Duane Thomas, Enigmatic Running Back for the Cowboys, Dies at 77
He led Dallas to its first Super Bowl victory after engaging in a well-publicized contract dispute in which he called Coach Tom Landry “plastic” and refused to talk to reporters.
Duane Thomas, whose brief period of brilliance as a running back with the Dallas Cowboys in the early 1970s was overshadowed by a highly publicized contract dispute with the team that ended up shortening his career, died on Sunday at his home in Sedona, Ariz. He was 77.
His daughter Jamila Pamoja-Thomas said the cause was a pulmonary embolism.
The Cowboys had not yet won a Super Bowl or been nicknamed “America’s Team” when they drafted the fast, powerful and elusive Thomas from West Texas State University as the 23rd pick in the first round of the N.F.L. draft in 1970.
“I’m so excited, I can’t think,” Thomas, a Dallas native, told The Associated Press.
In his rookie season, he led the team with 803 rushing yards and caught a touchdown in the Cowboys’ 16-13 loss to the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl V. While his teammates were subdued after that loss, Thomas reacted with wisdom beyond his years.
“There is something noble in defeat,” he told reporters. “You cannot find victory unless you first understand defeat.”
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In the summer before the 1971 season — two decades before a full-fledged free agency system in the N.F.L. gave players more leverage, and much higher salaries — Thomas threatened to retire if the Cowboys did not renegotiate his contract. At a news conference, he blistered the team’s management, calling Tom Landry, the stoic head coach, “so plastic, just not a man at all” and Tex Schramm, the general manager, “dishonest with me all along.”
The dispute escalated: The Cowboys traded Thomas during training camp that summer to the New England Patriots. Thomas and the team’s head coach, John Mazur, disagreed on Mazur’s insistence that Thomas line up in the traditional three-point stance before a play, rather than stand upright, as he had in Dallas.
“The coach kicked him off the field,” Upton Bell, the Patriots’ general manager at the time, recalled in an interview on Wednesday. (Bell had traded for Thomas and had been the personnel director of the Colts when he saw Thomas play at West Texas State.) “The three greatest players I saw in college were Jim Brown, O.J. Simpson and Gale Sayers,” Bell added, “and Thomas, with his size, speed, football intelligence and blocking ability, was the great ‘what if?’ in all sports.”
With Pete Rozelle, the N.F.L. commissioner, intervening at the request of the Patriots, Thomas was traded back to Dallas, where he continued to hold out for a new contract until early in the 1971 season.
He nevertheless had a productive season, rushing for 793 yards on 175 carries and scoring a league-leading 11 touchdowns. The Cowboys went on to return to the Super Bowl in January, defeating Miami, 24-3. Thomas led both teams in rushing, with 95 yards, and had scored a touchdown to put Dallas ahead, 16-3. It was Dallas’s first Super Bowl victory.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.”
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