EAST LANSING, Mich. _ George Julius Perles, the polarizing and outspoken former Michigan State University football player, coach, athletic director and Board of Trustees member, died late Tuesday night. He was 85.
Perles died peacefully in East Lansing with his family surrounding him, according to multiple sources close to family. He announced he was battling Parkinson's disease in 2017.
Perles was born July 16, 1934, on Detroit's west side and was a football and baseball star at Detroit Western. He earned all-state football honors as a junior and senior and graduated in 1953, then briefly attended the University of Tennessee before returning to Detroit and joining the Army with a number of his friends.
He served in the Army from 1954-56 and was stationed in Hawaii, where he continued to play football. After returning from active duty, Perles joined Duffy Daugherty's football team at MSU as an offensive and defensive tackle in the fall of 1956. Perles lettered for the Spartans in 1958 before a knee injury ended his playing career.
"He's a tough kid. It was a tough neighborhood," Danny Boisture, a former Daugherty assistant coach who grew up in the same neighborhood near Vernor and Junction as Perles, told the Free Press in 1982. "He was a great football player, a typical red-blooded young kid of that day."
After getting his bachelor's degree from MSU in 1960, Perles joined Daugherty's staff as a graduate assistant. He received his master's in educational administration in 1961 and went on to coach high school football at St. Rita's in Chicago and St. Ambrose High in Grosse Pointe Park, which went 23-2 in three seasons and won the 1962 City League championship with Perles as head coach.
After a two-year stint as an assistant coach at the University of Dayton, Perles returned to MSU and Daugherty's staff, coaching the defensive line from 1967-71.
Tom Landau, one of Perles' players at St. Ambrose, told the New York Times in 1990 that Perles was a "streets of Detroit guy."
"That's where he was from and it shaped the way he acted," Landau told the Times. "He was tough, but he was very loyal. If he thought you were with him, he stuck by you. But if he thought you weren't, you were his enemy for life."
