CANTON, Ohio — When his forever moment finally arrives on Saturday afternoon, when he gets to pose next to his elusive bronze bust after 35 years of waiting to be welcomed to an exclusive club for greatness, Joe Klecko will look down into the crowd, and if his eyes are not blurred by a tear or two or more, his heart will sing at the sight of his five children and five grandchildren … and the love of his life who waited all those years alongside him.
“We’ve been together since we were kids, you know?” Debbie Klecko told The Post. “To finally see him get what he deserves, what I know he deserves — I’m just so proud of him. To watch him finally get this is so exciting.”
She went to an all-girls high school in Chester, Pa., and after a friend of his at the all-boys high school introduced them, they went for pizza on their first date. They were married on July 26, 1975, not very long before her husband was the Jets’ sixth-round draft choice, out of Temple. He began terrorizing offensive linemen and running backs and quarterbacks at three different positions on the New York Sack Exchange, and unfortunately now is paying the price at age 69 for putting his 6-foot-3, 264-pound wrecking ball of a body so violently and so often in harm’s way.
Better late, even much too late, than never for Joe Klecko, and for Debbie Klecko.
“To me,” Debbie Klecko said, “it’s a relief. You know, year after year watching my husband — and he says he doesn’t care and it doesn’t matter — but I knew it hurt every year when it wouldn’t happen. To me, I would say a touch of relief and a joy.
“I was sad for my husband, because I knew he belonged there. I would watch other people that he played with during his time and I said, ‘Well he was better than that guy, he was as good as that guy,’ you know? And he belongs, he belongs in there. It was hard, it was hard, but I kept his spirits up. I’m like, ‘At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter,’ you know? But it did.”
She knows how much it will matter when Klecko is called, at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, to assume his rightful place.
“I think he’ll be very emotional, I do,” Debbie Klecko said. “He says he won’t, but I’ve seen him reading his speech and he was crying reading his speech to me. … I’m listening to his speech and everybody he wants to thank is already dead. … I’m like, ‘He waited a long time.’ ”
They dated for four years, and finally, in 1974, he proposed to her.
“Joe’s not a romantic, this was no big thing,” she said. “Actually, we were in the car in front of my mother’s house. We were about to go in the house and then he said, ‘Wait a minute.’ He had a ring, he gave it to me. He said, ‘You want to get married?’ ”
He had been working construction and driving huge tractor-trailer rigs until football beckoned. She came from a football family, and she had given him the push he needed when he hesitated joining the rough, tough sandlot Aston Knights of the long-defunct semi-pro Seaboard Football League … as Jim Jones from Poland University to keep his amateur status for college eligibility.
She threw the keys out of their parked car so he would have to retrieve them, and the rest was history.
“It was fun to sit in the stands, the excitement of it all, a very exhilarating time,” Debbie said.
She knew better about what made Joe Klecko tick than the personnel experts.
“Joe’s tenacity,” Debbie said. “Nobody’s gonna beat him. Nobody’s gonna get over on him. He still has that. I wish he would mellow out a little bit, but he’s gonna win no matter what it takes, nobody’s gonna beat him. That attitude made him better than anybody. Plus he was really, really strong and really fast.”
She was watching on television when her husband tore his right patellar tendon in Week 2 in Foxborough against the Patriots in 1982.
“It was horrible,” Debbie said. “I’ve seen him get hurt a lot, but I knew that one was bad. They called me from the trainers room and they let me know that he was hurt pretty bad and they were gonna take him right to the hospital, he wouldn’t be home. He got to the hospital [Lenox Hill] and he had the surgery, and the doctor [Bart Nisonson] called me the next morning. And he was acting like, ‘This is it. Joe’s not gonna play anymore. He had a good career,’ he’s telling me, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Whoa!’
“So when I told Joe that, he got so mad he cursed out the doctor. He had a fit. ‘I’ll be back on the field, no, no.’ And he was! Once again, that tenacity, nobody’s gonna beat him, this isn’t gonna beat him.”
Joe Klecko willed his way back for the Jets’ playoff run, which ended with that infuriating 14-0 loss in a driving rain in the 1982 AFC Championship game in Miami after the Dolphins’ Hall of Fame coach, Don Shula, didn’t cover the Orange Bowl field.
“I was with [center] Joe Fields’ wife,” Debbie said. “We sat there, and we were soaked. I remember him and Joe Fields walking out of that stadium that day and Joe Fields turned around to him and said, ‘This was it. You know we’re never gonna get back here again. This was the closest we’re ever gonna get.’ They just kinda were very sad and very down and very upset.”
The Jets made it back to the playoffs in 1985 and 1986, but Klecko needed reconstructive surgery on his left knee in December and was never the same. The Jets released him after the 1987 season.
“That was bad,” Debbie said. “That was really bad. I wasn’t expecting it. He had a six-pack of beer and we went and sat on the beach. He was mad. He was crying. I remember telling him, ‘Look, you had a great career. If this is it, then this is it.’ But he was not ready. I guess he had to go out on his terms, and that was not his term. If he could go back and do it over again, I think he would have probably did things a little differently.”
Klecko finished his career in 1988 with the Colts.
“His heart wasn’t in it like it should have been, like it always was up till then,” Debbie said.
He has endured five spinal surgeries, and most recently has had shoulder surgeries. He works out to keep his muscles as strong as he can.
“He’s living in pain right now,” Debbie said. “He’ll never admit that to anybody, but I know it.”
It hasn’t kept mighty Joe Klecko from being a Hall of Fame father to Michael, at 47 the oldest child, Danny, Gabriel, Joshua and Katie. The boys all played football and you bet Debbie told them they could never expect to be their father on the gridiron.
“Joe has always been an amazing father,” she said. “He’s tough on the kids, he’s not gonna let ’em get away with anything. But I always tell my daughter, she would get mad at him, and I’d say: ‘Look, there’s nobody in the world that’s gonna love you like he does. He would run into a burning building to save you. Nobody else is gonna do that.’ He would do anything for those kids.”
And it hasn’t kept him from being a Hall of Fame grandfather to Nathan, Christian, Thomas, Riley and little Wyatt.
“Even more so. ’Cause he’s more sweet, he doesn’t have to be their disciplinarian,” Debbie said. “So he’s sweet and loveable, and the typical bounce ’em-on-the-knee grandfather. He takes ’em out and throws the ball with ’em and he has them in the garden one day showing them how to garden. It’s pretty cute to watch ’em.”
And it hasn’t kept him from being her Hall of Fame husband.
“Joe’s a great husband, he really is,” Debbie said. “I always laugh at him, I always said, ‘I would rate you as a husband, A — best protector in the world, you get a Grade A. Best provider, you’ve been a great provider for us.’ And I said, ‘You were a little tough on the discipline, but …’ A good protector, a good provider, very sweet, loving … his family was No. 1.”
Joe Klecko gets his forever moment at age 69, following 16 major surgeries, by his count.
“I’ve asked him this several times: ‘If you could see yourself now, and go back in time and talk to your younger self, would you do this again?’ Most of the time he would always say, ‘Yes, I would still,’ but lately he’s been saying, ‘No, I would not go back and do it again. I would do something else,’ ” Debbie said with a laugh.
But then came the day Joe Namath delivered the news that should have arrived many years ago.
“To finally have him knock on the door,” Debbie said, “it was very exciting.”
Sack to the Future at long last for Joe Klecko.
“I’ll probably shed a tear or two,” Debbie Klecko said. “I had given up on it.”
Justice at last for Joe and Debbie Klecko.