NFL 100: At No. 16, Deacon Jones head slapped, smack talked and sacked his way to greatness (2024)

Welcome to theNFL 100,The Athletic’s endeavor to identify the 100 best players in football history. You can order the book versionhere. Every day until the season begins, we’ll unveil new members of the list, with the No. 1 player to be crowned on Wednesday, Sept. 8.

Some say Deacon Jones created the sack by giving it a name.

This is disputable. What is indisputable is Jones mastered the sack like no one before him and arguably no one since. Then he turned it into entertainment.

To understand how that happened, we need to go back to his hometown of Eatonville, Fla., where what he saw as a child gave him the purpose and determination that helped make him one of pro football’s all-time greats.

Jones was with Black friends after a church service when a car filled with young white people drove by. One of the passengers threw a watermelon out of the window and hit an elderly Black woman in the head. Jones said he could hear the people in the car laughing, and he chased the vehicle for as long as his lungs allowed. The woman died of the injuries she suffered, and Jones said there was no police investigation.

At South Carolina State University in 1958, Jones took part in a demonstration after a group of Black people were arrested for eating at a lunch counter designated for whites. Police tried to stop the protestors by chasing them with German shepherds and high-powered water hoses. “I ran right up into that alley,” Jones told Pro Football Weekly. “Had no out to it. And they turned the hose loose right up in that alley on me, pinned me up against the wall, and it ripped the back of my (suit), right down the back. I almost drowned, man. I almost drowned, and I was a well-conditioned athlete. I couldn’t move a muscle. It had me pinned up against that wall, and I couldn’t move.”

Jones saw his scholarship at South Carolina State revoked for participating in the protest, and he went to Mississippi Vocational College, where he encountered more racism.

It was football that enabled him to deal with all of it. “Thank God I had the ability to play a violent game like football,” he said, according to the New York Times. “It gave me an outlet for the anger in my heart.”

Jones, by admission, was malicious as a defensive end. He said the harder he hit, the more he released his hostilities. “I ain’t helping you up off the ground,” he said in an interview with NFL Films. “I’m gonna step on your hand.”

Or slap your head. As a 14th-round draft pick by the Rams in 1961, Jones needed every possible edge. He came to the NFL without refinement — his defensive line coach with the Rams, Jack Patera, told ESPN that his stance initially was like a frog squatting with a hand between his legs. But Jones learned.

Jones was not the first to use the head slap — some say he took it from teammate Rosey Grier — but he used it better than anyone. “Rembrandt, of course, did not invent painting,” he said.

Jones used the maneuver so effectively that by 1974 almost every lineman in the NFL was copying him, and by 1977 the NFL made it illegal.

“I have a mean streak, and in my business, I needed it, or I never would have made it,” Jones said in his autobiography, “Headslap.” “Pro football is, after all, a pain-giving game. My head slap gave pain. It made you not want to hold me at the line, which is the one illegal move offensive linemen get away with over and over in every game, today more than ever. My head slap was the right hand of Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali rolled into one.”

Jones had scars on his hands from the maneuver. Opponents had worse.

“Our right tackle Cas Banaszek had ice bags on his head after every game against the Rams,” 49ers tight end Bob Windsor said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Jones didn’t head-slap just to punish opponents. He did it to win games. He was a thinking man’s pass rusher, and the head slap was a way to gain an advantage.

“Football is a game of moves, a game of edges,” he wrote. “I aimed to create a weakness; I would slant, go for the angles. That way, even against two men, it wouldn’t be a Mexican standoff. With my quickness, I’d make a move. The guy setting up across from me goes for it, but he’s already beat. Now he’s got to move backwards. That’s when I take him on. I’ll go outside or reverse and cut inside.”

The great Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Jones was to defensive football what Babe Ruth was to offensive baseball. “He was a genius at it,” he said.

When Jones was paired with Merlin Olsen in 1962 on the left side of the Rams line, he had another advantage. The pair became one of the most effective in NFL history at stunting.

“(Olsen) and Deacon had to be the best defensive duo ever and they’d work stunts beautifully,” said former Rams coach George Allen.

Jones was voted NFL defensive player of the year in 1967 and ’68. Olsen won the Bert Bell Award as the NFL MVP in 1974. Both were five-time first-team All-Pros, and both were voted to the NFL’s 100th-anniversary team. Jones and Olsen were the heart of the Fearsome Foursome. Rounding out the quartet were Grier and Lamar Lundy. Roger Brown then replaced Grier from 1967 through ’70.

