Dombrowski gets surprise from College Hall of Fame

When Jim Dombrowski came to the University of Virginia in the early 1980s, he figured his future was in medicine and not on the gridiron.
After all, up to that point of his life the giant-sized Dombrowski had accomplished more as a hockey player than in football. Can you imagine Dombrowski coming at you on skates and carrying a stick? Not that he would need one.
Cementing himself as George Welsh’s starting offensive left tackle for four years (1982-85), the New York native dominated at his position, twice winning the Jacobs Blocking Trophy as the ACC’s best blocker and becoming Virginia’s first-ever unanimous All-American.
All that resulted in Dombrowski being the New Orleans Saints’ first-round draft pick (sixth overall) in 1986. He would flourish in that organization, playing a club-record 147 consecutive games over an 11-year span and earning him a spot in the Saints’ Hall of Fame.
Maybe he figured that award in 2003 might be his last. He had already been named to the ACC’s 50th Anniversary team as one of its best players ever.
What else was there?
Last Saturday, he found out when he returned home from playing in a member-guest golf tournament to find a strange package resting on the kitchen table of his New Orleans home.
Inside was one of the biggest treats of Dombrowski’s life: a football informing him that he had been elected to the College Football Hall of Fame’s class of 2008 along with such fabled names as Lou Holtz, Troy Aikman, Billy Cannon, Thurman Thomas, Ron Simmons and more.
“I think if anybody dreams that kind of stuff, I think they are pulling your leg,” Dombrowski said in a teleconference through UVa’s sports information department on Thursday afternoon. “I always enjoyed athletics no matter what sport I was playing when I was growing up. I just wanted to go out there and have fun and do the best I could.”
Dombrowski said he never thought about a college football scholarship until he started getting recruited after his senior year. That’s when Dick Bestwick and his staff lured him south from Williamsville, N.Y.
Bestwick didn’t get to hang around long enough to reap the benefits of Dombrowski. Welsh, his coaching successor, helped mold his offense around the physical tackle who paved the way for Virginia’s running game featuring the likes of All-ACC running back Barry Word.
“I think George would be the first to admit that Coach Bestwick and his staff gave them some good players that they were able to build upon, and through everybody’s hard work we were able to get the program going in the right direction,” Dombrowski said.
Welsh acknowledged that fact about this time a year ago when he and Bestwick attended UVa’s football alumni reunion, also attended by Dombrowski.
“I think that Coach Bestwick and his staff kind of turned the tide from the regime that was there prior to them, but obviously I have a tremendous sense of pride that the group of guys that I went to school with were able to get the ball rolling downhill, and through the remainder of George’s tenure, they took the ball and ran,” Dombrowski said.
“Who would have ever thought that at one point UVa would be the No. 1 team in the nation (three weeks in 1990)? Certainly not when I was recruited there. And with Al [Groh] and his staff, they have been able to keep things going.”
Still, when he arrived at UVa, he didn’t know how much his life would change.
He helped the Cavaliers attain three consecutive winning seasons — a mind-blowing feat at the time — and win the 1984 Peach Bowl against Big Ten runner-up Purdue (Virginia’s first-ever bowl game). The big tackle became only the fifth Cavalier to have his jersey number (73) retired.
He would meet his wife, Sandy, in Charlottesville (her family still lives here) and Dombrowski has been a celebrated name in Wahoo lore ever since.
“When I was at UVa, it was just going out and trying to find a spot on the team and find a spot on the field to play,” the Hall of Famer said. “I went to college to go to medical school and hopefully become an orthopedic surgeon, but my career in the NFL got in the way.”
Dombrowski was featured on the cover of this newspaper’s football section during his career. The hulking wide body donned a surgeon’s gown while pretending to operate on a football.
Little did he suspect that by the time he was through playing football that med school would be a distant afterthought.
“I never thought about getting drafted in the NFL until after my junior year, when a lot of the guys I played against were going pretty high in the draft,” Dombrowski said. “I said, ‘Hmmm, well you know, maybe I can do this as a career.’
“I never really looked beyond where I was. I always wanted to enjoy where I was and just took full advantage of it, enjoyed it as much as I could.”
When his career with the Saints came to a close he had small children and knew that medical school would be such a sacrifice that he would miss them growing up. Instead, he became a certified financial planner with Wachovia Securities in the New Orleans area.
His oldest of three sons, Carter, is a 19-year-old freshman at UVa, while Matt is a high school sophomore and John is an eighth grader.
Dombrowski, who will be honored at the National Football Foundation’s Hall of Fame awards dinner in New York on Dec. 9 (induction will follow next spring in South Bend, Ind.), will become the fourth Wahoo player inducted into the Hall (Bill Dudley, Tom Scott, Joe Palumbo), along with three coaches (Welsh, Frank Murray, and Earle “Greasy” Neale).