Robert Patrick "Rocky" Bleier

Xavier Catholic Schools later put his name on the football field and retired his number 23—the only jersey on the wall.

He was born in Appleton on March 5, 1946, and raised upstairs from Bleier’s Bar at Lawrence and Walnut, where his parents, Bob and Ellen, worked the mill-town tavern and his grandfather had worked the paper mill. Bob told patrons the newborn looked like a little rock; the nickname stuck. Rocky had a paper route and captained football, basketball, and track at Xavier High, which had opened the year before he arrived. A Parade All-American, he went to Notre Dame, won a national title, and landed as a sixteenth-round afterthought in Pittsburgh. After his rookie year the Army took him; he volunteered for Vietnam. On August 20, 1969, in a rice paddy near Hiệp Đức, a rifle round hit his left thigh and a grenade he tried to jump shattered the right foot. Tokyo surgeons pulled more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel and told him to think about walking. Art Rooney sent a postcard: “Rock — the team’s not doing well. We need you.”

He came back on a rebuilt foot, blocked for Franco Harris, ran for 1,036 yards beside him in 1976, and played Super Bowls IX, X, XIII, and XIV. His memoir Fighting Back became a 1980 television movie. Appleton dedicated Rocky Bleier Field at Xavier in 2007. The tavern childhood and the high-school wall are the city’s claim.