THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 2, 1995 TAG: 9509010060
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 229 lines
DARRYL NIMMO WILL not be on his couch like the rest of us Sunday, when the National Football League opens its autumn pageant of flash, bombast and athletic grace.
Nimmo might love football as much as any man who ever lived. Some wisdom from his grandmother, however, has stayed with him: ``The day you start watching,'' she told him, ``is the day you'll quit playing.''
And Darryl Nimmo is not ready to quit. At 30, an age when the boys in the pros start thinking about that Bonanza Steakhouse franchise or a job up in the press box, where the only way to break a collarbone is in grabbing for a sandwich, Nimmo remains the dean of adult football in southeastern Virginia.
He is No. 89: lean, hard, fast, 6-foot-2, 210 pounds of Saturday night mayhem, a defensive end and team captain for the Hampton Roads Sharks, one of the better of some 250 minor-league football teams that scramble weekly for shards of glory, faint praise and sometimes for the pure living hell of it.
It is football at the bottom rung. Sometimes it is more madness than method, more chaos than control. But it is full-speed, full-contact tackle football played by guys who know how to play it. A few had a taste of the NFL; a few more were a half-step shy of making the pros; and most played college ball. For some of the younger guys, it is their last best shot at a scholarship or a pro gig. If only somebody sees them. If only the word gets out.
Most, though, are like Nimmo: They know football isn't going to take them any further than this, Saturday nights on hard-packed crab grass at some second-rate field in Durham, Hampton, Lynchburg or Virginia Beach. Sunday mornings of nursing their sprains, balming their bruises and mentally ticking off the weekdays until next Saturday night, when they get it up and do it again.
``What can I tell you?'' Nimmo said when asked the obvious, why he still plays. ``It's the love of the game.''
Darryl Nimmo opens up slowly to strangers. People say he's kind of quiet, unless you know him. If you call his phone recorder, you'll get the fewest words possible: ``This is Darryl. We're not here. Leave a message.'' But if you prod him a little, give him a little time to trust you, he'll start to give it back.
C'mon, Darryl. Love of the game? Lots of people love the game, but they don't beat themselves up every Saturday night over it.
``OK, OK, let me tell you the truth,'' Nimmo said, confessing over a steak at a local Bennigan's. ``I don't drink, don't smoke; I don't do drugs and I don't go out all that much. I work hard all week; I was raised with this work ethic.
``But, y'see, everybody needs a release, and this is my release. I can go out there Saturday night and go totally crazy, and there's no trouble. Everybody has a good time.
``It is my release. It relieves the pressure on you. And I look forward to it all year long.''
That reasoning has taken him through 10 seasons now, through every overhaul and reincarnation of what used to be called semi-pro football in Hampton Roads. Nimmo broke in with the Chesapeake Bay Neptunes in '85 and has been through three team takeovers.
There was a time, he said, when the whole franchise could have been had for $10,000, about the price of a decent used pickup truck.
With him through all that has been No. 90, defensive lineman Darryl Jackson, but they're the only ones who've lasted that long. In fact, just 15 of this year's Sharks were with the team last year.
``We got rid of a lot of guys, especially guys we couldn't discipline,'' Nimmo said. Dr. T.J. Morgan Jr., a Virginia Beach chiropractor who now owns the Sharks, has dreams of taking them pro, either into the Canadian Football League or arena ball, a fast-paced game played indoors on a shortened field.
``It's really beautiful now,'' Nimmo said, ``the way it's run. Instead of one man trying to do it all, we have a man for every job. And a board of directors, that helps, keeps us from making wrong decisions.''
Fans have begun to notice. A recent home game drew more than 3,000.
``Makes every bit of difference, hearing all those people cheerin' and yellin','' Nimmo said. ``Used to be we'd be lucky for 500 to show up.''
It was tough sometimes, he said. Like the year they made the league playoffs but management couldn't scrape up the money to bus them down to Florida for the game.
