Porky Vieira

Porky's fine ride

Connecticut Post  5/14/2006     WEST HAVEN — How did he get the nickname Porky? Well, that's a story in itself. He was, in his own words, a pest. Not a bad kid. Not a troublemaker, just ... you know, a pest. A kid who could, and would, get under your skin. And back in those days, getting under someone's skin didn't take much. Bridgeport's "Hollow" was a tough neighborhood. Full of hard-working families. Mostly Italian and Irish immigrants. They didn't have a lot of love for each other, but they didn't have any love for the Portuguese. There were just five Portuguese families that lived in the Hollow in the late 1930s. One of those was the Vieiras. Florindo "Frank" Vieira was that pest. Frank says a woman named Nellie McKenna started it. Apparently, she didn't like Portuguese. Apparently, she really didn't like Frank Vieira, because every time she saw him walking down Harold Avenue, she would stick her head out the front door and yell, "You little Portagee (expletive)." Vieira heard it. Every single day. The neighborhood kids heard it, too. Portagee quickly became Porky: "You Porky SOB." It stuck.  It has been his nickname for 65 years. If you lived in Bridgeport in the late 1940s or early- to mid-1950s, then you knew Porky Vieira. The kid could shoot a basketball. Man, could that little Porky SOB shoot a basketball. One night in a 32-minute game at the Waterbury YMCA, Vieira scored 78 points. Another night at the old Bridgeport Armory, playing for the Savoys in the Connecticut Professional Basketball league, he scored 89. He once outscored a young Wilt Chamberlain — yes, that Wilt Chamberlain — in an all-star game in the Catskills in 1955, 38 points to 33. He scored 55 against Goose Tatum's all-star team. He scored 28, just in the first half, against Hot Rod Hundley of the Minneapolis Lakers in 1958. He could score against anyone. Anywhere. Any time. Any place. Bridgeport native and former Sports Illustrated writer Pat Jordan said that he once saw Porky score 65 one night, 72 the next and 74 the night after that. A lot of other people did, too. Porky always packed 'em in. The Middle Street Boys Club. The Armory. Boston Garden. Madison Square Garden. They came to see the hook shot. Or the set shot. Or, yes, the jump shot. Whether it was basketball or baseball, two sports he clearly loved, Porky never disappointed.  "Sports was the great equalizer. Sports helped me survive," Vieira, 72, said last week as he prepared to coach his University of New Haven baseball team in one final NCAA Division II tournament. "You could be purple. If you were good, you played. I played (basketball) with Alvin Clinkscales, who was black. We'd be on the same team. It didn't make any difference what color you were, what nationality. That's why sports have been so great to me, no one cared." Sports in Bridgeport made people forget about things like race and ethnicity. Italian. Irish. Portuguese. Porky made them all forget. Porky was a player. He excelled in both baseball and basketball — especially basketball. Porky was the best. "Vieira registers new mark, scores 45 for Rialtos" shouted out one Bridgeport Telegram back in January of 1952 after the 5-foot-6 guard had "16 doubledeckers" and "13 free throws" in an 87-65 win for the Rialtos Sweet Shoppe in the Senior City Recreation Basketball League game at the Armory. "Porky Vieira tallies 51" blared another in the Bridgeport Post. Week in and week out, the headlines always seemed to have Vieira's name in them.  "He was one of the best players around," said Ernie Petrucciano, who grew up with Vieira and was his basketball teammate at both Central High and Quinnipiac College. "He was a great shooter." Petrucciano is 73. In the last couple of years, he has had back surgery and a bypass operation, but mention Vieira and you can hear the strength surge into his voice when he starts to remember the stories that helped forge a lifelong bond between the two. Like the time they were in Torrington for a tournament. Ernie watched as Porky scored 67 points in that game. Afterward, the team piled into a car and drove down to Norwalk for another tournament that same day. In that game, Ernie watched Porky score 55. There was the time Porky took a shot over the eyebrow and played with a big bandage that covered most of his eye. Ernie said Porky scored 49 that night.  "He was super," Petrucciano said. He was a lot of other things, too. "He was a pain in the (expletive)," laughed Ron DelBianco, 73, who also grew up with Vieira in the Hollow. "He was like 12 or 13 years old and I'd always see him at Beach's Woods Park (where Kennedy Stadium is now). He would come down and cause all kinds of havoc." Growing up, Porky was seemingly mad at the world. Probably a day didn't go by when Vieira didn't walk out of St. Augustine's School and try to fight, or did fight, someone, trying to defend his ethnic background. How long did that go on? Not even Vieira knows for sure. He knows when the fighting stopped, though. That's when his older brother, Gus, got involved. Gus, whose nickname was Goose, dragged Porky to the Middle Street Boys Club and tossed him headlong into sports.  "Growing up in a community dominated by Italians and Irish and being Portuguese was a difficult thing. It was the first time I experienced a little bit of prejudice and I say it to this day, that was the motivating factor in my whole career, because I was fighting every single day," Vieira said. "My brother Gus stepped in, rest his soul (he passed away in 1985), and took me to the Boys Club so I could burn off a lot of that anger. The Boys Club became my second home." At the Boys Club, Goose quickly pointed out Petrucciano, who was playing basketball. "Maybe if you acted more like him, you might not get in so much trouble," Gus said to Porky. While sports became his outlet, Ernie became his best friend. "He was the best. Oh my god, he was something. Ernie was the guy that I always wanted to be," Porky said. "He was a dear friend. Ernie lived by the Bridgeport Brass (Co.) and we were like this (crossing his fingers). We played on the (Middle Street) 85-pound team, we played on the 100-pound team. I first met him when I was 9 or 10 and went through college with him. He was the best man at my wedding." Porky and Ernie played at Central High together under veteran coach Ed Reilly. Reilly was a tough, old, Irish SOB who didn't care if you were Irish, Italian or Portuguese. If you were good, you played. Porky and Ernie played a lot. "When I played the clock kept running," Porky said. "Violations, jump balls & the clock only stopped for fouls. The 3-point line? H*ll, it would have been a joke for me."  