The greatest player who never was

Douglas S. Looney

The stillness roars.

This truly is a place that sound forgot. For miles, there is nothing. Nothing but the rolling and endless hills of West Texas. Nothing but quiet. Nothing but beauty. Nothing but peace, at 5,380 feet. The early morning haze and mist shrouding Cathedral Mountain is giving way to brighter promise.

Day is breaking, 14 miles south of Alpine, Tex., 70 miles north of Mexico's border, and 70 million light years in thought from the real world. Or is this the real world? The only sound is of day breaking. Sitting in the midst of 33 acres is a strangely odd dome house heated by solar power, with water and electricity generated by a windmill.

Joe Don Looney built this house and lived here. He was - arguably, like everything else in sports - the greatest football player ever to buckle a chinstrap.

He grew up wild as the Texas wind in Fort Worth, eventually wandered into an Oklahoma junior college and subsequently transferred to the University of Oklahoma, where his star was born as an extraordinary running back. And then he became the first-round draft pick of the Giants. During those years in Norman and in the pros - between 1962 and 1969 - he captured the nation's attention. Indeed, he had a stranglehold on the public's fascination.

Says his uncle, Bill Looney, 68, of Abilene, "He was like something streaking across the sky. You see it once and you're not gonna forget about it." Joe Don could do everything on a football field; he could do anything with a football, including autograph it; he could do all the things little boys dream of doing in front of roaring and adoring crowds. He could. But he didn't want to. So he didn't.

The finest football player ever wasted it all.

The finest football player ever almost never played anywhere close to his ability, by most estimates displaying, maybe, 10 percent of his wondrous skills.

The finest football player ever "was like a guy squandering his inheritance," Bill Looney says.

The finest football player ever considered all his natural ability, evaluated his potential, examined his head, measured his heart, and concluded, "Naw."

The finest football player ever was almost a total bust.

The finest football player ever never was.

Joe Don's father, Don, 79, stares over at the dome house and shakes his head: "He was a bad little _____, but I loved him. You always forgive those you love."

Few needed more forgiving than Joe Don Looney, killed seven years ago last week - September 24, 1988 - down near the Mexican border, 8.6 miles north of Study Butte, when his motorcycle missed a curve on State Highway 118. Joe Don, 45 at the time, could never negotiate life's curves. The investigating highway patrolman says Looney never hit his brakes. Of course not Joe Don braked for nobody or no thing. When Looney was found face up under a mesquite bush, he was wearing a helmet. It may have been the only time in his life that he was caught doing the right thing.

Dan Devine, former head coach at Arizona State, Missouri, Notre Dame and of the Packers, doesn't temper his enthusiasm: "Joe Don Looney may have been to football what Mickey Mantle was to baseball."

Joe Don Looney fascinates. He always has. He always will.

It's partly because he is an enigma. Sam Huff, the superb Giants and Redskins linebacker, says that Joe Don "never had both shoes tied. His whole life made no sense. He always had a smart answer for you, and he was very clever. Most of all, he was always the subject of conversation."

Indeed it is difficult to be around football people for very long before Joe Don works his way into the conversation, whether you want him to or not Joe Don always generates smiles in remembrance. How can you not like a guy, who, as a Colt, punted a ball towering straight up, then put his hands on his hips and yelled, "Hey, God, how did you like that one?'

But Joe Don could never get the complete picture. Uncle Bill says, "You can't speak of the ocean to a frog inside a whale." Joe Don spent most of his life inside the whale.

Looney also had this marvelous albeit wacky sense of humor that almost always made an underlying point. Example: While living with a friend, Roger Parker, Parker got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. When Parker returned, he found Joe Don had swiped his pillow. "I screamed and hollered," Parker says, "and he said to me, "If you care that much about something, you should take it with you.'"

He once told the Dallas Times-Herald, "It's funny. When I played football, I couldn't play life. And now that I can play life, I can't play football." Out of Joe Don's mouth came one of the most famous quotes in sport. While playing for Detroit in 1966, Coach Harry Gilmer turned to Joe Don, gave him the next play and told him to carry it onto the field. Joe Don refused, saying, "If you want a messenger, call Western Union." For that suggestion, he was suspended.

At the Giants, where Looney was the No. 1 pick in '64, Coach Allie Sherman saw Looney didn't have his ankles taped. He ordered it done. Looney refused, saying, "I know more about my ankles than you do." They worked out an uneasy compromise; Looney taped his ankles over his socks. He was traded to Baltimore after only 28 days as a Giant. "I wanted him," recalls then-Colts coach Don Shula. "He had all this fantastic natural ability." A few days after joining the team, Looney walked in 15 minutes late to a meeting, says Shula, who promptly fined him $100. Said Joe Don, "OK, but how come you didn't give me $100 for being 15 minutes early last night?" Shula shakes his head and says, "He just could never put it all together."

Not once did Looney ever play two complete seasons with one team.

Joe Don wanted to do everything on his terms and under his conditions. In Abilene, Joy Looney, his aunt remembers, "Joe Don often said, `It's not what you think of me that counts. It's what I think of you.'" Was he a good person? He was not. Even his uncle admits, "If I didn't know him, I'd say he was a mean, sorry, no-good SOB." Looney unquestionably believed in the scorched-earth policy. Once, in a half-speed workout in Washington, Joe Don inexplicably lowered his shoulder and steamrolled a fully unsuspecting Huff. Then Looney stood over him, pointed and screamed, "How did you like that, big boy?" Of course Huff, a Hall of Famer, evened the score on the next play, but the episode did end their days as roommates. "What a wasted talent," Huff says.

But whether we like to admit it or not millions of us have our times when we would give anything to be like him. Joe Don Looney was 6 feet 1, 230 pounds, with a body like Atlas and looks like Brad Pitt Women could never help them around Joe Don, And didn't want to. He was bright and he was funny and he was a good time waiting to happen and he was trouble. He was rich (by virtue of his dad being oil-drilling rich) and he was brash and he was tough and he was fast. Marvels Shula, "He could bolt and get there in a hurry." Joe Don swaggered when he sat. Nobody told him to jump. He detested authority of any kind.

So it never went down well when Joe Don was routinely checked by Border Patrol officers in search of undocumented Mexicans whenever he would drive into Alpine from his dome house outside of town. He could not brook the notion that the officers had to give him permission to pass. There were numerous confrontations. Looney, for example, would cover something on the seat of his truck with a blanket and not let the Border Patrol look. The conversation concerning what was under the blanket would deteriorate fast There was nothing under the blanket. Joe Don would create trouble when none existed and there was no need for any.

Don Looney thinks his son's hatred of authority was rooted in childhood sports. Once, though Joe Don clearly was the best back on a kids football team, the coach instead chose another boy to be on the all-star team. The chosen youngster happened to be a relative of the coach. Another time, in baseball, Joe Don was chosen for the all-star team, which figured, since he was easily the best player in the league. He never was put in the game.

But Looney was never team oriented. His dad, an end for the Eagles who holds the team record for most receptions in a game (14, against Washington in 1940) was trying to set the lad straight. "Football is a team game Joe Don" he said. "You can't win by yourself." Joe Don sat there, sullen, thinking and unconvinced. Finally he said, "Would you give me a center?" Bill Looney says that because of unsavory childhood experiences, his nephew had ammunition for thinking that "all authority does is give you the ability to screw somebody."

His mother, Dorothy, of San Angelo, Tex., says she thinks the explanation of his childhood and its results is simple: "He was just the product of a bad marriage." Joe Don's parents divorced in 1962.

At Oklahoma, where he had a tumultuous 14-game career - but one long enough to be fifth in the nation in average per carry in 1962 (6.21 yards) and the nation's best punter, averaging 43.4 yards per try - he went to a sorority house to pick up his date, a spectacular blonde widely considered to be the prettiest around. He arrived at 7 p.m., the appointed hour. By 7:02, she had not come dowmstairs. He left a note: "Joe Don waits for no one." That story made quick time around Norman.

