Bill Nunn's signature role was as Radio Raheem in Spike Lee's
Do The Right Thing. Nunn and Lee were buddies from Morehouse College in Atlanta, and he was regular in Lee's movies. In a way, the brilliance of his Raheem was a curse more than a blessing; it's a nuanced performance combining intelligence, ego, and depth along with anger, rage, and potential violence. Much of Nunn's career would see him cast in roles that reflected only the angry part of the character, almost as if producers thought he were Bill Duke, or a younger version of him.
My favourite of Nunn's parts (though I can't claim to have seen them all) came in the wonderful Fallen Angels series which aired on Showtime in the mid-90s, and intermittently at odd hours in Britain (sometimes with the silly title Perfect Crimes) after that. They were 30 minute adaptations of hard-boiled detective stories, with top-flight writers, directors, DPs, and actors. Nunn played Walter Mosley's character Fearless Jones in an episode called 'Fearless', alongside Giancarlo Espositio and the much under-valued Cynda Williams. You can watch the three of them onstage in that lovely scene from
Mo' Better Blues, Nunn on bass, Esposito on piano, giving the spotlight to Wesley Snipes and Denzel, while Cynda sings 'Harlem Blues'.
Fearless was directed by Jim McBride and adapted by Richard Wesley, who also wrote
Uptown Saturday Night, and the adaptation of
Native Son. Although there's often little difference in Mosley's various leading men, especially on film, Esposito's Paris Minton is very much an Easy, while Nunn's Fearless captures the ironic nature of his name, in an almost classic noirish pairing. Oddly, Nunn also had a part in
Always Outnumbered, a TV movie made for HBO three years later, in which Lawrence Fishburne played another Mosley hero, Socrates Fortlow, and Mosley wrote the adaptation. Interestingly, Bill Duke was in that one too.
But one thing you probably didn't know was that Bill Nunn was a ball-boy for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and he and Art Rooney, who's now the Steelers' owner, once stole Mean Joe Greene's car. The ball-boy job came about because Nunn's father, Bill Nunn, Jr., was the sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier (owned by William Nunn Sr.) which was one of America's leading black newspapers. Bill Nunn Jr knew more about black college football and its players than anyone. Dan Rooney, the son of the then-owner of the Steelers, was curious about why Nunn never came to Steelers' games, and was told it was because the team ignored players from black colleges. Rooney was intrigued, they became friends, and eventually Nunn became a full-time scout for the team. It was Bill Nunn who brought many of the stars to the Steel Curtain Steelers of the 70s, including Greene, so it wasn't surprising his son and Rooney's son would be ball boys together.
Bill Nunn Jr. died in 2014, at just about the same time as Steelers' coach Chuck Noll. I wrote a piece about the two of them for nfluk.com, but the link to the article seems to have expired. So here is that piece; it's a shame that Bill Nunn III has gone so soon after.
NOLL AND NUNN: THE HEART OF THE STEELERS (May 2014)
In a sense, Chuck Noll's death on June
13th caught us by surprise. He was 82, of course, but we
had the image of the rock-hard Noll implanted on the Pittsburgh
Steelers' sideline not so long ago. That's because Noll was succeeded
by the even more granite-jawed Bill Cowher, and Cowher by the kinder,
gentler visage of Mike Tomlin, and as far as the Steelers are
concerned, that was it. Dan Snyder goes through more coaches in a
decade than Dan Rooney has in 45 years.
But another Steeler great died just a
month before Noll. Bill Nunn Jr, their longtime scout, died May 6th,
drawing somewhat less attention. But Nunn's role in the
transformation of the Steelers from also-rans to dynasty was crucial,
and his story and Noll's, and for that matter Dan Rooney's, are
tightly entwined, and worth telling here.
I'm not sure where Noll fits in the
rankings of top coaches ever, which is just about the first thing
everyone asked when he passed away. If you are what your record says
you are, then he's certainly among the very elite, and one of the
things I'd like to point out is that his career as an assistant gives
him extra points in the scoreboard of eliteitude. Lots of people
mentioned the innovation Noll and his defensive coordinator Bud
Carson brought to the 4-3 by lining up Joe Greene at an angle off the
center's shoulder. If you never saw Greene, think of Warren Sapp in
the Tampa 2 during the seasons he was in great shape and fully
motivated. And realise that for Greene that was every season.
But what was overlooked was that when
Noll was the coordinator for Sid Gillman's San Diego Chargers in the
AFL, he began to use an offset 4-3 by lining up The Big Cat, Ernie
Ladd, directly over center. Ladd was 6-9 315 and as Patriots' center
Jon Morris once said, 'when he lined up over you he blocked out the
sun.' Those Chargers had the original 'Fearsome Foursome': Ladd, Earl
Faison (a great forgotten star), Bill Hudson and Ron Nery, but that
was overshadowed by Gillman's innovative offense. Noll was a
defensive guy but when he built the Steel Curtain Steelers, he kept
Gillman's offensive innovation in mind, and the need for a Lance
Alworth-type deep threat receiver.
Before he got to Pittsburgh, Noll went to the Colts, as
defensive coordinator for Don Shula, with whom he had played on Paul
Brown's Browns. In 1968, those Colts went 13-1, with a defense built
around MLB Mike Curtis, but they lost the Super Bowl to Joe Namath's
Jets. Patriots' owner Billy Sullivan displayed his usual talent for understanding football, and hired the Jets offensive
coordinator, Clive Rush as their head coach, leaving Noll for the
Rooneys.
