(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series on former Olean Times Herald sports intern Tyler Dunne who, after stints with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Buffalo News, covering the Packers and Bills, respectively, and Bleacher Report writing NFL stories, now has his own web presence called Go Long. His first book “The Blood and Guts: How Tight Ends Save Football” debuted yesterday.)

During my football career, from high school through one year of college, until I became the team’s play-by-play man, I was a guard-linebacker.

But, secretly, I longed to play another position. To me, tight end seemed perfect. I loved the blocking part and the idea of catching the occasional pass seemed to make for the perfect contribution.

It never happened for me.

But Tyler Dunne, the Ellicottville Central alum and former Times Herald intern who has become one of the country’s leading pro football writers, has verified my contention.

Now with a web presence called “Go Long,” yesterday he debuted his first book “The Blood and Guts: How Tight Ends Save Football.”

In it, he profiles 15 tight ends who have impacted the National Football League: Mike Ditka, John Mackey, Jackie Smith, Ozzie Newsome, Kellen Winslow, Shannon Sharpe, Ben Coates, Mark Bruener, Tony Gonzalez, Jeremy Shockey, Greg Olsen, Dallas Clark, Jimmy Graham, Rob Gronkowski and George Kittle.

So how did he settle on this subject for an NFL book?

“I WAS talking to an agent about ideas and he brought it up,” Dunne recalled. “At first I was thinking, ‘OK, I guess I can see it, they’re fun, a lot of different personalities, you’ve got to block, you’ve got to catch the ball and do a little bit of everything.’ But the more I thought about it and researched some of these guys, the more it hit me like, ‘Sign me up … it’s the sport of football distilled into one position.’

“All of these guys (in the book) overcame something crazy in their lives to make them uniquely qualified to be an NFL tight end. Plus, the position has changed year-to-year, decade-to-decade unlike any other. I’m sure the tight end is preserving everything we love about football. I’m sort of like an old soul. Even though it’s more violent than ever, it’s that violence that keeps us coming back for more and what we love about it. It’s the position that highlights it, preserves it and makes it different from any other sport.”

WHY DID he choose the players that he did?

“Some of them are obvious, the best-of-the-best tight ends, Ditka, Gronk, Kittle, Shannon Sharpe, Tony Gonzalez … I felt we had to profile those guys,” Dunne said. “I talked to almost all 15. There were a few I wasn’t able to get but sometimes that makes for a really good chapter. Shannon Sharpe and Kellen Winslow I wasn’t able to lock down so I talked to Dan Fouts (Chargers QB) and Terrell Davis (Broncos running back) who were around those tight ends day in and day out.

“Then, too, I wondered, ‘Who are those tight ends that are saving football?’ A lot of it was subjective, me looking at it … ‘Yeah, Ben Coates, ‘90s, a tight end just blasting through DBs downfield. There’s nostalgia there, but he absolutely doesn’t seem to get his just due in terms of his historical significance.”

He added, “Dallas Clark was a little surprised that I reached out, he was like ‘I’m honored you want to even throw me in here.’ But when you hear the Xs and Os of it all, what he did in the Colts offense with Peyton Manning and how they kind of revolutionized offensive football, the role of the tight end evolved through him.

“But his personal story is the position in a nutshell where his mother died in his arms, he didn’t know where his life was going to go, let alone football. He walked on at Iowa, his appendix burst. He suffered all these injuries, he’s buried on the depth chart and (coach) Kirk Ferentz says, ‘All right, you’re a tight end.’”

Dunne continued, “George Kittle, more than anybody, is preserving the sport that we all love at the tight end position because he does it all. He’ll knock you out (blocking), then make a play downfield. There’s a lot of similarities between him and Mike Ditka.”

BUT HE LEARNED an early lesson on the “get er done” attitude for sports books.

“I started it in September of 2021 and the manuscript was due the first week in April,” Dunne recalled. “Those deadlines can creep up on you fast. I tried to approach it like I do the job in general … treating each tight end and each chapter as its own long-form feature. Some were even longer than the long ones, like Shockey came in at 11,000 words and Gonzalez was around there.

“I think what people will enjoy about the book is that you can jump around to different chapters, like if you want to read about Gronk first, you can go there and then you can go back to Winslow. But I also didn’t want it to be a collection of random stories, they’re absolutely intertwined. There are so many players and coaches where their lives intersected in so many different ways and their stories are so similar … Jackie Smith, Jimmy Graham, Dallas Clark, the things they went through. I went back to the chapters and tweaked and retweaked and tried to make this whole book connect as one.”

The Blood And Guts is available at Amazon, and while Dunne won’t be doing any formal signings, it’s now merely a new format.

“It’s a virtual book tour where I’ve set up more radio and podcast (interviews) than I’ve ever done in my life and hopefully we’ll have some excerpts in a few publications,” he said.

“It was a stressful and chaotic process at times with everything happening at once,” Dunne concluded, pointing out he intends to write more books. “But at the end of the day it was so satisfying and so rewarding and, more than anything, just so fun.”

(TOMORROW: Tyler Dunne’s web enterprise, Go Long)

(Chuck Pollock, an Olean Times Herald senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)