HE’S FAT AND SASSY . . . AND WEIGHS 340 : The Way He Tells It, Ex-Colt Art Donovan Enjoys More Fame Now Than Ever Before

Art Donovan’s retirement from football, to hear him tell it, had been almost entirely organized around the availability of kosher salami and Schlitz beer.

But a wave of nostalgia, sudden interest in a time when men were really men and apparently really fat as well, has swept him from his den and washed him onto the shores of celebrity.

You can see him from time to time on “Late Night With David Letterman,” even though he had never heard of the TV host when he was first invited.

You can read him in his book, “Fatso, Football When Men Were Really Men,” even though he hasn’t read it himself “Aw, I know all the stories any way,” he says.

He appears in commercials, speaks in a raspy Bronx way at banquets everywhere, does other talk shows. It seems he has done everything but host “Friday Night Videos.”

This is strange turf for a defensive tackle from the Baltimore Colt teams of the 1950s. He was a good tackle, even a great tackle. He was selected to the Hall of Fame just six years after he retired.

But his closest brush with show business had been an exhibition game in Louisville in which the Colts followed a circus act. Donovan remembers that the defensive linemen were throwing fistfuls of the elephant, well, stuff, into the offensive linemen’s faces. But that’s another story.

In other words, Donovan, 63, likewise has no clue as to his new fame. He weighs 340 pounds, has a “severe crew cut” and strikes the same thoughtful pose in Letterman’s TV interviews that Larry (Bud) Melman used to. His Bronx buffoonery--his eyes get big when he speaks--is extravagant.

“Whatever it is, it’s unbelievable,” he is saying of his attraction. “These days I’ve got to hide.”

Donovan, as you might expect of a defensive lineman, prefers the simple life. Up to the point of this phone interview, he had been washing pots and pans in the kitchen of the Baltimore country club he owns and operates with his wife. He had been looking forward to some kosher salami, a six-pack of Schlitz and Monday Night Football when fame gave yet another tug.

“Unbelievable,” he says.

Yet not entirely. Donovan, by way of an NFL film about the golden age of pro football, has been discovered as a relic from a colorful age. Not just a relic, but a regular oral historian. He tells it like it was, and it was very different and sometimes even funny.

“Last Tuesday I’m at a banquet,” he is saying, as deliverymen come and go in his kitchen, “and Ed and Steve Sabol are showing a 15-minute film of players from years back. Joe Theismann is sitting next to me and he says, ‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing.’ It was pretty scary, I’ve got to admit.”

Pro football had yet to become the science it now presents itself as. In Donovan’s first training camp, there was not one meeting, to study film, to do anything. “Football was quite simple in those days,” he explains. “A hell of a lot of hatchetmen running around doing bodily harm.”

There is apparently a nostalgia for this, and Donovan, cheerful lug, has proven an obliging source for the ancient material. And why not? Does it cut into his intake of kosher salami and Schlitz beer? It does not.

“The stories I could tell you,” he is saying. “Aw, the book guy couldn’t use ‘em, you probably can’t. I don’t think he used them.”

The stories he can tell are pretty good. And each one, whether he realizes it or not, illustrates a game unencumbered by big money or big problems, a game of equal parts violence and innocence.

Back in the ‘50s, football was not yet the integral part of culture it purports to be today. It wasn’t a studio event, sanitized by domed stadiums and life-preserving rules.

There weren’t enough officials to even calculate the mayhem. Probably the men weren’t any more manly then, but given the penny-ante stakes they were playing for--Donovan made $4,500 his first season--they could afford to be a lot more colorful. Donovan is popular now because he can recall that brief time in the game’s history when it was still a game.

“Bobby Layne, he was with the Steelers then and he was back to pass and we just smothered him,” Donovan recalls. “He says to us in the pileup, ‘Hey, I’m having a party tonight. Bring about eight guys.’ Let me tell you, he did have a party.”

Donovan doubts that similar invitations are being issued these days, as linemen meekly collect their quarterbacks “in the grasp.”

Oh, the stories.

