The National Herald’s presentation of the TOP 20 Greek- American Athletes continues today on our English Language website.
{The National Herald’s Top 20 Greek-American Athletes (13-16)
The National Herald’s Top 20 Greek-American Athletes (17-20)}
Four spots are being presented each day over five days. Counting down to #1, this portion includes numbers 12-9, beginning with Lou Tsioropoulos, from that magical place, Lynn, Massachusetts.
12 – LOU TSIOROPOULOS Basketball
Tsioropoulos in 1957. (Photo: Wikipedia/Public Domain)
Lou Tsioropoulos is in the small club of people who played for both an NCAA champion – at scandal tarred Kentucky – and an NBA champion, with the Boston Celtics, not far from his home town of Lynn, MA. There, he played in high school for Lynn English – against the legendary Harry Agganis, who was better known for being an All American in football and baseball, but was his rival at Lynn Classical.
The two teamed to play basketball for their Greek church before Agganis went on to Boston University and acclaim while Tsioropoulos went to Kentucky, where he – like Harry he was a great football player – he wanted to play football but was wanted more for his basketball prowess. He was a stalwart instead for the basketball team under legendary coach Adolph Rupp.
As a sophomore in 1951, he was a member of Kentucky’s NCAA Championship team, which defeated Kansas State 68-58 in the championship game. In the 1951-52 season, the team led the nation’s top college division in points per game, going 29-3, but it lost to St. John’s in the regional finals of the National Invitational Tournament, losing a chance to repeat as national champions.
In the fall of 1952, a point shaving scandal involving three Kentucky players (a fourth player, Bill Spivey, a teammate of Tsioropoulos on the 1951 National Championship team, was alleged to have been involved in the scandal but denied the charge) over a four-year period forced Kentucky to forfeit its upcoming season, which would have been the senior year for Tsioropoulos and future Hall-of-Famers Frank Ramsey and Cliff Hagan.
The suspension of the season made Kentucky’s basketball team, in effect, the first college sports team to get the ‘death penalty’, although the NCAA asked schools not to schedule Kentucky without mandating it. The resulting scandal ensnared a number of schools, including City College of New York and New York University. It was a low point in Kentucky basketball history, the New York Times reported, but Tsioropoulos was not involved and had a stellar career there.
Tsioropoulos, Ramsey, and Hagan graduated from Kentucky in 1953, and a became eligible for the NBA draft and all were selected by the Celtics, but they returned to Kentucky for one more season and the team finished 25-0. As graduate students, however, they wouldn’t have been allowed to play in the post-season, which Kentucky sat out, losing a chance for a fourth title in five years – potentially five straight if not for the point shaving scandal. Tsioropoulos averaged 14.5 points a game in the perfect season that saw Kentucky ranked #1, never getting the chance to gain another crown and not willing to risk an undefeated season.
Tsioropoulos’ #16 jersey was retired by his alma mater, and he is in the University of Kentucky Athletics Hall of Fame. He finished with career averages of 8.4 points and 8.3 rebounds and was coveted by Boston. But he’d have to wait.
He served in the Air Force and didn’t join the Celtics until 1956 – a year after his friend Agganis died from a pulmonary embolism after passing up the NFL to play baseball for the Boston Red Sox. The Celtics, behind Bill Russell, won the NBA title in 1957 and likely would have again in 1958 if Russell hadn’t been hurt.
Tsioropoulos was a role player coming off the bench for the power-laden team but not in the playoffs. He averaged 5.8 points and 4.8 rebounds during his three-year pro career, missing out two more years for his Air Force time.
“He was a prototype for the sixth man that was developed over the years,” Tommy Heinsohn, a teammate who later became the Celtics’ coach, said in a statement to The Times when Tsioropoulos died in August, 2015.
As Heinsohn’s backup at small forward, Tsioropoulos played three seasons with the Celtics, winning NBA championships in 1957 and 1959. In 157 NBA games, he averaged 5.8 points per game. His best NBA season was 1957-58; in which he averaged 7.7 points per game. This season was the only one of his three NBA seasons in which he played in the playoffs; he averaged 6.3 points per game.
