Associated Press Former Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, shown in this March,1993 file photo in Washington, died Monday in Denver. White served on the court for 31 years before retiring in 1993. In the court's history, only eight men served longer. His seat was filled by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He was 84.

WASHINGTON - Retired Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, a football hero whose reputation for clear-headed legal thinking and a hardheaded personality was honed through three decades on the nation's highest court, died yesterday. He was 84.

White served on the court for 31 years before retiring in 1993. In the court's history, only eight men served longer. His seat was filled by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

With White's death, there are no living former Supreme Court justices. He had been ill much of the last two years and looked frail during his rare appearances at the Supreme Court. White had kept a court office since his retirement but closed it last year and moved back to his native Colorado, a signal to many that his health was perilous.

White died yesterday morning in Denver, of complications from pneumonia, a statement from the Supreme Court said.

Appointed by President Kennedy in 1962, White soon became a dissenter from many of the court's liberal rulings of the 1960s.

Later in his tenure, he was a consistent, if independent, member of the court's increasingly conservative majority. A hard-liner on law-and-order issues, White often spoke for the court in decisions increasing police authority.

He dissented from the court's landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide, and thereafter steadfastly voted in favor of allowing states to regulate, or even outlaw, abortion.

White's record on other divisive social issues was mixed.

He voted to give federal courts broad power to order racial desegregation of the nation's public schools, and often sided with the court's liberal wing in civil-rights disputes. But he later opposed broad use of "affirmative action" to remedy past discrimination in employment.

White's votes in free-speech and free-press cases were mixed, but generally, he opposed expansive freedom-of-expression rights. He favored greater governmental accommodation of religion - in ways more liberal justices considered violations of the constitutionally required separation of church and state.

His opinion writing reflected his essential character: precise, methodical and impatient to finish the job.

On the bench, the gravelly voiced White was a tough interrogator of the lawyers who appeared before the court. His questions were brief and direct, and he had zero tolerance for the ill-prepared or longwinded.

In making Byron Raymond White his first Supreme Court pick, Kennedy said White had "excelled in everything he had attempted."

White's academic record, professional career and the sports pages backed up that assertion.

The valedictorian of his high school and University of Colorado class, White went on to study at Oxford and become a high-honors graduate of the Yale University Law School.

But to a generation of American sports fans he was better known as "Whizzer" White, the football player who won All-America honors and National Football League stardom. He later came to hate the nickname.

White was 44, the same age as Kennedy, when he joined the court. The two had met in 1939 in England, where White studied as a Rhodes scholar and Kennedy's father was U.S. ambassador.

The two men's paths again crossed during World War II when White, a naval intelligence officer, wrote the official report of the sinking of Kennedy's PT-109.