The Day The Gems Were Robbed: Looking Back at the ‘Super Bowl’ the Avalon Midget Football Team Lost

What’s that old saying? “Hell hath no fury like a 10-year-old cheated.” Or something like that. Well, it’s true. As we approach the 65th anniversary of the debut of the Avalon Gems midget football team, it’s amazing how clear the memories are in some cases, more than six decades later.

First, it’s hard to conceive in today’s world that there was a time when Avalon and Stone Harbor had enough children to field a full midget football team that competed in the Cape May County League. Yes, the Avalon/Stone Harbor Fire Lions played their games in the 1970s on Stone Harbor’s recreation fields at 80th Street.

Perhaps even harder to imagine was that in 1959 Avalon fielded the first midget football team on Seven Mile Beach with a roster of more than 25 players. Like all Avalon teams at the time, they were nicknamed the Gems, taken from an old Avalon advertising slogan which referred to Avalon as The Gem of the Jersey Coast. Avalon baseball and basketball teams as far back as the 1920s were named the Gems. So, it made sense when Bill Salvesen, an early organizer of Avalon’s Little League team, suggested that the town enter a team in the county midget football league, that they be called the Gems. The games were played on a field parallel to Dune Drive around 9th Street.

“We played our hearts out,” remembered Wilbur Lively, who lived in Virginia in 2009 when he reminisced about that first Gems season. Lively left the area to attend college more than 40 years earlier and hadn’t returned to the area but still had clear memories. “We had a great group of kids,” he said at the time. “My memory of the kids and that time is very clear.”

One person who still had vivid memories of that season and the championship game that Avalon lost 7-6 is Steve Sylvester, the former owner of Sylvester’s Seafood. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” he reminisced back in 2009 about the game played in Cape May Court House. “We were on the 1-yard line at the two-minute warning, and we got one play off. How does that happen? I can tell you, the person keeping the clock was from Court House, that’s how it happens. And we were robbed.”

Alan Turnier of Avalon shared Sylvester’s same memories in 2009. “Of course, I remember that game quite well,” he said at the time. “The problem that we had was with the clock. Or at least with the person keeping the clock. Who, by the way, wasn’t from Avalon.” Turnier also recalled what he referred to as their worst game of the season, vs. Wildwood Villas, now better known as Lower Township. “It was a bad game,” he recalled. “That team didn’t have much equipment, and they all seemed a lot older and bigger than us and came looking for us after the game. I seem to remember Billy Salvesen having bite marks on his arm after the game.”

Another teammate, Mike Matalucci, was asked recently out of the blue, some 65 years later, if he remembered the Avalon Gems championship game in 1959. Without hesitation he replied, “That was the Super Bowl to us, of course I remember that game.”

Lively also remembered that the Gems’ equipment was not up to today’s standards. “Some of our helmets didn’t have facemasks,” he recalled in 2009. “I was probably playing defensive back. I went to make a tackle, and I knocked myself silly. I don’t remember a thing after that hit – just wandering around the field, feeling lost.”

Lively also remembered that the group stayed close as they grew, and many went on to play football at Middle Township High School and helped the Panthers capture a Cape Atlantic League title.

Today, those Avalon kids are spread out across the country. Although some still reside in Avalon or Cape May County, others live in Georgia, Virginia, Florida, and even California. Regardless of how far their travels have taken them from the Seven Mile Beach, their memories are still clear from that championship game. “We were robbed, period,” concluded Sylvester in 2009. “And I’ll take that to my grave.” Apparently, hell hath no fury like a 10-year-old cheated out of championship. Who knew?