“He was a tough guy,” Hagan said after hearing of Tsioropoulos’ death. “He drew the tough assignments of guarding the best forward or center.” Ramsey recalled Tsioropoulos as a defensive specialist.
In the book ‘Big Blue Machine’, Russell Rice wrote about then-Kentucky football coach Bear Bryant – who went on to greater fame at Alabama – asking basketball coach Adolph Rupp if he’d seen the football prospect from Massachusetts. “I don’t know, Paul,” Rupp said. “What’s the guy’s name?” Bryant answered, “I don’t know, Adolph. He’s from Lynn, MA, a big Greek kid with a prominent nose.” The University of Kentucky reported that Hagan and Ramsey recalled the size of Tsioropoulos’ nose coming up during a trip to Puerto Rico the team took after winning the 1951 national championship. The UK players wanted to know why the Puerto Rican fans were calling Tsioropoulos “Cyrano.” It was for the French novelist and playwright Edmond Rostand’s character, Cyrano de Bergerac, who had a long nose. Tsioropoulos also quickly gained a reputation for having a difficult name to spell. Rice noted in his book that Rupp had his secretary mimeograph labels of the name ‘Lou Tsioropoulos’ on cards that he kept in his pocket and gave to officials keeping the scorebook.
11 – PETE PIHOS Football
Pihos c. 1955. (Photo: Wikipedia/Public Domain)
Pete Pihos was the epitome of an indomitable Greek man – his visage looked like it had been carved from granite – and he played football ferociously and seemed nearly indestructible.
He played end and fullback for Indiana from 1942-43 and 1945-46 and was a First Team All-American for three years, his college career interrupted by serving in World War II in the Army. He served in the 35th Infantry Division under George S. Patton. Commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant on the battlefield, he was awarded the Bronze Star and Silver Star medals for bravery.
When Pihos returned to Indiana after his military service, he played fullback for the 1945 Indiana Hoosiers football team that compiled the only undefeated record (9-0-1) in school history, won the program’s first Big Ten Conference championship, and ranked No. 4 in the final AP Poll. He had only two days of practice before his first game back, Indiana’s second game of the season, against Northwestern. He scored Indiana’s only touchdown in the game when he caught a pass at the Northwestern five-yard line and dragged three defenders with him over the goal-line.
He earned first-team All-America honors from Yank, the Army Weekly magazine, and finished eighth in voting for the Heisman Trophy. As a senior, Pihos played three positions (fullback, halfback, and quarterback) and was named the most valuable player on the 1946 team.
In four seasons at Indiana, Pihos scored 138 points, which was then the school’s all-time scoring record. He also broke Indiana career records for touchdowns and receptions. Bo McMillin, Indiana’s head football coach since 1934, called Pihos “the greatest all-around football player our team has known in my time at Indiana.”
In 1966, he was the first player from Indiana inducted into the College Hall of Fame. Undersized by today’s standards at 6-1, 201 pounds, Pihos played in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles from 1947-1955 and helped the team win consecutive titles in 1948 and 1949. He was selected six times to play in the Pro Bowl (1950-1955) and six times a first-team All-Pro (1948, 1949, 1952-1955).
During his career, he was one of the NFL’s leading receivers. He was named to the NFL 1940s All-Decade Team in 1969 and inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1970 and was named a first-team All-American by Sporting News, Collier’s Weekly, and The New York Sun.
MURDER MOST FOUL
Pihos was born in 1923 in Orlando, FL. His parents, Louis and Mary Pihos, were Greek immigrants. On July 31, 1937, when Pihos was 14 years old, his father, who ran a breakfast restaurant in Orlando, was murdered, his body found behind the counter with a fractured skull, leading police to believe he was hit with a hatchet. A young truck driver was arrested and charged with the murder but was not convicted.
Pihos attended Orlando High School where he played football as a tackle and basketball as a guard. When he was a junior in high school, his mother moved the family to Chicago, where he attended Austin High School.
Pihos was selected by the Eagles in the fifth round (41st overall pick) of the 1945 NFL draft, but he continued to play for Indiana in 1945 and 1946. In February 1947, he signed to join the Eagles after his graduation in June. In his first NFL season, he caught 23 passes for 382 yards and seven touchdowns. He also blocked a punt by Sammy Baugh and returned it 26 yards for a touchdown against the Washington Redskins.
