In 1982, before the final game of his 13-year career, D.D. Lewis, a durable and charismatic linebacker who was part of the Dallas Cowboys’ so-called Doomsday Defense, ventured a reason for the team’s remarkable run of success, which included victories in two of the five Super Bowls he played in.
“Texas Stadium has a hole in the roof, so God can watch his favorite team,” he said on national television, referring to the gap left in the team’s new home in Irving, Texas, which opened in 1971, when plans for a retractable roof were scrapped. “We have a direct link to God because Tom Landry is our coach.”
He had heard teammates joke about God peeking in at Cowboy home games. But he made the sentiment his own in the days before the National Football Conference championship game that January, and it became what he was best known for.
“And now when I go sign autographs,” he said on the “Pro Players’ Elite Network” podcast in 2018, “they want me to put that on the picture.”
Lewis first became an integral part of the Cowboys on special teams, where he found ways in the dangerous scramble of kickoffs and punts to spring the team’s returners and chase down those on the other teams.
“You have to go with abandon on those teams,” he told The Associated Press in 1972. “You have to have wild people. I have to admit, it scares me a little.”
In 1973, he got his chance to start on defense when the outside linebacker Chuck Howley retired. He remained there for nine seasons, winning the approval of the middle linebacker Lee Roy Jordan, the Cowboys’ defensive leader, who died in August.
“One reason we have done better is that we hit and pursue more now than we did at the beginning of the year,” Jordan told United Press International, reflecting on Lewis’s maturation from the start of the 1973 season.
Lewis died on Tuesday in Plano, Texas. He was 79.
His wife, Diane, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was kidney failure.
Dwight Douglas Lewis — he was named for two generals, Eisenhower and MacArthur — was born on Oct. 16, 1945, in Knoxville, Tenn. His father, Henry Lewis, was a printer, and his mother, Bessie (Wolfenbarger) Lewis, managed the home, which had four bedrooms to accommodate their 14 children, of whom D.D. was the youngest.
“My mama always told me we were a close family because they counted bodies per square inch,” he said in an interview with The South Bend Tribune in 2002.
He spent two weeks in jail after stealing a car when he was 13. He planned to drop out of high school and go to work, as his siblings had, until his nephew Robert E. Lee, who was playing on the football team, urged him to join.
“I said, ‘Robert, they’re going to kill me, I’m 145 pounds,’” he said in 2002. But on his first day of practice, when he was installed at middle linebacker, he flattened and bloodied another player with a hit, knocking out some of his teeth. He later recalled coaches rushing to congratulate him and saying: “Good job! We love it!”
“I found a home for my aggression,” he said in a speech to the Fayetteville Rotary Club in Tennessee, excerpted in a 2021 production of the online “Cowboys Legends Show.” “I took it off the streets and put it in the athletic arena.”
He earned a scholarship to Mississippi State University, in Starkville, where he was named an All-American and the Southeastern Conference defensive player of the year in 1967. The Alabama coach Bear Bryant called Lewis the best linebacker in the country.
In 2001, he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame.
Lewis was selected by the Cowboys in the sixth round of the 1968 draft; after his rookie season, he served with the Tennessee National Guard for a year.
Writing on the nonprofit website Mississippi Today after Lewis’s death, Rick Cleveland described him as “a tackling machine” who, despite his success, had a recurring nightmare: “‘I’d be playing linebacker,’ he said, ‘and a big hole would open up in the line. And here’d come the running back and he’d just flatten me.’”
He didn’t live that nightmare much with the Cowboys. He started 132 of 134 games with Dallas; intercepted two passes in the Cowboys’ win over the Los Angeles Rams in the N.F.C. championship game in 1976; and helped the Cowboys win the Super Bowl in 1972 over the Miami Dolphins and in 1978 over the Denver Broncos. He played in 27 playoff games, still a Cowboys record. He never played on a losing team.
But after retiring in 1982, he felt lost. He struggled in the oil business. He abused drugs and alcohol. He eventually found sobriety and fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. He married Diane Walters, who had been his college sweetheart, in 1989.
“He was far more connected to the people in A.A. than he was to his teammates,” Ms. Lewis, his wife, said in an interview. “He certainly maintained friendships with them, but his heart was with the people in A.A.”
He worked as a salesman and executive with a fertilizer company and also hosted a celebrity golf tournament to raise money for the Greater Knoxville Boys & Girls Club, where he learned to swim and play table tennis as a boy as a refuge from his raucous household.
In addition to his wife, Lewis is survived by two daughters, Melna Borland and Victoria Lewis, from his marriage to Margaret Smith, which ended in divorce; a stepson, Brook Barnes; and three grandsons.
Before his last game, against the 49ers for the N.F.C. championship, he told reporters that he was visualizing “interceptions, the winning touchdown, everything.”
It didn’t turn out that way. On the final play, Lewis tried to catch the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana before he threw the touchdown pass to a leaping Dwight Clark with 58 seconds left that enabled the 49ers to win.
“If you ever see that play again, look for old No. 50 — slow motion, I am — chasing Montana,” he said to the Fayetteville Rotary Club. “I was getting out of the shower not long ago, and I’m drying off and I’m thinking, ‘Why didn’t you blitz on that play?’”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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