Jim Nance: 'A Transformative Figure'

Jim Nance was a powerful man.

"He hit me so hard," Houston Oilers linebacker Ronnie Caveness once said of the Boston Patriots' 6-foot-2, 235-pound fullback, "my whole family felt it."

Perhaps that strength was God's way of girding him for a short life that would be marked by nearly as many lows as highs.

Nance, who died at 49 in 1992, nine years after a stroke partially paralyzed him and a year after an auto accident killed one of his two daughters, will be recalled often next month when the 2011 NCAA Wrestling Championships return to his home state.

The fifth of 10 children of an Indiana, Pa., gardener, he was one of wrestling-rich Pennsylvania's best-ever heavyweights.

"A transformative figure," said wrestling historian Jay Hammond. "Before him, heavyweights were big and slow, without much technique. Nance was very quick, very talented."

So talented that he won a pair of Pennsylvania high school titles after state officials created an "unlimited" weight classification to accommodate his burgeoning size and abilities.

"Everyone knew he couldn't hold 185 [then the top limit], and it would have been a shame to deny him," said Tom Elling, a Pennsylvania wrestling authority.

At Syracuse University in 1963, Nance became the NCAA's first black heavyweight champ. A year later, he was upset early in those championships on a referee's decision and inexplicably refused to enter the consolation bracket.

"He was so upset," said Elling, "that he left the tournament and hitchhiked back to Syracuse."

In addition to the defeat, Hammond said, what upset Nance were things he'd heard yelled at him from the crowd. "He could have kept competing," Hammond said. "But he wouldn't do it. He should have won three straight championships."

Wrestling is still not widely popular among African Americans. But at the Wells Fargo Center next month, perhaps as many as 10 percent of NCAA wrestlers will be black. When Nance took up the sport at the urging of an Indiana High School coach, he was an anomaly.

As late as the 1950s, blacks were prohibited from competing against whites in many states, even in Northern wrestling hotbed Iowa, where it was believed they perspired too much.

When Nance's name first surfaced nationally, in a 1962 Sports Illustrated item, that issue's cover pictured a row of Confederate-flag-waving Mississippi cheerleaders. (Four years later, as an American Football League star, Nance would be on the magazine's cover, the first Patriot to earn that distinction.)

Not until 1955 would a black wrestler, Reading's Bruce Gilmore, win a Pennsylvania high school title. In 1957, Iowa's Simon Roberts, who at the previous year's championships had been denied service at an Oklahoma restaurant, became the first black NCAA champ.

Nance, by all accounts, was as fearsome on the mat as on the gridiron.

When the fullback was posthumously inducted into the Patriots' Hall of Fame two years ago, Pats coach Bill Belichik said that, as a Naval Academy student, he'd seen the Syracuse wrestler.

"He looked like a fullback in his wrestling outfit," said Belichik. "He had incredible quickness and balance and power for a big man. You saw that on the field, as well."

Nance was luckier than most collegiate wrestlers. While there was no next step for those athletes, he had been a two-time all-American fullback at Syracuse. Coach Ben Schwartzwalder, himself a onetime West Virginia grappler, liked to recruit heavyweight wrestlers. Nance, in fact, succeeded Art Baker, another black Pennsylvanian who had been a heavyweight wrestling champ at an Erie high school.

In 1965, the Patriots, outbidding the NFL's Chicago Bears, signed Nance. He set an AFL rushing record in 1966 with 1,458 yards and was named the league's MVP. A year later, he led the league again, with 1,216 yards.

Wrestling, he said, proved a football asset.

"It's good for my balance," Nance said in 1966. "It's good for the small cuts. . . . The wrestling feeling has carried over. Those guys in the secondary are smaller than I am. They'll come in looking to tackle me head on, but after I've tagged them a couple of times they start closing their eyes or ducking their heads. Pretty soon they're swearing when they get up."

Disillusioned by a lack of carries, Nance was traded to the Eagles in 1972, but because of injuries he never played here.

In 1983, at the age of 40, he suffered a crippling stroke at his home in Quincy, Mass., a day later a massive heart attack. He regained some movement in his left hand and leg, but on June 16, 1992, Nance died at home.

"Jim Nance," Gerry Leeman, the late Lehigh coach, once said, "was the best wrestler I ever saw at heavyweight."