By Tom Rowe
Contributing Writer
Imagine, if you will, that you have the athletic ability to pinpoint a baseball anywhere in the strike zone at speeds well in excess of 90 miles per hour. And contemplate, yet, that your sports talents allow you to use deft hand-eye coordination in tossing basketballs with regularity through the net. What sport do you think you’d choose as your most proficient?
Well, if you are Charlie Townsend, one of the newest members of the Norwich High School Sports Hall of Fame, you would be most proud of your exploits on the football field as a punter. That’s right, a punter! Even though Townsend was an All-Iroquois League tight end on the gridiron, too, it is the memory of his booming punts that immediately brings a smile to his face.
“Everything I did athletically came easy to me. Whether it was throwing a baseball, catching a football, shooting a basketball or even playing pool, I was good at it,” recalled Townsend. “But, punting was something I had to work at. And when I became good at it, I was very proud.”
Called upon his freshman year by then grid coach Kurt Beyer to start honing his punting skills, Townsend went on to produce 53 career punts that traveled 1,792 yards for a 33.8 yard per boot average. And, remember the punter stands 10-12 yards behind the line of scrimmage, from where the subsequent boots are measured. But, more on that later.
All that notwithstanding, Townsend’s prowess in booting the pigskin a considerable distance is not what earned him enshrinement in this, the fifth edition of elite Tornado athletes.
As a three-year stalwart of the Purple mound corps, Townsend went 14-3 (.824) with four no-hitters, one combined no-no with fellow ace and Hall of Famer Fred Swertfager and two one-hitters. He lost out on a third one-hitter and another victory when his 16-strikeout effort in an 8-0 whitewashing of Walton on May 18, 1955 was ruled a forfeit because Norwich used an ineligible player.
Over the course of three seasons, he compiled 207 strikeouts in 120 innings (1.73 per inning) and allowed only 47 hits, 26 of which were given up during his sophomore campaign.
In helping lead Norwich to at least a share of three consecutive Iroquois League titles, it’s difficult to ascertain what was Townsend’s most productive spring. He earned his first varsity victory on May 1, 1954 when he three-hit Herkimer 4-2 in the second game of a twin bill, with nine strikeouts and two walks. All told, Townsend charted a 5-1 record his rookie season, which was Coach Frank Giltner’s 23rd and last as the Purple laid sole claim to the league crown.
With Ray Borowicz taking over the skipper duties for Norwich in 1955, Townsend lost his only game, despite a four-hitter, when Little Falls won out 4-1, thanks to six Tornado errors. He was literally unhittable after that as Norwich tied Oneonta for Iroquois supremacy. That aforementioned combined no-hitter with Swertfager followed that same day, April 30, at Mohawk, and two more no-hitters were sandwiched around a one-hitter over the remainder of the spring. In that one-hitter, a 7-0 blanking of Ilion on May 28, Townsend retired the first 20 batters he faced before the Golden Bombers’ Wayne Murphy slapped a two-strike single to center, thus preventing him of not only another no-hitter but a perfect game, too.
“Coach Borowicz didn’t like us fooling around with a lot of different pitches. He wanted Fred and I to just rare back and throw heat,” noted Townsend. “In one game down at Veterans Park, he told me to throw the first pitch as hard as I could over (catcher) Bob Fierro’s and the umpire’s head. When it hit the backstop, it made this loud rattling bang, and no one dug in very much the rest of the game.”
After no-hitting Little Falls in the final game of the 1955 season and the last game ever played at Alumni Field, because of the construction of Perry Browne School, Townsend opened his senior campaign with two straight no-hit gems of Walton (1-0, with 11 strikeouts) and Mohawk (2-0, with 15 whiffs). A pair of four-hit victories followed, the latter of which saw Townsend yield his first earned run in 57 innings over a two-year span.
He closed out his NHS career on June 2, 1956 with a 5-0 one-hitter against Little Falls. For the year, he compiled a 5-1 record over 40 innings of work. In addition to striking out 75, he walked 18 and gave up only 15 hits and seven runs, four of which were unearned in his lone loss to Ilion. The Tornado co-captain closed with a microscopic 0.53 ERA.
All this success was somewhat shrouded when the 1955-’56 basketball campaign began as Townsend was forced to sit out the team’s initial five games due to a concussion suffered during the latter part of the football season. When he did finally take the court, Norwich stood at 2-3 and continued to struggle most of the season, eventually winding up at 9-8 heading into Section 3 play.
That’s when the 6-foot-3, 205-pound power forward took charge. Over the course of the Purple’s improbable seven-game run to the sectional crown, he led all scorers with 98 points (14 per game average), with highs of 28 and 21 being recorded versus Richfield Springs (72-53) and Watertown (60-58), respectively.
“At the beginning of the season I felt fine, but the doctor wouldn’t release me,” recalled Townsend. “When he finally let me play again, it took a while to get back in shape, both with my shooting and my stamina.”
Despite missing those first five games, Townsend wound up with 202 points (10.6 ppg) in 19 games, hitting double digits in 12 of them. All told, he amassed 418 career markers in 39 games (10.7 ppg) as he tabulated 216 markers (10.8 ppg) his junior year, with a high of 19 coming in a 71-69 loss to Hamilton. In addition, he pulled 18 and 17 rebounds in respective contests against New Hartford and Cazenovia.
Like Arlo Guthrie in his immortal “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” we’re coming back around to that long-ago mentioned punting ability. Except for the game in which he suffered his first-quarter concussion, a 25-7 loss at Cortland on Oct. 28, 1955 when he was playing middle linebacker, Townsend saw punting activity in each of the other 13 contests.
