This is the second installment in The Gazette’s summer “Where Are They Now?” series. Each week for the rest of this summer, The Gazette will catch up with a prominent former Emporia-area athlete.
If your enduring image of Leon Lett — at least, Leon Lett the NFL player — is that of a guy who made two of the most famous boneheaded plays in the history of sports, maybe it’d be a good idea to look at him now.
The former Emporia State star defensive lineman and three-time Super Bowl champion with the Dallas Cowboys earned his degree last month at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Lett, now 40, transferred credits from ESU and attended UNLV for three semesters to earn his degree in university studies with an emphasis in sociology and history.
He had promised his mother that he would graduate someday; he was the only child in his family not to have a degree. And then there was his now-11-year-old daughter, Leandra, to whom he has tried to stress the importance of higher education.
“I always talk about my days at Emporia, so she’s always like, ‘Well Daddy, did you finish?’” Lett said. “So I couldn’t tell her a tale. I always told her no, but I was going to finish.”
Andre Patterson, the UNLV defensive line coach, had been a mentor of Lett’s since Patterson was his position coach in Dallas toward the end of his career. With Lett expressing his desire last year to finish his degree and to get into coaching, Patterson put Lett in touch with an academic adviser at UNLV.
“It wasn’t easy at all,” Lett said. “But it was very gratifying at the end to finish up, man — it’s so great. To be in a room with all those young guys, young kids that were graduating... it was overwhelming.”
Now that he’s done it, he’s well-entrenched in Vegas. This coming season, he’ll help out Patterson and the Rebels as a volunteer assistant defensive line coach.
“And it’s a good time for me. I know that it’s just something I probably couldn’t have done 20 years ago,” Lett said of living in Las Vegas. “I wouldn’t have been mature enough to go to Vegas, be working, stay out of the casinos and all the other fun that they have there. But now, at the age of 40, there’s a whole different purpose in mind. The main thing now is passing along some of the skills as well as some of the life lessons that I’ve learned to the younger kids there.”
An Alabama native, Lett arrived at Emporia State in 1989 after two years at Hinds Community College in Raymond, Miss. He made an immediate impact, making the NAIA’s All-District 10 first team and helping ESU to its first football national championship game, which the Hornets lost to Carson-Newman 34-20.
“I think we played with a purpose all season,” Lett said. “And Coach (Larry) Kramer — I’ve got some great stories. Everyone has great stories about Coach Kramer. Just a no-nonsense type of guy that really made us feel like blue-collar guys, us against the world. And we went out and we played hard for him week in and week out.”
After missing the last three games of his senior year at ESU with an injury, Lett was selected by the Cowboys in the seventh round of the 1991 NFL draft. Nicknamed “the Big Cat” because of his uncommon agility for a 6-foot-6, 290-pound lineman, Lett was a three-time Pro Bowler with the Cowboys — but he became best-known for a pair of lapses in judgment witnessed in two highly viewed games.
The first came at Super Bowl XXVII in January 1993, the end of Lett’s second season in the NFL. The Cowboys were blasting the Buffalo Bills 52-17 when Lett recovered a fumble at the Buffalo 45 and ran the ball back for what it appeared would be an easy touchdown. But Lett slowed down as he closed in on the end zone and began celebrating early, ceremoniously holding his arms out to each side. That allowed Buffalo’s Don Beebe to catch up to him and knock the ball into the end zone and out of bounds before Lett crossed the goal line.
The next season, during a Thanksgiving Day game against the Miami Dolphins, the Cowboys blocked a field goal in the closing seconds, which appeared to preserve a 14-13 win. But instead of simply letting the ball go so the play could be whistled dead, Lett attempted to recover the loose ball. He slipped on the snowy field and failed to corrall the ball, and Miami recovered on the Dallas 1, made good on another field goal try and won the game.
“My youngest years especially, when I was still playing and when it happened, it was kind of difficult,” Lett said of the criticism he received over those two plays. “I thought people were just giving me too much of a hard time. Now that I look back on it, it’s just part of the history of the game, and it’s OK when people come up and bring up the plays. ... I’m OK with it now. It gives me the opportunity to meet people and talk to ’em, and actually, people (get to) know the real me.”
Lett struggled with substance abuse during his pro career, earning three suspensions from the NFL totaling 28 games. He says his substance abuse days are behind him now — and as a developing motivational speaker, part of his message includes the importance of making good life decisions.
“And I’ll tell them... it was just myself being rebellious and young,” Lett said, “and not really looking at the big picture and not really taking the advantage of the opportunity that I had, and just taking for granted that I was gonna be a championship football player in the NFL, that I could pretty much write my own rules, and not live by the rules that the NFL or society said that matters. So... if you’re gonna make those decisions, you’re gonna (need) a chance to think about the repercussions behind those decisions, whether it’s drug use, or drinking and driving, or smacking your girlfriend, or disobeying your parents, or disrespecting people in general. It’s always gonna come back and bite you.”
The public speaking engagements serve as an opportunity for Lett to act as a role model.
“I’m getting more and more opportunities to do it,” he said. “It’s just a great opportunity for me to just talk to guys normally. I don’t like to try to go out and lecture ’em. I just really tell ’em about my experiences: where I came from, how I made it to the NFL from south Alabama to Emporia State University to the Dallas Cowboys, and being on the biggest stage in football.”
People often ask Lett that question: how he made it from Emporia State to the NFL.
“And I’ll have to say that the competition — there was some good competition in the NAIA back then,” he said. “And now they’re Division II, and I think we had a big part of the school moving up from the NAIA to Division II.
“So Emporia, to me, is where it all started.”
Comments
We allow registered users to post comments on this Web site. To learn more about our posting policies please read our User Poster Agreement Policy.
Posted by admireed (anonymous) on June 28, 2009 at 5:19 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Congrats Leon. Wish 100% of the college athletes would GET THAT DEGREE!
Post a comment
We allow registered users to post comments on this Web site. Our goal with this feature is to encourage thoughtful discussions about the news stories. Using the comment feature to make random attacks on people is not acceptable. Emporiagazette.com neither endorses nor guarantees the accuracy of any user contribution. Responsibility for what is posted or contributed to this site is the sole responsibility of each user. To learn more about our posting policies please read our User Poster Agreement Policy.
(Requires free registration.)