This is a bold new day in the pantheon of sporting immortals. For the first time, a player with a significant amount of Falcons DNA will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
When the speechifying is done today in Canton, Ohio, it will not be the franchise’s first-ever draft pick (Tommy Nobis) nor its signature pass rusher (Claude Humphrey) nor one of its trusty former linemen (Jeff Van Note, Mike Kenn) who finally will lend the Falcons some Hall of Fame gravitas.
Rather, it will be a newer model Falcon, one who spent the first five years of a brazen, highlight-laden 13-year career in Atlanta, one who ultimately had to move on to find success and fill out a legacy.
Deion Sanders did the free-agent strut out of town in 1994, bound for Super Bowl titles first in San Francisco and then Dallas. The idea of him building a career worthy of Canton was taking shape even then, judging from a parting conversation Sanders had with the then-boss of the Falcons.
“I remember Taylor Smith telling me point blank — even with the [somewhat contentious] separation we had — that if you go to the Hall of Fame, please remember us,” Sanders said recently.
That he has, happily latching onto the designation as the Hall’s first Falcon.
“Every man likes to be the first of anything,” he said.
Arthur Blank, who bought the Falcons from the Smith family more than seven years after Sanders left for greener fields, will lead a small contingent of team executives to Ohio for the ceremony. Sanders, who lives outside of Dallas, arrived in Canton on Thursday aboard one of seven buses carrying three youth football teams that he sponsors through his charitable foundation back home.
That arrival was quite different than the one 22 years ago, when he touched down at Hartsfield-Jackson as the Falcons’ first draft pick. He showed up then weighed down in gold and diamonds, as flashy as a Vegas lounge act.
The days of ostentatious bling are long over, Sanders said. For one thing, his fingers are too bent by football to accommodate multiple rings. For another, he said, “I’m working with kids – I don’t have time to take off necklaces.”
“Jewelry was bait,” Sanders said. “I don’t need bait now.”
Sanders was in the Atlanta area three weeks ago on a tour with his youth teams. That weekend, he also held a pre-Hall of Fame fund-raising party downtown, billed as a sort of homecoming for a former Falcon.
That event was far more palatable than another return. Barely a month after leaving for San Francisco, Sanders came in with the 49ers to play the Falcons in the 2-year-old Georgia Dome. San Francisco won by 39 — a game in which Sanders pranced into the end zone during a 93-yard interception return and got into a slap fight with receiver Andre Rison. To the media afterward, Sanders declared that he stilled owned the Falcons’ home field. “It’s my house!” he yapped.
These days, Sanders says he has retired the loud “Prime Time” persona in favor of that of a man who spends his days either talking football for the NFL Network or shuttling — in a mini-van, no less — between his home and the high school where his youth program is based.
That simpler side of him has always been there, he said, but “no one really cared about that part of me. You cared about the guy who danced and high-stepped and all that.”
Of his post-football life, Sanders said he has found a purpose working with kids in the Dallas area. “I’m not lost; I’m not searching; I know who I am and what I am and where I need to go.”
Few know Sanders as well as Jamie Dukes, a former teammate both at FSU and with the Falcons. Today, Sanders sits on the board of Dukes’ charity. Dukes recognized a “metamorphosis” beginning in his old friend not long after Sanders left the Falcons, as he slowly began to give form to his charitable instincts. That process is becoming complete with Sanders’ youth program, called the Prime Time Association.
“He’s always had a giving heart,” Dukes said. “It was just hard for people to see the difference from the showman, because the showman generated the dollars.”
That showman was one of the most dynamic players in league history. Never an enthusiastic hitter, Sanders bent games with his speed and his instincts. He returned a punt for a touchdown in his first game as a Falcon. A cornerback by trade, he also had 60 catches (three touchdowns) on offense for Atlanta and Dallas. He dissuaded opposing quarterbacks from even looking to his side of the field — and reaped 53 career interceptions, nine for touchdowns, from those who challenged him.
“When he got on the football field, he backed up everything,” Smith said.
During one ultimately fruitless session in which Smith was trying to sign Sanders to a new long-term contract, he remembered his star telling him, “Taylor, you have to pay for ‘it.’ Only a few players have that special something, that ‘it.’”
“And he was right,” Smith said.
Like Bo Jackson, Sanders bounced between football and baseball. It is only Jackson that Dukes ranks ahead of Sanders as the most gifted athlete he has ever seen.
So transcendent were Sanders’ talents that Dukes contends he still could have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer had he played his entire career with the Falcons, winning not a single Super Bowl. The man made the moment; the moment didn’t have to make the man.
He was just a cut above anyone else who ever wore a stylized raptor on the side of his helmet, maintains the onetime Falcons center.
“I can’t think of another [Falcons] player whose Deion’s brilliance didn’t far exceed. No disrespect, but just comparing apples to apples,” Dukes said.
Just five seasons in Atlanta, then, were enough to establish Sanders as a Falcons all-timer.
Five seasons out of 13 total makes Sanders a bit more than 38 percent Falcon. And a 38 percent Falcon gaining entrance to the Hall of Fame has to be better than no Falcon at all.
And proclaiming, “I hope I open the door for many other Falcons,” Sanders even set himself up as a trailblazing advocate for a franchise that has gone un-represented among the bronze busts of Canton.
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