Pride of the Greyhounds: Ray Legenza and 64 Straight Wins by Connecticut’s Best High School Baseball Team by Paul Hensler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pride of the Greyhounds: Ray Legenza and 64 Straight Wins by Connecticut’s Best High School Baseball Team by Paul Hensler Jorge Iber Paul Hensler. Pride of the Greyhounds: Ray Legenza and 64 Straight Wins by Connecticut’s Best High School Baseball Team. Naugatuck, CT: Paul Hensler, 2022. 306 pp. Paperback, $20.00. There are few things that can make a small town prouder than to have a group of their youths “make good” at the state level and, even in some cases, to bring national notoriety to the community. Winning state titles, particularly for a locale steeped in working- class values, is also often an element in such stories. The chronicle of the 1969– 72 Naugatuck High School Greyhounds, under the leadership of their legendary coach Ray Legenza, fits into this framework perfectly. In this self-published work, author Paul Hensler, himself a 1974 graduate of Naugatuck High, takes his readers on an ephemeral tour of the borough since the mid-nineteenth century. From the start, industrial production was at the heart of the community’s economic vitality, with the making of metal, rubber, and chemicals being among the principal endeavors. As many other authors have noted (in regard to the connection between such towns and sport— with [End Page 126] S. L. Price’s Playing through the Whistle being an excellent example), by the time we get to this story’s setting Naugatuck was beginning to decline and suffer from both environmental and economic deterioration. In this context, the notoriety and achievements of Coach Legenza and his charges were a welcome respite. Hensler provides background on Coach Ray and how he came to wind up in charge of the Greyhounds. Long before the storied undefeated run, which is the focus of this work, the NHS nine had success under his leadership, winning various titles in the 1950s and early 1960s. Coach Ray also guided the school’s football team to state championships in 1956 and 1967. In addition to discussing his success on the diamond and gridiron, the author also notes that Legenza, who served his country in the army during World War II, was a loving husband and father, a devout Catholic, and had a very conservative nature, precisely counter to much of what was taking place in the broader culture at the end of the 1960s. The reason for mentioning these points is because the military, his working- class upbringing, and his faith certainly shaped the way that Ray managed his charges at NHS. Particularly significant is how Hens-ler focuses on these elements in order to contrast Legenza to another successful high school baseball coach of this era, Lynn Sweet, whose unorthodox (might we say “hippie”) leadership methodology helped guide a Macon, Illinois, high school team to a state title at about this same time (in 1971). This particular, and in many ways, contrasting story is described in Chris Ballard’s book, One Shot at Forever. The divergence in managerial styles could not have been starker, but it is also insightful to see how two men, in similar situations, found success dealing with the broader social changes confronting their teenage charges. The book proceeds to examine the Greyhound’s loss in the state title game in 1969 and the subsequent start of the sixty- four-game winning streak. Hens-ler does a good job of providing a not overwhelming (specific game-by- game) recounting of the streak but just enough to provide readers with a sense of both NHS’s dominance against weaker opponents and more tense moments along the way of the long stretch of victories. Of course, the longer this string continued, the more positive publicity there was for NHS and their community. Additionally, there was a serious process of researching which high school team in the United States actually held the longest winning streak in baseball. At first, it was thought that the honor belonged to a school in Newark, New Jersey, with a total of sixty. However, it was ultimately (though incorrectly, as a team from Oklahoma City won sixty- six consecutively between 1952 and 1954) determined that a school in Waxahachie, Texas (with a total of sixty- five...