April 2025 ~
Dennis Maloney (Cleveland, 1960) hung up the phone wondering if his dad had lost a screw — or at the very least had somehow loosened one since the last time they spoke.
Maybe he’d taken a hit to the head during his football-playing youth that was only now manifesting itself in the form of the casually ridiculous request — demand, really — the senior Maloney had just made of his son.
This was sometime in the 70s, when Denni, his wife, Lynne, and their two kids were living in Indianapolis, the latest stop on the mini-tour through America on which Jantzen Sportswear was sending the rising young member of its sales and management team. Stints in Portland, Dallas and New Orleans had preceded Indianapolis, and future stays in Washington D.C. and New York City were to come.
But in the there-and-then of that conversation in Indy, Maloney was wondering what his dad could have been thinking when he called from Portland telling him to get up to South Bend and onto the campus of Notre Dame University.
“Dad was part of some executive group and they’d decided they wanted to have Ara Parseghian as a guest speaker,” Maloney remembers. “So, he calls and says, ‘Go up and talk to Ara and see if you can get him to come out here.’ I’m somewhere in my 20s and my dad’s telling me, ‘Just go talk to the famous coach of Notre Dame football,’ like that’s no big deal. My response was, ‘You go talk to him.’”
So of course, after he’d shaken himself out of the shock of that audacious suggestion, Maloney went up and talked to Ara Parseghian.
“I called and was surprised that he agreed to see me,” says Maloney, still sounding a little surprised all these years later. “It didn’t take long to figure out Parseghian wasn’t talking to my dad’s group because he charged $25,000 per speaking engagement. But as I’m sitting in his office with him, Notre Dame athletic director Moose Krause comes in and says, ‘Ara, you’ve got to come see this. We just opened a door that probably hasn’t been opened in 25 years.’ And he says to me, ‘Young man, you come with us.’”
Moments later, Maloney, in suit and tie, is sitting on a dusty floor with two Irish legends going through newly discovered photos of previous Irish legends like George (“Win one for the Gipper”) Gipp, Knute Rockne and the Four Horseman.
For Maloney, this is a standout memory in a long list of them that began in Philadelphia in the early 1950s and at halftime of a major college football game. Maloney’s dad, who had played football at Lincoln High School, the University of Portland and the Portland Rockets, the city’s World War II-era professional team, had taken a job, also with Jantzen, that eventually led to Pennsylvania. There, Dennis would wind up as a running back for a Pop Warner team that got to play a mini-game at halftime of a Navy vs. Villanova football contest.
“I scored a 60-yard touchdown,” Maloney remembers. “At that point, I really did think I was going to be a running back.”
But, after Dad got transferred back to Portland and Maloney enrolled at Cleveland, he quickly learned there was more to the position than long, unencumbered runs to gridiron glory.
“In high school I learned that guys actually hit back, so I switched positions,” Maloney says with a laugh before adding that, at 240 pounds, he wasn’t exactly the prototypical halfback anyway.
He wound up playing center and defensive line, eventually earning 1st Team All-PIL honors and, as a senior, starting in the Shrine Game.
Thinking he was a running back wasn’t the only idea Maloney would have to be disabused of at Cleveland. He’d also envisioned himself as a high school baseball player. Unfortunately, that vision wasn’t as clear to a certain Cleveland coach with a pretty sharp eye for baseball talent.
“I went out for the team and was at a practice when Coach (Jack) Dunn came up and said, ‘Den, have you ever thought about going out for track and field?’ I said, ‘But Coach, I’m a baseball player.’ Jack said, ‘Not anymore.’ At least that’s how I remember it,” Maloney recalls wryly.
With one door closed, another opened for Maloney when he followed Dunn’s advice and joined the Cleveland track team, where he directed his focus to the shot put, in part because it was an event he could work on at home — at least until he couldn’t.
“We lived across from the ninth hole at Eastmoreland Golf Course, and I used to try to throw the shot across the street (to the course property). At first, I couldn’t make it, so I was putting holes in the street. I got asked not to do that anymore, but I kept it up and started reaching the curb on the other side. Then I started taking chunks out of the curb and they insisted I stop throwing, which I didn’t do. Before long, I started hitting the grass beyond the curb, and they were OK with that. But when I started hitting the sidewalk on the other side of the grass, that’s when I was told I had to stop once and for all.”
Maloney’s track Cleveland career was highlighted by the head-to-head shot put battles he enjoyed with Terry Brown, a fellow future PIL Hall of Famer from Grant. The intense battle the pair engaged in as seniors during the PIL Championships sits atop Maloney’s list of favorite high school memories.
