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!