A current link on the Central High School Web site lists Vieira as the city's best shooter. Ever. Right now, Vieira has gotten more votes than Walter Luckett, Barry McLeod, Chris Smith, Frank Oleynick, Wes Matthews and John Bagley, in that order. "You can't compare your high school memories to anything. Those years were the greatest years of my life, playing sports," Vieira said. "Bridgeport was the most glorious city to grow up in as a kid, sports-wise. Because it was like & every game I played in was standing room only. I wouldn't trade that for anything." Porky first worked as a ball boy for Perry Pilotti's Bridgeport Newfields and his Aerasols of the American Basketball League in the late 1940s and honed his skills against such Newfield players like George Petrovick, Mickey Homa and Ernie Gomez. After Central, Vieira took a scholarship to Arnold College but quickly "bombed out," as he put it. He got a job working at the Brass company, but after a few months of that, he was ready to give college another shot. Quinnipiac coach Tuffie Maroon gave both Vieira and Petrucciano scholarships and in 1953, they led the Braves to a 16-7 record as Porky averaged 35.3 points a game. Vieira is still the school's all-time leading scorer and the only player to have his number (44) retired there. From 1953-57, Vieira scored 2,649 points. He had 20 games when he scored 40 or more points and five games when he scored 50 or more. He still holds the school's single-game record for points with 68, set against Brooklyn Poly on Feb. 3, 1957, getting the mark only after he missed his first 10 shots. While playing with Quinnipiac, Vieira also played for various all-star teams and recreation league teams in Bridgeport. He played for the Rialtos.  He played for the Sylvans. After he graduated college, with a bachelor of arts in business administration, he played for Savoy AA for five seasons in the Connecticut Professional Basketball League. He started his coaching career at St. Anthony's High School in Bristol — Vieira had received his master's in physical education at Southern Connecticut — went to the University of New Haven with aspirations of becoming the basketball coach. He has spent 44 years coaching baseball instead, from the UNH program's inception in 1963. Vieira's baseball teams compiled 42 straight winning seasons before last year's 13-19-1 mark. Overall, his Chargers have been to 25 NCAA tournaments, including 17 NCAA and NAIA World Series. The Chargers have 81 NCAA wins and two NCAA World Series runner-up finishes. Heading into the NCAA Division II Northeast tournament this week — the Chargers are expected to get a bid tonight — Vieira's all-time record with the Chargers is a staggering 1,127-321-6. "Forty five years & it feels like 45 months," Vieira said. "It's time to go. I've got a great assistant in Raphael Cerrato and kids today, I think they want to identify with someone younger. I'm so old school, I don't want to hear any bull. It's different now. My time is done. H*ll, I'm older than Casey Stengel was when he coached the Mets (Stengel actually was 74 when he finished with the Mets in 1965). That's scary." He still misses Bridgeport. Misses it terribly, and hopes to visit soon. Even though he still talks to Petrucciano and DelBianco on the phone, he rarely gets back to see the old haunts. Vieira said that he went to his five-year high school reunion at Central in 1957. He hasn't been back to one since. And that tears him up inside. "I miss seeing the people I grew up with," he says. "Ron DelBianco, he was the best all-around athlete in Bridgeport. All-State football. All-state basketball. All-state baseball. He was unbelievable. Massive guy. Great guy. He was something. It's amazing how the time flies. I wonder how many people that remember me as a player?" It's a safe bet that everyone over the age of 60 who still calls Bridgeport home remembers Porky. If they didn't go to the Armory to watch Vieira play, they heard stories about him or read about him in the newspaper. Recreation league games. All-Star games. Pick-up games. Porky played all the time. DelBianco remembers watching Vieira strip down to his underwear to shoot baskets in the Boys Club in the summer months when the temperature was sweltering and the humidity was just as bad.  "He'd play beyond exhaustion," DelBianco said. "He'd play all year round, which no one did. He shot. And he shot." If he wasn't playing basketball, Vieira was playing baseball. He played for the White Eagles and Lenox in the Senior City League down at Seaside Park, along with DelBianco and Petrucciano and, of course, his brother Goose. "I loved it," Vieira said. "Those were some of my favorite times. Oh my God. Baseball was my first love but I could never really conquer it the way I wanted. Baseball is so tough, the skill involved. To be able to hit, to be able to throw, to be able to run. I wasn't bad but where the h*ll was I going?" Vieira did get one offer, from the New York Giants for $2,000, but he didn't take it. Likewise, he also got an offer from the Minneapolis Lakers to play in the NBA, but Vieira said Maroon held back the offer because he wanted Porky to get his degree. According to Vieira, the Lakers wanted to promote him as the smallest player in the NBA. The last thing Porky wanted to be was a gimmick. Not when he was putting up games of anywhere between 35 and 65 a night in the old pro leagues. Even now, some 50 years later, Vieira still smiles when he remembers those days. And those games.  "All the things I did in Bridgeport, everything else is like nothing," he said. "I was so fortunate to play in the Armory in front of 1,000 people. I played with Ernie at the Boston Garden for Central and we won the New Englands. Those thrills ... I've never been awed by anything else. Bridgeport was the place. I loved it. "In Bridgeport, I'll always be Porky. That's how I want it. Bridgeport's my town. No one there ever calls me Frank. I'm Porky. I wouldn't want it any other way." Contact Chris Elsberry at celsberry@ctpost.com"