From Rutgers Football Defensive End to Successful Writer
Michael J. Pellowski penned gags for comedians Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller and wrote for Marvel and DC comics
When Princeton played Rutgers in the centennial football game on September 27, 1969, before a packed house of 30,000 fans at Rutgers Stadium (and a national television audience), the weapon of choice in the Tigers explosive offense was the single-wing formation.
The idea was simple: load one side of the offensive line with an overwhelming number of blockers in order to make the runner’s job easier. The Rutgers defensive end bearing the onus of the onslaught all afternoon was Michael J. Pellowski, all 230 pounds of him.
“It was like being a lone cowboy on foot trying to stop a stampede,” says Pellowski, a 1971 graduate of Rutgers College. “But we won the game, 29–0, and because of our success shutting down their single-wing formation, Princeton discontinued using it.”
Nineteen sixty-nine, the middle year of the three that Pellowski played for the Scarlet Knights, was a memorable one for him. He set a record, which still stands today, for the most quarterback sacks in a game (four in the September 20 game against Lafayette), en route to recording 18 sacks in just the 29 games over his career.
“I had a reputation for being one the toughest players,” says Pellowski, who also played baseball at Rutgers. His coaches thought so highly of him that he was named defensive captian in 1970, a year he earned All-East honors. Upon graduation, he tried out for pro football with the New England Patriots, but the competition was too steep.
Pellowski turned to what he always aspired to be, a writer, and he embarked on a career that has been fruitful and varied. He has written more than 100 books, ranging from humor to sports to children’s picture books. “I still get emails from people who read one of my children’s books when they were a child and tell me it was their favorite,” says Pellowski, who had four children with Judy Snyder Pellowski, his wife of 50 years and his indispensable partner throughout his writing career. “Lots of people still have their copy of Double Trouble.”
He even found work writing gags for comedians Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller, among others. Fast and prolific throughout his writing career, Pellowski wrote for Marvel and DC comics, too.
Most recently, he authored the historical novel Bloody Red Bob Scarlet (White Bird Publications), which was published in September. Set in the decades surrounding the Civil War, the novel even has a chapter devoted to the first collegiate football game, between Rutgers and Princeton. The main character, Red Bob Scarlet, returns to New Brunswick after the conflict, attends Rutgers, and plays in the game.
The novel is, in a way, an extension of Pellowski’s 2008 coffee table book Rutgers Football: A Gridiron Tradition in Scarlet (Rutgers University Press), in which chapters, organized by blocks of years, are prefaced with historical nuggets that place Rutgers football eras in the context of the prevailing times.
Pellowski attended Rutgers during the height of the Vietnam War, when college students were able to get deferments from the draft. But studies were tough, and Pellowski, juggling a demanding course load and sports practices, was in a constant state of anxiety, worried that he might fail out of college and expose himself to the draft. His concern wasn’t unwarranted: many first-year students did fail, he remembers, and were soon on their way to Southeast Asia.
The first in his family to attend college, Pellowski was the eldest of five children, raised in Franklin, New Jersey, where he starred in high school football and was heavily recruited by top colleges as both a tight end and defensive end. Higher education wasn’t really ever a consideration in his family, he says. His father dug ditches for a living and his mother was a waitress. There were no books in the house.
“You know, my ambition in life was simple,” says Pellowski, who lives in Hillsborough, New Jersey. “To paraphrase the great tennis player Althea Gibson, ‘I just wanted to be somebody.’ So, I went for it and I got it.”