If this league had highlight films, Darryl Nimmo's moment on the late-sports roundup would have come about midway through the third quarter last week, when an outgunned Durham Cardinals team tried to get back into the game by taking to the air.
Bad mistake, but there wasn't much choice. The Sharks had cut Durham's running game to nothing. Jackson knocked down anyone who came up the middle. When the Durham backs ran away from Nimmo, they were running at No. 98, Rodney ``The Black Russian'' Baylor, who doesn't let much past him. The linebackers - Ramirez, Yannacone, King - are just as nasty, and the defensive backfield is anchored by No. 32, Dexter Stephenson, a hitter who played for the Miami Dolphins.
With that kind of backup, Nimmo was free to blitz. He found himself in a defensive end's dream sequence: no blocker in his path and the quarterback looking left, unaware that 210 pounds of cleated, tightly wrapped muscle was about to hit him from his right.
The quarterback was slammed to the turf, separated from the ball and, for a moment or two, from planet Earth, from reality, and from any will to get up.
Standing above him was Nimmo, his arms stretched to the Kempsville sky, toward the lights over a little-used stadium behind a school-board storage yard off Witchduck Road, 1,500 hard-core fans roaring approval, 44 other Sharks nodding and woofing at the sight: Cap'n Nimmo, No. 89, spiritual leader to a stoked-up band of football believers, had struck again.
It's Saturday night, man, and Cap'n Nimmo had found his release.
The other days of the week, Darryl Nimmo and a friend run a landscaping and lawn-care business. He cut his teeth on construction and demolition equipment, running graders and back-hoes and other heavy gear for his father and his grandfather.
``I grew up on Tonka Toys, you know, those heavy steel trucks and stuff. So all that equipment, when I got older, was just like big Tonka Toys to me.
``There were times in summer, when we'd be having two-a-day practices, and I'd drive to school in a tractor-trailer rig. I'd go to work at 5:30 or so, then leave for the morning practice, go back to work, then go back for afternoon practice.
``If you weren't playing ball,'' Nimmo said of his family's rules, ``then you had to work.''
So he played ball as much as he could: football, basketball and track at Princess Anne High School. He splintered a shin playing junior-college football, then did a brief turn at Norfolk State.
He got a tryout with the Cleveland Browns. ``I had better numbers than most of those guys,'' he said of the speed and strength statistics used to rank player prospects, ``and I know more about the game than most of them. But some coach came by, we were in a line, and he asked me where I played ball. I told him Norfolk State and he just looked at me like I was dirt, turned his back and kept walking.''
A lot of minor-league players have similar stories. High-school coaches who only promote one or two prospects, ignoring kids who might mature a year or two later. Prospects from small colleges who get overlooked in the rush for big-name players from Division I.
Sometimes that's true. Nobody wanted Johnny Unitas, who was plucked from a sandlot team and went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Colts. In baseball, Mike Piazza is leading the National League in hitting, but not a single major league team wanted him when he entered the pro draft. He got to the majors because the Dodgers' manager, Tommy Lasorda, is his godfather, and convinced the organization to give the kid a break. They drafted him dead last.
Not everybody is lucky enough to have Unitas' arm or Lasorda for a godfather, so it makes you wonder how many other all-stars the pro scouts have missed. The truth, though, is that they don't miss many. Of the 45 players on the Sharks, only two or three might have been legitimate professional prospects.
The rest, like Nimmo, have never made a dime playing football.
But they have paid a price. Nimmo said he's seen marriages break up over devotion to the game. ``We practice two, three times a week, then the game on Saturday. These guys have jobs, too, so they're gone all day, then three or four nights a week. It's a strain.''
He remembered one Saturday when a player sneaked onto the team bus for an away game on his wedding anniversary. Nimmo chuckled, shaking his head. ``Man, on the way home he was realizing he was in trouble. We were all yellin' at the driver, `Hey, man, pull over. Find someplace this guy can buy some flowers, anything.' ''
People don't realize how serious it can get. ``Guys will show up for tryouts thinkin' all they have to do is put on a helmet and they're a player. Then they take that first hit. You don't always see them leave, but next thing, you look around and they're just gone.
