Life in the Passing Lane : It’s Still a Thrill for 48-Year-Old Quarterback

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Tom Nordee parked his car, grabbed his football from the trunk and walked to a field at Cerritos College. He is a quarterback, an aging one at 48, who can’t get the thrill of throwing touchdown passes out of his system.

“I go under the old adage that you don’t quit playing because you get old, you get old because you quit playing,” said Nordee, who lives in Long Beach. “I’ve just never quit.”

He was about to play a game in a four-on-four flag football league. Scanning a sheet of statistics, he found his name among the passing leaders through the first five games. “Look at this,” he said. “Thirty-six TDs and one interception. I like that. That would be averaging almost eight touchdowns a game.”

Not only does Nordee play in the Saturday league, he plays in Sunday afternoon, Tuesday night and Thursday night leagues. He has led his seven-man Yankee Doodles team to a No. 10 ranking in the top division of the American Flag Football Assn. During his lunch hour at Cypress College, where he is a counselor, he practices his passing.

But even all of this is never enough; in recent years he has gone to Europe, once taking a year’s leave from his job, to coach and play full-contact football for pro teams.

What would he do without the sport?

“I think he’d have a terrible time,” said Don (Chico) Tyrell, 55, who has been catching Nordee’s passes for many years.

Bobby Burson, a 41-year-old in a headband who was about to go out for a practice pass, agreed: “Any team can have him if they fly him in and give him a hotel room, anybody in the nation. Even the guys that glared at him and told him he was an SOB.”

Burson explained how Nordee can get on people’s nerves: “Some teams have never beaten him in 20 years, and sometimes that mutates into hard feelings. A lot of guys have picked fights with Tom just to get him out of the game. But they don’t disrespect him, by any means.”

Nordee is often perceived as arrogant, but Tyrell said, “He’s not arrogant at all. He’s a good guy and just a very good quarterback.”

As Nordee and his team, the Dandy’s, warmed up on this Saturday, the opposing players on Da Lench Mob, who were in their early 20s, looked over with expressions that said, “We’re going to kill these old guys.”

The old quarterback laughed. “Maybe I’m a step slower and maybe I’ve lost a few yards in my distance,” he said, “but I make up for that with experience. The game’s real cerebral for me, almost like chess. I can just look at a defense and analytically take it apart.”

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Nordee--6 feet 2 and 190 pounds, in sweat pants and a black jersey, with a Notre Dame cap covering his nearly bald head and with an unshaven face--stood 15 yards deep to take the snap from center.

As his three receivers ran their patterns, Nordee ran up, dodged a rusher, pump-faked a couple of times and threw a long, high pass that traveled nearly the length of the 50-yard field. The ball dropped into the hands of Tyrell in the end zone.

Relishing his role as a general, Nordee kept up a nonstop patter of encouragement and directives. Using all his receivers, he threw short passes, intermediate passes and long passes. He never came off the field, playing safety on defense, lunging to grab the flag from ball carriers and intercepting two passes.

The game was like countless other flag football games--shouts and the sound of an official’s whistle filled the air, as did the smell of damp earth. Witnesses to Nordee’s glory, though, were few--a couple of spectators at the end of the field and the substitute players along the sideline.

After Craig Munsell, the youngest member of the team at 23, and Pete Baker, 35, caught Nordee touchdown passes, the Dandy’s led 27-12. Baker caught his breath and said, “Our team’s name should be the Over the Hill Gang.”

But none of their surprised opponents would have bought that. One of them said: “They know their stuff, they’re really organized. I’d kill to be on his (Nordee’s) team.”

In all, Nordee threw five TD passes as his team won, 34-25. When the game ended, the losing players gathered around Nordee, seeking advice. “I only had one pick (interception) all season,” he told them. “You guys got three picks today, so that’s doing good.”

*

Afterward, Nordee drove toward Long Beach in the gathering dusk, and reminisced about the dawn of his quarterback career. He was a water polo player, and had never played football (he weighed 128 pounds while at Poly High) until his last semester at Long Beach City College in 1965. He made the team as a reserve but rode the bench until the season’s last game.