“For three years, we went back and forth,” Maloney recalls. “Every time we competed, one of us would walk away happy and the other not so much.”
As seniors, Maloney and Brown had taken turns setting the league’s best marks throughout the dual-meet season. Entering the PIL title meet, Maloney had the best throw, but that didn’t last long.
“On Terry’s third attempt, he threw the shot about a foot farther than he’d ever thrown before; it went past my best by five or six inches,” Maloney says. “My third throw went about two inches past his, but his fourth went another four inches past mine. On his last throw, Terry splintered the wood at the end of shot-put area. Then on my last one, I threw it out of the throwing area to beat him. When it was all over, we both had exceeded our personal-best by 15 or16 inches.”
Maloney says that memory has rushed back to him anytime he’s driven past McDaniel (then Madison) High School on 82nd Avenue, where that PIL Championship meet was held.
“That’s because my wife always points to the track and says, ‘That’s where you did it, isn’t it?’” Maloney says, laughing. “She’s heard that story so many times.”
Dennis and Lynne met at the University of Oregon, where he’d earned a scholarship after his play in the Shrine Game caught the attention of Ducks coaches. Through four seasons, Maloney played center and tackle on a freshman team coached by future USC legend John Robinson and for a varsity squad led by the Ducks’ own legend, Len Casanova. His teammates included future PIL (and NFL) Hall of Famer Mel Renfro, Dave Wilcox (another NFL Hall of Famer) and future NFL quarterback Bob Berry.
Highlights of his career included playing blue bloods like Michigan, Penn State and Texas, never being part of a losing season and playing in the 1963 Sun Bowl, the last bowl game the Ducks would play in for the next 25 years.
But sitting atop his list of highlights is the pass he made (figuratively) that got thrown right back to him (literally) and wound up changing his life.
“One day I’m walking on campus in my letterman’s jacket when I see a woman in front of the Theta (sorority) house holding a football,” Maloney says. “I yell ‘Hit me’ and she throws a perfect spiral across the street that hits me right in the numbers. I can’t remember if I caught it, but that’s how I met my wife.”
That was 58 years, two children, Kelly and Michael (who played center at West Linn), and four grandsons (including another former West Linn center) and all those relocations ago. Along the way, in 2011, was Maloney’s induction into the PIL Hall of Fame which followed his 2009 entry into the UO Hall of Fame. The latter is an honor he is more than proud to claim, he says with tongue firmly planted in cheek, regardless of how deserving of it he may be.
Better let Maloney explain this one himself:
“I also went out for track at the UO but, because I was on a football scholarship and I was maybe only the third-best shot putter on the team, I would only get called to compete if the coaches thought I could place high enough to earn a team point. One year there were maybe six or seven occasions that I’d be practicing football next to Hayward Field and get called over to the track, have to change out of my football gear and go throw the shot. I may have scored a grand total of six points for the team that year but that team won the national championship and made it into the UO Hall of Fame. I don’t deserve to be there, but I’m there too.”
Maloney’s life on the road for Jantzen ended in 1983, when he and his family left their home in Connecticut and returned to Portland. He continued working for the company for another 18 years, serving as sales manager for men’s wear, then vice president of marketing before closing the book on his work life with a final six years in charge of “an international thing.”
“Those last six years, I travelled all over the world and got to see 40 countries; it was pretty special,” he says.
In retirement, Maloney has filled time with an array of projects, including building a world-class man cave decorated largely with Ducks memorabilia, among which are the programs for every game he played in except one.
Raised in a golf family, he was for years an avid golfer with four holes in one to his credit, 400 rounds of golf played with one friend and three golf holes in the yard of his and Lynne’s Netarts beach house.
Maloney has been involved with the PIL Hall of Fame for more than a decade, serving on the board and, during the Covid lockdown, taking over a project started by fellow board member and Hall of Famer John Aust to catalog every All-PIL player in football, basketball, baseball and track since the league’s first all-star team in 1909.
“John had created stack of paper with all these names that had to be two feet high, probably 2,500 to 3,000 pages, all handwritten,” Maloney says. “Once Covid hit, I had the time, so over the next few years I entered all those names into a spreadsheet. I was pretty pleased when I finished. Then I realized the data we had only went to 2012.”
The All-Star rosters can now be found here on the Hall of Fame website. As for the all-stars named after 2012, Maloney says with another laugh, “Somebody else will have to take on that project.”
Do you know Dennis Maloney? If you’d like to reconnect, he can be found at [email protected]
Watch a recent interview with Dennis
Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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