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:

• A comprehensive poll taken by the Dallas Morning New in 1980 ranked him No. 4 on a list of Texas’ all-time great schoolboy running backs.

• He is the all-time leading rusher at Oklahoma (3,995 yards), ranking ahead of Heisman Trophy winners Steve Owens and Billy Sims, as well as Greg Pruitt.

• He played in the 1979 Pro Bowl, after putting up 1,654 rushing and receiving yards for Baltimore.

Joe was a two-time schoolboy All-America at Lincoln and a two-time collegiate All-America at Oklahoma. About the only meaningful award that escaped his grasp was the Heisman Trophy, and that omission remains a sore sport with then Sooners coach Barry Switzer.

Switzer contends that Little Joe, not Ohio State’s Archie Griffin, should have won back-to-back Heismans in 1974-75. Oklahoma, though it claimed the national championship both years, was on probation and couldn’t appear on television. So Washington didn’t get the necessary exposure.

He received plenty of exposure on that unforgettable 1978 Monday Night Football performance in Foxboro, Mass. And, in so doing, he got a certain hometown sports editor off the hook.

A conversation with a writer in Baltimore, shortly after the Colts traded popular running back Lydell Mitchell to San Diego for Washington, produced a bold prediction from this end. Without hedging or qualifying, I assured the guy Joe would make Colt fans forget the talented Mitchell.

That’s when I learned you can’t trust sports writers, but you could count on Little Joe. The guy in Baltimore took what I thought was casual conversation and turned it into a column. I believed what I had said, but I was unhappy because of the unnecessary pressure it put on Washington.

The pressure was so unbearable Joe literally ran wild two weeks later. On a rainy, dreary Monday night, at a time when he was still learning the Colts playbook, Little Joe delivered a performance that left Howard Cosell babbling.

First he threw a 54-yard touchdown pass. Then he caught a 23-yard scoring pass. Finally, with 1:17 left, he returned a kickoff 90 yards for the game winning touchdown.

Joe had made his statement and validated mine. The guy in Baltimore wrote another column, reminding readers of the prediction from Port Arthur. Joe went on to lead the Colts in rushing and receiving and made the Pro Bowl. Lydell Mitchell was never again an issue.

Congratulations, Joe, your honor tonight is most deserved.

Port Arthur News sports editor Bob West can be e-mailed at rdwest@usa.net.