When Noll arrived in 1969, Nunn was the
sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper with a
national profile, and a part-time scout for the Steelers. His father,
Bill Nunn Sr. was the paper's editor; perhaps Dan Rooney recognised
something in Nunn, something about the way they worked hard to avoid
the tinge of nepotism which always has been a part of the NFL. Bill
Nunn Jr was a fine basketball player at Westinghouse High, where is
father had been the school's first black football player. Nunn went
to West Virginia State, playing with Westinghouse's Chuck Cooper, and
with Earl Lloyd. Cooper became the first black player drafted by the
NBA, and Lloyd, by virtue of the schedule, would become the first
black to actually play in the NBA. Nunn was good enough to get an
offer from the Harlem Globetrotters, who in those days had talent
worthy of an NBA team, but he went back to Pittsburgh and became his
father's sports editor.
Every weekend in football season, Nunn
covered a different game played by black colleges, and while he did
he built a network which enabled him to in effect scout the entire
country. Thus, he began picking the Courier's black college
All-American team. There is a famous story of the Giants drafting
Roosevelt Brown simply because Wellington Mara had followed his
progress in the Courier. Nunn chose Tank Younger to his team in 1948;
Younger would star on one of the great offensive teams of all-time,
the early 50s Rams, before becoming a scout. It was Nunn who tipped
Younger to David Jones, a defensive lineman expelled from South
Carolina State for taking part in civil rights marches. Jones was
playing for Mississippi Vocational College, and running down wide
receivers thirty yards downfield. At the Rams he would be nicknamed
Deacon, and you know the rest.
Younger, who played at Grambling, had
been the first player in the NFL from an historically black college.
The AFL, desperate for talent, was quicker than the NFL to scout
those schools, with Lloyd Wells of the Chiefs prominent. One day in
1967, Dan Rooney asked a Courier reporter why Nunn never came to
Steelers games, and was told Nunn didn't like the way the Steelers
seemed to ignore black colleges. Rooney arranged a meeting and hired
Dunn to work for the team part time. When Noll arrived, the two
clicked, and Nunn left the Courier and became a full-time scout. In
their first draft together, their first pick was Joe Greene, from
North Texas State.
The Steelers had no GM, as such. Dan
Rooney ran the scouting, and Noll knew the kind of players he wanted,
focused on athleticism. Rooney, Noll, Nunn and the other scouts were
all on the same page. Nunn looked for the same thing; he often went
to campus dances on Saturday nights after games, to watch players he
scouted on the dance floor and check out how light-footed they were.
Dancing was different in those days.
Of course 1974 was the Steelers'
signature draft, and Nunn was crucial to it. He had scouted Johnny
Stallworth at Alabama A&M, but word got out. When scouts arrived
to time Stallworth, the field was wet, and his 40 time was slow. They
left; Nunn stayed and found a dry field somewhere in Huntsville. He
also dug up film for Noll to watch (this wasn't an automatic thing as
it is today). When Stallworth played at the Senior Bowl, they moved
him to cornerback, and he looked like a receiver moved to corner
(think of how Richard Sherman he might've been today). So Stallworth
was off other teams' radar, but Noll was so enamoured of what he saw
on film he wanted to take him in the first round.
Nunn persuaded Noll to wait. The
Steelers grabbed Lynn Swann, a bigger name from USC, in round one. In
round two, Nunn again talked Noll out of 'reaching' for Stallworth,
and they took Jack Lambert from Kent State instead. The Steelers
didn't have a third-round pick, and by the time the fourth round came
around, they used their earlier pick (acquired from the Cardinals) in
the round for Stallworth. Nunn breathed a huge sigh of relief. He
hadn't been quite so confident as he had let on that Stallworth would
still be there. In round five they added Mike Webster of Wisconsin:
four Hall of Famers from their first five picks (the second choice in
round four was Jimmy 'Spiderman' Allen, who played on two of the
Super Bowl teams). Nunn's influence extended even after the draft's
17 rounds; the Steelers signed Donnie Shell undrafted out of South
Carolina State.
Mel Blount (Southern), LC Greenwood
(Arkansas AM&N), Ernie Holmes (Texas Southern) and Frank Lewis
(Grambling) are some more of the key members of those Steeler teams
Nunn drew from traditionally black colleges. Another was Joe Gilliam,
the quarterback from Tennessee State, who certainly had the talent to
star in the NFL, but whose career spiralled out of control after
Terry Bradshaw took the starting job away from him.
Nunn worked for the Steelers for 46
years, like Noll staying on the team's books right til the end. You
might recognise his son, Bill Nunn III, an actor who made his name in
his fellow Morehouse College alumnus Spike Lee's early films, most
notably as Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing.
Bill Nunn Jr leaves a tremendous
legacy, one that fits into the Steelers' story perfectly. He once
explained that Dan Rooney and Chuck Noll 'ignored the dots', which
were little stickers teams put on their draft board identifying the
race of the player. It was an issue then. Men like Noll and Nunn made
that an anachronism. Dan Rooney went a step farther with the Rooney
rule. When you watch Mike Tomlin on the Steelers sideline, think of
Chuck Noll and Bill Nunn, and where the Steelers and the NFL would be
without them.
-Friday Monthly Tight End, May 2014, nfluk.com
My obituary of Henry Heimlich, inventor of the eponymous manoeuvre to deal with choking, is up at the Guardian online, you can link to it here. It is pretty much as filed; the biggest cut was some information about his wife Jane. I found it fascinating that she wrote a book called Things Your Doctor Won't Tell You, and co-authored another about Homeopathy. Given Heimlich's sometime shaky status with the medical establishment, that seemed somehow telling. I'm not sure the ubiquitous nature of her father, Arthur Murray, and his self-promoting dance empire, would be clear in Britain; I debated trying to make a connection with his son-in-law and his self-promotion, and later learned (but from only one source) that Arthur Murray Heimlich's medical school. But the connection seemed interesting, particularly in light of all the celebrity endorsements his technique received in its early days (including New York mayor Ed Koch, see photo).
