I was born a bit of a cynic. Even as a child it seems as if I thought it unhealthy to be too enamored of any sports team or individual athlete.

But I made some exceptions. Particularly when it came to football.

Brad Van Pelt was one of those guys. And now he’s dead at age 57.

I’m not sure what recommended Brad Van Pelt to me. His name, perhaps. More likely, it was because he was Michigan State’s best player in the early 1970s, when the Big Ten got a lot of exposure on ABC’s college football game of the week, and I probably saw him play a half-dozen times.

Van Pelt wore No. 10, and almost by himself he made me a Michigan State football fan. At least for a time.

There was a period there, I now recall, when I decided that the free safety — the last defender in any given play — held the most romantic position on the field. The Last Man. The guy who could run down someone about to score, or plug what otherwise might be a touchdown-springing hole.

For a long time — well, actually, perhaps even now — I thought the most “glorious” play in football was a defender not giving up on a play and saving a touchdown with a long sprint and a shoestring tackle. There was something about the anticipation of the play, and not giving up on it, that appealed to me.  I decided I would rather be that Last Man than the running back or receiver or even the quarterback.

I recall also being impressed by another college free safety of approximately the same era, a guy named Tommy* Casanova who played for LSU, and almost by himself made the Tigers nationa-championship material. And, meantime (or a bit earlier), I was a fan of NFL safeties Eddie Meador (of the Rams) and Larry Wilson (of the St. Louis Cardinals).

And this is how odd the vagaries of memory are, but I can remember that Van Pelt wore No. 10 (as he would during his NFL career) and Casanova wore No. 37. Or I’m almost certain he did. And, actually, Eddie Meador wore 21 and Larry Wilson wore 8.

Each player made outsized impacts on their team. Which I suppose was more possible for safeties back then, when scores were lower and games were played more conservatively. Especially for Van Pelt in the Big Ten, dominated back then by arch-conservatives Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler.

I saw Van Pelt play more often than Casanova, of course, because Southeastern Conference games (LSU is in the SEC) were rarely televised in Southern California in the early 1970s.

I can remember being disappointed the Rams didn’t take him, in the 1973 NFL draft, going with Ron Jaworski, instead … but being pleased that they did draft Van Pelt’s Michigan State teammate, Bill Simpson, a year or so later. Fondness by association, that is.

Van Pelt, as the story I linked to (above) notes, was shifted to linebacker in the NFL — he almost certainly was considered a “tweener”, too slow for safety, too small for linebacker — and spent most of his career with the New York Giants during their nadir, in the 1970s. So there was a certain strangeness to his career pattern; he seemed better known for his three seasons as a Spartan than his 14 seasons in the NFL.

What puzzles me is … that the story has him playing two seasons with the Raiders, 1984-1985, apparently. And by then, the Raiders were in Los Angeles. Why do I have no recollection of seeing him play in person? Was he hurt a lot? Did I just not see many Raiders games at the time, leaving them to my paper’s writers?

I’m sorry I have no recollection of his Los Angeles days.

Anyway. Yeah. Brad Van Pelt. I admired him from half a continent away because he seemed so smart and so talented and so efficient — and not some obvious star that just anyone could pick out and declare his favorite player.

Dead at 57. Too young. But, then, NFL guys tend not to last particularly long. The life is just too hard on their bodies.

I was a fan. For sure.

(*Tommy Casanova corrects previous error, as noted in comments below.)