Both father and grandfather are in the Boxing Hall of Fame.Īrt Donovan Jr. His father, Arthur Sr., was a boxing referee who officiated at 14 heavyweight title bouts, most involving Joe Louis. His grandfather, Mike Donovan, was a world middleweight champion and taught boxing to Theodore Roosevelt. was born, weighing 17 pounds, on June 5, 1924, in the Bronx. You have to respect a guy like that.”Īrthur James Donovan Jr. “I couldn’t believe he’d just waste a play like that,” Donovan wrote. Donovan spoke warmly of the time Norm Van Brocklin, a quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams and the Philadelphia Eagles, was tired of his pass rush and threw a bullet pass right into his unprotected face. He played much of his career without a face mask, prompting a writer to observe that he had had more stitches than a football. Buzz Nutter, a Colts center who played with him, said, “One man alone could not knock Artie off his feet.”ĭonovan was a Hall of Fame defensive tackle for the Baltimore Colts franchise from 1950 to 1961. Ewbank said nobody could fool Donovan twice with the same play. One opponent, Stan Jones, a Chicago Bears lineman, likened his agility to a matador’s. He was in the sixth class admitted to the Hall of Fame, vaulting over a backlog of players going back to the 1920s waiting to get in. “I don’t know, I guess so,” Donovan responded.ĭespite his modesty, his peers were quick to praise him. Letterman asked if he would recommend it. Promoting his book on “Late Night with David Letterman,” he confessed that he had not exactly read it but knew most of the stories. He barely hid his distaste for calisthenics: he said he did 13 push-ups in 13 years of training camps.ĭonovan became a darling of late-night talk shows. “I never started eating until it was light,” he said. In the book, he wrote that he was a light eater. But always self-deprecating, he volunteered in his autobiography that at another point in the game, he had ended up flat on his back.ĭonovan practically made a second career of talking, and joking, about his weight and his battles to reduce it, gamely using his nickname in the title of his autobiography, “Fatso: Football When Men Were Really Men” (1987). Donovan made a key tackle to help set up their final drive. But Donovan’s smack-down belligerence, coupled with astounding agility for a 6-foot-3, 300-pound behemoth, was at the center of the Colts’ effort. Other members of the Magnificent Seven may have been better known than Donovan: Unitas, Lenny Moore, Raymond Berry, Jim Parker, Gino Marchetti and Coach Weeb Ewbank. Suddenly, baseball was no longer America’s indisputable national sport. A national television audience of 40 million watched the game as it spilled into the night. The Colts won the game, 23-17, on a Unitas-led drive in the league’s first sudden-death overtime championship game. A 12-year National Football League veteran, he was one of the Colts’ “Magnificent Seven,” led by quarterback Johnny Unitas, who together helped make the 1958 league championship showdown against the Giants at Yankee Stadium the greatest game ever played, in the opinion of many football historians. Art donovan pro#The Baltimore Ravens, the city’s current football team, announced the death.ĭonovan was an All-Pro defensive tackle, played in five Pro Bowls and in 1968 became the first Colt and the first pure defensive lineman inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Art Donovan, a 300-pound tackle for the Baltimore Colts whose nimble brutality helped propel him to the Hall of Fame and his team to two championships in the 1950s, and whose humor-laced tales about himself and the game won him an equal helping of celebrity, died on Sunday in Baltimore.
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