Deacon Jones

David D. "Deacon" Jones (December 9, 1938 – June 3, 2013) was an American football defensive end who played in the National Football League (NFL) for 14 seasons.

He played for the Los Angeles Rams, San Diego Chargers, and the Washington Redskins.

Jones' college football career consisted of a year at South Carolina State University in 1958, followed by a year of inactivity in 1959 and a final season at Mississippi Vocational College, now known as Mississippi Valley State University, in 1960.

South Carolina State revoked Jones' scholarship after they learned that he participated in a protest during the Civil Rights Movement.

However, one of the assistant football coaches at South Carolina State was leaving to coach at Mississippi Vocational, and told Jones and some of the other African-American players that he could get them scholarships at the new school.

While he was playing at Mississippi Vocational, he and his African-American teammates had to sleep in cots in the opposing team's gym because motels would not take them on numerous occasions.

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Due to a lack of television coverage and modern scouting networks, Jones was largely overlooked during his college career.

According to an NFL Films interview with writer Ray Didinger, "Deacon was discovered kinda by accident. The Rams were scouting some running backs and they found this defensive tackle who was outrunning the running backs that they were scouting."

Jones was selected in the 14th round of the 1961 NFL draft by the Los Angeles Rams.

He then earned a starting role as a defensive end and teamed with tackle Merlin Olsen to give Los Angeles a perennial All-Pro left side of the defensive line.

He became a part of the Fearsome Foursome defensive line of the Rams (along with Lamar Lundy, Rosey Grier, and Olsen), which is now considered to have been one of the best defensive lines of all time.

He was voted the team's Outstanding Defensive Lineman by the Los Angeles Rams Alumni in 1962, '64, '65, and '66.

He was also in seven straight Pro Bowls, from 1964 to 1970, and was selected to an eighth after the 1972 season with the San Diego Chargers.

Jones won consensus All-Pro honors five straight years from 1965 through 1969 and was second-team All-Pro in 1964, 1970, and 1972.

Along the way, Jones was named the Associated Press NFL Defensive Player of the Week four times: week 14, 1967; week 12, 1968; week 11, 1969; and week 10, 1970.

An extremely durable player, Jones missed only six games of a possible 196 regular-season encounters in his 14 National Football League seasons.

Jones was considered by many to revolutionize the position of defensive end.

He was credited with coining the phrase "sacking the quarterback".

He once stated that a quarterback being sacked devastated the offense in the same way that a city was devastated when it was sacked.

In 1971, Jones suffered a severely sprained arch, which caused him to miss four starts, and he ended the season with 4½ sacks, his career-low to that point.

Jones was traded along with Lee White and Greg Wojcik from the Rams to the San Diego Chargers for Jeff Staggs, a second-rounder in 1972 (30th overall) and a second and third-rounder in 1973 (31st and 60th overall) on January 29, 1972.

He was named San Diego's defensive captain and led all Chargers' defensive linemen in tackles and won a berth on the AFC Pro Bowl squad.

He concluded his career with the Washington Redskins in 1974.

In the final game of his NFL career, the Redskins allowed him to kick the point-after-touchdown for the game's last score.

He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1980.

Jones specialized in sacks, a term that he coined.

Nicknamed "the Secretary of Defense", Jones is considered one of the greatest defensive players ever.

The Los Angeles Times called Jones "most valuable Ram of all time," and former Rams head coach George Allen called him the "greatest defensive end of modern football".

Jones was born in Eatonville, Florida, and lived in a four-bedroom house with his family of ten.

Jones attended Hungerford High School, where he played football, baseball, and basketball.

During high school, Jones developed a lump in his thigh and learned that it was a tumor; he had surgery to remove it by Dr. Ron Alegria.

Late in life, Jones told The San Diego Union-Tribune that when he was 14 years old, he witnessed a carload of white teenagers laughingly hit an elderly black woman with a watermelon.

The woman died days later from the injury, and Jones recalls that there was never a police investigation.

"Unlike many black people then, I was determined not to be what society said I was," Jones later recounted.

"Thank God I had the ability to play a violent game like football. It gave me an outlet for the anger in my heart."

In 1999, Jones provided a Los Angeles Times reporter with some other detailed imagery about his forte: "You take all the offensive linemen and put them in a burlap bag, and then you take a baseball bat and beat on the bag. You're sacking them, you're bagging them. And that’s what you're doing with a quarterback."

What separated Jones from every other defensive end was his speed and his ability to make tackles from sideline to sideline, which was unheard of in his time.

He also was the first pass rusher to use the head slap, a move that he said was, "to give myself an initial head start on the pass rush, in other words an extra step. Because anytime you go upside a man's head … or a woman; they may have a tendency to blink they [sic] eyes or close they eyes. And that's all I needed."

"The head slap was not my invention, but Rembrandt, of course, did not invent painting. The quickness of my hands and the length of my arms, it was perfect for me. It was the greatest thing I ever did, and when I left the game, they outlawed it."