Editor’s note: The following column from the Best of West collection was originally published in the Port Arthur News on April 19, 1991.

Twenty yeas later than Baylor backers would have liked, Little Joe Washington is finally going to Waco. The reason for his visit will only serve to remind what a great player the Bears, indeed the entire Southwest Conference, lost out on when Joe chose to play at Oklahoma.

Washington is to be inducted into the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame Friday night. Among those going into the Waco-based shrine with him are Houston Oiler standout Ray Childress, former SMU coach and Green Bay Packer great Forrest Gregg, La Marque’s Norm Bulaich and sportscaster Frank Fallon.

Anybody who ever saw Joe Washington — at any level — running with a football, knows the honor is appropriate. Joe was the best schoolboy running back in Texas in 1971, was arguably the best collegiate running back in 1974 and 1975 at Oklahoma and enjoyed many moments of brilliance during a 10-year NFL career.

This is a guy who:

• Started on the varsity at Lincoln High School as a ninth grader.

• Went 80 yards for a touchdown against mighty Oklahoma’s No. 1 defense the first time he touched the ball as a collegiate freshman.

• Delivered what was voted the top individual performance in the first 20 years of ABC’s Monday Night Football only two weeks after being traded to the Baltimore Colts.

Joe Washington was magic in silver shoes, a genuine phenom with an uncanny knock for making would-be tacklers look foolish as he dipped and darted to daylight. He wasn’t big enough to run over people or fast enough to run away from them, but he was always a big play waiting to happen.

Little Joe could stop on the proverbial dime, go sideways in the blink of an eye and had the kind of acceleration usually accompanied by screeching tires. There were those who could catch him from behind, but the only sure way to get him down was to surround him.

Sometimes even that didn’t work. The first time I saw him play, three or four defenders from Hebert High School were closing in on him from different directions. With nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, Joe simply hurdled the tacklers immediately in front of him.

It was one of the few times I ever found Hebert’s gregarious head coach Clifton Ozen to be speechless. University of Texas coach Darrell Royal, on the other hand, was never speechless when the subject was Joe Washington. It was Royal who uttered the memorable keyhole quote about Oklahoma’s No. 24.

“Joe Washington was one of the all time great runners I’ve ever seen,” Royal reflected, in an interview five years after retiring from coaching. “I once made the statement that he could jump through a keyhole going sideways if he didn’t have his headgear on. The width of the headgear is about the only thing that could have stopped him from doing it.”

Washington’s football accomplishments are so numerous one hardly knows where to start when mentioning them. Long before somebody stuck the name “human highlight film” on Atlanta Hawks marvel Dominique Wilkens, the description fit Little Joe.

Consider just a few of the feats that underscore how good this man was: