Joe Delaney... Don't Let the Memory Fade
Posted 9-24-02
by CK Rairden
Landmark Columnist

"If this just saves one child ..it will all be worth it."

It's been stated a thousand times, usually as rhetoric with no substance. I know a substantive story where one child was saved, at a cost most would not be willing to bear. A bit over 19 years ago, a young 24-year old man had everything going for him. His career had taken off, he had a loving wife and three children and his future was mapped out in the National Football League. On June 29, 1983 that all changed with three children's cries for help. At Chennault Park in Monroe, Louisiana this young NFL athlete answered a call to be extraordinary.

Joe Delaney had beaten all the odds for his entire life. Discouraged by his father to pursue his dreams of playing football, Joe went on to star at the small college of Northwestern State University. He was noticed by the Kansas City Chiefs and selected in the second round of the 1981 draft. He rewarded the Chiefs franchise, then at a lowly state throughout the league, with a record setting performance. He gained over 1,100 yards, played in the Pro Bowl, and was named the team MVP. In 1982, the strike-shortened season interrupted what was surely to be Delaney's second season of many successful campaigns in the NFL. The strike was settled and the Chiefs held hope for 1983, with plans for Delaney to return as the team's star running back. Then fate stepped in.

On that fateful June day in 1983, much of the hope for the Chiefs as a team was squelched. At the same time, much of the hope for mankind was lifted up, squarely on the shoulders of Joe Delaney. The scenario began when three kids had wandered into a "pond" and had gotten themselves into a life-threatening situation. The children were screaming for help. Joe was at that park and became an extraordinary hero in the blink of an eye. Reports are that Joe instructed others nearby to call for help, while he acted. You see Joe Delaney could not swim, but he knew without his intervention these children would surely perish in that pond of water in the park. Joe waded into the water and managed to get one of the boys to the bank of the body of water. That child was saved. Then as extraordinary heroes do, Joe went back for the other two children. He would never return from the water alive. The other two children he attempted to save also perished on this June day in 1983.

The term hero was properly redefined last September after being over used for trivial accomplishments for many years. This was not a trivial feat that Joe Delaney performed. He gave his life in an attempt to save three children that he did not know. His selfless act produced more results than he could have ever delivered on any football field. He managed to save one child's life at an extraordinary cost. His three children would grow up without a father and his young wife would be widowed. In this instance Joe Delaney's sacrifice saved one child and in his selfless thought process, it was worth it.

He was and is a hero and should not have been forgotten.

But for many years that's exactly what happened. Sure, there were television cameras and reporters covering the event for a few days in 1983. President Ronald Reagan recognized the sacrifice and awarded Joe the Presidential Citizen's Medal in July of 1983. Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt set aside Delaney's jersey No. 37 that year. A member of the Kansas City Chiefs will never again wear it. But too many folks in the Chiefs' organization forgot. His number is not in the Chiefs "Ring of Honor" that surrounds Arrowhead Stadium. And now two generations of Chiefs' fans know little of the small running back with the huge heart and the blazing speed. When you gaze upon the ring of honor that surrounds Arrowhead Stadium, you should see the raised black letters stating [37 Joe Delaney.] But still you don't, and that's a shame. Joe Delaney deserves that honor for his play with the team even though his time with the Chiefs was cut short due to his heroic act of self-sacrifice.

Memories of Joe Delaney Still Strong in His Hometown
July 21st, 2001
By JOE POSNANSKI
Columnist

HAUGHTON, La. -- They're all grown up, Joe. Can you believe it? Joanna packs her boxes, gets ready to head off to Louisiana State University to study medicine. Folks have told Joanna all her life that she should give up all that medicine stuff, girls from small towns deserve small dreams, but she just never listened to them. Why would she? Joanna is Joe Delaney's daughter.

Yes, Joanna's the last. The older Delaney daughters, Tamika and Crystal, already have children of their own. Now, Joanna leaves. The house feels so quiet and empty. Now, Carolyn Delaney can let herself cry just a little bit. She did it. She made it. It was 18 years ago, on a hot summer Wednesday, that Joe Delaney, star running back for the Kansas City Chiefs, jumped into a rain-filled pond to save drowning kids. He drowned.

When they told Carolyn, she shrieked and shivered so violently, the nurses had to sedate her. She lived in that fog for weeks: Wake up, scream and shiver, get a shot, collapse into deep sleep, wake up again. Carolyn does not remember Joe's funeral. All she remembers is a blur of cameras and reporters. And hopelessness. Life was over.

Then, past midnight one night that summer, Carolyn swayed back and forth on the rocking chair that Joe had bought for her and the baby. Joe came to her. "You have to be strong," the vision of Joe told her. "You have to move on with your live. Take care of our children. You have to be strong for them."

"I can't, Joe," Carolyn whispered.

"Yes, you can," Joe Delaney said. "I'll be with you."

"And then," Carolyn Delaney says now, 18 years later, "Joe disappeared. And I snapped out of it. He was right. I had to be strong. And I was strong every single day after that. That's what Joe would have wanted."