The Eagles made it to the NFL Championship Game – there was no Super Bowl yet – in each of Pihos’ first three seasons with the team. In 1947, the team captured its first division championship. In the playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers for the Eastern Division title, Pihos blocked a punt to set up the first touchdown in the Eagles’ 21–0 win – but they lost the title game to the Chicago Cardinals even though Pihos caught three touchdown passes. Pihos scored the only offensive touchdown of the 1949 championship game via a 31-yard reception in the second quarter during a heavy downpour.
His 766 receiving yards and 11 receiving touchdowns in 1948 were both the second-most in the NFL that season. He earned first-team All-Pro recognition in 1948 from United Press (UP), New York Daily News, Chicago Herald-American, and Pro Football Illustrated and in 1949 from the International News Service, UP, Associated Press, and New York Daily News.
DON’T COUNT HIM OUT
Pihos caught only 12 passes and scored only one touchdown in 1952, and the Eagles thought his career was over, but he still managed to make the Pro Bowl and earn first team All-Pro honors by the AP as a defensive end.
Not willing take a pay cut and be an exclusive defensive end, he trained heavily during the off-season prior to 1953 and had his best statistics over the next three years. Pihos led the NFL in receptions in each of his final three seasons, in receiving yards twice, and in receiving touchdowns once. In 1953, he became the third different player to record a ‘triple crown’ in receiving with 63 receptions, 1,049 yards and 10 touchdowns.
In November 1955, Pihos announced that the current season would be his last as a player. In his final NFL game, on Dec. 11 against the Chicago Bears, he caught 11 passes for 114 yards. He retired after playing in the Pro Bowl that January, in which he caught four passes and scored the East’s first touchdown.
During his nine seasons of play with the Eagles, Pihos missed just one game. In August 1969, as part of the NFL’s 50th anniversary, the Pro Football Hall of Fame selected All Decade teams for each of the league’s first five decades. Pihos was selected as an end on the NFL 1940s All Decade Team.
When he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, at his induction, a telegram came from Vice President Spiro Agnew calling Pihos “the Golden Greek of football” and “the most durable and versatile football player” of his time.
After his playing career was over, Pihos was the head football coach for National Agricultural College (later renamed Delaware Valley University) from 1956 to 1958 and had coaching positions for Tulane and Richmond Rebels of the Atlantic Coast Football League. He then had a business career.
In 2001 was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, the dementia attributed to his football career, and in 2004 he was swindled by a con artist who got his lifetime collection of sports memorabilia. He spent his last years at home with a former wife, and as the Alzheimer’s disease worsened into the latter stages, he was at the Grace Healthcare nursing home in Winston-Salem, NC. He died there at age 87 in August 2011.
10 – HELEN MAROULIS Freestyle Wrestling
Freestyle wrestler Helen Maroulis poses for photos at the Team USA Olympic media summit, March 9, 2016, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
When you watch Helen Maroulis wrestle, it’s like imagining competition in ancient Greece during the Olympics, except that only men were allowed then. She could probably have beaten them, so dominant is the 5-3, 126-lb.
Olympic gold medalist in her sport. She won the 2016 Olympic event in the 53-kilogram class by easily handling 13-time world champion and three consecutive gold medalist Saori Yoshida 4-1, bringing her Japanese opponent to tears as commentators marveled at the ease with which she dispensed of a woman who hadn’t lost a bout in four years and had only been defeated twice in her life. Yoshida was the most decorated freestyle wrestler of all time, winning gold at the 2004, 2008, and 2012 Olympics. Maroulis’ victory was a first gold for the U.S. in women’s wrestling.
“I’ve been dreaming about wrestling Saori for so long,” Maroulis said to NBC after her gold-medal bout. “She’s a hero. She’s the most decorated wrestler in the sport. It’s such an honor to wrestle her.” Later she told ESPN: “By the time I got around to Yoshida, I felt like I had studied her so much that I knew her on a personal level. It wasn’t about needing to win because I had to prove that I am good enough, it just raised me up to compete at the best of my ability”.
