History Lesson 
The Lonely Blues of Duane Thomas
As Louis Armstrong said, if they don't know what it is, then you can't tell 'em.
Youlanda says: Just wanted to say that the story on Duane Thomas was very interesting to me especially since I live with his son Timothy (whose name was changed to Awali Idris). It helps me understand him a little better. Thank you. I am glad I ran across this article. (September 25th, 2009 at 1:02pm)
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"I guess you would call Duane a loner," says Floyd Iglehart, Duane's high school coach. Floyd has since moved up to Bishop College. "The only thing that boy liked to do was run. All the time...running, by himself. Running from home to school, running back home, running over to his girl friend's house at night."
The Thomas family seemed star-crossed, predestined to more than their share of grief. Misfortune played against misfortune: bills mounted. Franklin, Duane's oldest brother, incurred a serious kidney ailment. Bertrand cut off a finger in woodshop while daydreaming about Duane. Not long after the death of John and Loretta Thomas, Duane learned that his girl friend, Elizabeth Malone, was pregnant.
Mary Waller described what happened:
"Duane didn't want to marry her, but he wanted to do what was right. The girl's mama and their preacher came over here one night, bringing Elizabeth along. She was crying. I was crying. Duane just sat there, like we were judging him. He never said a word. Elizabeth's mama promised him that if he'd give the baby a name, she'd have the marriage annulled. Remember now, Duane was just a junior in high school."
No one outside the immediate family knew of the marriage. Otherwise, Duane would not have been allowed to play high school football. The annullment never came. The child, Annette, was born, and several years later another child, Timothy, was born. Duane and Elizabeth seldom lived together. But their curious, apparently permanent relationship continued, and continues still. "They have an arrangement," a friend told me.
At West Texas State, Duane's financial problems mounted astronomically, as did social pressures. West Texas State is located in Canyon, where black people are either athletes or short order cooks, and as it became apparent that Duane was an athlete of unusual promise—a sure Number One draft choice—local merchants extended him unusual credit.
Cowboy Personnel Director Gil Brandt told me: "Duane's wife ran up some bills you wouldn't believe. Duane got stuck with them. A little town like that, I don't know how she did it."
Elizabeth Thomas lives now in South Dallas. She does community service work, writes poetry and publishes occasional articles in Dallas' black weeklies. After Duane and Bertrand were busted for possession of marijuana last spring, Elizabeth published an open letter accusing the Cowboys of setting up the bust. In the Dallas Express amid articles on sickle cell anemia, Miss Tan America, church news and such headlines as "Nixon Sends Grambling Band to Liberia", Elizabeth charged that the Cowboys were practicing "colonization" on her husband. "They just decided 'this nigga' had to be broken," Elizabeth told her readers. So they got the law on him.
It is difficult to believe anything like that actually happened. Ironically, Duane was trying to help his younger brother avoid a familiar trap when two highway patrolmen pulled them over in Greenville, Tex. "Bertrand had knocked up this chick," a friend explained. "They were driving around talking, and Duane was giving him hell about how he was handling it, or rather, how it was being handled for him by a lot of people."
Through the eyes of a white highway patrolman, it looked like this: Here were these two black boys, stocking caps pulled down over their ears, cruising through town in a new car that seemed to match the description of a car on the stolen report. One of the officers testified that, on approaching Duane's car, he "observed marijuana smoke." Presumably, the brothers were engulfed in a giant green cloud, which, upon further examination, turned out to be coming from a small quantity of marijuana. The brothers pleaded guilty and were assessed five-year probated sentences, a light sentence under the circumstances.
If, as Elizabeth Thomas charges, the Cowboys viewed Thomas as a piece of real estate in need of government regulation, the result was a ploy that backfired on everyone. The terms of his probation did require that he "work faithfully at suitable employment as far as possible." But as the judge and probation officer (both Cowboy fans) interpreted it, that didn't mean he had to report to the Dallas Cowboys.
After Duane was traded to San Diego, Judge Hollis Garmon stated publicly that the court would take it kindly if Duane would go back to football. Probation officer Bill Haddock told me: "We'd like to see him working somewhere, but this is a special case. Duane's not your dollar-an-hour man. If he chooses to hold out for a better contract, we think we ought to give him leeway."
One curious victim of the bust in Greenville was the highway patrolman who first sighted smoke. By coincidence, I sat across the table from him last May at a meeting of the Greenville Lions Club. While Governor Preston Smith expounded on the delicate problems of law and order, the patrolman told me what had happened to his family since the big nab. Among other things, he said, his daughter was being harrassed by her contemporaries, both black and white. "For a while we thought we might have to take her out of school," he said, shaking his head sadly. "But they finally started leaving her alone and things got better."
We walk along Warren, in South Dallas, then up Oakland, past bars, theaters, penny-arcades, cleaners and other small black businesses. I stop and talk to people along the way. They all know Duane. Or they know about him. The young ones see him as a hero, and the old ones believe he is giving everyone a bad name.
"I think he's crazy," says an old man sitting on a curb drinking a cardboard carton of orange drink.
We walk on. Abner shakes his head and says, "Duane plays crazy, which is what you learn in South Dallas. Man, you gotta learn to see and don't see...move and not look back."
For all of their computers, psychological evaluation systems and spy networks, the Dallas Cowboys are pitifully human. They were the last to realize Duane was weirding out.
When he refused to report to camp before the 1971 season, they wrote it off as a routine contract hassle, developing in a routine manner. The club had a firm policy: They would not renegotiate contracts. And Thomas's contract still had two years to go. The Cowboys were convinced it was a fair contract, granted, one that had worked out in their favor, but they had paid for their share of lemons in the past and now it seemed right to them that they should share in the luck of the draw.
Duane didn't see it that way. He told Dallas writer Steve Perkins: "They've been in business longer than I have. I feel like they should have been obligated to be honest with me." Duane had either got the idea independently, or with the help of his many friends and advisers in these post-Kiner days, that the Cowboys were persecuting him because he was black. That's ridiculous. To paraphrase what Jerry Kramer said about Vince Lombardi, the Cowboys treat everyone equally bad, although it is true that they reward loyalty. If Duane hadn't been a rookie they might have gone along with his demands.
No, the first inkling management had of what would soon be known in polite circles as The Duane Thomas Problem was when Duane called a press conference and described coach Tom Landry as "a plastic man, actually no man at all." Gil Brandt was branded "a liar." Duane put down club president Tex Schramm as a man who was "sick, demented and completely dishonest," to which Schramm replied goodnaturedly, "That's not bad. He got two out or three."
After that, Duane started appearing and disappearing like the Roadrunner. The Cowboys traded him to New England (the same club to which they had unloaded Kiner) but Duane was back within a week. There were conflicting reports about why that trade was negated. The wire services first reported that Duane defied an order from coach John Mazur to get down in a three-point stance. "This is the way we do it in Dallas," Duane told Mazur, bending over with his hands on his knees. "That way, we can see the linebackers." Though this was a perfectly logical and even brilliant statement of his position, there was a flaw which didn't occur to anyone at the time: The Cowboys don't do it that way. They use a three-point stance, just like New England. But then Duane didn't say the Cowboys, he said Dallas.
The most damning report, and the one that Pete Rozelle relied on to negate the trade, was that Duane refused to complete his physical examination, thereby implying Thomas was on drugs. It has since been established that Thomas wasn't on drugs, merely sleepy and irritable from his new diet of fruit and nuts. He refused to complete the physical for the same reason he refused to attend meetings or practices: because there was something else he wanted to do; in this case, take a nap.
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