deacon jones

BY MICHAEL RICHMAN

FOR INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 9/19/2007

It was April 1965.

Deacon Jones, one of the most talented defensive ends in pro football, wanted to be even more menacing.

Watching a tape of a Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston heavyweight title fight, Jones saw how Ali used jabs, quick combinations and excellent footwork to defeat Liston by technical knockout in six rounds.

Jones thought that incorporating similar moves into his game would provide an edge when he squared off against offensive linemen.

Entering his fifth season, he possessed the speed and power to outmaneuver opponents, but needed another weapon to make it even harder for them to stop him.

He thus refined his use of the head slap, a move the National Football League has since outlawed.

Lining up in a sprinter's stance mostly at left end, he'd charge off the line with all his fury and use his left hand to hit an offensive lineman upside the helmet and sometimes his right hand to pop him on the other side. His goal was to daze an opponent and make him blink as he blew past him in hopes of sacking the quarterback.

"It's a softening-up process because those blows hurt," Jones told IBD. "Those guys would start closing their eyes. We played the game from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. Your knees were in play, your head was in play. My whole game was based on hitting people in the head."

As Jones turned the single and double head slap into one of the most feared moves in football, his career rose to new heights. In 1965, he went to the first of his eight Pro Bowls and earned the first of five straight consensus first-team All-NFL distinctions. A major news service tapped him as NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1967 and 1968.

Jones retired in 1974 after 14 seasons, his first 11 with the Los Angeles Rams, two with the San Diego Chargers and a last one with the Washington Redskins. A first-ballot inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1980, he was named to the NFL's 75th anniversary team and the league's team of the 1960s.

Today he runs the Deacon Jones Foundation, which tries to mold inner-city youth into contributing members of society. On the football side, he appears as an analyst on TV and radio talk shows, including Fox's "NFL This Morning."

He sure has strong credentials. It's widely believed that his career total for sacks rivals if not exceeds the greatest sack figures in NFL history, although sacks didn't become an official statistic until 1982. The NFL Network recently aired a feature that ranked him as the No. 1 pass rusher to ever play the game.

"He was fantastic coming off the ball," Bob Windsor, a San Francisco 49ers tight end from 1967 to 1971, told IBD. "He had the greatest head slap anybody could have. Our right tackle, Cas Banaszek, had ice bags on his head after every game against the Rams. His head was swollen by inches of pounding, Deacon hit him so hard."

Windsor felt the head slap while trying to block the 6-foot-5, 272-pound Jones in a 1967 exhibition game.

"He had these big eyeballs open like light bulbs," Windsor said. "He was in a sprinter's stance ready to take off. He's glaring and snorting, raring to take somebody apart. He said, 'Rookie, I'm coming to get you, buddy.'

"He hit me with his head slap about five times before I even knew it. I'm down on my back, and these big feet are clumping over my chest. I look around and see, POW! He smacked (quarterback) John Brodie as hard as you could ever smack him. John got up with blood caked all over his helmet and up his nose. On his way back, Deacon said to me, 'I'll do that the next play, too.' "

Jones, who played with a chip on his shoulder pads, intimidated many quarterbacks, whether by sacking them or delivering a hard blow after a pass was thrown. He considered QBs his "sworn enemies" and said reducing their effectiveness was like "cutting off the head of a snake."