Her grandparents emigrated to the United States from the Greek island Kalamos in the 1960s. Maroulis visited her father’s island a few weeks after her victory at Rio, and was given an award by the local community. She won the bronze medal at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and at the 2024 Games in Paris, adding to her medal count.
She was born in Rockville, MD, the daughter of Paula and Yiannis ‘John’ Maroulis. She calls herself “Greek by birth, wrestler by heart,” and her father was involved in wrestling, epitomizing the spirit of athleticism. She visits Greece and loves her family’s island in the Ionian Sea, and went to show her grandmother a bronze medal she won in the World Championships in Uzbekistan, adding that to her 2012 silver at the worlds championships before winning the 2015 world championship on the way to gold at Rio.
She attended Magruder High School for three years, where as a freshman she became the first female wrestler to place at the Maryland state wrestling championships. She was also named Most Outstanding Wrestler of a tournament, by pinning a senior boy who had won the year before, and finished high school with 99 career victories. She then moved to Marquette Senior High School in Marquette, MI and was on the wrestling team at Missouri Baptist University in Saint Louis before transferring to compete for Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
At the age-group level, Maroulis was a three-time Junior World medalist (bronze in 2008 and 2010, silver in 2011. She’s a three-time junior World medalist, 2013 and 2015 World Cup champion, 2011 Pan American Games champion, six-time U.S. champion, and four time WCWA women’s college national champion.
In 2012, she lost the final match at the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 55- kilogram category and was so upset she considered competing for Greece, but the country’s bureaucracy kept her off the team and likely deprived Greece of a medal in the sport that is one of the symbols of the ancient games Greece invented.
Showing she had lost nothing in her drive, she won the gold medal in the 2025 world championships in the 57 kilogram category, adding to her place in history in one of the world’s toughest sports.
After her victory at the Rio Games she wrote in a piece for Sports Illustrated about what drove her – fear. “I’m afraid. Like, of everything. Afraid of the dark. Afraid of people looking at me. Afraid of being home alone. Afraid of not being enough. Afraid of my fear. Afraid of your impression of me after you read about my fear,” she wrote.
But then she detailed how she took up wrestling at seven and took on boys in competition because there was no one else to wrestle, her pink ankle socks standing out even as she got older and wrestled boys, and how their fathers would scream at them to beat her. A high school teammate told her, “I can’t wrestle you because my girlfriend won’t let me.”
She said, “I begged my parents to let me wrestle. My dad finally conceded, and said, “I’ll let you wrestle one match. If you win that match, you can continue.” She added: “So It was the only match I would win all year, but it was all I needed. That one precious victory cemented my dad’s promise. I now had permission to keep going.” She added: “When I pretended to be fearless, I learned I was closing myself off to my creative side. For me, the mat is my canvas. Without fear, there is no courage. And without courage, there is no creativity. And without any of those, being on the mat just doesn’t work”.
9-FRED SMERLAS Football
(Photo: Facebook/Fred Smerlas)
Fred Smerlas, perhaps in another life as Hercules, was one of the most brutal – and smartest – men ever to play the most brutal position in football: noseguard. It required strength, ferocity, meanness, and a disdain for your own body because you were going to throw it at behemoths trying to block you and as you tried to run down backs who could run like deer and hit like tanks. He could hit back harder.
Smerlas, a 6-4, 295-lb. Wrecking Machine, was graduated from Waltham, MA High School in 1975, where he was a feared wrestler as well, with a 65-0 record in his final two years, a two-time New England champion and the top-ranked heavyweight in the country, the Boston Herald said. He was a two sport All-American in high school in wrestling and football. Fifty-eight of those victories came on pins, 50 in the first period. “Wrestling was natural for me,” he says. “I’d look at a move and I’d know it. In my senior year a kid lasted 1:01 and got a standing ovation. Mothers used to come up to me and say, ‘Don’t hurt my son.’ I’d tell them, ‘I’m not going to hurt him, just pin him.’”
At Boston College, playing football for a winless team, opponents ran away from him as fast as they could, and one opponent recounted how Smerlas grabbed him by the nose through his face mask and rubbed his face in the dirt with revelry.
