Courtesy the Houston Chronicle

(January 21, 2011) JIm Nantz began the week in New England with the Jets-Patriots game and moved to Houston, where he and his family Wednesday announced the creation of the Nantz National Alzheimer’s Center at Methodist Hospital. He flew Thursday to New York, and he ends the week in Pittsburgh, where he and Phil Simms on Sunday will call the AFC title game between the Jets and Steelers for CBS.

The most significant football image that is always on his mind, however, has nothing to do with Rex Ryan, Ben Roethlisberger or Mark Sanchez.

Nantz recalls his late father, Jim Nantz Jr., talking about his days playing football during the leather-helmet era at Guilford College in North Carolina. The elder Nantz attempted to block a punt during one game when the kicker’s foot caught him in the side of his head, bursting an eardrum and leaving him with, as his son recalled, "a headache that wouldn’t go away."

Jim Nantz Jr. eventually developed Alzheimer’s disease in the mid-1990s and died in 2008. The Nantz National Alzheimer’s Center, established in his name, is tasked with finding a cure for the disease and providing care for Alzheimer’s patients and their families.

Of his father’s college football injury, Nantz said, "You can’t tell me that wasn’t related to my father’s developing Alzheimer’s."

And, thus, the new program at Methodist will work hand-in-hand with the hospital’s concussion center, created in partnership with the Texans, to explore potential links between head trauma and Alzheimer’s in the same fashion that Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy last year developed research suggesting a link between head trauma and a disease that mimics the symptoms of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

"This is not for me a one-week commitment or a hit and run thing. This is a lifetime commitment of my personal resources and time and energy," Nantz said. "This is something I am committed to working on for the rest of my life."

Accordingly, he has had more than a passing interest during recent weeks in NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s campaign to crack down on blows to the head.

"I love what the commissioner has done," Nantz said. "The only thing that troubles me now is the kickback he got from the players. The players whose lives he is trying to save are the people who are resisting the most."

Referring to the Chronicle’s recent series about the health struggles of Bum Phillips’s circa 1978-80 Oilers teams, he said, "I wish I could take our Oilers heroes of 30 years ago and walk them into a locker room and say ‘I remember these guys when they looked like you. And you want to complain about the commissioner levying fines for these hits? Give me all the bravado you want. I’m trying to help you here, pal.’ "

Nantz is likely to mention the Alzheimer’s center during Sunday’s broadcast, and the center will be a beneficiary of the annual NCAA gala that will accompany the Final Four’s arrival in Houston. The center’s Web site is www.nantzfriends.org.

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