TEMPE, Ariz. — Ellen Tullos was asleep in her bed at home in Killeen, Texas, this past March when her phone rang.
It was TMZ.
Tullos, 73, knew instantly who they were calling about — her father, former Chicago Cardinals two-way star Marshall Goldberg — she just didn’t know why.
Turns out, TMZ was wondering if Tullos would be willing to give new Arizona Cardinals defensive end J.J. Watt, who had signed with Arizona the day before, permission to wear her father’s number — No. 99. It was the number Watt had worn during his 10 years with the Houston Texans but one that had been retired by the Cardinals. Tullos didn’t hesitate.
“I thought it was fine,” Tullos told ESPN. “I understood that it was a number that was important to J.J. while he was playing sports, and it didn’t seem like an unreasonable request.
“As it was, Dad got all the honors that he really deserved and needed to have his number retired and he’s gone and J.J. is here, and he’s dying to play and why not?”
For the next two hours, Tullos said she took five different phone calls, with about five minutes between each.
Once the TMZ story posted, Goldberg went from a mostly forgotten star of professional football’s early days to the forefront of the NFL landscape. The day before the TMZ story, “Marshall Goldberg” ranked as a two on Google’s 1-100 scale of search interest. On March 2, that number skyrocketed to 87. A day later, it was at 100, which Google equates to “peak popularity.”
Goldberg is a College Football Hall of Famer out of Pitt who played eight seasons with the Cardinals — a tenure split up because of his stint in a special Navy unit from 1944 to ’46 — and was part of the Cardinals’ only championship in 1947. And now, 15 years after his death following an eight-year struggle with dementia he was remembered again, all because of Watt.
A Navy man, a family man
Goldberg’s granddaughters got a kick out of their aunt being quoted on a…
Source : espn