To designate Joe Don as the best player ever requires a leap in faith. It is a little like saying Jack Nicklaus might have the driver out of his bag; like saying Michael Jordan might have been the best basketball player ever - if he had ever shot an 18-foot pull-up jumper. Of course, Nicklaus did and Jordan did and they are the best because they have proved it Joe Don never proved jack squat. Even Uncle Bill, perhaps the closest to Joe Don of anybody, concedes, "What he actually accomplished didn't amount to -." In 42 games in the NFL over parts of five seasons, he rushed for 724 yards. Walter Payton rushed for 16,726, Tony Dorsett 12,739, Jim Brown, 12,312. Cliff Battles is No. 125 in lifetime NFL rushing, with 3,622 yards. Who is Cliff Battles? Looney's achievement was pathetic. Marvels Joe Schmidt the former AllPro Lions linebacker and coach, "Joe Don's a national hero, still. My God, think what he would be like if he had ever done anything."

Yet, nobody has ever been capable of ignoring what he might have accomplished. Allie Sherman says, "He had it all. I mean all. He was more than just size. He was more than just speed. He was wonderfully built big legs, huge torso, could deliver a blow. He had slashing, veering power, agility, acceleration. He had body control like Payton - only with power. He could bust that first tackle, then go 14 to 24 yards more. He could catch the ball. He was bright He had vision. There wasn't a single thing he didn't have. But, whatever devils rode with the guy, it was always, `This is the way I want it.'" Once during a Giants practice, Looney persisted in running the- ball right when it was supposed to go left. Finally, Sherman asked him why he was doing that. Said Joe Don, "I feel like running right more than left."

So was Looney really better than, say, Dick Butkus, Otto Graham, Joe Montana, Bruiser Kinard, Jim Ringo, Mike Ditka, O.J. Simpson, Gale Sayers, Jim Brown? Maybe. "He had all those great assets," Sherman laments. Looney is accorded such lofty praise by Sherman because of a little-considered attribute of a great back: "With or without the ball, they create pressure on the defense." Shula agrees: "He had all the ability in the world, with those great skills, to be a great, great back. But... I don't know, no coach had been able to handle him, but every coach thought he could, including me." A friend from Oklahoma days, Danny Boyd, says Joe Don was "a man without limits. I really think he could have been the greatest ever, the next Jim Brown only better. The problem was he grew up in a time when you didn't talk back to the system, the system talked to you. For him to go along with that, he would have had to give up too much of his soul."

Otto Graham, who created Looney at the Redskins with the same predictable results - disputes, confrontations, mediocre performance - is asked if Looney could have been the best player ever, if he had wanted to. Says Graham, Wanting to is the biggest part. He was a strange individual. No one could communicate with him. I knew he was a questionable person to have on my team, but he was such a great talent." Like each of the five NFL coaches who had Joe Don Graham, too, thought he could handle him. Looking back, Graham is forthright: "I couldn't." Once, Graham tried to send Looney into a game, but Joe Don declined the opportunity, saying he was not warmed up.

Tom Fears was head coach of the Saints, Looney's last stop in 1969, and he says of the greatest-ever inquiry: "I wouldn't doubt it." Huff concedes that Looney "had more potential than anyone who ever played the game." Devine says of the two best kickoff returns he ever saw, one was by Sayers, the other by Looney. So was Joe Don the greatest ever? Says Devine, "On occasion, he certainly did perform like it."

In an interview in Sooners Illustrated, Looney was asked about stories that he might have been the greatest, if he had played to his potential. Responded Joe Don, "In my life, I wasn't supposed to be a great football player. Obviously it never happened. Something always came up."

The reason few football people will categorically deny Looney's latent greatness is there was not a single shortcoming in him physically. That in itself, is a rarity. The routine lament is that a player is an inch short, 10 pounds too light, a tick slow. What if, for example, Dan Marino had Fran Tarkenton's scrambling ability? Joe Don lacked nothing. Arthur Daley wrote in The New York Times years ago, "He could explode shatteringly through a line but also had the deftness and speed of a sprinter in an open field. He threw a block like a house falling down. He could catch passes. He was a super punter. He had it all - from the neck down."