Joe. The trouble with all the incredible Joe Delaney stories is they all sound alike. A hundred or so people gather in Joe Delaney Park on Saturday, a family reunion of sorts. As part of the festivities, one of the adult Delaneys asks questions about Joe, offering dollar bills to any kids who know the answers. The children wildly raise their hands in the heat.

"Where did Joe go to school?"

"Northwest Louisiana!" a boy shouts and gets his dollar.

And then Delaney family and friends tell their Joe stories, and the stories all sound alike. He mowed this woman's lawn in the dead of Louisiana summer. He gave this person money to get through a bad stretch. He turned this child away from drugs. He checked in on this lonely man every single day, just to say hello.

"He had the biggest heart," his sister Alma says.

"Such a big heart," his twin sister Joanne says.

"Such a big heart," his sister Lucille says. That's the one thing everybody says about Joe. Big heart. Joe was the smallest boy on the streets of Haughton, son of a hot-tempered truck driver and a churchgoing mother. He dreamed only to play professional football.

The other kids laughed at his dream. The adults told him to learn a trade. Joe's father, Woodrow, told his son to stop this football foolishness, to go out and feed the hogs, do his chores, that was it, no more football. But then he would leave for work, and Joe's mother Eunice, with all the love in a mother's heart, would do Joe's chores while Joe scored touchdowns.

"I'm not going to lie, I thought he was crazy," Carolyn Delaney says. "I never thought he would play professional football. Nobody did. But he would not listen to anybody, not even me. He just kept saying, `I'm going to make it,' until I got too tired to argue with him."

He made it. And in his brief burst of time in the sunshine, Joe Delaney ran the football like no man has ever run in Kansas City. He had track-star speed, but what caught you was the way he attacked bigger men, ran fearlessly through tiny fractures of daylight.

The story goes that when Joe played football at Haughton High, there was a neighborhood dog named "King" who used to run alongside Joe during games. They scored so many touchdowns together that the announcer started calling them a team: "There goes Joe and his dog King, to the end zone again!"

"People were afraid to tackle Joe," Joanne says, "because they so were scared of that dog." That's how Joe ran all his life, like he had his dog King beside him. In his first season, he broke off an 82-yard run, and had a 193-yard game, and ran for more than 1,000 yards in the season. He played in the Pro Bowl.

And none of it changed Joe. He built a little house in Haughton, and he bought a sensible car, and he gave his mother a blank check, and he offered to help anybody who needed help, and in the evenings he would comb his daughters' hair on the porch, in the Louisiana breeze.

When Joe Delaney heard those kids screaming on June 29, 1983, at Chennault Park, he did what everybody who ever knew him knew he had to do. He jumped in to the pond. He could not swim, but he jumped in anyway. Two boys died. One lived. By the time Joe Delaney was pulled out, his heart had stopped beating.

Across America, Delaney was admired. President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Citizen's Medal. Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt quietly set aside Delaney's No. 37 to never be worn again. So it goes for heroes.

At home in Haughton, three daughters and a young wife waited for Joe Delaney.

Tamika. How much pain can one person endure? Tamika was 7 when her father jumped into the pond to save those boys. The other daughters have only vague memories of Joe, but Tamika can remember everything about him. The way he looked. The smile. The softness of his voice.

Yes, he talked so quietly. Sometimes, when the television cameras were on him, Joe would get flustered, start talking fast, but at home, he spoke softly and sparingly.

"You want Daddy to comb your hair?" he asked Tamika.

Tamika was the one who had to grow up fastest, the one who had to hear, more than anyone else, what a fine man Joe Delaney had been, the one who had to try to live up to his name. Every teacher at school, it seems, had taught Joe, and loved him. Every neighbor had a story about Joe Delaney.

Anytime she did anything at all, there was someone around to ask her, "Do you think Joe Delaney would want you to do that?"

She grew up. Found her way. Got married. Had two children of her own. Then, one day about three years ago, Tamika's husband Rodney was on vacation in Los Angeles. He was outside a club, when a gang fight broke out. Bullets flew. He was hit just once. Others in the nightclub that night were hit many times, and they survived. Rodney was hit once. He died.

How much pain can one person endure? Tamika moved back home for a little while, to get her head straight, to get her heart pumping again. She is back with her children now, doing the best she can.

"I helped her," Carolyn says, "because I had been there. I knew what she felt. And I told her, `You will find out that you are stronger than you think.' That's the thing. We are all stronger than we think."

Crystal. There is little doubt that Crystal, the middle daughter, is the one most like Joe Delaney. She looks like him, acts like him, even runs like him. When Eunice sees Crystal at church on Sundays, tears always well up in her eyes.

"She's just so much like Joe," Eunice says, and she can't go on.

It was Crystal who was most haunted by that day. She was only 4, but every day afterward she would stand by the window and wait for Joe to return. She called to every person who passed the house. A car would sound in the background and she would light up. "Daddy!" she screamed.

They kept trying to explain to Crystal how her father had died saving other children, how he would not come home again, but she would not listen. She kept looking out the window, refusing to leave, waiting and waiting.

"She just believed he was coming home," Carolyn says. "And there was no talking her out of it."