At 6-5 and 270 pounds, Jones had physical gifts that were rarely seen in his era. Allen said he was the quickest defensive lineman off the snap he had ever seen and also said he had better footwork and faster hands than any other defensive lineman. Jones was so athletic, Allen said, that he could have been an outstanding linebacker or even a defensive back. He also was extremely durable, missing just five games over a 14-year career that concluded with two seasons in San Diego and one in Washington.

And there was more.

“He was the single-best practice player I ever coached,” Allen wrote in “Pro Football’s 100 Greatest Players.” “He went as hard in practice as in games. He drew blood from his teammates in practice.”

Jones was outstanding in practice, but more so in games. Especially games that meant something.

“He was at his best in big games because he had a big ego, and he loved being known as the best and loved being in the spotlight,” Allen said.

Jones, whose given name was David and who became known as the Secretary of Defense, would not argue. He changed his name because Deacon had more pizzazz. The first time he met the press in Los Angeles, he told them of the change. “My name is Deacon Jones,” he said. “I’ve come to preach the gospel of winning football to the good people of Los Angeles.”

He loved to talk, whether he was entertaining the public, demeaning opponents or lobbying officials. Cowboys offensive lineman Rayfield Wright was a verbal victim in a 1969 game.

“As an offensive lineman, you’re taught only to hear the quarterback’s voice, nothing else,” Wright told Sports Illustrated. “I’m listening in case there’s an audible, and in the pause between ‘Huts!’ I hear a deep, heavy voice say, ‘Does yo’ mama know you’re out here?’ It was Deacon Jones.’

Jones’ swagger, loquaciousness and charisma made him one of the all-time great interview subjects.

“I wouldn’t want to be a lawyer, I wouldn’t want to be a doctor, I wouldn’t want to be the president of the United States,” Jones said in an NFL Films interview. “I was destined. Just like Ray Charles was born to sing the blues, Deacon was born to rush quarterbacks.”

But he did more than that. Jones sang R&B in nightclubs with the band Nightshift, which later became War. While he wasn’t always treated well in his hometown, Hollywood loved him. Jones portrayed a Black Viking in “The Norseman,” gave fatherly advice to an alien in the TV show “ALF” and recited poetry in Miller Lite ads.

“Blue is the violet, red is the rose, and if you don’t believe me, I’m gonna break your nose.”

A showman at heart, Jones once brought down Washington’s Bobby Mitchell, known as one of the NFL’s fastest men. But before the tackle, he ran with him for 10 yards or so, matching him stride for stride. Later, he said he didn’t bring him down earlier because he wanted everyone to see that he was as fast as Mitchell.

Whatever he did, an audience formed.

“He was a storyteller,” said Hall of Fame defensive end Michael Strahan, whom Jones took under his wing. “I’ve never heard a guy tell stories the way Deacon told stories, from his head slaps to how they basically changed the game for him.”

If Jones couldn’t talk about himself, others stepped up.

“What was it like to play against Deacon Jones?” Packers quarterback Bart Starr said. “How did people feel about Attila the Hun?”

Strahan called Jones the founding father of defensive ends.

“Deacon made the position glamorous, which was hard to do,” he said. “Quarterbacks are glamorous, not defensive linemen … until Deacon came along.”

Jones played before sacks were officially kept, but unofficial records indicate he had 173 1/2, still the third most in history even though he played before the passing era. He also unofficially had 26 sacks in a 14-game season in 1967, which would still be the NFL record even for a 16-game season. A recently published study of sacks before 1982 says Jones led the league in sacks five times — three more times than anyone else.

After Jones died in 2013 at the age of 74, the NFL started giving the Deacon Jones Award to the player who finishes each season with the most sacks.

Said Olsen: “There has never been a better football player than Deacon Jones.”

(Illustration: Wes McCabe /The Athletic; photo: Focus on Sport)

Dan Pompei is a senior writer for The Athletic who has been telling NFL stories for close to four decades. He is one of 49 members on the Pro Football Hall of Fame selectors board and one of nine members on the Seniors Committee. In 2013, he received the Bill Nunn Award from the Pro Football Writers of America for long and distinguished reporting. Follow Dan on Twitter @danpompei