Hampton University Athletics

Tom Casey was a three-sport star student-athlete at Hampton Institute from 1942-48, with a stint in the military in between. The trio of sports he competed in was football, basketball and track and field.

With football as his prime sport, among the honors Casey earned included selection as an All-American two times as well as being tabbed the recipient of the Townsend Trophy, symbolic of being the team’s most valuable player, in both 1947 and 1948. As a college athlete, he earned 12 varsity letters and reaped All-CIAA honors while maintaining an A average in the classroom.

Following graduation from HI with high honors in 1948, Casey played professional football with the New York Yankees of the All-American Football League (a predecessor to the American Football League) in 1948 and then with the Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger Cats and Winnipeg Blue Bombers. He was inducted into the CFL Hall of Fame.
 

What helps to make Casey’s stardom in professional quite remarkable is that his accolades were achieved during an era in which the racial color line was well defined. Moreover, while he starred in professional football, he was also matriculating through medical school at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. After finishing medical school and then retiring from football, Casey studied further in England pursuant to his specialty in neurology, taught at the undergraduate level at the Case-Western School of Medicine and then began a long career with the General Electric Corporation. He was a physician with GE and later became the corporation’s medical director and corporate vice-president. He worked at GE from 1976 until his retirement.

Born in 1924 in Wellsville, Ohio and reared in both Wall and Freedom, Pennsylvania, Casey and his wife Mary adopted three children, Geri, Marty and Tommy. He died in 2002.