On June 29, 1983, Kansas City Chiefs running back Joe Delaney lost his life after jumping into a pond in Monroe, Louisiana, in a last-ditch attempt to save the lives of three drowning children.
On that sweltering June day, hundreds flocked to Monroe, Louisiana’s Chennault Park, where a six-foot-deep pond sat with warning signs telling folks not to enter the water. Three boys, though, ignored the warnings and jumped in, anyway, according to the Shreveport Times.
The Chiefs’ 24-year-old star running back was near the pond when the boys jumped into the still waters. Sure enough, despite the warnings — even from the player himself — the boys got to a part of the pond where the bottom dropped off quickly. All three boys were in trouble, and Delaney felt he had to act.
Delaney reportedly told a witness, “I can’t swim good,” as he rushed into the water, adding, “but I’ve got to save those kids.”
Unfortunately, Delaney did not make it out of the pond alive. Neither did two of the three boys whom he hoped to save.
His sister, JoAnn Brazeale, said she was unsure if her football hero brother could swim, but noted, “He was always going to help somebody.”
“It sounds just like him — he was always doing something for somebody else,” Bobby Ray McHalffey, Delaney’s coach at Haughton High School, told the media after he learned of the tragic incident. “There’s none better.”
Delaney was the Chiefs’ 1981 second-round NFL Draft pick and rushed for 1,121 yards that season, helping the Chiefs to their first winning season since 1973.
Delaney left behind his wife and three little daughters, one of whom was only four months old.
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