Former Secretary Takes Up Writing

He put the “d” in football. What? You say there is no “d” in football? There was the way Deacon Jones played it.

He put the word “sack” into the lexicon. He was the first one to conjure up the image of the fallen quarterback being wrapped in burlap or a body bag.

No one bothered to interview a defensive end before Deacon came along. You concentrated on the quarterbacks, the running backs. The glamour guys.

Deacon changed all that. He made defensive end into a cabinet post. He was the football administration’s official “Secretary of Defense.”

He was, in a way, the Muhammad Ali of football. Before Deacon, the game used to round up all the troglodytes it could find, suit them up and tell them, “Now, you just stand there and don’t let anyone by.”

Deacon didn’t rely on brute strength, although he had plenty of that. Deacon relied on footwork, speed, deception. Deacon was as unstoppable as a flood, as elusive as a fly in a hot room.

When you hear a football crowd yell “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” it is a tribute to Deacon. Before him, there was no such yell. Oh, maybe back in the Ivy League at a Harvard-Yale game, the student body in raccoon coats and flapper skirts would yell “Hold that line!” but it wasn’t the same thing.

You see, defense was a passive thing in those days. You waited at the line of scrimmage or slid along the length of it, waiting for the ballcarrier to crash into you like a ship hitting the rocks. The “Seven Blocks of Granite” were the kind of thing they used to call successful defenders.

Deacon Jones was nobody’s block of granite. He was on the move. The way Deacon played it, the defense did the attacking. The classic explanation of his job was, you just crash around or over the blockers and arrive at the quarterback in ill humor. Big Daddy Gene Lipscomb used to like to say he just charged in picking people up and throwing them aside till he found the one with the ball. Him, you kept.

Deacon did this better than anybody. Coaches sat up nights trying to devise schemes that would take the play away from No. 75. They couldn’t. This was because Deacon without the ball could run as fast as anyone with the ball. He had such impressive speed for a man 255 pounds that he used to race running backs--not linemen--in training camp for betting money. The Rams’ trainer, George Menefee, used to line up the suckers. Until, one day, the head coach, Harland Svare, asked them to stop. They were giving the team’s running backs inferiority complexes. Beaten by a down lineman!

The Deacon knew how to work the room too. He was one of the first to raise his hands to get the crowd to cheer for the home team. And he shared the nuances of modern defensive football with the fans by calling attention to them in the press. Deacon was never a “No comment” interview. Deacon had lots of comments. He was militant but not hobbled by hate.

Before Deacon, defensive linemen were the unknown soldiers of the sport. Silent butlers, so to speak. They were so safe from recognition that you figured you might find Jimmy Hoffa in there. Before Deacon, defensive linemen got drafted just ahead of placekick-holders.

The crowds used to go out for a beer and a hot dog when the Rams didn’t have the football. But when Deacon came along, they used to wait till the Rams did have the football. Deacon was more exciting to watch than Billy Wade or Ron Jaworski.

It wasn’t only speed and power with Deacon. Watching him charge the ballhandler was like watching Dempsey-Firpo. Deacon had perfected another weapon in the pass-rusher’s arsenal--the head slap. Deacon came across the line of scrimmage throwing these crazy rights and straight lefts to the helmet of the blocking backs till you could hear the heads rattling like dice in a cage. How effective was it? So effective, they outlawed it in Deacon’s last year.

Deacon was part of the greatest pass rush of all time--the Fearsome Foursome of Lamar Lundy, Rosey Grier, Merlin Olsen and the Deacon. They were as choreographed as “Swan Lake,” a ballet not a game. They didn’t come at you the same way twice. They didn’t invent, but they perfected the maneuvers known as “stunting” and “looping” where they traded positions or lunges at the snap of the ball to confound the offense. Johnny Unitas once said the passer got 3 1/2 seconds to get rid of the ball--except against the Rams’ Fearsomes where you were lucky they didn’t arrive when the ball did.

Deacon was so fast off the line that new officials used to conclude confusedly that he must have been offside. Deacon was like a good sprinter who can anticipate the starter’s gun from the initial click.

The best evidence is, Deacon himself coined the word “sack” to describe his tactic of hog-tying quarterbacks. In fact, the league didn’t bother to keep sophisticated defensive statistics at all till Jones arrived. Because of Jones, they added a new category--the “hurried” pass. This meant the rush was so severe, the quarterback never got John Unitas’ 3 1/2 seconds to get rid of the ball. If you held the ball that long with Jones coming, the only receiver open to you would be Deacon.

The sack was Deacon’s contribution to the great game. He racked up 26 of them one year (1967) to go along with 100 solo tackles and 39 assisted tackles. He was a zone defense all by himself. He was the Sultan of Sack.

Deacon has told his story in a new biography soon on the market. It’s called, fittingly, “Headslap,” and “The Life and Times of Deacon Jones.”

It’s a nice read. Takes you back to the glory days when the Rams were here and so were Deacon, Rosey, Merlin and Lamar. They’re all gone from the field now--Deacon, Merlin, Rosey. And the Rams themselves.

There’ll probably never be another crew who’ll dominate a line of scrimmage the way they did. They don’t emphasize the pass rush these days. They lean more to the nickel (and dime) defenses, the “prevent” defenses.

Deacon was a prevent defense all by himself. And with his buddies, they weren’t a nickel-and-dime defense. They were a million-dollar defense. They saw to it the ball never got out into that small-change area.