Death of an Iron Man

Villanova College on Philadelphia's Main Line has only a small (10,000 seats) stadium of its own, but it takes its football in deadly earnest. This year it won five out of eight games on a rugged road schedule that included Army, Alabama, Kentucky, Houston, Boston College and Louisiana State. The player who helped Villanova snap back each Saturday was its 60-minute iron man, Co-Captain Domenic ("Nick") Liotta, a steamrolling (5 ft. 11 in., 220 Ibs.) guard from Everett, Mass.

Nick was popular and a paradox. On the surface, he was a roughhewn hellion, who prided himself in dressing sloppily, once showed up barefooted for a publicity picture. But Nick also had the squad's best scholastic record and liked to listen by the hour to classical operatic recordings. Planing to and from games, he would entertain his teammates by braying in a gravelly baritone the brokenhearted clown's famous lament from I Pagliacci.

Flying down to the Louisiana State game a fortnight ago, Nick was unaccountably silent. The Saturday before, up in Nick's home territory, Villanova had taken a 20-13 defeat from Boston College. This time, the iron man himself had not snapped back. Moody and morose, he sat staring straight ahead in the plane, deaf to all efforts to cheer him.

Only hours before the L.S.U. game, he brightened for a moment when told that Grantland Rice had picked him as a first-string offensive guard on Look's All-America team. Against L.S.U., Nick played 55 minutes, took a terrific physical beating. But he could do little to prevent the Wildcats' 45-7 rout by the Southern team that was only a six-point pre-game favorite. Going home that night in the plane, Nick could not sleep as his teammates did. Through his bruised lips, he kept muttering: "I'm no good. I'm no good."

At 6 o'clock one morning last week, Nick arose in his Villanova dormitory, got a length of telephone wire and went down into the basement. There he noosed one end of the wire around his neck, got up on an old wash basin, tied the other end of the wire around a ceiling pipe. Then he jumped. Some time between then and noon, when a team trainer found him, the wire broke under the strain. By then, it was too late for Nick Liotta.

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