FINALLY FITTING IN : Buffalo’s Diminutive Quarterback Flutie Settling in as One of League’s Best

What Doug Flutie is doing is so pure and so sweet we had almost forgotten it was possible. He’s having fun, and we’re laughing with him. Here’s a guy who left stardom in Canada for risk in Buffalo. He took a paycut from $1 million to $250,000. Now 36 years old, he made the move to help his autistic son, Dougie. He also did it to prove to himself, if no one else, that he could play anywhere.

What a story. Left for football dead by NFL geniuses in 1989, Flutie is now America’s sweetheart. Still not Robo-QB, still a little guy in a Tall & Big Man’s game, he plays with an intuition in motion that can’t be taught, can’t be measured and will thrill you bone-deep, as against the Dolphins on a November day when . . .

He’s running right, looking for you if you can catch the ball. Don’t worry about how he’s going to get it to you.

He’ll find a way, maybe throw it behind his back between a tall guy’s legs and off somebody’s hat.

He’ll say it’s luck. “I’m the kind of guy,” he says, “who’ll hook a 7-iron from 150 yards, it hits a tree and bounces out onto the green.”

So you better get open because something lucky is about to happen. Andre Reed, the veteran Bills star, is so far left that he practically loses sight of the little scrambling man.

Reed’s open, but then so’s half the city of Buffalo, because who’s defending anyone over there?

No way Doug Flutie can get Andre Reed the ball. No way “he could be running that hard to the right” (Reed said later) “and put the necessary strength on the pass to the left.”

But here comes the ball, crossing the field, over the tall people all breathing heavily, tuckered out from chasing the little person, all wondering where’s he throwing that thing?

Into Andre Reed’s hands. At the 1-yard line. To set up the Bills’ first touchdown in a Buffalo 30, Miami 24 game after which Genius Coach Jimmy Johnson says of Doug Flutie, “He’s a talented quarterback. We knew that going in. You know he’s a major factor.”

Wait, wait. If we knew that, Mr. GCJJ, why did Doug Flutie spend the 1990s wandering the tundra of British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario?

NFL geniuses cover their behinds by persuading us it’s the player’s fault. Everyone’s so big, is what they said of Flutie, a quarterback can’t survive at 5-foot-9 and 175 pounds.

So we’ve learned a happy thing.

Sometimes it really is the size of the fight in the dog.

Doug Flutie has been to Winnipeg, where moose have the right of way. He has suited up under a bare light bulb in Hamilton. He has worked for free in Toronto when the front office couldn’t put two nickels together.

In a country where sports fame falls mostly on men who skate backward and part the hair of toothless goons with their crooked sticks, the little man became a football star.

OK, winning the Heisman Trophy out of Boston College in 1984 didn’t make him NFL-tall. The Bears fired him, the Patriots fired him. Everybody wanted skyscrapers named Scott Mitchell, Heath Shuler, Gus Frerotte and Kerry Collins.

OK, being a Canadian star meant nothing. Forget the 41,355 yards and 270 touchdowns in eight seasons. Forget the six MVP awards, the three league championships.

Forget that Warren Moon and Joe Theismann came down from Canada.

OK, Flutie is still the quarterback who fell off a charm bracelet.

So he took Buffalo’s $250,000 insult. (Meanwhile, reneging on a promise he’d be No. 1, the Bills later hired a tall guy who’d started one NFL game and promised him 100 times Flutie’s money: $25 million.)

If Flutie couldn’t be tall, he’d stand tall. He’d say he wasn’t out to prove anything, that he’d been happy in Canada where the football is more entertaining. Coming back to the NFL was “just gravy, just icing on the cake.”

He’d be a quarterback who makes his team good. His kind do it with self-confidence so profound it’s as natural as the color of their eyes. They move teammates to the rapture heard from Bills offensive lineman Joe Panos.

“There is a certain aura about him,” Panos says of Flutie. They met only this summer. Flutie became the starter only when the $25 million Robo-QB got hurt. Suddenly, the Bills were good. “We’re just hanging on for the ride.”

Backup quarterback Glenn Foley of the Jets, who stopped Flutie’s run of success today, calls Flutie “a true winner, an unbelievable athlete.”

Former Bills defensive coach Chuck Dickerson says, “He’s everything that’s right about America. He’s the underdog, he’s underpaid, he works hard and he’s just been waiting for his opportunity.”

So the happy folks around Buffalo have embraced the little guy.

They’ve bought 125,000 boxes of Flutie Flakes, the cereal Doug created to raise money for The Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism. Severely pigskin-obsessed fans dress as cereal boxes.

One judge of talent knew it all along. “He proves when he walks on the field he is a football player. They can say whatever they want. He’s played just as well all along at his size as other, bigger players.”

Thus spoke Doug Flutie’s mom, Joan. She coached three teams when she and Richard gave their four kids a Florida childhood of fun and games. And now there’s a flagpole out front of their house in Melbourne, Fla. On the pole is a Bills’ jersey. It’s Doug’s.