Indiana Pacers, Dotson accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he led his team to the All-England championship.
Andy Barberi, a High School All-American lineman at Curtis High School and team captain at New York University, played all 60 minutes in NYU’s 1936 upset of Vince Lombardi and Fordham’s previously undefeated “Seven Blocks of Granite.”
Barberi returned to Staten Island to coach football for 29 years at his alma mater, where the football field bears his name.
Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in baseball history, the last-inning “Shot Heard Round the World” that vaulted the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers in their 1951 National League playoff.
The Curtis High School grad hit 263 home runs in a 15-year major-league career with the Giants, Braves, Cubs, Red Sox and Orioles, drove in 100 runs four times, and led the Giants in homers five years in a row.
Two days before he hit the “Shot heard Round the World,” Bobby Thomson hit a two-run homer to beat the Dodgers 3-1 in Game One of their three-game National League playoff, the country’s first nationally televised baseball game.
Mike Siani, a record-setting receiver at New Dorp High School and Villanova, scored 17 touchdowns and caught 158 passes in nine seasons with the Oakland Raiders and Baltimore Colts of the National Football League.
Perhaps Staten Island’s greatest all-around athlete, Siani was a High School All-American in football, led the Island in scoring in basketball, and was drafted as a shortstop out of high school and college.
Elmer Ripley, a Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, won a national tournament as a player with the New York Nationals in 1914 and an NCAA Eastern championship as a coach at Georgetown in 1943.
Generally regarded as the best player of his generation, Ripley also coached Notre Dame, Army, Columbia, Yale and Wagner College, and the Israeli and Canadian Olympic teams.
