Lee Roy Jordan, a middle linebacker convinced that the foundation of success was hitting your teammates in practice just as hard as you hit opposing players on game day — a philosophy that made enemies but also boosted his college and professional teams to championships — has died. He was 84.
The Dallas Cowboys, his team for his entire 14-year pro career, announced his death on Saturday without providing further details.
Jordan was named an All-Pro linebacker twice, and he appeared in five Pro Bowls and three Super Bowls, one of which the Cowboys won, in 1972.
Known as much for leadership as talent, he was never elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He can be given partial credit, however, for a more team-oriented honor.
In the time between 1966, when he became a regular starter for the Cowboys, until the end of 1976, when he retired, the team had a winning record every season. Jordan’s grit and competence made him captain of the defense.
Those same qualities became understood as so intrinsic to the Cowboys organization that, in 1978, the team became known by an enduring nickname: “America’s Team.”
Jordan was undersized, at 6 feet 1 inch and 215 pounds. He developed his work ethic growing up as the youngest of four boys on a farm in rural Alabama and by becoming a model player, and team captain, for the hard-driving coach Paul (Bear) Bryant of the University of Alabama.
“I never had another one like Lee Roy Jordan,” Bryant wrote in “Bear: The Hard Life and Good Times of Alabama’s Coach Bryant,” a 1974 memoir. “He would have made every tackle on every play if they had stayed in bounds.”
From 1960 to 1962, when Jordan played for the Crimson Tide, the team lost only twice and won both the Sugar Bowl and the Orange Bowl. During the whole 1961 season, the defense allowed only three touchdowns.
Jordan, who was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983, was selected by the Cowboys in the first round of the National Football League draft in 1963.
He sometimes seemed to run the Cowboys defense single-handedly.
Coaches on the sideline would try to call a play. Jordan would look, laugh and then turn to his teammates in a huddle and give directions of his own.
He growled exhortations: “Who’s going to make the play? Who’s it going to be?” He issued commandments: “Man, they are not going to score. We’re gonna kick their butts.”
Drew Pearson, a Hall of Fame wide receiver with the Cowboys, recalled to the author Peter Golenbock for his 1997 book “Cowboys Have Always Been My Heroes: The Definitive Oral History of America’s Team” that Jordan would start fights with players he thought were “sloughing off.”
“Even today I see him, and it sometimes sends chills down my spine,” Pearson said. Tom Landry, the Cowboys coach, was widely regarded as a brilliant football tactician, “but he wasn’t the motivator,” Pearson said. “Lee Roy was that guy.”
Jordan cultivated what he called “intestinal fortitude” by always maintaining the same level of intensity. He practiced his ferocious tackling style on his own teammates.
Rumors spread of Jordan using racial slurs when alone with white teammates. He insisted that he treated people on a colorblind basis dependent only on their commitment to winning. Among those most admiring of his leadership were some Black teammates, like cornerback Mel Renfro.
Early on, the Cowboys had the reputation of big-game losers who could not make the Super Bowl. They finally did, thanks in part to a lunging Jordan interception that led to a touchdown in a conference championship game against the San Francisco 49ers. But then, in the 1971 Super Bowl, they lost to the Baltimore Colts in the final seconds.
Jordan predicted that the Cowboys would return to the Super Bowl the next year. They did. The defense held the Miami Dolphins to 3 points on their way to a dominant victory.
In the Cowboys oral history, offensive lineman John Wilbur called Jordan “a dirty, mouthy guy”; “the redneck of the team”; and “the team snitch.”
“But I’ll tell you what,” Wilbur added. “He was a hell of a guy to have on your team. He played hard and was a great team leader.”
Lee Roy Jordan was born on April 27, 1941, in Excel, a town of about 300 people in south-central Alabama. His parents, Walter and Cleo Jordan, ran a farm with livestock and a variety of crops. They had no electricity until Lee Roy was 12. He often rode to and from school on a horse.
“A football game’s still like a day off to me,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1975. “I grew up picking cotton.”
In college biology, Lee Roy met a fellow student named Mary “Biddie” Banks. She later married him wearing a veil knit by Coach Bryant’s wife, also named Mary. They had three sons and many grandchildren.
After retiring, Jordan ran a Dallas lumber supply company. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
In 2009, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram asked Jordan where he kept his Super Bowl ring. He replied that he wore it daily and, because of an injury to his right hand, had to use it in lieu of a wedding ring.
He added, “My wife was awful nice to let me do that.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
The post Lee Roy Jordan, Ferocious Linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, Dies at 84 appeared first on New York Times.
