July 11, 2006

By Louis Bonnette

Jesse Castete has to chuckle when he reads about the fortunes and misfortunes of some of today's professional football players.

"They get fined and have to miss a game and you read that it's going to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars for each game they miss," said the former McNeese State standout and professional football player.

"I signed for a $400 bonus and a one year contract of $6,000," he said.

Castete, who twice was McNeese's leading rusher in the mid-1950s and earned all-conference honors, was drafted in Frebruary of 1956 by the Chicago Bears following his senior season.

"I didn't know anything about it (the draft) until the paper (Lake Charles American Press) ran an article about it several days after it happened. About a month later George Halas Jr. shows up at the dormitory unannounced and offers me that $400 bonus and a contract. He game me four, $100 bills and it was the first time that I had ever seen a $100 bill.

"He said 'I'll see you in Chicago in July' and that was it."

Castete, who had rushed for 1,696 yards during his career at McNeese and still ranks among the top 11 all-time rushers, was told that he would be playing defensive back for the Bears, a position that he had also played for the Cowboys in the era of the two-way performer.

"I went up early, got an apartment by Wrigley Field and worked out about three weeks before the start of camp," Castete said.

When he reported for camp, there were 100 other players also in the field, vying for one of 37 spots on the roster, the maximum for the pros in those days.

"Each day we had players taking off for home, even had some leave after the first workout," the former Cowboy said. "It got to where we would start picking out who we felt would be leaving after each session."

Castete and eight other rookies made the team whose roster that year was headed by such all-pros as George Blanda, Doug Atkins, Ed Meadows, Bill George and J. C. Caroline.

The Lake Charles native started nine games with the Bears that season before he was waived.

"Some veterans came back from the war and they put them on the roster and waived many of the rookies," Castete said, adding that he was picked up by the Los Angeles Rams where he finished out the year and then played another.

He made his share of pass interceptions and tackles with the Bears but it's a game that another player came to the forefront that he remembers most.

"We were playing Baltimore in Chicago that day and Baltimore's quarterback was named Shaw. I can't remember his first name but Meadows knocked him out in the first half and a guy by the name of Unitas came in and that was the start of his career."

Jim Brown was the toughest player he ever tried to tackle.

One Sunday in Cleveland, Castete said that his entire secondary begin to think that Brown was a member of their coverage because he was in their backfield so much.

"We thought that maybe the best way to tackle him was to let him run by and then jump on his back. But, we couldn't do that because he was faster than any of us. I think that day he scored four touchdowns and ran for I don't know how many yards he rushed for."

The toughest quarterback he said he had to face was Bobby Layne at Detroit.

"He could pick you apart and he always had great protection because he never wore a chin strap with his helmet and never had a bar on his helmet."

At Los Angeles he played on a team that featured Norm Van Brocklin and Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch.

Besides starting all games that season, what he most remembers was playing the San Francisco 49ers in the LA Coliseum in front of 104,000 fans.

"It was a pro football record back then but I don't know if it still stands," he said.

After that season with the Rams, he retired from the pro ranks.

"I had started a family by then and felt that I needed to get on with what I had expected to do...coach football. I could coach high school ball in Illinois for more money than I was getting to play professional football."

He would come back to Louisiana, serving as head coach at Vinton High and then moving over to Texas where he would become head coach at Stephen F. Austin High in Pt. Acres and then take over at Wharton Junior College and finally move on to Lamar University as an assistant coach. He later became director of housing at Lamar, retiring about 10 years ago and moving back to Lake Charles.

Castete had grown up on the north side of Lake Charles and attended what was then a new Marion High School.

"I only played football two years because that's the only years they had the sport while I was there," he said.

He played for the late Hebert Hinton and was a standout in that sport as well as in track and field where he participated in the triple jump, pole vault and the relays, helping his team to the state 880 yard relay title.

A. I. Ratcliff, then head coach at McNeese, signed Castete to a football scholarship and he went on to become a Cowboy standout.

"We had some good years and we had some not so good years," he recalls.

"One season I think that we lost only one game and became the first McNeese team to beat both Southwestern Louisiana and Southeastern Louisiana. I also remember one season that wasn?t so good. I think that we had only one victory.

"In one game that year we were playing Trinity in San Antonio.

"They had a Tiger that was their mascot and had it in a cage that was attached to a pickup truck. There was a track around their football field and every time they scored, that truck would pull that tiger around the track.

"On one of their last touchdowns the truck ran out of gas. We got beat I think 61-0."

The 72 year old Castete, now a member of the McNeese Hall of Fame, grew up in Lake Charles in a house adjacent to what is now the No. 16 fairway at Pine Shadows Golf Course.

"There were only rice fields back there then," he said, nothing that golf is now his passion.

He began to play when he was coaching in high school.

Now, he plays at least twice a week at Mallard Cove.

"The other days I spend taking care of the yard and the pool," he said, adding that he also likes to recall what he likes to think of as the good, old days of football.