Duane Thomas was a valuable running back and non-conformist in a league that valued conformity more than it did talent.
Thomas had two seasons with the Dallas Cowboys and was their leading rusher in both. In his rookie season, they reached the Super Bowl for the first time. In his second season, they won it.
The Cowboys traded Thomas after both title games because he wanted a pay raise. They preferred to get rid of him rather than renegotiate his contract.
Thomas led the NFL in average yards per carry (5.3) as a rookie in 1970 and in total touchdowns (13) and rushing touchdowns (11) in 1971. Against the St. Louis Cardinals, he scored four touchdowns in the 1971 regular-season finale.
On the run
Born and raised in South Dallas, Thomas was a teen when his parents, John and Loretta, died less than a year apart. He moved in with relatives.
Regarding those teen years, Thomas said to Gary Cartwright of Texas Monthly magazine in 1971, “Both of my parents were dead and I traveled a lot. This aunt in Los Angeles … This aunt in Dallas … You travel, you see things. One night, I slept next to a dead man on a railroad track, only I didn’t know he was dead. You see things and you start to relate … I met the Great Cosmos out there.”
(According to Cartwright, “The Great Cosmos was Duane’s attempt to express the inexpressible, and he used the term like a new toy. It was an interchangeable expression of faith and fear, of love and loneliness, of infinite acceptance and eternal rejection, a gussied-up extraterrestrial slang that still hovered painfully near his South Dallas streets.”)
“When I was young, hobos used to come and sleep on our porch,” Thomas told the Boston Globe. “We might not have anything but beans and cornbread but we always shared what we had.”
Thomas played football at Lincoln High School in South Dallas. He reminded observers of Abner Haynes, who played for Lincoln a decade earlier and went on to lead the American Football League (AFL) in rushing touchdowns for three consecutive seasons (1960-62).
Lincoln head coach Floyd Iglehart told Gary Cartwright, “I guess you could call Duane a loner. The only thing that boy liked to do was run. All the time … Running, by himself. Running from home to school, running back home, running over to his girlfriend’s house at night.”
Thomas and his girlfriend married while in high school after she got pregnant. They had a daughter and later a son, according to Texas Monthly.
Happy days
Thomas went to college at West Texas A&M in the panhandle town of Canyon, 375 miles from Dallas. He averaged six yards per carry in four seasons.
The Cowboys chose Thomas in the first round of the 1970 NFL draft. (The Cardinals took the first running back, Texas A&M’s Larry Stegent, who then tore up his knees.)
Cowboys head coach Tom Landry was ecstatic about Thomas being available when Dallas’ turn came with the 23rd pick. “We have unlimited feeling for Thomas,” Landry told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “He’s the type running back that doesn’t come along every year … If we’d gone into the draft with only one (player) to come out with, he’s the one we wanted … This guy doesn’t lack anything.”
Asked his reaction to being drafted by Dallas, Thomas said to the newspaper, “There’s nothing like home sweet home. I’m so excited I can hardly think.”
Thomas signed a three-year contract. According to Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray, Thomas got base salaries of $18,000 in 1970, $20,000 in 1971 and $22,000 in 1972. Thomas also got a $25,000 signing bonus, plus a bonus for making the team as a rookie.
Robust rookie
Calvin Hill and Walt Garrison opened the 1970 season as the Cowboys’ starting running backs, with Thomas primarily returning kickoffs. (He averaged 22 yards on 19 returns.) In October, Thomas moved into the starting backfield. The rookie led the 1970 Cowboys in rushing (803 yards) and rushing touchdowns (five).
“Thomas is the best we’ve ever had as far as hitting all types of plays and being able to go all the way on them,” Landry told The Sporting News.
Football writer Bob Oates observed, “When daylight appears in a football line, even a crack of light, his acceleration is breathtaking.” Jim Murray wrote, “He didn’t really run; he just sort of flowed, like syrup over a waffle.”
In describing what it was like to carry a football as a NFL running back, Thomas told Gary Cartwright, “It’s like moving in a shadow … in a dream … where everything is real slow and yet so fast you don’t think about it … Then you see some light and you go for it.”
The 1970 Cowboys qualified for the playoffs and Thomas carried them to wins over the Detroit Lions (135 yards rushing) and San Francisco 49ers (143 yards rushing and two touchdowns _ one rushing and the other receiving).
“Thomas is great at cutting back on power sweeps,” columnist Dick Young noted in The Sporting News. “Here’s a guy who picks up the most casual six, eight yards a try I ever saw.”
In the third quarter of the Super Bowl against the Baltimore Colts, the Cowboys were ahead, 13-6, and on the verge of delivering a knockout punch. On first down from the Baltimore 2-yard line, Thomas took a handoff, got inside the 1, twisted and tried to get across the goal line, but linebacker Mike Curtis stripped the ball out of his hands and cornerback Jim Duncan recovered. The Colts rallied and won, 16-13.
