Pasztor’s long, strange trip

Only a handful of fans noticed when Virginia’s No. 63 trotted out onto the field at Scott Stadium last Saturday night to start the game against Maryland.
The vast majority had no idea who Austin Pasztor was or anything about the odyssey that brought him to the Cavaliers’ football program.
To say that Pasztor’s journey from Langton, Ontario in Canada to Charlottesville was a bit bizarre would be an understatement. The fact that he was starting at offensive left guard for Virginia as a 17-year-old was mindboggling.
Yet, the Canadian played well enough to be graded out at 78 percent against an aggressive Maryland defense, earning Pasztor a nomination from UVa coach Al Groh for ACC rookie of the week.
Lining up beside All-ACC candidate Eugene Monroe, Pasztor played all but the final snap to help the Cavaliers roll up 201 yards on the ground and stun the Terrapins 31-0.
None of this would have happened if Fork Union Military Academy postgraduate coach John Shuman hadn’t been receptive to what he first thought was a summer prank last year.
“Actually I thought it was a joke,” Shuman said. “I was sitting here in my office on a lazy summer day and no one else was around. Someone called me and asked if they could bring a Canadian all-star team down to scrimmage us.”
Once Shuman was convinced the coach on the phone was serious, he agreed to a scrimmage, wrote it down and actually forgot about it. In mid-August last year, the Canadians called back and said they would be there at the end of the month.
It was a trip that would change Pasztor’s life.
“When they got here and rolled off the bus, they were the biggest 15- and 16-year-olds I had ever seen,” said Shuman.
FUMA played the perfect hosts. They gave the Canadians a clinic on American football, practiced with them to prepare them for a scrimmage the following day. The major issue was that in Canadian football, the defensive line plays a yard off from the ball rather than close to the line of scrimmage.
Throughout the weekend, Pasztor and another player stood out. When the Canadians boarded their bus to leave, Shuman already knew that if No. 74 or No. 60 wanted to come back, he was willing and ready to accept them.
A week later when the Canadian coach called Shuman and told him that Pasztor wanted to enroll at Fork Union, Shuman looked on the roster and saw that Pasztor was No. 74.
“We’ve got to have him,” Shuman said and quickly called the Pasztor household in Ontario.
Rick and Connie Pasztor were surprised to get the phone call.
“We didn’t expect Austin to leave for another year because he was only 16 at the time,” Rick Pasztor said. “When Coach Shuman called, that was a shocker.”
From the Canadian scrimmage the last weekend of August, Pasztor was back at FUMA to enroll by Sept. 21.
“He came in on a Monday and he started for us that Saturday against a junior college team,” Shuman said. “I’m thinking, we have a
6-foot-6, 310-pound guy who can move. Man, I was fired up.”
Shuman had no idea that the big Canadian was only 16 and should have really been playing on the Fork Union high school team as a regular senior. When he did find out, he did what any smart coach would do.
“I said, ‘Hey man, it’s too late now ... you’ve got to play for me,’” Shuman said. “We just rolled with it.”
By Thanksgiving, Shuman had alerted Virginia to Pasztor. The FUMA coach knew that Groh liked towering, athletic linemen and brought film to UVa’s resident Canadian expert, recruiting coordinator Bob Price, the former head coach of the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes.
Before the end of the day, Virginia was ready to pounce on the big man. By the first weekend in December, Pasztor was in Groh’s office for a long sitdown. By the end of the meeting, the Canadian had an offer in hand.
“I had a couple of offers going into the trip [Buffalo, Temple, Youngstown State], but none as big as UVa,” Pasztor recalled. “I was real excited about the visit. Almost immediately I wanted to commit but I thought it would be better if I thought about it for a while.”
A few days later, he committed and stuck with Virginia although Miami (Fla.) and Michigan State came in late with offers.
Until that trip with the all-star team to Fork Union for the scrimmage, Pasztor said he had only dreamed of playing major college football in the U.S., but realistically believed he would probably end up playing college ball in Canada, where there are no football scholarships and the stadiums are much like high school facilities in the U.S.
“In Canada, the hockey players get all the girls and the football players get left in the dust,” said Pasztor, who has grown into a 6-7, 310 frame.
Although he won’t turn 18 until Nov. 26, he believes he has stopped growing.
From that trip put together by Peter Zanka and Norbert Wolf to last Saturday’s start, the past 15 months have been a whirlwind experience for Pasztor.
“I remember when playing D-I football was only a dream,” he said. “Just being a player on a team would be nice, then all of a sudden you find out you’re not going to get redshirted, then find out you’re going to start. That’s never what I would have expected before all this.”
His parents were all for the move even though their older son, Matt, was leaving home at the same time to pursue Canadian junior league hockey, a big deal.
“When you have an opportunity to go down to the States, that’s pretty good and he took it,” Rick Pasztor said.
While he had played football since he was six years old, Austin was also a hockey player. In fact, he played goalie until he literally outgrew the position.
“You don’t see too many
6-7, 312-pound goalies, eh?” said his father.
Pasztor, who had always been the biggest kid in his class, would have required special-made skates and pads, costing thousands of dollars, to keep playing the sport and to equip his size 17 shoe.
“I think he would have gone to football eventually anyway because of his size,” Rick Pasztor said.
While he hadn’t worked a lot in the weight room growing up, Pasztor brought natural strength from working on the family farm, once a tobacco farm that now grows fruits and vegetables.
“That was a lot of hard work and my parents always wanted me to work hard,” said Pasztor of his labor on the farm, located seven miles from the north shore of Lake Erie.
He had been exposed to American football all his life with his home located about two hours from Buffalo and two hours from Detroit. The NFL was big there and so was college football. His father has been watching American football since he was a tike and so has Austin.
Coming from a large family, many of the Pazstors have made the trek to Charlottesville, an 11 and 1/2 hour drive one way. His mom and dad plan to be at Saturday’s game against East Carolina.
They are trying to spread Virginia football around their small Canadian community.
“We’re working on it,” said Rick Pasztor. “Starting with our family, we’re wearing Virginia shirts and we’ve got the sticker on the vehicle.”
Meanwhile, Austin will continue to work hard just as he did at Fork Union, and continue to catch grief from his teammates, who goof on him regularly about being a Canuck.
“They are on me all the time,” Austin chuckled about his Virginia teammates. “Every day they have to say something. If I say anything weird or with an accent, they’re getting on me for it.”
Anything particularly funny?
“I don’t think anything they say is that funny,” Pasztor snickered.
“We call him ‘Big Canada,’” said Cavaliers tight end John Phillips. “He’s a big ol’ boy. But he picks up on things really well in practice.”
Because he had played some at Duke, making the start against Maryland
wasn’t quite as bewildering as it could have been. Pasztor believed he played well for his first start.
“He has a very positive attitude,” Groh said. “When things don’t go perfect, he’s able to learn from it, shake it off and move on. He gets up off the canvas and is ready to fight again.”
Not bad for a rookie, a true freshman that is already delivering eye-popping performances.
Heck, just wait until he turns 18.