Jack "Honeyboy" Evans
by Phil and Will, Dec 3, 1937
8/26/20262 min read
When you speak of professional football players here in Shenandoah, they'll tell you that there wasn't a coal region grinder to compare with Andy Kutsko, Frankie Racis or Mike (Old Ironsides) Gallery. But if you happen to cross the path of an old Coaldale football enthusiast, he'll argue until he becomes blue in the face that there never was a tougher or better coal region-bred footballer than Jack "Honeyboy" Evans.
We met a sportsman the other day who seldom missed the old Coaldale Big Green eleven in action. He saw them all in the old days and rates Evans as the greatest coal region gridder to ever wear a cleated shoe.
When one considers the many years of service that "Honeyboy" saw in coal region professional grid clashes, he is compelled to rate the former Coaldale lineman with the best of these.
Evans played 23 years with the Coaldale Big Green outfit--23 years of the bruising type of football, requiring power and brawn instead of speed and brains, as today.
Evans, who played Center, was small in comparison with his mates on the line and the giants he opposed, but he had that old intestinal fortitude when it came to taking it and handing it out. He was on the bottom of many a pile-up in those famous Coaldale defensive stands, yet he always came back for more, and not once in all those years of rough and tough football was he seriously injured.
"Honeyboy" Evans was famed as probably the only Center in pro football who ever made Lud Wray, former All-America Center at Penn, say "uncle." As great a player as Wray was in those days, he never completed a game against Evans. Lud had the strength, the skill, and a lot of college tricks that Evans lacked, but he couldn't stand up and dish it out with the rugged athlete from the Panther Creek Valley.
Evans weighed only 133 pounds when he started playing with Coaldale. In his best years with the Big Green squad, he never scaled more than 165, but he thought nothing of mixing it up with such brawny grid stalwarts as Little, Spagna, Alexander, Day, Henry, Wray, Nash, and countless others All-Americans that he faced in his long career.
Evans participated in the game until he was 43 years old and even then he was reluctant to retire from the game he loved so well.
Shenandoah fans will never forget the day when "Honeyboy" intercepted a forward pass and ran 60 yards for the touchdown that gave Coaldale the professional championship of the coal regions. Coaldale fans plunged heavily on their favorites that day and were so overjoyed with the outcome that they "tipped" Evans to the tune of $400.
"Honeyboy" Evans has settled down to the quietude of a family life in Tamaqua, a far cry from the bristling days on the gridiron, but those who loved the game as it was played in those halcyon days will always remember Evans for his aggressive style of pigskin play.