Hard feelings
Based on the overall success of his first season, Thomas wanted to be paid more than the $20,000 his contract called for him to receive in 1971. He asked the Cowboys to renegotiate and they refused.
Upset with the response, Thomas held a news conference in July 1971 and criticized Cowboys management. He said Landry was “so plastic, just not a man at all.” He called team president Tex Schramm “sick, demented and completely dishonest” and said player personnel director Gil Brandt was “a liar.”
“I had all the freedom of a Negro slave,” Thomas said to the Boston Globe.
The Cowboys shipped Thomas, lineman Halvor Hagen and defensive back Honor Jackson to the New England Patriots for running back Carl Garrett and a No. 1 draft pick.
At his first training camp practice with the 1971 Patriots, Thomas clashed with head coach John Mazur when asked to set up in a three-point stance. Thomas went into a two-point stance instead. According to The Sporting News, Thomas told Mazur, “This is the way I was taught at Dallas. They said you could see the linebackers better from a two-point stance.”
Mazur insisted a three-point stance was better. Thomas replied, “That may be but I’m doing it my way.”
(Years later, Thomas recalled to the Boston Globe, “I was in a two-point stance because it gives a better view of a handoff. I was behind [fullback] Jim Nance, and I couldn’t see. His ass was the size of a volleyball court.”)
Mazur ordered Thomas to leave the field, then went to general manager Upton Bell and said he wanted Thomas off the team.
When Bell called the Cowboys about rescinding the trade, Tex Schramm said no, but NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle intervened and brokered a compromise, the Boston Globe reported. The Cowboys returned Garrett and the No. 1 draft pick to the Patriots, who sent Thomas and two high draft picks to Dallas. The Patriots kept Hagen and Jackson.
With the Cowboys still unwilling to renegotiate his contract, Thomas refused to report. The Cowboys placed him on their reserve list without pay.
In late September 1971, Thomas agreed to return to the team.
Championship run
The player the Cowboys traded in July and reluctantly relented to take back led them in rushing (793 yards) and total touchdowns scored (13) in 1971, even though he played in just 11 of their 14 games.
One of those games was a 44-21 Cowboys victory against the Patriots. Thomas ignited the rout with a 56-yard touchdown run for the first score of the game. Landry described Thomas as “tremendous,” The Sporting News reported.
Another highlight came Dec. 18, 1971, in the Cowboys’ 31-12 triumph against the Cardinals at Dallas. Thomas scored three touchdowns rushing and another receiving. One of the touchdown runs was of 53 yards. The touchdown catch, on a screen play, went 34 yards. “Thomas zigzagged behind blockers, cut back to the middle and scored easily,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Game stats and Video
Throughout the season, Thomas refused to talk with the media because he thought it had taken management’s side in his contract squabble. Years later, he told the Boston Globe, “The NFL controlled the media. That’s how they kept players in line _ through fear, which is an old slave tactic. Pit one against the another … Tom (Landry) would tell you one thing and the media something else.”
Thomas helped the Cowboys repeat as NFC champions, scoring touchdowns in playoff victories versus the Minnesota Vikings and San Francisco 49ers.
In the Super Bowl against the Miami Dolphins, Thomas rushed for 95 yards and a touchdown in Dallas’ 24-3 victory, earning a winner’s share of $15,000.
Moving around
At training camp in July 1972, Thomas again threatened to sit out unless his base pay was raised. Again, the Cowboys traded him _ to the San Diego Chargers for wide receiver Billy Parks and running back Mike Montgomery.
“I’m not going to try and change Duane Thomas,” Chargers head coach Harland Svare said to The Sporting News. “He won’t be expected to stand and salute.”
Thomas never played a regular-season game for the Chargers. He eventually was put on the reserve list in 1972 and traded to the Washington Redskins for two high draft picks in 1973.
Thomas played two seasons (1973-74) with Washington. One of his best performances came on Sept. 22, 1974, when he rushed for 96 yards against the Cardinals, who won, 17-10. Game stats
After playing a few games for Hawaii of the World Football League in 1975, Thomas worked a variety of jobs, including as an avocado farmer in California, before settling in the Village of Oak Creek near Sedona, Arizona.
“I was living in my own little world,” Thomas told Jim Murray. “I was making the world up as I went along.”
RetroSimba 
That musta been one uncomfortable Cowboys locker room after Thomas returned. Kudos to Landry for being called “plastic” and apparently not taking it personally. I like that Thomas likened his disagreement with management over an increase in salary to slavery especially because at the time players weren’t making much. Thomas’s strategy as a youngster of running everywhere hits home. I think it does wonders for mental health, to stay ahead, whether by actually physically running or running in the mind to stay ahead of crippling doubts that can result in depression.