“There were only 12 seconds to go and we had a big lead,” Nordee recalled. “The water polo players were all up in the stands cheering, ‘We want Nordee, we want Nordee.’ The coach (Rollie Eilerts) said, ‘Yeah, Nordee, you can go in.’ ”

The ball was on East Los Angeles College’s 6-yard line. As ordered, Nordee called a running play, but it lost three yards. He called timeout and told the astonished coaches that he didn’t want to end his brief career on one play. Told to call the same run, Nordee instead faked a handoff and passed to a wide receiver for a touchdown.

“Everybody went wild,” he said.

But the offensive coordinator glared at him during the celebration and said, “You’ll never play again.”

A year later, Nordee was playing football in Vietnam, where he served as a medic. “I found football very therapeutic there,” he said. “We would get to a riverbed and set up our perimeters, and I’d get all these guys out in the river and we’d play football with a canteen. This would take their minds off their fears and they’d be much more relaxed.”

When he returned from the service, he made Long Beach State’s football team, but with two senior quarterbacks ahead of him, he never figured in the 49ers’ plans. He began his semipro career in 1969 with the Orange County Razorbacks in the California Football League. “That’s where I started to blossom,” Nordee said. “In my first game I set the league passing record for completions and yards. I think I was 18 for 34 with more than 300 yards.”

Over the years, Nordee tried out for several pro teams. The Rams signed him during a National Football League strike in 1974. “I was told I was going to start against the Cleveland Browns at the Coliseum,” he said. But Ron Jaworski returned to the team and Coach Chuck Knox started him instead. Then two other quarterbacks, John Hadl and James Harris, rejoined the team, and Nordee was cut. Too old at 29, he was told.

Former Ram star Tom Fears signed Nordee to a contract with the Los Angeles Express of the United States Football League in 1983. Fears was the team’s director of player personnel, but the coaching staff decided Nordee, at 38, was too old. So the “mad bomber,” as he was once called, returned to semipro and flag games, and appeared in a few football movies, throwing passes as an extra.

In 1988, Nordee took a leave of absence and went to Italy to coach and play American-style, 11-man tackle football. “They give you an apartment, a car and a salary of $3,000 a month.” In 1990, he played for the Amsterdam Rams. Unable to get another leave, he flew to Holland six weekends in a row, getting back to Los Angeles at 6 on Monday mornings and going straight to work with a severe case of jet lag. He said a team in Germany wants him to play next spring, but he hasn’t decided whether to go.

*

Nordee stopped at Yankee Doodle’s, the bar that sponsors his teams. The quarterback, who jogs 25 miles a week and often rides his bicycle to work, ordered water. “I run the beach a lot,” he said, “and I see some of those seniors who are in amazing shape because they’re retired and all they do is work out. That’s the kind of life.”

When Nordee retires from his job at Cypress College, no one will be surprised to see him still playing football. “As long as I’m still having fun and enjoying it, I’ll continue to play,” he said, looking over at the trophies his teams have won. “I do it out of sheer desire.”

Nordee, who is divorced, has a 20-year-old daughter, April, who has played on his flag teams. He said his passion for football contributed to the breakup of his marriage in the mid-1970s.

The NFL dream he was chasing then is still hard to let go. “If I could just do a George Plimpton thing,” he said, referring to the writer who once tried out for the Detroit Lions. “Take some of my players and play a series in an exhibition game, to show them that when you sit back in punt formation, you can riddle anybody.”

Too old, he was always told, but maybe there is still a way.

He said Fears once joked to him after he had tried out, at 41, for a pro international league that never got off the ground: “Nordee, if somehow we could get you to a plastic surgeon.”

Nordee, still basking in the glow of five TD passes, poured another glass of water and said, “If I could get some hair and get rid of the wrinkles. . . .”

He didn’t seem to be joking.