Remembering football rebel Joe Don Looney | Frank's Place
The late running back from the '60s was ahead of his time.
Since he didn't fear death, the fact that his own played out like a verse from a 1950s teen-tragedy tune might have pleased Joe Don Looney.
The rebellious football hero died in 1988 when his Harley spun out on a hairpin highway curve, not far from the remote southwest Texas town of Study Butte.
"I'll never forget him, the leader of the pack."
Not only had Looney, 45, died before his time, he'd lived before it too.
His defiant career ended in 1968, just as a cultural revolution was sweeping away the conventions he never learned to abide.
A handsome, talented iconoclast whom one sportswriter later described as "a white Herschel Walker," Looney could have had fame, fortune, and a spot on Dancing With the Stars in this Age of Kardashian.
Instead, he fought the law and the law won.
"Never was a man more aptly named," New York Jets wideout George Sauer Jr. once said of Looney.
I recall the wonderful name and bizarre behavior as refreshing counterpoints to early 1960s conformity. Because Looney was such an oddity, an anti-authoritarian figure in a militaristic sport, he became a staple in the sports pages of Philadelphia, the city where his father had briefly been a star.
In 1940, rookie Eagles end Don Looney led the NFL in both receptions (58) and receiving yards (707). Until DeSean Jackson in 2008, he was the only NFL receiver with 100 yards in catches in his first two games.
Don Looney was a model player and citizen. Following football, he became an avatar of the authority his son rejected - an NFL official, oil-company executive, bank director.
Born in 1942, Joe Don Looney was a rare physical specimen. Six-foot-one and 230 pounds, he ran 100 yards in 9.8 seconds, could squat-lift 450 pounds, and drew comparisons to Jim Brown.
But by the time he burst into national prominence at Oklahoma in 1962, he'd already dropped out of Texas, been kicked out of TCU, and enrolled at junior college.
According to Dallas' D magazine, Oklahoma was losing, 3-0, to Syracuse when Looney, on the bench, approached Sooners coach Bud Wilkinson.
"If you want to win the game," he told him, "you'd better put me in."
When the stunned coach hesitated, Looney inserted himself, told the quarterback to "gimme the ball," and galloped 63 yards for the winning touchdown.
Powerful and swift, he was an all-American running back that year. But in 1963 Looney punched a graduate-assistant coach and was booted off the team.
His ample resumé of erratic behavior didn't deter the New York Giants from making him their No. 1 pick (12th overall) in the 1964 NFL draft. Things didn't go well.
Before the team's first exhibition game, and not long after the "shape up or ship out" lecture he got from quarterback Y.A. Tittle, Looney was traded to Baltimore. He'd been a Giant for 28 days.
"He owed the team so much in fines," team spokesman Dan Smith told reporters, "he couldn't afford to play for us."
As with every coach he played for, Looney had chafed under Allie Sherman's discipline.
"If practice makes perfect and perfection is unattainable," Looney once said, "why do I have to practice?"
That attitude was anathema in an era when Vince Lombardi was the model NFL coach. When a player was ordered to jump, the only acceptable response was "How high?"
That wasn't Looney. As football historian Michael McCambridge pointed out, his reaction would more likely be, "Why should I jump?" "Why do I need to jump now?" "What is me jumping going to do for the cause?"
He played sparingly under Colts coach Don Shula, even less after he was arrested on assault charges in November 1964.
No stereotypical flower child, Looney supported Barry Goldwater in that year's presidential race. He got into an argument with a couple who backed LBJ. Hours after their spat ended, Looney broke into the couple's apartment and physically assaulted them. He was fined $100 and given a year's probation.
When a locker-room fight with teammate John Diehl soon followed, Looney was dealt to Detroit for linebacker Dennis Gaubatz.
"The Colts made a hell of a deal," Looney said.
He had a decent first season with the Lions - 356 yards and nine TDs in nine games - but in 1966, the rebel resurfaced. When coach Harry Gilmer tried sending him into a game with a play for quarterback Milt Plum, Looney refused.
"If you want a messenger boy," he told Gilmer, "call Western Union."
Soon he was a Washington Redskin. He played 14 games there over two seasons and was released.
By then, the draft-eligible Looney's Army reserve unit had been called up and he wound up in Vietnam. Though he filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all American soldiers sent there, he spent a year in Southeast Asia.
Returning in 1969, Looney signed with the New Orleans Saints. After three games and three rushes - for minus-3 yards - he was done.
"Given his immense talent," the website Monday Morning Quarterback later noted, "Looney's NFL career was remarkably unremarkable."
Loosed into a world where he was never going to fit, Looney saw his life get even stranger in his last few decades.
He got heavily into guns and was arrested for possessing an illegal machine gun. He used and sold drugs. He trained elephants, took up yoga, lived in an Indian ashram, and developed a host of bizarre ideas about food, including one that had him drinking his own urine.
Like most of Philadelphia, I'd forgotten about Looney until a September night in 1988 when, browsing the Inquirer's news services, I read about his death.
"Looney," that Associated Press report understated, "had a checkered college and pro career."
And the great misfortune to have had it take place in a plain-white era.