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EDEN — Terry Widel thought his younger brother was pulling his leg.

“Guess who I’m sitting beside?” Ken Widel said into his cell phone, shouting over the noise of a University of Pittsburgh basketball game.

“Dick Groat,” he told Terry, who lives in Eden.

Terry, who is 61 and a retired McMichael High School football coach, laughed, convinced it was a prank.

The entire family knew that Groat, No. 24, a shortstop and a star of the Pittsburgh Pirates in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, was Terry’s childhood idol. And if his brother really wanted to taunt him, throwing out that name was the way to do it.

But Ken, who is a huge fan of Pitt basketball, indeed was sitting in the stands with Groat, who, at 79, is a color commentator for the men’s basketball team.

That phone call eventually led to an invitation. A chapter of the university’s Panther Club would be hosting a benefit golf tournament in May at Champion Lakes Golf Course, a course Groat owns in Ligonier, Pa.

Terry was invited. It was a chance to spend time with his brother, who was in charge of the tournament, and play some golf. But the real enticement was seeing his idol, Dick Groat, in person — for the second time in his life.

To know the full story, you have to go back 50 years.

When you grew up near Pittsburgh in the shadow of the steel mills that belched smoke up and down the Monongahela River, there was only one baseball team — the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“I guess if you grew up in Eden, you just picked a team a team to root for,” Terry says.

“In Pittsburgh, you loved every sports team in Pittsburgh.” But he loved more than the teams; he loved to play the sports, as well.

Terry started playing Little League ball at age 5. You were supposed to be 6, but his father stretched the truth so that his son, who was already in love with anything involving a ball, could join the action.

At age 7, his grandfather took him to Forbes Field for his first Pirates game — a doubleheader against the Chicago Cubs.

At the time, Terry played shortstop, so it was no surprise when he became enamored with Dick Groat, the shortstop who paired with second baseman Bill Mazeroski to make the Pirates’ midfield legendary.

Like Terry, Groat was from the Rust Belt. He emerged from high school as a two-sport athlete, excelling in baseball and basketball, and he made a name for himself at Duke University where he was twice All-American in both sports.

He signed with the Pirates in 1952.

After seeing Groat on the field, Terry wanted No. 24 on his uniform. He spent his pennies on bubble gum baseball cards, hoping to score one of Groat’s. And any time “knothole” bleacher seats were offered at church or Little League, Terry snapped them up, taking the 10-minute streetcar ride from his home to Forbes Field to watch the game.

And then the pinnacle came in 1960.

That’s the year the Pirates, in a come-from-behind season, won the World Series, beating the New York Yankees in the ninth inning of the seventh game with a crowd-rousing homer hit by Mazeroski. That year, the National League named Groat its Most Valuable Player.

And in nearby Dravosburg, Pa., it was the year that Groat agreed to be the speaker at the father-son banquet at a small United Methodist church that just so happened to be where Terry was a member.

It was just after the series win, when Terry’s father came in from the steel mill one afternoon and told his son about the banquet.

“I went bonkers,” says Terry.

It was a spit-and-polish, suit-and-tie night, even if you were only 11. Terry’s dad brought along the Polaroid, in hopes that he could snap a photo.

And sure enough, at the end of the evening, Terry stood by Groat and smiled as his dad took the shot and waited for the photo to roll out the side of the camera.

“I was in awe,” Terry recalls. “Dick Groat actually had his arm on my shoulder.”

He took the photo to school and showed it around.

In May, that photo made the rounds again. Terry was sitting at the bar at Champion Lakes with Groat, and it was the baseball icon showing off the picture this time.

The black-and-white snapshot was a little frayed on the edge, a little faded by time, and a little worn from making the rounds in dugouts and on playgrounds before being pasted into the Widel family photo album.

But it was clearly a star-struck 11-year-old and a handsome young athlete in the midst of a career that put him in the record books.

There in the bar, Terry slung his arm over Groat’s shoulder and they both smiled as a camera flashed. This time it was Ken Widel who took the photo. Terry is still smiling.

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-1781 Ext. 116 or myla.barnhardt@news-record.com