"In every given situation, the quarterback must be hit," he said. "He must be punished in hopes that in the third or fourth quarter he's starting to throw wobbly passes that we're picking off."
A long day of shows, a memorial to Isabella Blow, and the opening tonight of "The Golden Age of Couture" at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I left the V & A, staying only for cocktails and a chat, as Prince was arriving with his couture-coordinated entourage of young women. Daphne Guinness, her black-and-white hair swept up with feathers, had invited him, and she waited with Philip Treacy by the door. It was a small, very glamorous, mostly English crowd tonight, and somehow the clothes and the attitude reflected curator Claire Wilcox's wonderful exhibition. The show deals with the links between London tailoring and Paris dressmaking in the years 1947 to 1957, and of course there is a lot of Dior and Balenciaga. You see as well how thoroughly dedicated English society was to fashion.
The cocktails were held in the main circular entrance, and I didn't seem to be able to move from my side of the room. I saw John Galliano ― last night in Paris, Bernard Arnault gave a dinner for about 200 people in the salon at Dior to celebrate the house's 60th anniversary ― and Vivienne Westwood, who had on a corseted dress, her red hair long and wild. Amanda Harlech was there in a pale green Chanel dress. I saw Stella Tennant, Jemima Khan in a Dolce dress with a metal chastity belt, and Claudia Schiffer, who was dressed in a long white gown and who sticks her hand out to meet everyone.
I talked for awhile with Stephen Jones, who later tonight will go to Giles Deacon's studio in the East End to finish work on the hats. Giles' show is tomorrow night, and it will have lots of fresh color and prints. Jones, who did the hats for Marc Jacobs's show last week, mentioned the controversy, and said few people probably knew that Jacobs dressed each model himself that night. I hadn't heard that. If you're responsible for eight collections a year, if you're always under pressure, I suppose you're going to be more sensitive to the things you absolutely can control.
Isabella Blow's memorial service was held at noon in the Guards' Chapel. There was not a place left to sit when the Regimental Band of the Irish Guards began playing Bryan Ferry's "When She Walks in the Room." Most of the women wore hats, in the fashion of Issy. Detmar Blow, her husband, spoke briefly. There were three addresses, by Anna Wintour, Suzy Menkes and Geordie Greig of The Tatler. Wintour's was fantastic ― warm, funny, full of rich detail. She read from some letters that Issy had written to a friend in England around 1990, including one in which Issy said she had "lied like the devil" on her resume to get a job as Wintour's assistant. And Wintour said she has never encountered another
Former Hawkeye track standout Charles "Deacon" Jones passed away early this morning in Hillside, Ill., Iowa officials confirmed.

He was 73.

Jones suffered numerous health problems in the last decade, undergoing several heart procedures and battling diabetes. He died one week after his 73rd birthday.

Jones was inducted in to the University of Iowa Varsity Club Hall of Fame as a member of the charter class in 1989.

He was a two-time Olympian, running the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the 1956 games in Melbourne, Australia, and the 1960 games in Rome.

Jones was a two-time NCAA champion, two-time all-American and seven-time Big Ten champion for the Hawkeyes (1954-58). He won Iowa� first and only individual cross country national title in 1955, becoming the first African-American and sophomore national cross country champion in history.

The seven-time Big Ten champion also won the national two-mile track title in 1957. During the 1957 track season, Jones was unbeaten in the college mile and two mile. He set Big Ten indoor and outdoor records in the one and two mile races, and still holds the school record in the 3,000-meter steeplechase (8:47.40).

A native of St. Paul, Minn., Jones?athletic career started at Boystown in Nebraska. Following his track career, Jones served as director of financial aid at Chicago City College for 27 years.


Jones had humble beginnings. Born David Jones in 1938 and raised in Eatonville, Fla., a rural town, he worked in the fields with his father, Ishmeal Jones, during time off from school and on weekends. They pitched watermelons and picked oranges from trees, both exhausting work. All the while, Ishmeal instilled a strong work ethic in his son, plus discipline and toughness.

A strong athlete, Jones began playing college football at 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds. He starred at defensive tackle at South Carolina State and later Mississippi Vocational College, the forerunner to Mississippi Valley State. Both schools played only other all-black colleges and didn't get much attention from pro scouts, and Jones was uncertain whether the pros would draft him.

But he often reminded himself of a quote by Abraham Lincoln when he was a young lawyer: "I will study and prepare myself, and someday my opportunity will come."

Patience paid off when the Rams drafted Jones in the 14th round in 1961. Three games into the season he started at defensive end, a position where the coaches felt his speed could be used best. He was named Rams Rookie of the Year.

Jones was a marketing maverick. In his early years in the league, defensive linemen were obscure players to the average fan. He nicknamed himself Deacon to give himself a special identity that fans and the media would remember. He also coined the term "sack" to give players credit for tackling quarterbacks behind the line of scrimmage. Doing so helped glamorize the positions of defensive end and tackle.

"When I entered the game, there was no way of identifying what the defensive linemen did, so I tried to find a term that fit what I was trying to describe," Jones said. "To me, you put all offensive linemen in a burlap bag, take a baseball bat and beat on the bag. The word sack came out of that. By putting some notoriety and flamboyancy in there . . . like a quarterback throws the football, a running back runs the football . . . it helped defensive linemen rise on the pay scale."