Yes, there were many sides to that relationship between Duane Thomas and Tom Landry. In January 1972, Landry said to The Sporting News, “You tell Duane something, he gets it, and does it. He opens up when I talk to him, and we’ve talked by the hour.” In 1987, when Thomas came to Cowboys training camp to do research for a book. Landry met with Thomas and was generous with the time he gave him. “We get along very well,” Landry told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In a 2016 interview with the Sedona Red Rock News, Thomas said of Landry, “He was very meticulous with detail, which was great with me, because that was more my background.”
I agree with you on how running, or walking, or just being in motion rather than long periods of sitting, is good for the mind and soul as well as for the body.
With Duane Thomas you can only keep repeating, “what if.” What if that controversial fumble by Duane Thomas in Super Bowl V never happened? What if Duane Thomas had the patience to play out his original contract with Cowboys and then seek a big pay raise? What if… It’s pretty amazing how till this day some people place Duane Thomas only behind Jim Brown, Gayle Sayers and O.J. Simpson. The Cowboys should forever be grateful that then Commissioner Pete Rozelle sent Duane Thomas back to Dallas. Because one of the compensation picks they received was Robert Newhouse.
Thanks for the info about running back Robert Newhouse being drafted by the Cowboys with one of the compensation picks received in the restructured trade with the Patriots. I didn’t know that.
You are right about what if. Upton Bell, the Patriots general manager who made the trade for Thomas, said to the New York Times, “Thomas, with his size, speed, football intelligence and blocking ability, was the great ‘what if’ in all sports.”
You also are right about how often Thomas was compared with the all-time best rushers.
Jim Brown, who briefly was an adviser to Thomas, told columnist Dick Young in January 1972, “He’s one of the best runners in history, and just wants to be paid that way. He is the most gifted runner in football today.”
Abner Haynes said to the Boston Globe that Thomas “had the tools like Jim Brown and myself.”
Chargers head coach Harland Svare said the only rusher with more skills than Duane Thomas was Jim Brown, The Sporting News reported.
In an August 1978 piece, Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote, “Nobody ever ran with a football any better than Duane Thomas. Not Red Grange, George Gipp, O.J. Simpson, Gale Sayers, Tom Harmon, Mr. Outside or Mr. Inside, the Four Horsemen, Jim Brown or Bronco Nagurski … If Gale Sayers was magic, Duane Thomas was poetry.”
I’m going to have to put my foot down when it comes to writing about Cowboys, Mark. :)
Well, I get it, Gary, but at least, in this case, it’s a story about a rebellious Cowboys player.
I’m sure it will shock you to learn that Duane Thomas told the Boston Globe that some members of Cowboys management “were John Birchers” when he played. Think much has changed?
Here’s a Rams-related Duane Thomas item: On Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 25, 1971, with the score tied at 21-21 in the fourth quarter, Duane Thomas scored the winning touchdown for the Cowboys on a five-yard sweep against the Los Angeles Rams at Dallas.
A confused Rams defense was out of position on the play. “We audibilized,” Rams head coach Tommy Prothro told the Los Angeles Times, “but some of the players didn’t hear the audible. Some were in one defense and others in another.”
Still, cornerback Gene Howard had “an easy tackle” but missed Thomas, the Times reported.
Regarding Thomas’ touchdown, Tom Landry told the newspaper, “I thought it was a great effort as he had no room and no blocking.” https://www.pro-football-reference.com/boxscores/197111250dal.htm
Were there no lawyers in Dallas in the early ’70s? Just imagine a press conference two weeks before the Superbowl in which the mouthpiece says, “Mr. Thomas cherishes the opportunity to play for wonderful gentlemen such as Coach Landry and Messrs. Schramm and Brandt. However, at these prices Renaissance architecture has captured his interest over football, so he’s in Florence until spring.” That’s what Jerry Kapstein would have said.
Yep, Jerry Kapstein negotiated some pretty favorable contracts for his baseball clients, and something tells me Duane Thomas would have liked Florence, Italy.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the representatives who did the negotiations that led to Thomas’ three-year contract with the Cowboys were Norm Young and Lou Edney of Probus Management of White Plains, N.Y. Thomas dropped them in 1971 and hired as his representative Chuck DeKeato of Los Angeles, the Star-Telegram reported. Thomas used several different people to represent him after that.
Thomas had guts to speak out like he did, without backpedaling on his statements. No retraction. No “taken out of context.” No “mainstream media misrepresenting the facts.”
I agree with you completely. He was a smart player and a stand-up guy.