David D. “Deacon” Jones (December 9, 1938 – June 3, 2013) was a NFL Defensive End for the Los Angeles Rams, San Diego Chargers and the Washington Redskins. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1980.
Jones specialized in quarterback ‘sacks”, a term which he coined. Nicknamed the “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 Redskins head coach George Allen called him the “Greatest Defensive End of Modern Football”.
Jones was born in Eatonville, Florida. When he was 14 years old, he witnessed a carload of white teenagers laughingly hit an elderly black church woman with a watermelon. The woman died days later from the injury, and 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.”
Jones was considered by many to revolutionize the position of defensive end. Jones was credited with coining the phrase “sacking the quarterback”. In 1999, Jones provided an L.A. Times reporter with some 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 blinding 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 utilize the head slap, a move that he said was “…to give myself an initial headstart 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 Rembrant,, 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.”
Pro Football Weekly reported he accumulated 194½ sacks over his career, which would be third on the all-time sack list. (Jones would have ranked first all-time at the time of his retirement, and since has been surpassed by two fellow Hall of Famers Bruce Smith and Reggie White.)
In 1967, Jones had 26 sacks in only 14 games, which (if official) would stand as the single season record. (The term “sack” had not yet been coined at the time, and official sack statistics were not recorded by the NFL until 1982.) Then in 1968, Jones tallied 24 sacks in 14 games, also more than the current NFL record. The sum total of these two seasons would account for 50 sacks in 2 seasons by Jones, far more than anyone else has ever achieved
An extremely durable player, Jones missed only six games of a possible 196 regular-season encounters in his 14 National Football League seasons.
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