One afternoon roughly a decade ago, when the death toll wasalready too high, Andy Nelson stood there in his barbeque restaurant on YorkRoad and looked at a photograph displayed on a wall of his old Baltimore Coltsfootball team.
He pointed at one old teammate, and then another. Gone, gone. Gently, wistfully, he beganreciting a roll call of the deceased.
“Shinnick,” he said, touching the old linebacker’s face.“Gone. Jim Parker, Big Daddy. There’s the Horse. And Pellington and ShermanPlunkett. And Unitas. Half the ballclub, gone now.”
“You look at this a lot?” I asked.
“I keep looking,” said Nelson, who played defensive back onthose championship teams of six decades ago, “’cause they keep disappearing.”
And now we add the great defensive end Ordell Braase to thelist of the disappeared. Braase died this week, at 87, after a long twilightstruggle with Alzheimer’s.
He played a dozen years with the Colts. He played on adefensive line alongside Artie Donovan and Gino Marchetti and Big Daddy Lipscomb,and later he played alongside Fred Miller and Bubba Smith and Billy Ray Smith.He played on championship teams, and he played on near-misses. He made the ProBowl a couple of years. He wasn’t quite a Hall of Famer, but year after year hewas a vital part of a marvelous defensive unit.
And that’s only a piece of his legacy. He was part of Baltimore’spro football generation that transcended the playing field. When his playingdays were done, you’d hear him on the radio every week, on a riotous show calledBraase, Donovan, Davis and Fans.
Never mind self-important insider talk about football x’sand o’s. This was about a community coming together, in which football was onlyan excuse to gather and share some laughs. The show was forever on the verge ofhysteria, with Donovan telling one outrageous story after another, and TomDavis and all listeners bursting with laughter, and Braase happily adding tothe delight.
And where did they do the show? At Braase’s restaurant out on York Road, Ordell Braase’s Flaming Pit. He had the place for a long time. And he wasn’t alone.
We couldn’t get enough of the Colts in those days, and so along York Road alone you had Braase’s place, and Andy Nelson’s Barbecue, and John Unitas and his Golden Arm Restaurant, and Bill Pellington had his Iron Horse. There were Gino’s and Ameche’s burger joints all over town, and over on Gwynn Oak Avenue there was Lenny Moore’s club.
They were part of the community. They weren’t just sports gypsies, wandering in for a few years and then disappearing. Then, when the Colts were stolen away to Indianapolis, Braase was among the old Colts who helped rally the city, and pressure the National Football League, to get a new team here.
He was part of a different era in professional sports, when the athletes were still working-class types not so far removed from the fans who adored them.
Braase’s death is a reminder of that era. If you find yourself out York Road, drop in to Andy Nelson’s Barbecue. Check out that old photo on the wall, the one with the disappearing championship Colts. It’ll give you chills.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Also see: Ordell Braase, Former Baltimore Colt, Dies At 87
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