``The local guys, we all know them pretty well. But some of these guys will show up, they make me laugh. They'll be tellin' you they were all-state here, all-conference there. Heck, we can't check up on all that. Only way you can tell is to hit 'em once. Then we see who makes the cut.''
One who made the cut was Tim Yannacone, a New Jersey refugee linebacker from Bemidji State University, who Nimmo said moved to Virginia just to play for the Sharks. ``Yeah, Yannacone, he's something. Comes down here, no job, no home. Then he makes the team and he's like, `Hey, anybody know where I can stay?'
``But think about it. If you're a ballplayer, and its summer and you want to play football, where's a better place to be than Virginia Beach?''
Those old dreams of making the pros are pretty much a moot point for Nimmo. Much as he loves the game, it doesn't dominate him, he doesn't obsess about what might have been. He's about other things now, and they become apparent in a round-about way, as little asides slip into the conversation.
He was talking about his home gym - ``No plastic weights,'' he said, laughing - and how proud he is of all the top-grade workout gear he picked up at bankruptcy sales from those yuppie fern-gyms that keep going out of business. Nimmo is a workout fanatic. If you were to cast him in bronze, you wouldn't be too far off the shape, the color, and the texture. He's that solid.
He started talking about how the neighborhood kids come by to work out - ``Nimmo's Dungeon,'' the call it - how he coaches a little youth ball, and then the talk turned to how hard it is for some of those kids.
``Some of them, man, you just want to reach out and save them. They have it tough at home, then things go wrong at school. Sometimes the teachers get on their backs; maybe they just don't like the way a kid dresses, the way he walks.
``You had your fads, when you were their age. Had them I was in school, too, but you can't jump a kid just 'cause you don't like that he has his hat on backwards. Sometimes their parents just aren't there, or they don't care, too busy, and I wind up going down to the school to talk to the teachers for them, try to straighten things out.
``That's the thing, you see. You've got to get back to the community, to give back to the community.
``My ambition is to save one kid, to do one kid right. There's this little kid I know, he's just 5, just a beautiful kid, and I worry about him. Man, if I could, I'd adopt him. His mom, well, right now she's unstable, and his daddy's in jail.
``If you can save just one kid, just reach one - well, that would pay off more than anything else you could do in life.''
Well, that's a lot to think about, and it weighed on the conversation as Nimmo finished his dessert and the interview sort of wound down. He'd said earlier that in all his years of playing ball, it was the first time anybody had interviewed him. So he asked a little favor.
``Do something for me, will you? Whatever you do here, mention my mom's name, will you? She's my No. 1 fan.''
That seemed reasonable. Sunday, when the networks light up the pro game again, all those guys will get a chance to elbow their way into a camera shot and wave to the folks back home. With everything Darryl Nimmo has given to the game, it's only fair that he get the chance just once in his career. So here goes:
``Hey, Rachel. Hi, Mom. Darryl loves ya.'' MEMO: The Hampton Roads Sharks play their arch-rivals, the Peninsula
Poseidons, tonight at 7 p.m. at Todd Stadium, Warwick Boulevard, Newport
News. Next week they are at home against the Baltimore Big Reds, at the
Center for Effective Learning complex on Witchduck Road, Virginia Beach.
Game time is 7:30. For more info, call 463-6741. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Paul Aiken, Staff
Fellow Shark Rodney Baylor pats Darryl Nimmo on the head after Nimmo
sacked the Durham quarterback, causing a fumble that the Sharks
recovered.
Nimmo...
Nimmo...
Owner T.J. Morgan Jr. leads the Sharks, including No. 89 Nimmo, in a
post-game prayer.
Photo by PAUL AIKEN, Staff
Hampton Roads Shark Darryl Nimmo trims hedges as part of his real
job as a landscaper.
by CNB