But from the neck up, what an adventure in the wilderness Joe Don was. "Weird, wasn't he?" suggests his dad. Bud Wilkinson, the late Oklahoma coach, once groused, "That boy has curtains in his mind." But Bill Looney explains, "He not only didn't want to play football, he didn't want to be What he was saying is, `I don't want the cheese. Just get me out of the trap.'"

The problem was Looney played football only because people said he was good at it. In fact the only benefit he ever saw to being a football player was that it seemed to attract women. Former lion Wayne Walker likes to tee the story that one night before a game, Looney was out with eight different women, then scored two touchdowns within the first five minutes of the game. Said Looney, "Wayne Walker is a liar. I think it was 13 women. It was an odd number. That's all I remember."

So uninterested was Looney in football that he went from Paschal High School in Fort Worth to the University of Texas, where he was not on scholarship and didn't even consider playing football. He joined a fraternity, partied and flunked nearly all his classes. So he transferred back home to Texas Cristian, ostensibly to play football, but he was unaware that a combination of his horrid grades and a rule meant to discourage transferring within the Southwest Conference would preclude him from playing for two years. So, he went on to Cameron (Okla.) Junior College, where the academic entrance requirement was that a player be alive - but that could be waived for cause.

Looney loved it, playing with a bunch of misfits like himself, and getting on with the coach, the late Leroy Montgomery. Montgomery. Montgomery reamed him out for being late for the first practice, traveling up one side, down the other, spitting Joe Don out, then finally concluding. Coach Montgomery. Nice to meet you." They shook hands. It was the beginning of the best relationship Looney ever had with a coach.

In 1962,he be came Oklahoma's first junior-college player. Wilkinson rued the day. Showing up late for fall practice, Looney was third-team fullback. In the opening game, Syracuse was leading the Sooners, 3-0, deep in the fourth quarter. That's when the cheeky Looney approached Wilkinson and said, "Put me in, coach, and I'll win the SOB." Wilkinson did. Whereupon, with 2:07 remaining, Looney ran into a mess of trouble going off-tackle, was surrounded by six Syracuse players, somehow got loose, ran 60 yards, and Oklahoma won, 7-3. A legend was born. Later that season, he uncorked a 61-yard run against Kansas in the third quarter when O.U. was scoreless and trailing by a touchdown. The Sooners won, 13-7. In the second game of the '63 season, he scored on a double reverse that beat Southern Cal, 17-12. Lance Rentzel, a former wide receiver for the Sooners, says he recalls the time Joe Don told Wilkinson, "`Take me out. My biorhythms are out of sync.' I watched him sit there for a long time, posed just like The Thinker. He never moved. Finally, he jumped up and said, `Coach, my biorhythms are fine. Put me in.' Bud did, we ran a 61 trap, and he ran I don't know how far for a touchdown."

However, Joe Don wouldn't block, fake, play defense, practice, listen, cooperate or go to meetings. All he wanted to do - and did - was run with the ball - if his karma was right. He was an All-American in '62, leading his team to an 8.3 record, rushing 852 yards on 137 carries, while making seven catches for 119 yards and scoring 10 touchdowns.

Wilkinson finally threw Looney off the team early in the '63 season for getting in a fight with a graduate assistant, the team's former center John E. Tatum.

Then it was on to the Giants (he got a $40,000 signing bonus and $25,000 salary), the Colts, the Lions, the Redskins and finally, the Saints. Between the Redskins and the Saints, he spent a year in Vietnam with rear forces, standing guard as an Army private. He told his dad, "When the shells come, I jump in a foxhole. I am always the first one in. I don't try to win any medals."

Looney rebelled at every stop. Famed Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle says he recalls one discussion he had with Looney about missing curfew.

