Marchetti’s steps take him to heights he didn’t expect

It was little more than dumb luck that brought Gino Marchetti to the University of San Francisco, where the high school dropout and World War II veteran launched a career that would land him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The future All-Pro defensive end, who had quit school in the Bay Area industrial town of Antioch to join the Army, was back home playing for a semipro team.

But football, he thought, would never take him anywhere.

Marchetti, who had served as a machine gunner in the Battle of the Bulge, expected to follow in the footsteps of the other boys he’d grown up with in Antioch: marry, raise kids and work at the local paper mill for 30 years.

“That’s basically what everybody did back then,” he says.

Then fate stepped in.

Marchetti, spotting an unfamiliar car parked in front of his mother’s house, wandered over to see who had come to visit and found two coaches waiting on the porch. They’d come to Antioch, he says, to persuade his brother, Angelo, and another local boy to play football at Modesto Junior College.

“They never said one word to me,” Marchetti, 81, says from his home in West Chester, Pa., where he lives with his second wife, Joan, and within easy driving distance of what he calls a “his and hers” family of seven children and more than 20 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “But as they were walking out the door later, one of them looked at me and said, ‘You look like you’re big enough to play. Why don’t you tag along?’ And I tagged along, and it went on from there.

“If I hadn’t seen that car, I never would have left there.”

And the 6-foot-4, 225-pound Marchetti never would have been named the greatest defensive end in the NFL’s first 50 years, as he was in 1969, nor made a fortune in fast food, as he did from a chain of hamburger joints bearing his name.

At Modesto, Marchetti caught the eye of a USF recruiter, Brad Lynn, who later tracked him down working as a bartender at his brother Lino’s tavern. “I can distinctly remember, I was smoking a cigarette,” Marchetti says of their first meeting. “Soon as he said who he was, I put it out.”

Wearing a motorcycle jacket with 17 zippers -- “The more zippers you had, the cooler you were,” he says -- Marchetti later gunned his Harley into San Francisco to meet with coach Joe Kuharich. Though Kuharich later asked Lynn, “Where’d you find that dumb hillbilly?” Marchetti made a more favorable impression on the field.

In 1951, Marchetti’s senior season and the last in which the tiny school would field a major-college football program, USF finished 9-0. It was a talent-laden team: nine Dons would go on to play in the NFL, five would make the Pro Bowl and three -- Marchetti, Ollie Matson and Bob St. Clair -- would be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Their publicist, Pete Rozelle, would later lead the transformation of the NFL into a sporting colossus, serving 29 years as commissioner.

Kuharich’s team, however, would be celebrated as much for its integrity as its football exploits. When it was intimated to the Dons that a bid to a bowl game in the South could be theirs if they would agree to leave their two African American players behind, they declined to play without Matson and Burl Toler, who later would be tabbed by Rozelle to be the NFL’s first black official.

“I know a lady wrote a book about it, and she brings it up as a noble thing,” Marchetti says of author Kristine Setting Clark, whose compilation of stories, “Undefeated, Untied, and Uninvited,” was published in 2002. “But we never thought that way. It was just something that was right to do. They were a part of us.”

Marchetti, the 14th pick in the 1952 draft, played 14 seasons in the NFL, won championships with Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts in 1958 and ’59 and was voted into the Pro Bowl 11 times.

Equally successful in business, the “dumb hillbilly” co-owned Gino’s, a chain of burger restaurants patterned after an even more successful chain.

“Being from the West Coast,” Marchetti says, “I was familiar with McDonald’s and there was no such thing in Baltimore. So we opened up a place that we called Gino’s, and it was identical to McDonald’s. By the time we sold, we had about 300.”

Marchetti, whose holdings also included Rustler’s Steakhouse and Colonel Sanders restaurants, cashed out in the early 1980s, shortly after suffering a heart attack that he blamed on overindulgence.

“When I retired from football,” he says, “it felt so good to eat and drink. There were a few years where I was living on a fast track and I got up to about 325 pounds.” Referring to his heart attack, he says, “That’s when I had the warning.”

Marchetti weighs about 250 now, he says, and has spent much of his retirement fishing for marlin or, in recent years, doting on grandkids.

“Now that I’ve got a lot of time to think,” he says, “I realize how lucky I’ve been. Today, everybody has goals. You know, ‘My goal is to do this, my goal is to do that.’ I never had a goal in my life. I just put one foot in front of the other, and I was lucky enough to make the right decisions.”

jerome.crowe@latimes.com