“Those were tough guys. I don’t know if they were any tougher but I remember looking across the sideline and seeing Layne actually kicking his offensive linemen. Once I tackled him and smelled his breath and said, ‘Geez, Bobby, you must have been on quite a bender last night.’ He said, ‘Aw, I had a few at halftime.’ ”

It was a time, evidently, when men were dipsomaniacs. Many of the early NFL activities sprang from the availability of strong drink. It may be viewed as the equivalent of cocaine abuse today, but that could be harsh. It was a more innocent time and Donovan’s colleagues, with the exception of Layne, were ultimately saved from all calamity but Donovan’s anecdotage.

Probably Don Shula doesn’t like to see this get around but, as a defensive back for the old Colts, he had an altogether different image than the one he projects as the coach of the Miami Dolphins today. Donovan, in his book, remembers that Shula stole a cab. And would have gotten away with it except for the delay caused by teammate Carl Taseff who, in the confusion, was trying to pay Shula the fare.

Some of these men, the way Donovan relates it, were pathologically violent. A man named Bill Pellington, a “250-pound killing machine,” would lapse into sick grins after he turned some poor back into a pile of gore.

Yet, the worst trouble these guys could get into seemed to be a team fight at 25,000 feet. According to Donovan, the offense and defense were going at each other, biting and gouging, and the plane was pitching back and forth and the captain was on the horn telling them he’d have them all brought up on air piracy. “One of the best fights we had,” Donovan relates.

Donovan, son of a famous referee, was in precious few of them himself. Occasionally he drop-kicked somebody--because a man has to do what a man’s gotta do--but at 300 pounds he couldn’t catch too many victims. He has about 10 stories of him chasing some reckless offender. They always get away.

Once he was part of a car pool and it was his turn to pick up the kids, one of them Johnny Unitas’, for school. The Unitas boy waited until Donovan got out of the car and fired snowballs at him. Donovan couldn’t catch him either, but the boy’s mother still barked at Donovan for the pursuit.

He enjoyed some collisions in his 12 seasons, first with the hopeless Colts and later with the championship Colts. Mostly they were with quarterbacks, a feisty bunch compared to today’s. They seemed to enjoy the contact as much as the linemen.

“Norm Van Brocklin was a tough guy,” Donovan remembers.

Tough enough to call Donovan’s number once. Tired of Donovan’s pass rush, Van Brocklin had his lineman swing open the gate to allow him through. Van Brocklin coolly fired a bullet right into Donovan’s face.

“I couldn’t believe he’d just waste a play like that,” he says in the book. “I guess he was mad. You have to respect a guy like that.”

Another guy like that was Y.A. Tittle, though no favorite of Donovan’s. When both were members of the 1950 Colts, Tittle invited him and a bunch of guys to his house for a chicken dinner. He told them to bring the chicken over to his house and his wife would cook it. So Donovan’s respect for him is grudging, but respect nonetheless.

“He took his lumps. When he was with the 49ers, we piled on him and his calf came up to his knee. I felt a little bad about that and even visited him in the hospital.

“But then a couple of weeks later we’re beating them in the fourth quarter and here comes Tittle. He’s going to be the hero. Well, that did it. We started yelling at him, we’re screaming, we’re going to kill him. He kind of stopped and went back off the field.”

Everybody took lumps. It was the shared experience of pain that bonded teammates and enemies. A player jumped up and down on Donovan’s leg until it broke--yes, it is an odd game--but he accepted it with equanimity. Even when, two weeks later, they taped the leg and put him back into the game. Donovan explained he would probably be slower than even he had been but the coach said, “Well, fall to the ground and slow some folks down.”

That’s football, or was. It has probably become too important a game to tolerate the characters who once played it. But in Donovan’s day, when it was almost like barnstorming, character triumphed over ability.

For Donovan, it provided a lucky life. Off-season work with a distillery, ownership of two liquor stores and his country club have made him wealthy. “To think that I showed up with $45 in my pocket,” he sighs. “And now if I’m not worth a couple of million . . . “

A couple million!

“I guess. Of course, I could care less.”

Donovan still has work to do. The club is thriving and demanding, and he has memories of a time that will not come again. So he is wealthy any way you look at it, enriched by a time when men were really, well, boys.