"Mr. Tittle," said Joe Don, "you mean they still shine a flashlight on you to make sure you're in bed?"

"Yes, they do."

"Mr. Tittle, you are 37 years old and have been in this league 17 years and they do that.?"

"Yes, they do."

"Mr. Tittle, you are 37 years old and have been in this league 17 years, and you still don't know when to go to bed?"

Tittle laughs at the retelling. "In football," he says, "there are a lot of stupid rules and regulations to be followed whether you like it or not. Maybe he was right and we were wrong."

Suggests Joe Don's Uncle Bill, "There was something in his nature that made him go to extremes. There was no damn middle ground in him.I think he got caught up in the change between the World War II mentality of drinkin' whiskey and smokin' cigarettes to the `60s mentality of dope, long hair and ragged clothes. This place he was in he didn't like. He was makin' an attempt to move himself above it. I think he spent most of his life trying to get back up stream to the source of where he came from. When you are trying to go back upstream, a lot of strange things happen. I don't know how far he ever got."

Bill and Joy Looney have the best insight because they saw Joe Don in all seasons. Says Joy, "Our house was his refuge in the storm. We always let him in, but sometimes it was hard." At various visits, he had long hair, no hair, strange friends, stranger friends, no friends; he was filthy dirty and squeaky clean and had a succession of odd diets, including a fixation with garlic to the extent that the house nearly required fumigation when he left.

Looney never worked. His dad kept him going. He may have made $200,000 in the NFL, his dad estimates, but it was spent sooner rather than later. At his death, Joe Don was receiving a $200-a-month pension from the NFL.

He also spent time living on a boat in Hong Kong harbor and seven years with a guru in India named Baba. His father paid Baba $100 a month. The guru assigned Joe Don to take care of an elephant in order to teach the player humility. The authority-hating Joe Don was totally devoted to Baba, who told him what to do every moment of every day. Go figure. Says Bill Looney, "You get out of the realm of the ordinary and defy the order of the day, people will remember you." Presently, the elephant died and Joe Don said he was glad.

Later, in 1982, Baba died, and Looney returned to Alpine where he built his house. Then he started budding another, for his parents, even though they were divorced. The house was being framed he was killed.

Don Looney is sitting in Joe Don's dome house, in the loft bedroom. It is raining. Much is just like the day Joe Don left on his motorcycle he had bought for $850. "I hated that motorcycle," Don says. "I told him I'd give him $1,000 to get rid of it."

The old man recalls a conversation with his son.

"I just want to know the truth," Joe Don said.

"About what?"

"I don't know."

"Well, Joe Don, there are a lot of people trying to find the truth and a lot more not telling it."

There are colored sky fights. On one wall is a saying, "Who plants a tree plants a hope." Just down the hill are 91 trees Joe Don planted in 1984, apple, grape, pear, pecan. On another wall is a quote from Agnes Repplier, "It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere." Once, Looney observed, "If the end zone is where happiness is, I'd be living there. It's not, so I'm living here."

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."

Maybe it was his football philosophy. Most agree Joe Don never liked the game much. "He had more of a sandlot philosophy about football," says friend Roger Parker of Houston. "He just wanted to play and have fun. The further he went in football, the less fun he had." Joe Don once told Parker. "The only value in football is fun. So when you play it for money, it losses its value."

Maybe it was drugs. Ex-wife Collins says when he returned from Vietnam, "He had a very, very serious drug problem." She says he used a cornucopia of pills, plus coccaine, LSD, heroin.

Maybe it was frustration. Says Parker, "He had a lifelong quest to find something to model himself after. He was searching for an ideal that had no flaws." Says Janine Segart, who was with Joe Don during his guru days. "He was looking for richness, oneness, fullness. He wanted to reach the point where everything was perfect - and he knew it was possible.

Douglas S. Looney is a free-lance writer from Boulder, Colo. This is his second story for The Sporting News. As the Editor's Note on Page 3 say, the Looneys of Colorado are not related to the Looneys of Texas.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Sporting News Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning