Bob Cosgrove
American rugby player

Bob Cosgrove (June 2, 1915 – October 13, 1981) was an offensive lineman in the Ontario Rugby Football Union.
A graduate of the University of Montana Cosgrove began his football career in the WIFU with the Calgary Bronks. He turned professional in the east with Toronto Argonauts in 1941, but moved to the ORFU the next season with the Toronto Balmy Beach Beachers where he was an all-star.
Perhaps his best season was 1943 with the wartime Toronto RCAF Hurricanes, when he was again an all-star and winner of the Imperial Oil Trophy as the ORFU most valuable player.
Cosgrove later played for several Toronto teams: the Beachers, the Toronto Indians, the Beachers again when they merged with the Indians, and finally another year with the Argos (he played 13 regular season and 2 playoff games with the Boatmen in his two years).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bob Cosgrove” is american rugby player. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cosgrove, American and rugby, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4932142. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1981, 1941 and 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bob Cosgrove” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.