Finally, they took Crystal to a counselor, who suggested that the family take down all memories of Joe Delaney. So they took down all the photographs and newspaper articles and awards. They put away all his football equipment and his guitar.

Of course, that did not block out the past. But it did help Crystal stop staring out windows. She grew up, became a track star herself at Haughton High. She tried to break her father's records. She just missed. She did not break his records. He was too fast.

"That girl, I see Joe's soul in her," Eunice Delaney says.

She does not remember her father well. It's all blurs and whispers and things that people tell her. But she remembers how close he used to hold her. She's 23 now, has a son, D'Anthony, who is 3 years old. She already tells D'Anthony stories about his grandfather.

To this day, there are still no photographs of Joe Delaney anywhere in the house.

Joanna. Joe named her. He was so sure that she was going to be a boy. He would go around and tell people, "This time, it's a boy for sure." He said it so many times, that Carolyn herself had become convinced. At night, just before they fell asleep, he would say, "It's a boy, isn't it?"

And she would say, "Yes, it's definitely a boy."

Of course, it was a girl, and Joe picked the name. Joanna. Partly in honor of his twin sister, Joanne, who was so close to him that, when he got hurt on the football field, she felt pain. And partly so he could call her Jo Jo, which he did often those first four months.

Joanna marks the time. She is 18 now, which means it has been 18 years since Joe died. She does not remember him, but more than any of the other daughters, she studies him. She keeps a scrapbook of every article. She often asks Carolyn to tell the story of how she got her name.

"I've told you that story a million times," Carolyn says, but then she tells it again, and Jo Jo listens like it's the first time.

Carolyn. Something beautiful happened to Carolyn Delaney this week. She works as a driver for a casino, so she was driving this nice gentleman back to his hotel. They talked, and at some point he asked her name.

"Carolyn Delaney."

"Delaney. Delaney... that name. There was a football player Delaney. Played for the Kansas City Chiefs. Tried to save some drowning boys. Are you related to him?"

"He was my husband."

"Really?" the man asked. And the man started going on and on about what a nice man Joe Delaney was, how Joe signed an autograph for the man once, how Joe always smiled, how Joe talked so modestly, how Joe ran with such daring, on and on. You would think Carolyn has grown tired of such talk. No. She soaked it in, like Louisiana sunshine.

You see, Joe's old teammates don't call anymore. Neither do the coaches. There's is a whole generation of Chiefs fans who don't know Joe Delaney, and why would they? Joe Delaney is not even in the Chiefs Ring of Honor. How is that possible? At first, the Chiefs were so kind, they promised that Joe would not be forgotten. Truth is, she has not heard from the Chiefs in a long time.

"If I had a son, and he was drafted by the Chiefs, I would try to talk him out of going," she says sadly. "They forgot Joe. He gave his heart to them. And they forgot him."

Yes, these have been a hard 18 years for Carolyn, drenched with money problems and family squabbles and all the emptiness Joe left behind. She never remarried after Joe died. She never even dated. "How could I?" she asks. "He was my soul mate. You only get one soul mate."

She has seen the one survivor from that awful day -- LeMarkits Holland -- go to jail on a drug conviction. She has seen the people who promised to help her after Joe died disappear. She has watched her daughters grow up without a father, and sometimes it was almost unbearable.

But the hurt that won't go away, she says, is that Joe Delaney's memory fades away in Kansas City. There is one group, "37 Forever," that fights to keep his memory alive. She likes that. But the rest breaks her heart.

"I'll never go back to Kansas City," she says. "When I think of how much he loved the Chiefs...."

She stops. It's not good to talk about this. She would rather talk about the man in the van. She could have listened to him talk about Joe all night. But soon they came upon the hotel, and the man stepped out. "Your husband was a good man," the man said.

"Yes he was," Carolyn whispered.

They put numbers on telephone poles in little Louisiana towns, and by telephone pole 58 there's a small dirt road. Take it back about a half mile, over bumps and rocks, past weeds and dragonflies, you come upon a small cemetery, surrounded by crickets and baby Christmas trees.

This is where Joe Delaney is buried. There's a marble tombstone with his name and photograph on it, the years he lived, the people left behind. This tombstone also announces the proudest achievement of his life: That he was a running back for the Kansas City Chiefs during July 1981-June 1983.

Then, below it all, a verse: "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for another."

"I think if Joe knew exactly what would happen," Carolyn Delaney says, "he would have still jumped in to save those boys."

Carolyn says she has not seen a vision of Joe Delaney since that day on the porch 18 years ago. But she has heard him often. She has heard him say, "Do what you want, baby," and "Be strong for the children," and, "I'm here with you." She has heard him singing in church and cheering loud at Haughton High football games.

Here's what she heard him say this week: "The girls have grown up real well. Real well. You did good, Carolyn." And his voice made her cry. Because they are grown up. Joe Delaney has been gone for 18 years, but they're all still here, all of them, doing the very best they can. Carolyn and her daughters won't get any presidential awards for that. Then, not all heroes do.

Article taken from The Kansas City Star.com

Joe Delaney Stats

Running Back
Kansas City Chiefs
1981-1982
Born: 1958
1981 AFC Rookie of the Year