The Lonely Blues of Duane Thomas

As Louis Armstrong said, if they don't know what it is, then you can't tell 'em.

by Gary Cartwright

(Page 2 of 4)

No one could find Duane after the game. How slow Duane was getting out of the dressing room had become a team joke, how he would stand for minutes at a time, answering banal questions from the press. I watched him after the 5-0 playoff victory over Detroit, one of the strangest games in NFL history; most of the players were dressed and gone, but Duane was still pinned to the wall.

Trying to be helpful, I asked him what it was like to carry a football in the National Football League. About the same as running over to his girl friend's house in South Dallas after dark, he said. Just running. He never felt it when they hit him. More often, it was the tackler who felt it. Less than an hour earlier Duane had collided with Detroit line-backer Wayne Walker—and they had carried Walker off the field.

Duane took his time, then he added: "It's like moving in a shadow...in a dream...where everything is real slow and yet so fast you don't think about it...then you see...hey! you see some light and you go for it." When Vince Lombardi described the same phenomena as "running to daylight," he was canonized in the press. I glanced at one reporter's notebook and noticed he hadn't caught a single word. He tried, but before Duane's stream of consciousness the reporter's thought-process had collapsed and he filled out the page with squiggly circles.

But after the Super Bowl, with the world and national TV waiting for an explanation, no one could find Duane Thomas, not even Kiner, who was walking around the Orange Bowl locker room in a daze, asking everyone he saw, "Where's my man? What happened to my man?" Kiner and Thomas were supposed to leave that night for a vacation in the Bahamas, but it was six months later before Kiner heard from his friend.

Super Week was Duane's first full exposure to Big Time Media, and vice versa. Writers and TV men and radio men from all over the country tracked him down at the Cowboys' training quarters in Fort Lauderdale. They asked him the stock questions and went off shaking their heads, feeding their notebooks to passing squirrels. How do you feel, being a rookie and all, how do you feel about playing in the Super Bowl? "Okay," Duane told them. "It's just another game." But it's the ultimate game, they assured him. Duane cocked his head proudly so they could see up his nostrils, and he posed his own question: "Then why are they playing it again next year?"

One morning a few days before the game, a tribe of writers found Thomas sitting on the beach behind the hotel. He was alone and barefoot, and there was a football playbook in his lap. He seemed to be studying the Alantic Ocean.

"What are you thinking about?" they asked.

"Where I am," Duane said.

"You mean on a beach in Fort Lauderdale?"

"No," Duane said. "I mean where I am." His nostrils flared slightly.

"Where's that?"

"Just now I was thinking about New Zealand."

"Oh?"

"It's a good place to retire."

"A rookie shouldn't be thinking about retiring."

Duane gave them his curious poor-devil look and said, "It's the best time."

The tribe continued down the beach, leaving Duane to his fantasies. "He's looking at the wrong ocean," said Steve Perkins of The Dallas Time Herald, "New Zealand's the other way." Frank Boggs of The Daily Oklahoman pointed toward the horizon where an airplane trailed a sunburn-lotion streamer and said, "Look! I believe I can see Oklahoma City!"

Later, the writers looked up from their beach chairs and way out there, flat against the ocean, was a tiny figure paddling a kayak. The figure, like Yossarian, seemed to be paddling out to sea. One of the writers raised his binoculars and reported with mock alarm, "My God! It's Duane Thomas!"

I saw Thomas and Kiner only once during Super Week, and then very briefly. I stumbled onto them down by the seawall.

"What are you guys doing down here?" I asked.

"Hiding from the riffraff," Kiner told me.

They traded Kiner a few weeks later. Goodbye and hello, Great Cosmos. Hello and goodbye. The Cowboys claim that Kiner asked to be traded, and I have no reason to doubt them. Nevertheless, they traded the one man Thomas fully trusted. Duane had to find someone else to trust.

When Duane reappeared months later, he told Steve Perkins of The Times Herald "Hey! I read that my fumble was the play that lost the game. I didn't know that I was the one who was expected to win it."

But of course he was. Most of Dallas expected it.

I know one thing, Duane played as well as anyone else in the 1970 Super Bowl. Miserable though it was, that game was a plateau for the Cowboys and they rode there on the shoulders of Duane Thomas. Week after week, from midseason until the Super Bowl, Thomas was incredible. During one stretch of that strange 5-0 playoff victory over Detroit, the Cowboys called fourteen straight running plays against a defense that was begging them to run just one more time. Of Dallas' 231-yard total, Duane accounted for 135 yards. The following week in the NFC championship game against San Francisco, he ran for 143 yards. Take away that one fumble in the Super Bowl and Thomas would have been Player of the Year in all of pro football.

There is a popular misconception that the Dallas Cowboys "discovered" Duane Thomas. They discovered him in the sense that the Dutch discovered Manhattan Island. What they did was bet on the come. There wasn't a scout in the industry who questioned Thomas's ability, but there was a darker, subjective side. The Philadelphia Eagles' scouting report, for example, had this notation: "Thomas has a history of being a troublemaker, and history repeats itself."

Almost all of Duane's problems could be traced directly to money. In that respect, he wasn't the maker of trouble but its victim.

A few months ago I visited Duane's old neighborhood with a friend, Abner Haynes, the American Football League's first superstar. Abner grew up on one end of Warren Street, Duane on the other. Abner was eight or nine years older; he retired from pro football when Duane was still in college. He got out in one piece and is now a vice president of the Zale Corporation.

"The thing that trips me," Abner was saying, "is I think Duane's an unhappy man. I've done everything I could to reach him. I've got commitments from Stanley Marcus, Donny Zale, Lamar Hunt, men like that...they've offered to sit down and try to help Duane. But I don't know if he wants help.

Walking along Warren, Abner recalled how it was in South Dallas. "Just walking down Warren and across Oakland was a traumatic experience," he told me. "You learned to hate because hate helped you survive. It was all around you. Older guys with college degrees, walking the streets 'cause nobody would hire them. One of your partners getting his head blown off for stealing a lousy hubcap. One thing you never saw in our neighborhood was an insurance salesman. Why would a black person who was catching hell then spend money on something that wouldn't payoff for 20 years? And the really terrible part, there wasn't any reason to believe it would get better."

One way out was sports; it is more than coincidence that sports stars such as Abner Haynes, Dave Stallworth and Ernie Banks grew up in that same South Dallas ghetto. They were Duane's heroes, not Jimmy Brown, as some people assume.

The neighborhood struggles along today much as it did when Duane was a kid. It is not your sleazy dead-cat slum—not The Dallas Morning News stereotype where boy friends of welfare mothers sit around drinking Beefeaters and watching color TV—no, it's a prim, pious neighborhood of well-cared-for wooden homes, neat lawns and mom-and-pop groceries. There seems to be a Baptist church on every corner. There are parks and playgrounds—Fair Park is less than a mile away. The difference between this neighborhood and the one I grew up in is that all the faces are black. No, the decay is not on the surface, and that is the problem. "Back before Duane's time," Abner said, "We didn't believe in tomorrow. Now a boy can see it for himself on the TV screen."

Duane's aunt, Mary Waller, still lives on Warren, in the comfortable pink frame house where Duane lived while finishing high school.

Duane's mama and daddy were good, hardworking Christians," Aunt Mary Waller says. "Duane was like his daddy. You'd never hear either one of them say much. Loretta did the talking in that family. When they died—they went less than a year apart—Duane took it very hard."

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