New sports stars whiz by so quickly these days that even the real ones seem to last only a season. Yet all the while Abner Haynes still sits up high and dry atop the pages of Chiefs history, untouched by time or fashion. Whatever else the culture that we know as sports today may be up to, there is always something special about being the first.
Haynes, who passed away this week at the age of 86, has the distinction of being the first great star of Lamar Hunt's Dallas Texans that three years later became the Kansas City Chiefs.
"Lil' Abner", as he was known — the name of a popular comic strip at the time — burst on the scene as the war between the American Football League and the National Football League was just heating up, and he did it in a city that boasted two teams going head-to-head for the fan's attention.
It was the Texans versus the Cowboys, but Haynes stood out to the extent that the Dallas Morning News would call him the "Most Popular Athlete in Big D." He had a popular song written about him that made the rounds on Dallas radio stations.
How big a star was he?
"There ought to be a law," wrote the heralded sports columnist Dan Jenkins, "Once a Week, a writer has to rave about Abner Haynes."
"He's performed some miraculous deeds with a football," wrote fellow columnist, the legendary Blackie Sherrod. "The memory box gets all cluttered. Just when you have one Haynes' running feat all memorized, along comes another and blots out the picture. Each one is prettier than the last."
Sam Blair, who covered the Texans for the Dallas Morning News, said of Haynes "What can you say after you've said fantastic, fabulous, amazing, marvelous, magnificent and, if you'll pardon the expression, great?"
"He was a franchise player before there were franchise players," said his coach, Hank Stram.
Why his memory still remains vivid when so many others have failed has largely to do with the place pro football suddenly had in a community that was just then rediscovering pro football.
Haynes was very much the focus of his team's offense in those early years. His was a freebooting style of running back that would come to characterize the AFL on offense — exuberant, expansive and risk-prone — one that was often heavy on the pass when compared to the staider NFL approach. He led the entire AFL in touchdowns, rushing attempts and yards, yards-per-rush and all-purpose yards (including tops in punt and kickoff returns) his rookie year. He led the league again in rushing in 1961, and in 1962, he recorded another first — gaining over 1,000 yards for the first time in team history (1,049) as the Texans were crowned American Football League champions in a double-overtime win over the Houston Oilers.
He was the league's first player of the year (an early version of MVP) and, at the same time, its first rookie of the year, too, and its first rushing champion. He was a three-time All-AFL pick, and he was colorful, just like the new league in which he played, in addition to being an owner of a wit as quick as his reflexes.
All these many years later, he still ranks high in many franchise rushing categories, and the most profitable seasons of his 8-year pro career were spent in Dallas and Kansas City.
There is, of course, plenty left of a player's life after his career is over, and Haynes wasted none of it. He was a long-time community activist, and his actions off the field were as substantial as what he did on it. He is still remembered in his hometown and to people who had known of him since his days as a Missouri Valley Conference great from North Texas State College. Perhaps more famously, he was one of two young Black men who had played on a rare integrated college team.
Fifty years after he had left the game of football, he nominated Chris Burford, his teammate from the Texans and Chiefs, for the African-American Ethnic Sports Hall of Fame.
The two men had built a relationship in those early years in Dallas, and Haynes had taken the unusual step — unusual for that time, anyway — of asking Burford, who was white, to dinner at his home in Dallas.
Just how unique it was to simply come to dinner at the home of a member of another race is hard to fathom today. In 1960, it was unknown and, to a large extent, unthinkable in certain portions of this country. Haynes remarked that up until that time, his parents had never had dinner with a white person before anywhere.
"We went through so much together," Haynes said of his teammate from those early days of the AFL, "and Chris showed me the dignity side of man."
The persistent adulation of sports figures is important for what it says about our thirst for idols. Heroes reflect standards a society reveres, rather than an absolute and eternal set of qualities, and America was just entering its Civil Rights era when Haynes' star was ascending.
In his day, he had helped open up college and professional football for his race. At heart, a hero must speak to our highest aspirations, and he did. Surely, we feel heroism more easily than we define it.
Up until the time of his death, Abner Haynes had a set of principles he believed in and showed that sport makes equals of us all.
