Cowboys’ mysterious running back Duane Thomas passes away at age 77
After a highly publicized contract dispute in which he dubbed Coach Tom Landry “plastic” and refused to speak with media, he led Dallas to its first Super Bowl victory.
Duane Thomas passed away on Sunday at his Sedona, Arizona, home. His career was cut short due to a widely publicized contract dispute with the Dallas Cowboys, which overshadowed his brief era of greatness as a running back in the early 1970s. He was seventy-seven.
A pulmonary embolism was the cause, according to his daughter Jamila Pamoja-Thomas.
When the Cowboys selected the quick, strong, and elusive Thomas from West Texas State University with the 23rd choice in the first round of the 1970 NFL draft, they had neither won a Super Bowl nor earned the moniker “America’s Team.”
The Associated Press was told by Thomas, a Dallas native, “I can’t believe how excited I am.”
He led the team in rushing yards in his rookie campaign (803 total), and he scored a touchdown in the Cowboys’ 16–13 Super Bowl V loss to the Baltimore Colts. After the defeat, Thomas responded with maturity well beyond his years, while his teammates remained reserved.
He told reporters, “There is something noble in defeat.” “You must first comprehend defeat in order to find victory.”
Two decades before the NFL implemented a full-fledged free agency system, which offered players greater bargaining power and significantly higher wages, Thomas vowed to retire in the summer before the 1971 season if the Cowboys would not renegotiate his contract. He blasted the team’s management at a press conference, calling general manager Tex Schramm “dishonest with me all along” and stoic head coach Tom Landry “so plastic, just not a man at all.”
The Cowboys traded Thomas to the New England Patriots during training camp that summer, escalating the conflict. John Mazur, the team’s head coach, insisted that Thomas line up in the conventional three-point stance prior to a play rather than standing straight, as he had done in Dallas, but Thomas refused.
In an interview on Wednesday, Upton Bell, the general manager of the Patriots at the time, recalled that “the coach kicked him off the field.” (Bell, who saw Thomas play at West Texas State, had been the Colts’ personnel director and had traded for Thomas.) “Jim Brown, O.J. Simpson, and Gale Sayers were the three best players I ever saw in college,” Bell continued. “And Thomas, with his size, speed, football acumen, and blocking prowess, was the ultimate ‘what if?’ in all sports.”
Thomas was traded back to Dallas, where he remained unsigned until the beginning of the 1971 season, thanks to N.F.L. commissioner Pete Rozelle’s intervention at the Patriots’ request.
Despite this, he had a successful season, gaining 793 yards on 175 carries and recording 11 touchdowns, which led the league. In January, the Cowboys made their Super Bowl comeback, winning 24-3 over Miami. With 95 yards of rushing, Thomas led both teams. He also scored a touchdown to give Dallas a 16-3 lead. It was Dallas’s inaugural Super Bowl triumph.
For a time, Thomas’s adviser was Jim Brown, the civil rights activist and former Cleveland Browns superstar.
Thomas’s stance — and his willingness to sacrifice his career — was “part of a larger narrative of Black athletes challenging how labor was treated,” Robert Bennett III, a professor of health, exercise and sports studies at Denison University who is writing a book about activist Black football players in the 1960s and ’70s, wrote in an email.
He compared Thomas to Curt Flood, the All-Star center fielder who challenged baseball’s labor system, under which the reserve clause contractually tied players to their teams year after year unless they were traded or sold. (Flood’s case ended in 1972 with the United States Supreme Court leaving the clause undisturbed. But free agency came to baseball through an arbitrator’s ruling three years later.)
Thomas hadn’t spoken to reporters throughout the 1971 season, believing that they had sided with management during his holdout. And when he rebuffed a reporter in the locker room after the Super Bowl, Landry defended him.
“His sole object is to be prepared to play football,” Landry told The A.P. “He does it his own way. He doesn’t like any distractions. At meetings, he says maybe two words. He seldom is not ready to play.”
Duane Julius Thomas was born on June 21, 1947, in Dallas. His father, John, was a carpenter who also rented out homes. His mother, Lauretta (Jones) Thomas, was a housekeeper.
Duane was a star at Lincoln High School in Dallas before being recruited by West Texas State, in Canyon, where he played in the backfield with Mercury Morris, the future Miami Dolphins star. In his senior year, Thomas gained 1,072 yards, the 10th-highest total in the country among college running backs.
When Thomas was drafted by the Cowboys, Red Hickey, a team scout, told The A.P. that Thomas could “run over you or he can run around you.”
“He probably has more weave, more moves than Hill,” he added, referring to Calvin Hill, a running back Dallas had drafted a year earlier.
As talented as Thomas was, he didn’t stay with the Cowboys past the 1971 season. After skipping practice and two team meetings, he was traded to the San Diego (now Los Angeles) Chargers during training camp in the summer of 1972.
“I could justify illness,” Landry told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “but I can’t justify somebody not showing up just because they didn’t feel like it.”
Thomas never played for the Chargers because of a dispute with their coach, Harland Svare, over, among other things, a lackluster practice; he was traded in July 1973, during training camp, to the Washington Redskins (now Commanders), gaining only 442 yards over the 1973 and ’74 seasons. When he did not report to training camp in 1975, he was released.
Over the next few years, Thomas attempted comebacks with the Honolulu Hawaiians of the World Football League, the Cowboys, the British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League and the Green Bay Packers. But nothing lasted.
After his football career, he earned a living by signing autographs at shows, growing avocados on a farm in Ojai, Calif., and painting portrait landscapes. He also collaborated with the sportswriter Paul Zimmerman on a book, “Duane Thomas and the Fall of America’s Team” (1988).
In addition to Ms. Pamoja-Thomas, Thomas is survived by his wife, Tapzyana Thomas; three other daughters, Hisani Thomas, Aisha Thomas and Naeemah Thomas-Riley; three sons, Awali and Duane, from his marriage to Imani Pamoja, which ended in divorce, and Hassan Speed, from a relationship with Racheal Speed; a stepson, Sheloman Byrd, from his second marriage; a sister, Jocelyn Thomas; a brother, Bertrand; 15 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
For Thomas, his silence had been “my way of performing, of telling people I still didn’t agree with what the Cowboys were doing,” he once told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.
“It was a way of protesting my treatment in a quiet way,” he added.
Professor Bennett said he viewed Thomas as a player who “sought control over himself.”
“He was his own man,” he said, “considering the times.”
