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The following is a letter from Father Gerard Garrigan O.S.B. He mentions a number of pictures that can be found on Tom’s profile above.
Tom Galati is one of the kindest, brightest and wittiest people whom I have been blessed to know. It was so good to hear from him. His most gracious words about me as a priest, though quite undeserved, reminded me of a pillow that my brother Sid Garrigan has. The pillow bears this message: MY AMBITION IN LIFE IS TO BECOME THE KIND OF PERSON MY DOG THINKS I AM. I need to make sure that Tom Galati never meets my family, our monks of Saint Louis Abbey, the parishioners of Saint Anselm Parish or the students or faculty of Saint Louis Priory School, otherwise his deluded opinion of me would immediately change.
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Tom Galati McBride High School
Class of 1970 graduation photoThomas “Kid” Galati
Epiphany
Library Worker 2
Football 1
Soccer 1, 2, 3, 4
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McBride High School 1969 – 1970
Student Court and Student CouncilTom Galati had quite an impressive soccer career. After starring at McBride High School in St. Louis, Tom went on to earn second team All-American honors at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, winning a Second Division National Collegiate Soccer Championship in 1972. He was a first-round draft pick for the expansion Philadelphia Atoms who won the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) Championship in 1974. Tom finished second in the Rookie of the Year voting that year.
I have two vivid memories of Tom Galati. The first was watching him play for McBride High School against Riverview Gardens High School, the public school in whose district I lived. I was a year behind Tom at McBride from which he graduated in 1970. I had played grade school soccer at St. Jerome Parish with a number of the Riverview Gardens players. Riverview’s coach was Gene Baker who would go on to build a high school soccer dynasty at Granite City High School in the steel town in Illinois just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. He would become equally successful as a college coach at Blackburn College in southern Illinois.As I remember the story as it was told to me, Gene Baker instructed a goon on his team to mark Tom Galati and to follow him everywhere he went, even to the bathroom. The goon was a Gold Gloves boxer whose soccer skills were negligible to nonexistent. I recall Galati leaving the field when substituted for and the goon taking Coach Baker’s instruction literally, following Galati right off the field. The goon continued to hack at Galati from the beginning of the game, but Galati kept his cool resisting the strong urge to slug him. His patience was rewarded in the end when the referee finally tossed the goon from the game.
image.pngMcBride High School 1969 – 1970 soccer team (Tom Galati is fourth from left in front row)
I have another anecdote about Coach Gene Baker. We had a wonderful Italian restaurant, Ponticello’s, not far from our home. They had my favorite pizza. Even though I would spend three academic years in Rome studying for the priesthood as a Benedictine monk, my favorite pizza in the world remained Ponticello’s. My friend Keith Eckberg from Ferguson, Missouri and I had a tradition of eating at Ponticello’s on my vacation. Keith is a fine man, but not a church-goer. Keith and I were at Ponticello’s for our annual meal and I was dressed in lay clothes, not in clerical or monastic garb. Evidently, we had been talking about “churchy” things. We were told by our waiter that our check had been paid for, as it turned out, by Coach Gene Baker who mistook me for Fr. Tom Robertson, a former soccer player who was active with the soccer old timers in St. Louis. I confessed to Gene that I was not Fr. Robertson, but to his credit, he did not un-pay the bill. We had a good chat talking about Rich and Ed Zeidler, my good friends from St. Jerome, who played high school soccer for Coach Baker at Riverview. When I next saw Fr. Robertson, I thanked him for the free meal he got me at Ponticello’s by Gene Baker’s mistake.
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St. Jerome soccer team c. 1964 at Bissell Hills Park in Bellefontaine Neighbors, Missouri including Bob Kessen (front row third from right) who marked Pelé holding the legend scoreless
2026 U.S. Men’s Soccer Team Captain Tim Ream began his soccer career playing for St. Jerome at Bissell Hills Park in Bellefontaine Neighbors, Missouri. The thirty-eight year old Ream has earned 86 caps in international competition.
2007 Class Tom Galati 1
Tom Galati SIU-Edwardsville Cougar
Back to Tom Galati. The other memory I have of Tom is when I ran into him and his wife at a market. I mentioned to him that my St. Jerome grade school soccer teammate Bob Kessen had marked the renowned Pelé at the end of the Black Pearl’s stellar career when he played for the New York Cosmos as a seasoned player and that Pelé did not score. (Please see Bob in St. Jerome team photo above.) Bob had played with Galati at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. Both are now in SIU-E’s Hall of Fame. Galati then told me that he also had covered Pelé when he played against him in the National Professional Soccer League. (Please see photo of Galati and Pelé above at beginning of this piece.) When I asked Tom how he did marking the great soccer maest, he replied, “Well, he didn’t score. But I was rough with him.” Tom had wanted to get a signed jersey from Pelé following the game, but after Tom had mugged him throughout the game, there was no way Pelé was giving Galati anything. Then Tom quipped with his keen sense of humor, “I should have let him score.” You can get a lot of money on e-Bay for a signed Pelé jersey. Bragging that you marked Pelé and he didn’t score, sadly, won’t get you anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Galati
Galati, Tom 2007
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