Don’t call me a football fan.  A better description would be football historian.  The old stories about Paul Brown, Art Donovan and Don Hutson are what I really enjoy.  It’s character development.  Everything else about football is just a chess game.  So it was with some surprise the other day I found myself struggling with the name “Buzz” Nutter.

Madison Monroe “Buzz” Nutter died a few days ago.  He was approaching what would be 80 years old.  The obituary mentioned Nutter had played on two championship teams with the old Baltimore Colts.  Those ’58 and ’59 clubs are among the ten best teams likely ever assembled.  Nutter was a center, a position which doesn’t get much mention in the broadcast booth.  It’s the position played at Michigan by a young Gerald Ford.  It was a position I nearly played while in high school.  A coach told me when I snapped the ball it was probably the best technique he’d ever witnessed.  Then I was moved to right guard because the quarterbacks complained I snapped the ball so hard it made their hands hurt.  Quarterback is called the glamour position.  Their hands hurt.

“Buzz” Nutter almost didn’t play professional football.  A West Virginia native who graduated from Virginia Tech and drafted by the Washington Redskins, he was cut by the team in 1953.  He went home and took a job in a coal mine.  A college degree was a rare thing in the early 50s.  You would think Nutter would’ve been hired on in the local insurance office or trained in local bank management.  Instead he picked up a shovel and went into the mine.

This is what “Buzz” Nutter’s people did.  Yet he had a few wrinkles ahead.  The Washington Redskins of that era were the laughing stocks of football.  Edward Bennett Williams may have been a titan on the social circuit but his franchise was poorly operated.  Meanwhile Baltimore sort of had a franchise.  It came out of the defunct All-America League with San Francisco and Cleveland but bounced between Miami, Dallas and Baltimore.  Management was willing to take chances on players others discarded.  The Colts picked up Nutter.  Later “Fuzzy” Thurston joined the team and before being traded to Green Bay helped anchor the line along with Nutter.  And the Colts took a chance on a castoff quarterback, one whom would never complain about sore hands, John Unitas. 

Unitas and Alan Ameche were the heroes of the ’58 title game, some still call it football’s greatest moment, but Art Donovan insists “Buzz” Nutter did the heavy lifting.  Unitas rallied the Colts through the passing game.  Donovan says game film shows Nutter made his initial pass blocks and then raced downfield clearing paths for receivers. 

When Ameche crossed the goal line in overtime he spiked the ball.  Nutter wrestled it away from fans and carried it to the locker room. 

Nutter’s obituary was published with a photograph.  The retired ballplayer was astride a forklift.  After football he owned a beer distributorship.  Considering the gallons of cold beer his old teammates guzzled it isn’t a shocker.  Today’s recently retired professional athletes invest in these businesses and hire managers.  Old timers often got into the beer business, think Roger Maris, and they worked alongside everyone else.  It’s that picture of Nutter that says so much about the man.  No glamour at his position.  A coal miner.  A forklift operator. 

He’s smiling in the photograph.  A man happy to be on the team.

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