Editor’s note: We’re counting down to LSU’s Sept. 3 season opener against Florida State with a look back at the greatest Tiger players at each number from The Advocate book “LSU By The Numbers.” Saturday marks 50 days until kickoff, so we start with No. 50, All-American center George “The Terrible” Tarasovic:
50 George Tarasovic
C, 1951
All-American and All-SEC 1951
For even devout fans, George Tarasovic is probably the best LSU athlete you never heard of.
He spent only one school year in Baton Rouge, but it was a remarkable one. He played center and middle linebacker for LSU in football in 1951, earning All-American and All-SEC honors on offense as the Tigers went 7-3-1 under LSU All-American-turned-coach Gaynell Tinsley. He also lettered in basketball as a forward in the 1951-52 season and in track in 1952, throwing the shot put and discus and running the occasional relay.
And then he was gone, taken in the second round (18th overall) of the 1952 NFL Draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers, the start of a 15-year NFL career that also took him to Philadelphia and Denver before he retired.
Pretty impressive for the son of Czech and Russian immigrants who came late to football.
“Dad planned on being a blue-collar guy,” George Tarasovic Jr. said. “But his junior year in high school, someone said, ‘Why don’t you try football?’”
By his senior year, Tarasovic had more than 60 football scholarship offers and even some for basketball. He attended Boston College, starting at center as a sophomore, but the school never seemed like home for him.
During the offseason, Tarasovic returned home to visit his high school coach in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The coach had ties to LSU and, without ever setting foot on campus, Tarasovic agreed to go there after spending a year at a junior college.
George Jr. described his father as friendly and affable off the field, the kind of man who could walk into a restaurant and know the owner and the busboy by name. He and former NFL teammate Eddie Khayat, who played at Tulane, founded a charity golf tournament with other former NFL players from the Steelers, Eagles and Baltimore Colts that raised over $1 million for the Special Olympics.
But on the field he was a different person. At LSU he earned the nickname George “The Terrible.”
“I’ve read articles that talked about how violently he tackled people on the field,” George Jr. said, “throwing them around like rag dolls. He was a very aggressive, go to the whistle – and then some – kind of player.”
Tarasovic died Oct. 24, 2019, in Savannah, Georgia. As far as his son knows, Tarasovic only made it back to LSU once for an All-American reunion. One of the school’s greats, a one-year wonder.
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