#8

 

DEACON JONES

Deacon Jones was so good at rushing the passer that his former coach, George Allen, called him the greatest defensive player of the modern era. Jones was also as inventive in front of the microphone as he was devastating on the field. He invented his nickname of Deacon “because nobody would ever remember a player named David Jones.” Jones coined the term sack and the NFL, to its credit, had the good sense to adopt the phrase without adding its own spin to it.

Jones starred for the Los Angeles Rams from 1961 through 1971 before closing out the last three years of his career with the San Diego Chargers and the Washington Redskins. He was the pre-eminent defensive player of his time, which is saying something considering he played at the same time as Ray Nitschke, Willie Davis, Dick Butkus, and Larry Wilson. He had devastating speed from the defensive end position which he combined with a concussion-inducing head slap (now outlawed) that often rendered opposing offensive tackles helpless. Then Jones would get after the quarterback and bring him down behind the line of scrimmage.

“I called it sacking the quarterback because it was like war when they would ‘sack’ the city,” Jones explained. “It was just devastating, man. That was my contribution to the game.”

The sack would not become an official statistic for the National Football League until the 1982 season, some eight years after Jones last put on a uniform. So, officially, Jones has zero sacks on his NFL resume. But football historian John Turney went back to try and get sack totals on many of the great players who played prior to the era, including the term’s inventor. Turney’s research, determined through official NFL play-by-play charts and double-checked through NFL Films, found Jones had 173.5 quarterback sacks in his career. That total would be good enough to rank him third all-time in the sack department, behind only Bruce Smith (200) and Reggie White (198).

A case can be made that Jones had the best five-year run of any defensive player in league history. He recorded 106 sacks between 1964 and 1968. The last two years of that run saw Jones record a cool 50 sacks.

He went up against Hall of Fame linemen of the era such as Forrest Gregg of the Green Bay Packers, Jim Parker of the Baltimore Colts, and Bob St. Clair of the San Francisco 49ers, and all of those greats almost always needed help to contend with the speed of Jones. “They all needed help,” Jones said. “Nobody could handle me alone. I was just too mean and too bad.”

As the years have gone by, Jones is only too happy to answer reporters’ questions and he often does so in WWE style as he talks about how great he is. If you listen carefully, Jones has his tongue planted firmly in his cheek and he is almost always having a good time at the expense of his questioner. Jones was a great team player as well a sack specialist and he takes as much pride in his association with his teammates Merlin Olsen, Rosey Grier, and Lamar Lundy who together formed the Rams’ “Fearsome Foursome.”

“If you want to get technical about it, the Vikings’ ‘Purple People Eaters,’ the Steelers’ ‘Steel Curtain’ and the Cowboys’ ‘Doomsday Defense’ all came after the Fearsome Foursome,” Jones said. “Those teams saw how devastating a great defensive line could be and they wanted to be like us. They had their own nicknames but none of those names were as good as ours and I truly believe that we were the best defensive line to play—in our era or any other.”

While Olsen was a great player and a Hall of Famer in his own right, it was Jones who gave the Rams’ defensive line its tremendous ability to turn a game around in an instant. “Deacon Jones was not just the best defensive lineman to play the game,” Olsen said. “He was the best defensive player ever and from my perspective he was the best all-around football player I ever saw.”

George Allen, who cut his teeth as a coach under George Halas, could not give enough credit to Jones for his all-around defensive ability. “No one has ever had his combination of speed, instinct, intelligence, motivation, and drive,” Allen said.

Jones never had any doubts about his own all-around ability. “I had a lot of confidence,” Jones said. “To be a great football player, you have to have confidence. It helps to be a little angry, too. I also was that. Frustration builds inner drive . . . at least it did for me.”

That drive resulted in his inventing not only the term that has become such a big part of today’s game but his devastating head slap as well. If he wanted to go inside the tackle, Jones would come with his outside arm and then follow with a blow from his inside one. If he wanted to go outside, it was just the opposite.

“Many defensive ends had their own version of the head slap,” Jones explained. “They would take their arm, deliver the shot and off they would go. I could hit the offensive tackle twice before somebody else could do it once. That’s what made it so effective.”

Jones, always with the twinkle in his eye, knows that he is anything but modest. He doesn’t really care because he knows he’s telling it the way it was when he dominated for the Rams.