This is Stu’s Hunt Down of Steve Bono, which from now on should be remembered as the Hunt Down in which Stu became the first person under 80 and also the first person since 1932 to use the word “fussbudget.” Stu?

The Huntdown

Name: Steve Bono

Claim to Fame, Minnesota: was chosen by the Vikings in the sixth round of the 1985 NFL Draft to back up Tommy Kramer and Wade Wilson, immediately becoming the the most popular quarterback on the team. This phenomenon, known in football circles as The Best Quarterback is the One We Haven’t Seen Play Fallacy, is a long-standing Minnesota tradition, and why John David Booty will never be more popular than he is right now. Bono’s most memorable game with the Purple is one in which he replaced an ineffective Wade Wilson at Philadelphia, completed 1 of 10 passes for 5 yards and a quarterback rating of “Moses Moreno,” and was pulled in favor of Wilson with eight minutes left in the game and the Vikings trailing 23-0. Wilson would rally the Vikings to a stunning 28-23 win, and you may recall Anthony Carter dodging snowballs from the Eagles faithful and mastering karate and friendship for everyone as he scored the winning touchdown.

Claim to Fame, Everywhere Else: despite his inauspicious two years with Minnesota, would go on to a ridiculously lengthy NFL career, with stops in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Kansas City, Green Bay, St. Louis and Carolina before retiring after the 1999 season. As the Wiki mentions, he had a 76-yard rushing touchdown for the Chiefs in 1995. As anyone who’s seen the highlight can tell you, he ran those 76 yards very, very slowly.

Where He Is Now: this press release says he’s a Principal for ThinkEquity, “a research-centric institutional investment firm focused on the growth economy.” Given that the words “economy” and “growth” appear in the same sentence, you may have guessed that this was written in 2006, long before the bread riots and pestilence began.

Glorious Randomness: he’s apparently quite the fussbudget. From a 1995 Sports Illustrated profile by Michael Silver:

Steve, the NFL’s answer to Frasier’s Niles Crane, color-coordinates his closet, folds and hangs his clothes immediately after removing them and waits to do his ironing until the last possible minute before he dresses, the better to ensure there are no unsightly wrinkles in his garb. He has been known to go ballistic over a misplaced stapler, and he counts the 1985 day on which his Minnesota Viking teammates dumped out the contents of his briefcase as one of the darkest he has endured.

“During training camp his rookie year, the guys noticed that he carried this very organized briefcase everywhere he went,” Tina says. “One day they turned it over and let everything drop on the floor. He called me in a panic; you would have thought somebody had died.”

Says Steve, “It was not a good night. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Steve Bono, everyone.

[Proprietor note: Photo from the Strib vault, circa 1996, featuring Martin Harrison dragging Bono down. Harrison apparently had seven sacks that season].

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Hunt Down, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.