Olympian shares one regret

His family had just moved to Lawrence from New York City in 1944 when Bill Nieder went to work as a caddy at Lawrence Country Club, lugging a bag on each shoulder. It wasn’t until Tuesday night, as guest of former Kansas University football coach Don Fambrough, that Nieder set foot in the club’s dining room.

So compelling was Nieder in telling stories about what he has been up to between the time he first set foot on the golf course and in the dining room, that Fambrough, the city’s most revered yarn-spinner, sat back and listened.

So what has Nieder, in town visiting relatives, been up to for the last 66 of his 76 years?

Well, he was the first football All-American from a Lawrence high school, as a teenager wrecked his father’s car three times, including once when it stalled on a trolley track in Kansas City, so badly wrecked his knee in his one and only varsity football game at KU that he nearly had to have his right leg amputated after gangrene set in, set two world records in the shot put, won a silver medal in the 1956 Olympic Games and a gold in Rome in the 1960 Olympics, sold the Dallas Cowboys their first artificial-surface football field, sold the red track used in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, had five operations on his right knee, four on his right hip, three on his left knee, a shoulder replacement and two back surgeries, listened to crooner Dean Martin tell a hilarious, unprintable joke over breakfast, befriended one president of the United States, Richard Nixon, and watched the Olympics seated with another president, Bill Clinton.

Guys like Nieder don’t watch life roll past, they live it, breathe it, drink it. Regrets. Just one, really. The aborted football career.

“Nothing made me prouder than putting that Kansas jersey on for the first time,” Nieder said.

Fambrough, his freshman football coach at KU, said he never saw a better football player and added that J.V. Sykes and the rest of his assistants felt the same about the center/middle linebacker.

“He was 6-3, weighed about 225, could run like a deer and would knock you on your (seat),” Fambrough said.

Sometimes in the chow hall. Nieder told of how he and a teammate were playing tug-of-war with a milk pitcher when things escalated.

“We got into it, and they had all these pictures of All-American football players on the wall, and we knocked half of them off the wall,” Nieder remembered.

Nieder said the world records were nice, the gold medal nicer, but a full football career at Kansas and in the NFL would have been nicer. He ruined his knee when a TCU player clipped him in front of the KU bench. Dean Nesmith, the legendary trainer, nursed him back.

Remembered Nieder: “Deaner said, ‘You’re a football player now, get off the ground.’ Then he looked down and said, ‘Oh (expletive), you’re leg’s pointing in the wrong direction.'”

After a long, painful night in the hospital, Nieder looked at his foot the next day, and it was blackened by gangrene. When amputation was mentioned, he called his father and told him to come guard his leg and not let anybody cut it off. It never came to that. All that was cut off was a most promising football career.