Vince Promuto, a Pro Bowl offensive guard for Washington’s football team in the 1960s, who attended law school during his playing years and later had a successful career in business, died June 1 at his home in Pompano Beach, Fla. He was 82.
Mr. Promuto was a rare standout player on a mediocre team that had only one winning season during his 11 years in Washington. He is a member of the team’s Ring of Honor and has been named one of the top 70 players in franchise history.
He joined the team, then called the Redskins, in 1960, won a starting job during his first scrimmage with the team and went on to be a mainstay on the offensive line for a decade, appearing in 130 games throughout his NFL career. He played in the 1963 and 1964 Pro Bowl games.
Mr. Promuto excelled as a pass blocker on teams that included quarterbacks Norm Snead and later Sonny Jurgensen, often battling much larger defensive linemen.
“I wasn’t particularly big,” Mr. Promuto told The Washington Post in 1971. “I never weighed over 245 pounds in shape and I went against big men who were 6-5 or over and weighed 270 pounds and over. I had to be quicker than they were to compensate for their size and I had to hit them low.”
The only time Mr. Promuto played on a winning team with the Redskins came in 1969, Vince Lombardi’s only season in Washington before he died of cancer a year later. Mr. Promuto, who was a team captain that year, could do such an uncanny impression of Lombardi, a fellow New Yorker, that even the coach had to laugh.
“What Lombardi did was make you forget the limitations you put on yourself,” Mr. Promuto told the Washington Times in 2000. “When you were exhausted at the end of a game, he taught you how to rise above that exhaustion so it didn’t diminish your play. And if you made a mistake, you learned how to come back on the next play and do it right. That was a great thing to learn for being successful after football.”
Mr. Promuto was a popular player who, during his playing days, lived in Potomac, Md., where he kept horses and 80 pet pigeons. After injuries limited him to three games in 1970, he retired.
Vincent Louis Promuto was born June 8, 1938, in the Bronx. His father had a trash-hauling business.
In his youth, Mr. Promuto was part of a Bronx street gang, he told The Post in 1967. Often in trouble at school, he was assigned to do maintenance at the baseball field one day when an errant javelin from track practice landed nearby.
He grabbed the javelin and threw it back — farther than it had been thrown in the first place. He then joined the track team and, during his junior and senior years, the football team. He received 36 scholarship offers and chose the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
“Of the 70 guys in the gang, only one other graduated from high school and I was the only one to go to college,” Mr. Promuto told The Post. “It’s funny how you could be easily led into thinking that belonging to the gang was living.”
At Holy Cross, he set a collegiate record by recovering eight fumbles in one game. After graduating in 1960, he was drafted by the Redskins.
While playing in Washington, Mr. Promuto was encouraged by team president Edward Bennett Williams to attend law school. He received a law degree from American University in 1967. He clerked for a federal judge and became the first director of public affairs for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
During what he called an internal power struggle, Mr. Promuto was fired in 1976 for filing false expense reports and misusing government telephones for personal business. He then sued the DEA, saying, “If that was the reason they wanted to fire me, they could fire all of Washington for that reason.”
In 1977, the U.S. Civil Service Commission ordered that Mr. Promuto be reinstated with back pay and that all charges against him be stricken from his record. His dismissal was ruled “excessive … arbitrary and unreasonable.”
“I made up my mind that I wanted to clear myself,” he said at the time, “and that after I cleared myself I would resign. That’s what I’m doing now.”
Mr. Promuto later helped manage several family-run sanitation companies in New York and was credited with instituting environmentally friendly practices. The businesses were sold in the 1990s.
Since 1992, Mr. Promuto lived primarily in South Florida. He became a licensed sea captain and often traveled throughout the Caribbean with his wife on their yacht.
Survivors include his wife of 60 years, the former Alexis Youmans; three children, Karen Brady, Vaux Finnimore and Louis Promuto; a brother; a sister; and two grandsons.
At a dinner in January 1968, Mr. Promuto was honored as the team’s outstanding player of the previous season by its alumni association. He said the hardest job for an offensive lineman was to protect a scrambling quarterback because “you don’t know where to block.” He said that was not a problem with Jurgensen, a dropback passer who stayed in the pocket created by the offensive line.
“You know he’s going to be to your left, seven yards back,” Mr. Promuto said. “If Sonny gets cute, I can always threaten him with what linemen call a ‘lookout block.’ A lineman blocks and then yells, ‘Look out!’ ”
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