SOUTH DEERFIELD — Leading up to the biggest local football game of the regular season early last week, the boys from Frontier Regional School were paid a surprise visit by a Redskins turned Red Hawk legend. They were duly impressed by his athletic presence.
“Yeah,” recalled Coach Don Gordon, who lost the Intercounty League North showdown with Turners Falls High School, 28-12, on his home field Friday but nonetheless qualified for the postseason, “all the kids were impressed with his size. They were all talking about it afterward.”
Storied Frontier alum and 1987 graduate Mark Chmura, 47 and fit, according to Gordon, showed up at practice early in the week with longtime friend Bernie Sadoski, another Frontier grad who was a generation ahead of his friend. The two men worked out in the weight room when Chmura was in high school and have maintained a tight relationship ever since. For anyone new to the area or just pulling their heads from deep in the Lake Hitchcock sand, Chmura led Frontier to two straight state Division III basketball championship games, losing to Cohasset in 1986 and beating Fairhaven in 1987.
A 1,000-career-point scorer, there are those who believe Chmura could have been a successful college basketball player, but he instead chose football and made quite a name for himself on the gridiron after high school. The first stop for the 6-foot-5, 255-pound specimen, who on the 1985 and 1986 Frontier football teams displayed uncanny fine-motor skills and speed for a man so big, was Boston College, where he graduated in 1992 with a school-record 169 receptions. Drafted in the sixth round (157th overall) of the 1992 NFL Draft by the Green Bay Packers, he played eight seasons (1992-99), made three Pro Bowls, won 1997’s Super Bowl XXXI, 35-21, over Bill Parcells’ New England Patriots, and was inducted into the illustrious Packers Hall of Fame in 2010. Chmura’s career and Packers stats show 188 receptions for 2,253 yards and 17 touchdowns in 90 games. Not bad for a country boy with country roots, who, during his memorable Frontier years, could be found serving as an altar boy with younger brother Matt at the now defunct St. James Church, across North Main Street from late coach Myron Rokoszak’s home of many years.
Chmura arrived at practice last week as the Red Hawks were going through walk-throughs in preparation for the key Friday-night showdown with Turners Falls that had the entire county talking. The boys took pause to meet the fabled Frontier athlete who towers over all others in school lore. He not only rose to the pinnacle of his sport, but achieved all-time-great Packers’ status. He shook hands with every player, exchanged pleasantries and wished them luck in their looming crucial game.
Before departing, Chmura had one more little chore to perform for his alma mater. The school wanted Chmura to sign a special football it had received last year from the NFL commissioner’s office to celebrate 2016’s Super Bowl 50. The balls went to every high school in the land that had produced Super Bowl players. Removed from its decorative cardboard box in the coaches’ office, Chmura used a broad-tipped marker to put his John Hancock on the ball in big, bold, black letters for future display in a hallway trophy case near the gymnasium.
The special ball will soon take its place in that gym-side display case, forever cementing Chmura’s Frontier legacy. And the legend grows for the small-town, Franklin County lad known affectionately to his Green Bay Packer teammates and fellow NFL warriors as “Chewy.”
There may never be another like him at Frontier. Athletes with his gifts are rare at large urban schools, forget rural regional schools in places like the Happy Valley.
Any way you cut it, Mark Chmura was a once-in-a-lifetime Frontier athlete, one who may never be matched.