2025 Chesterton Athletics Hall of Fame: Pete Ferrari, Class of 1974

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

In the early 1960s, most young boys from Chesterton who didn’t grow up dreaming about being a fireman or an astronaut pictured themselves playing for the Bears or the Bulls, the Cubs or the White Sox.
Not Pete Ferrari, a football, basketball and baseball star who will be inducted into the Chesterton Athletics Hall of Fame this weekend.
“You’re not going to believe this, but I wanted to be a dentist since I was 7 years old,” said Ferrari, a retired dentist. “My dentist was a good family friend of ours, but I was frightened to death, and I decided I’m going to be a dentist and not hurt people like he hurt me.”
The dentist of Ferrari’s youth, as with many in that era, told his young patient to raise his right hand when he felt the pain, and then pretended not to see it for a few seconds, so as not to spend hours drilling one tooth.
Painful memories have a way of lingering, as evidenced by the details Ferrari remembers from trips to the dentist’s office.
“He had this big, tall bench and he would make your next appointment there and he was always looking down and I wondered what the hell was he doing, so I walked behind his bench, and he had a big five-gallon bag of Old Gold tobacco, and he was rolling his cigarettes,” Ferrari remembered. “He was the receptionist. He was the hygienist. He was the dentist. He did everything. He was a one-man show. But I remember sitting in the reception area and he had that belt-driven drill, and I could hear it, and I thought, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to go back there.’”
He went back there every time but never went back on the promise he made to himself when he was 7, even though that meant turning down several opportunities to become a college athlete.
He recalls visiting Western Michigan, which he remembered as recruiting him for football and basketball. Same for Wabash. Manchester recruited him for basketball.
“I already knew what I wanted to do,” he said. “I knew what I wanted to accomplish.”
So that’s why he went to Indiana University in Bloomington and then to IU’s dental school in Indianapolis. By then, his organized sports career was limited to intramural basketball at IU. It was a good time to be in the stands watching the Hoosiers. In Ferrari’s sophomore season, Bob Knight’s team won the first of his three national titles with a 32-0 record. Ferrari continued to travel to games from his home several years into his dental career and was at Assembly Hall to watch the Hoosiers play against Purdue on Feb. 23, 1985, when Knight threw the chair across the floor.
In younger years, Ferrari was the one being watched. He thrilled spectators, indoors and out.
He was an All-DAC selection in football, basketball and baseball and earned honorable mention all-state honors in basketball. He was named Chesterton’s outstanding male athlete at the senior awards banquet.
“The funny thing about it is I was just an Average Joe. I just did my job. I played hard, just like the rest of us played hard,” Ferrari said. “I didn’t try to stand out by any means. I just played and we all helped each other. I had great teammates.”
He rattled off several football teammates, including but not limited to Jim Read, Jack Cutler (ex-Bears QB Jay’s father), Joe Gifford, Jim Lanier and Tim McGinty,; basketball: Mike Matanich, Schmidt, Gifford; and, and baseball: Terry Maple, Gifford, Schmidt and Lanier.
“We had a group of guys in all the sports,” Ferrari said. “We all cared about each other. There was no who’s better than you type of situation. We were all on an even platform.”
But Ferrari did at once fit in and stand out, such as on one early February night in 1974, back at a time when Chesterton typically wasn’t winning basketball games against Portage and Valparaiso in the same season but did that yer. Ferrari fouled out with two minutes remaining, but he already had sealed the win vs. Portage with 32 points on his way to 390 for his senior season. He was named team MVP.
In the fall, Ferrari was a receiver, defensive back and kickoff returner, and in the spring a base-stealing, leadoff-hitting shortstop.
His reputation is such that those who know him have no doubt that had he cut down a cherry tree he would not have lied about it. Yet, Ferrari, a 1974 Chesterton graduate, did cop to a lie he told more than 50 years ago.
Head coach Ray Banary had Ferrari returning punts, a job many believe to the most difficult job in all of sports.
“Nobody blocks on a punt return, so you get killed, so finally I went up to Banary and said, ‘Coach, I don’t mind punt returns, but I cannot judge the ball. I cannot judge punts, so I think you need to put someone else back there,’” Ferrari said. “I lied. I didn’t want to get killed anymore. Nobody blocks the opponent. You try to get a catch, and you’d get hammered.”
Kickoff returns were a different story. Ferrari handled those duties so well that he earned the team award for the most yards per return as a senior: 49.
As of Ferrari’s senior year at IU, one of his high school coaches, Banary assistant, Robert Ehrick, became his father-in-law when he married Ehrick’s daughter Linda. Pete and Linda have a son and daughter and now are grandparents living in Valparaiso.
Ehrick, an assistant principal at Chesterton then, also was his future son-in-law’s driver’s education teacher.
“At that time, they were living in Chesterton, but he was from LaPorte,” Ferrari said. “So, when we were in Driver’s Ed we would drive to LaPorte and he would pick up his fertilizer and stuff. He would get stuff for his garden on my time.”
An outdoorsman, Ferrari used to fish professionally. His sharp shooting eye extends beyond the basketball court. Through the decades, farmer friends have invited him to their farms to shoot destructive coyotes and raccoons.
When Pete and Linda had a place in Culver on Lake Maxinkuckee for seven years, not all the animals he hunted were on purpose.
“It was 61 miles each way,” he said. “Over seven years I got seven deer with my car and two with my crossbow, so I got more deer with my car than with my crossbow.”
Not even he was quick enough to get out of the way of a deer crossing the road.
Ferrari shares a lament with every other great shooter from his and earlier eras: “Oh man, if they had 3-pointers back then, imagine how many points I would have scored.”
Save the sympathy cards. Ferrari scored enough points and had a big enough impact in his fall and spring sports that he will be honored at halftime of Chesterton’s home opener in football, Friday vs. Hammond Morton, and at an induction dinner Saturday at Sand Creek Country Club.
Those interested in purchasing tickets for $40 should call the Chesterton Athletic Department at (219) 983-3730.