Art Demmas' legacy went well beyond the football field

Art Demmas ruled the arenas where giants fought and played.

As an NFL umpire, he was as passionate about his role as the competitors he surveyed during each play. Together, they were turf-bound in concrete bowls of compressed humanity, where hair-trigger passions threatened to erupt at the slightest bad bounce of the oblong ball.

Demmas and his fellow officials could somehow command the chaos with a whistle, a little yellow patch of fabric, and the right to look a player in the eye and say, “No.” Few accrued as much respect as Demmas, who mentored eight rookie referees during his 29-year career, including Ed “Which Way to the Beach” Hochuli.

Officials don’t often become famous for the right reasons, but Demmas’ excellent reputation was a testament to how good he was at his job. John Madden, who coached many years with Demmas on the field, later sang his praises from the television booth.

“I always thought Art Demmas was one of the best umpires in the National Football League,” Madden crowed on the air, using the “telestrator” to map Demmas’ tenuous dance behind the defensive line.

Of course, we relished the photos of Demmas, in full cry, diverting post-whistle collisions of 300-pound behemoths who were derailed by sweat and anger.

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While professional sports is good at building monoliths, it’s the media’s job to give dimension, but even that can seem pale and flat away from the lights.

I had the fortune to meet Art Demmas’ daughter Suzanne, become his son-in-law and learn over the 22 years that I knew him that his greatest legacy was off the field.

Yes, football influenced his public persona, but his unflagging character, sense of respect and fairness, and commitment to family is what informed everything he did in life. The NFL did not make Art Demmas great. He made the NFL better.

He showed that you could be a man’s man and a gentleman’s gentleman with quiet confidence. He replaced swagger with warmth, concern and love.

Demmas was a man who could bear the full impact of a helmet to his chest, suffer a cracked sternum and finish the game, but would cringe during a family photograph if someone stood too close to the edge of a step. His 10-year-old grandson and namesake christened him our family’s  “MVP of Worry.”

This was the beautiful dichotomy that we all loved. Impartial to a fault when it came to The Game, his devotion to friendship was unwavering. The man who stood with celebrities of every stripe, worked four Super Bowls and appeared on television before millions upon millions of people, loved nothing more than being surrounded by family within the confines of home.

And while Demmas was a bona fide hero of Vanderbilt, he took no umbrage when both his daughters enrolled at the University of Tennessee. He was more proud that he had raised two strong, independent women than harboring some blind devotion to an alma mater.

Of all the stories people have told me, though, and they are legion, my favorite remains about a skinny cub reporter trying to do her job when not many women ventured into the realm of sports. Cindy Smith endured more than her fair share of harassment and marginalization, but one day she found herself speaking to Demmas.

“He was courteous, kind and respectful,” said Smith, who one day would be a senior editor at The Tennessean. She told me that she knew right away that this was a man raising daughters .

Yes, the Super Bowl rings shine and clatter in ostentatious glory. However, what comforts us are memories of family nights by the fire, roundtable discussions after dinner and the way he was truly more interested in other people’s stories than his own.

He often told us whenever we were about to part, “You’ll never know much I love you,” right up until the moment his season passed.

Yes, Art, we know.

Reach Jim Myers at 615-259-8367 on Instagram@culinarityand on Twitter@ReadJimMyers.