When I was a young boy in Virginia, I watched on television as Joe Namath (Nemeth) led the New York Jets to an improbable championship in American football's Super Bowl win over the Baltimore Colts in 1969.

The Colts were heavy favorites, but Namath was bold enough to predict that his team would win. He was right, and I can remember the score without hesitation: New York 16, Baltimore 7. I was so fascinated by Namath that later I purchased a jersey and put his name and uniform number (12) on the back when I played pickup games with school and neighborhood friends. Some of my friends even called me Joe!

Little did I know that today, more than 30 years later, I would be living in Hungary, the homeland of Namath's parents. And what a treat it was to visit the Vasváry Collection and see newspaper clippings of Namath's football career, and that of other famous American athletes who came from Hungarian background.

I have been a sportswriter/journalist for about the past 15 years in the Washington, D.C. area. I am a free-lance journalist in Hungary, and have also taken classes through the Hungarian studies department at the university.

My family moved to Szeged this fall after my wife accepted a position as a visiting professor at the university in the Institute of English and American Studies. She is teaching Renaissance literature. I was made aware of the Vasváry Collection by Csillag András, Ph.D., whom my wife and I had for a lecture this past August through the Hungarian studies program. He told me about his work on the biography of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.

Csillag also told me something that I did not know: that Namath's parents changed the spelling of their name from Nemeth when they moved to the United States, in order to preserve the Hungarian pronunciation of the word. I also remembered that in the 1980s I wrote a story on American college/university baseball player Carey Nemeth. He played at James Madison University, a school named for a rather famous American. And now I know the family name, Nemeth, is a common one in Hungary.

There are other Hungarian athletes who went to America whom I had heard of before we came to Szeged, though I was not aware of their ethnic background. Those include American football stars Larry Csonka, Lou Groza, Don Shula and the Gogolak brothers, Charlie and Peter, and all of them are included in the Vasváry Collection. It was interesting to learn that there is a street named Csonka not far from our flat in Szeged.

And then there is Al Hrabosky, a baseball star in the United States in the 1970s. His nickname was (the Mad Hungarian), but I am told he got that nickname because of the way he prepared himself (with a scowl on his face) before pitching the ball to the batter. In real life, a veteran baseball scout told me, Hrabosky is one of the nicest people you could ever meet.

So this past summer I wrote a letter to Hrabosky, who lives in St. Louis, Missouri. I told him of my background as a sportswriter and of my upcoming move to Hungary. He wrote back and mentioned that he was second-generation Hungarian. He even gave me his phone number, which is not a common practice among famous athletes. I tried to call him before we came to Hungary, but he was on the road in his new career as a baseball broadcaster.

I am looking forward to spending time at the Vasváry Collection in the coming months, and my interest goes beyond sports. I am also interested in studying Hungarians who were involved in the American Civil War, for one. Many, of course, served in the Union army.

The house I grew up in Virginia was built in 1865, after the war ended. The previous home that stood on the farm in the Shenandoah Valley was burned by Union leader Phil Sheridan and his troops on a raid of the region near the end of the war, in 1864. As the story goes in a family genealogy, Sheridan's men lit flames to the house and told the owner, Reuben Swope, that if he tried to put out the fire they would return and kill him. After Sheridan's men left, the owner did throw water on the flames in an attempt to save the structure.

But later, perhaps after he remembered the promise of Sheridan's men, he relit the fire and the house was destroyed. Swope, whose ancestors came from Bavaria in Germany in the 1700s, died in 1872. As a child, my mother and I would walk around our 90-acre farm (called a ranch by Hungarians) and try to figure out where the old house stood. We never did find the correct location. I am sure I will have better luck with trying to find what I am looking for in Szeged at the Vasváry Collection.