Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,815

This is the grave of Rayfield Wright.

Born in 1945 in Griffin, Georgia, Wright grew up there. He was a good high school basketball player. He wanted to play football too, but couldn’t make the high school team. He was good enough at hoops though to attend Fort Valley State, an HBCU also in Georgia. He did quite well. He had to earn money over the summer though and was working in some kind of mill, maybe timber given the region. The football coach wanted him to try out so he quit the job and was placed on the football team, despite not playing in high school. As a hoops player, Wright was pretty thin. Big but thin. So he was first at safety on the football team. But then the coach, who would become a lifelong mentor, had him put on weight and put him at defensive end and tight end, where he started to dominate. He also punted.

Well, in 1967, the Dallas Cowboys heard about this kid. Raw, but very athletic. So they took a flyer on him in the seventh round of the draft. Makes sense, that’s just where you want to take a chance. Often, these chances don’t work out. This one sure did. At this time, he was 6’6″ and weighed 225, so he stayed mostly at defensive end and tight end. But he also started moving inside to offensive tackle. That is where he would make his mark.

In 1969, the Cowboys right tackle Ralph Neely went down to an injury. The team decided to start Wright there as his replacement. They were playing the Rams. Lined up against Wright that game? Oh, just Deacon Jones, one of the all time greats. But Wright held his own and the Cowboys were really impressed. But Wright remembered one thing from the game. Before the first snap, Jones insulted his mother (as one does) to throw him off and then on the first snap, took the hardest shot at his head that he could. That was probably Wright’s first major concussion. It would not be his last.

Wright became the full time starter in 1970. And for the next decade, he was one of the great offensive linemen in the NFL. He was the key lineman on those great Cowboys teams of the 70s, blocking for Staubach and Dorsett, later in his career. During his time with the Cowboys, the team won 10 division titles and 5 NFC titles, including two Super Bowl wins. That’s unfortunate because Fuck the Cowboys. But that’s not really against Wright, who was far from the most annoying Cowboy of the era and also he was awesome.

The Cowboys released Wright at the end of the 1979 season. He was pretty much finished. His legs were shot. He signed with the Philadelphia Eagles, but retired during training camp during the 1980 season.

Wright was a three time First Team All Pro, from 1971-73. Then he was named Second Team All Pro from 1974-76. What that means is that Wright had built himself a very solid, if not entirely clear cut case for the NFL Hall of Fame. You can pretty well track who is going to make the Hall of Fame through First Team All Pro years, outside of quarterback, which has to be evaluated differently since obviously there are more than one QB who is a future HOFer at any given time. The only better measure of future HOFers is the All Decade Team. Did Wright make the All Decade Team of the 1970s? Why yes he did! First Team too.

All of this should make us wonder why it took Wright so long to get the call from Canton? Every single member of the 70s All Decade First and Second Team, on offense at least, are in the HOF. He wasn’t quite the very last one, but I think he was the last first teamer. He finally got the call from the Veterans Committee in 2006.

This is also a perfectly fine place to talk about the recent selectees to the HOF. Deion Sanders’ crusade for a smaller Hall led to only four people being elected this year, with three in the modern era being the smallest in twenty years. I do not like this at all–it’s so hard to get in there anyway. Anyway, congrats to Eric Allen, Jared Allen, Antonio Gates, and Sterling Sharpe from the Veterans Committee. I was of course not at all surprised by Gates or Jared Allen, but if we were talking about three people off that amazing list of 15, I would not have anticipated Eric Allen. Great defensive back, no question. But with Luke Kuechly sitting there? Huh. At least Eli Manning didn’t get in.

Wright was around the game quite a bit after his retirement, but not really a central figure. He was an assistant coach for the Arizona Rattlers of the Arena Football League. He also was involved in child welfare issues in Arizona, where he was living, and was named as a judge to the state’s Juvenile Supreme Court. Really, he did as much as he could for at-risk youth and was considered one of the great philanthropists.

Unfortunately, all those years of playing offensive tackle with poor head protection had its effect on Wright, as it has on so many NFL players. He suffered from dementia in his later years. He had so many concussions as a player, really he had no idea how many. He suffered from seizures which sometimes hit him when driving and he was in car accidents because of this. He joined the players as part of the class-action suit against the NFL in the 2010s that finally forced the league’s owners to take this issue seriously. Concussion numbers weren’t even studied before this. Slowly, things have gotten safer on the field and concussions hit an all-time low this year. Still too many though.

Wright died in 2022. He was 76 years old.

Rayfield Wright is buried in Annetta Cemetery, Annetta, Texas. I visited here in October 2023, so the stone was not up yet. Here it is from a recent picture I found online:

This new style of digitally carving photographs into gravestone is….something.

If you would like this series to visit other members of the NFL All-Decade Team from the 1970s, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Walter Payton is in Columbia, Missouri and Harvey Martin is in Dallas. Martin is one of the only second team players from that team not in the HOF, along with L.C. Greenwood, Louis Wright, and Dick Anderson. Maybe the Veterans Committee will finally get to those guys. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.