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WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? BJORN NITTMO? Kicker Bjorn Nittmo chased his NFL dream for more than a decade, including a stop in training camp with the Buffalo Bills. He became a recurring character on 'Late Night with David Letterman.' A head injury left Nittmo so shattered that he walked out on his wife and four children. Years later, he continues to drop in, unannounced and unkempt, before taking off again. His estranged family wants him to get help before it's too late. By Tim Graham / News Sports Reporter Illustration by Daniel Zakroczemski / Buffalo News Published Sept. 1, 2016 Bjorn Nittmo is somewhere out there, presumably in the Arizona mountains, maybe installing home-satellite systems but almost certainly running from himself. Eleven years ago he stopped coming home to his wife and four children. The youngest was 6 months old. He had lost part of his memory and still complains about the constant howling in his head from a concussive whomp. He has filed for bankruptcy and faced at least six civil judgments or liens. At some point he began using a different name. There might be a sinister reason to take on an alias, or perhaps he simply grew tired of people asking if he was that Bjorn Nittmo. Yes, he’s the same guy David Letterman introduced in 1989 as “the only Bjorn Nittmo in the New Jersey phonebook.” In actuality he’s the only Bjorn Nittmo in the world, though he is more peculiar than even that. Nittmo was the left-footed, southern-drawled, Swedish placekicker the media treated like a geegaw from a Cracker Barrel store. He was a New York Giants rookie when he became a recurring character on NBC’s groundbreaking “Late Night with David Letterman.” Letterman was smitten with saying Bjorn Nittmo (extra emphasis on the “Nitt!”), invited him onto the show as a guest and then invited him back again. Letterman, tickled later to hear a man was pretending to be Nittmo at Manhattan bars to get free drinks and score with ladies, made “Who do you think you are? Bjorn Nittmo?” a “Late Night” catchphrase. Nittmo was a New York celebrity. His NFL dreams were coming true. An innocent, immigrant’s charm made him easy to root for. “It was exciting,” his then-wife, Mary Lois Nittmo, said. “You thought, ‘Here we are. We’re going to have it all.’ “And we didn’t.” Bjorn Nittmo’s brightest memories are accompanied by a dull VHS flicker and a low- def warble. Seated next to Letterman or kicking footballs into the studio audience at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, there’s so much life in Nittmo’s twinkly blue eyes, his curly, dirty-blond mullet and his gee-whiz smile. Nittmo played six games for the Giants in 1989 and never kicked in a real NFL game again. The Buffalo Bills signed him to test Scott Norwood’s psyche the summer after Wide Right. Nittmo chased the NFL for a dozen years, a vagabond from the World League of American Football to the Canadian Football League to the Arena Football League, including a season for the Buffalo Destroyers. Had there been another American pro football league, Nittmo would have sought employment there. He kicked for the Miami Sharks of the fictional Associated Football Franchises of America in the 1999 Oliver Stone film “Any Given Sunday.” Nittmo’s NFL tryouts were countless. He came cruelly close to being the Kansas City Chiefs’ kicker in 1996. He was overthrowing Tampa Bay Buccaneers incumbent Michael Husted in 1997, but a concussion erased enough of Nittmo’s brain that he insisted he had one child, although at the time he had two. A month later, Nittmo still couldn’t retrieve weeks of his summer. He grew increasingly unstable. Now he’s a phantom, a vapor. He disappears for months, sometimes years until he returns unannounced, shabbier and more withered than the previous visit. His stops are fleeting. He arrives suddenly and vanishes in a poof, another fever-dream figment. His loved ones fear it’s too late to pull him out of his abyss, that any day they’ll answer a phone call informing them he was found dead along the roadside. July 26 was his 50th birthday. Daughters Katarina, 22, Madeleine, 20, with Mary Lois Nittmo, 47, and siblings, Annika, 15, and Karsten, 11. At left is one of Katarina's horses, "Mama." (David Leeson/Special to The News) Nittmo’s children refuse to call him Dad. To them, he’s just Bjorn, and the last time they saw him – in late April, the first time in seven months – he appeared homeless. His beard was scraggly and overgrown. His clothes were baggy, his Arizona Cardinals ballcap ratty. “It was very disturbing the way he looked,” Mary Lois said at the sturdy, pine dining room table in her Winnsboro, Texas, home about 100 miles east of Dallas. “He said he hadn’t showered in a couple days. He’s lost a lot of weight. “I think we all realized where this is headed.” Bjorn showed up from two states away to slip a Mother’s Day card under the windshield wiper of Mary Lois’ blue Honda minivan. They have been divorced nearly 11 years, yet he continues to deliver cards for their anniversary, her birthday, Valentine’s Day. But to suggest Bjorn Nittmo operates like clockwork would be folly. He didn’t realize Mother’s Day was over a week away. Alerted by a coworker a disheveled man was lurking around her car in the Winnsboro Elementary parking lot, Mary Lois went outside and convinced Bjorn to come home and see the kids. The weary Nittmo family endured another emotionally charged, awkward meeting. They begged him to get help for the umpteenth time. Then he evaporated again, presumably back to the Arizona mountains, but not without mentioning he might drift up to the Northwest for work. Maybe he’ll actually wander there. Maybe he dropped that tidbit to inhibit his family from tracking him so he can hide out until the next time. Bjorn Nittmo did not respond to messages – left on his known, working mobile phone – for this story about a football player and his family muddling through the damage wrought by his dogged pursuit of a dream. Sometimes you get only one shot to make your mark. Sometimes only one shot can take it all away. “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? BJORN NITTMO?” For nearly 19 years, Mary Lois Nittmo had not seen the play she believes disintegrated her husband and eventually repelled him from his four young children, off into the Coconino Mountains of northern Arizona. The preseason exhibition between the Buccaneers and Atlanta Falcons on Aug. 9, 1997, wasn’t televised in the part of Florida where the Nittmos lived. Mary Lois stayed home with their two girls and wasn’t aware Bjorn’s opening kickoff had gone awry until the Buccaneers called after the game. Nittmo had two previously diagnosed concussions Mary Lois knows of. Both happened while kicking for the Montreal Machine in the World League. To be informed of a third head injury was disconcerting, sure, but long-term effects from multiple concussions weren’t considered perilous two decades ago as they are today. Then Bjorn got on the phone. He asked Mary Lois about 3-year-old Katarina, but had zero recollection of Madeleine, six days shy of her first birthday. “There are parts of our lives,” Mary Lois said, “he still doesn’t remember.” Husted’s recollections of witnessing Nittmo get hurt were crystalline. The fear of losing his spot to Nittmo jolted his senses. Husted was entering his fifth season in Tampa Bay but wobbled the previous season, missing seven of 19 field-goal attempts from Week Six to Week 14. Nittmo was signed to challenge Husted and got off to a better start in training camp. The opening kickoff was moments away when Tampa Bay special teams coordinator Joe Marciano instructed Husted to stand down; Nittmo was getting the first shot. “So I think, ‘Uh oh,’ “ Husted said. “They were giving him a chance to take the job.” Bjorn Nittmo, with daughter Madeleine, taken shortly before he suffered a concussion in 1997. In May, finally, Mary Lois saw what happened next. The Buffalo News obtained a copy of the Buccaneers’ game telecast. At the same pine table the Nittmos staged their latest intervention three weeks earlier, she leaned hesitantly toward a computer monitor. Madeleine sat nearby for support. There was Nittmo in a white uniform, his left arm raised to signal the opening kickoff. He looked to his left to make sure the coverage unit was ready on that side. He turned to make sure they were ready on his right. He had a goatee. He anxiously chewed gum. Mary Lois gasped at the sight of him. Nittmo took two steps, a little timing skip and two more steps. He swung his left foot, clubbing the ball end over end down the Georgia Dome field. Falcons rookie Byron Hanspard snagged Nittmo’s kick a yard deep in the end zone and glided up the left hash marks. Hanspard hit a seam and didn’t break stride as he closed on Nittmo, the final defender, at the Falcons’ 36-yard line. Mary Lois was transfixed but began to tremble. She sniffed back tears. Nittmo tried to wrap Hanspard around the waist, but the reigning Doak Walker Award winner (college football’s best running back) was too fast and too strong. Nittmo’s left arm slowed him enough to prevent the touchdown, but Hanspard’s force helicoptered Nittmo to the turf.

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