Smerlas was indestructible doing a 14-year career from 1979-92 with the Buffalo Bills, San Francisco 49ers, and New England Patriots, his mean mustache a menacing visage for offensive linemen and would-be blockers.
In his 1990 autobiography ‘By a Nose’, he recounted his 11 years with the Bills and how they went from also-rans to contenders. He was the Alex Karras of his time, and he was born to play. He was shaving in the eighth grade, bench-pressing 440 pounds in the 12th. By then he stood 6’3″ and weighed 250 pounds. Two years later he would weigh 305, Sports Illustrated’s Fred Zimmerman wrote in a 1988 profile, writing that Smerlas was descended from a 7-foot, 350-lb. strongman known as ‘The Tree’.
Smerlas was hairy as a bear, thick as a barrel, had massive legs and durability playing with violence in perhaps the most violent sport, avoided by men who avoided almost no one else, fearing him.
“He’s played with a hyperextended elbow and a pinched rotator cuff,” Bills trainer Eddie Abramoski told the magazine. “He’s played with a sprained ankle that was twice its normal size and a wrist that was so badly sprained he couldn’t bend it. ‘Tape me up,’ he said. He puts pain out of his mind. He’ll play as long as I tell him no permanent harm could result.”
“Loud and boisterous – you can stand in the hallway and know immediately whether Smerlas is in the locker room – he plays the game the way they did 50 years ago. ‘Are you Zorba the Greek?’” a TV man asked him. “Absorba the Greek,” Smerlas said.
AN ALLEY FIGHTER
He is like Karras in his rebellious personality and challenges of authority, and quotable too, which the sportswriters loved. “Right up to high school I was a nice quiet kid, very mellow, never wanted to fight,” Smerlas told SI.
“One kid threw a knife and it stuck in the wall next to the teacher. I’d go home and look in the mirror – chubby, goofy-looking kid with big ears – and I’d say, ‘Man, I’ve got to do something to survive here.’ So I started lifting weights. And I’d hit a speed bag – I was always quick with my hands – and run with combat boots on. My body started to change.”
On the 0-11 team at Boston College, scouts were so impressed they flocked to see him on a miserable a b club because he never took a play off, playing like each play was his last, all-out. “I had no technique,” he said. “I just wanted to kill the guy in front of me. We used to beat people up and lose … I was out of control. I’d spit and scream and grab face masks. I remember someone once talking to me on the field and how weird it felt, so I started doing it. I wouldn’t go to our defensive huddle. Instead, I’d stand there yelling at the other team.”
Like Karras, he was the victim of football injustice, not in the NCAA Hall of Fame because his Boston College teams weren’t good and inexplicably not in the NFL Hall of Fame – you can imagine he and Karras side-by-side.
To this day, no pure nose tackle went to more Pro Bowls (five) or was All-Pro (four) more often, with Smerlas making Pro Football Weekly’s All-Pro team from 1980-82 and the players’ All-Pro team, the NEA, in 1983. In 1980 he finished tied for second behind Oakland’s Lester Hayes in balloting for the UPI AFC Defensive Player of the Year and even garnered a few votes in the AP NFL Defensive Player-of-the-Year voting.
“I never saw the guy have a bad game,” Hall-of-Fame center Dwight Stephenson told Talk of Fame Two. “As a nose tackle, Fred played the position better than anyone in the NFL. He did his job – keeping his linebackers free and tying up a couple of men in the middle, He was a load. He was the best. A tough, tough player.”
Smerlas was also durable – starting 149 straight games in the middle of the Bills’ defense – and missed games in only two of his 14 seasons, his rookie year when he missed the final three and in his 12th season. “Fred was a warrior!” said Ted Cottrell, one of his coaches.” He was double-teamed on just about every play (that) he was out on the field. He hardly ever missed a game due to injury. He would play through pain … He was a man’s man!”
He is a member of the Buffalo Bills Wall of Fame and was inducted into the Professional Football Researchers Association Hall of Very Good Class in 2018. Smerlas is considered by many to be one of the best pure 3-4 nose tackles in NFL history. Pro Football Journal said: “There’s just too much non-statistical information for his case to be ignored.”
