Friday column: A player, and man, to remember

I had forgotten Joe Delaney.

Then I learned that on Saturday the Kansas City Chiefs’ Leonard Pope saved a 6-year-old from drowning. Pope had jumped fully clothed — “cell phone, wallet and everything” — into a pool when he saw the boy go under.

“He saved my son’s life,” Anne Moore, the child’s mother, told a reporter.

“My heart dropped,” Pope, the father of two young girls, told ESPN. “It could have been any child … I just knew I had to do something. I wasn’t waiting on anyone else … to try to pull him out.”

The story I read mentioned another Chief who had made a similar decision 28 years earlier — to the month.

Like Pope, Delaney was a father of young girls. Unlike Pope, Delaney was an uncertain swimmer, at best. Yet when he saw three boys sink in a Louisiana pond with a sharp fall-off, he dove in anyway.

Delaney helped bring one boy to the surface and safety, then went after the other two. Neither they nor he came up alive.

Eleven days after Delaney’s July 4, 1983 funeral, his wife, Carolyn, and their three daughters were presented with his Presidential Citizens Medal.

“He made the ultimate sacrifice by placing the lives of three children above regard for his own safety,” wrote Ronald Reagan. “By the supreme example of courage and compassion, this brilliantly gifted young man left a spiritual legacy for his fellow Americans.”

Undersized as a youth, Delaney nonetheless dreamed of playing college football, and worked diligently to make it happen.

In college at tiny Northwestern State, a Division I-AA school, he dreamed of making the jump to the NFL, and worked diligently to make that happen.

Did he make it? Did he ever.

In his rookie year, Delaney, drafted as a “situation back,” set four team records and made the Pro Bowl, earning this encomium from future Hall of Fame defensive end Elvin Bethea:

“I’ve played against the best — O.J. Simpson, Gale Sayers, Walter Payton — and he ranks right up there with them. … He is great with a capital G.”

But there was more to the man than his football ability.

There was his humility, there was his ability to make friends with anyone he came across, there was his love of family, his love of kids. He spent summers following his first two pro seasons back in tiny Haughton, La., rounding up youngsters for pickup basketball and football games, then taking them out for ice cream.

A 2003 newspaper article about Delaney said that even at that early stage of his career, he was looking beyond his playing days to a time when he would become a counselor or teacher, “something working with kids.”

So his decision to risk his life for three youngsters he didn’t know didn’t come as a surprise to those who knew him, certainly not to his college coach, A.L. Williams.

At Delaney’s funeral — attended by 3,000 mourners packed into a broiling high school gym — Williams recalled getting a phone call from Les Miller, the Chiefs’ director of player personnel.

“He said, ‘I want to talk to you about one of your players.’ I thought something was wrong. But then he said. ‘I just wanted to tell you that Joe Delaney is the finest young man and the hardest worker we’ve ever had here.

“People ask me, ‘How could Joe have gone in that water the way he did?’ And I answer, ‘Why, he never gave it a second thought, because helping people was a conditioned reflex to Joe Delaney.’ ”

The line of cars from the gym to the cemetery stretched 2 miles. Not everyone got close enough to the headstone to read the words at its base: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for another.”

I’m glad Leonard Pope saved that boy’s life Saturday — glad for the boy, glad for his family and glad for me.

For I had forgotten Joe Delaney.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.