The greatest player who never was

In his office, there are nine shelves of books: The Reality of Man, The Chakras, Black Elk Speaks, A Mirror for Simple Souls, The Bhagavad Geeta. Next to it is a six-sided prayer room for chanting. There's a cushion he sat on. Beside it is a book, The Nectar of Chanting. Don surveys all the stuff. "He was strange, wasn't he? I have no idea what all this means but it sure got his attention." Joe Don's dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Ram, wanders around, sniffing, hoping Joe Don will return.

Don Looney walks outside. Joe Don's truck is still parked there, It has nearly 105,000 miles on it. "I'd say 90 percent of Joe Don's life was happy," Don says. "But there's no doubt he could have been the best football player ever. I wonder why he didn't want to be." He walks slowly over the rocks. His head is down. His hands are in his pockets.

The stillness roars.

UNCONVENTIONAL

WISDOM

Why was Joe Don Looney so weird?

The theories suggested by family and friends:

Maybe predestination. His dad, Don, sits in the old-style elegance of the Forth Worth Club, which he has frequented over the years, and thinks a long time. It was just the way the Good Lord made him. There was nothin' I could do about it."

Maybe he was starved for attention. That's the view of former Oklahoma quarterback Ronnie Fletcher, an evangelist. "Why else," asks Fletcher, "would he have gone down and started firing a gun at a little ticket booth at the Oklahoma track?"

Maybe his family was too wealthy. Newt Burton, an all-conference guard for the Sooners and now an oral surgeon in Birmingham, Ala., says. "His family was wealthy, so he didn't have a lot of the pressures the rest of us do. His attitude was, `I don't have to do anything,'" Joe Don's aunt, Joy Looney, agrees: "He would starve before he would work."

Maybe it was his temper. "He had a real short fuse," says ex-wife Peggy Collins. "He was more suited for a cerebral life instead of an athletic one. He should have been a college philosophy professor."

Maybe he was too intelligent. Says his father, "Things upset a person with a high intelligence like Joe Don. A dumb SOB like me it don't bother."

Maybe he was a crazy. Once, Joe Don said to evangelist Fletcher, "See that glass of water? How do I know that's not God?"

Maybe he had a fear of success. Chet Sample, athletic director at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, says, "The better he got, the better people expected him to get. It was hard on him."

Maybe he had too much confidence. Before playing Texas the third game of the '62 season, he told teammate Mike Ringer, now an assistant U.S. attorney in Oklahoma City, "If they give me the ball 19 times. He failed to score. Oklahoma lost, 9-6.

Maybe it was steroids. One of his best friends, Sooners all-conference end John Flynn, says his buddy "went to Baton Rouge before his senior year and got all 'roided up. He got so big he couldn't receive. And he started arguing about everything."