Buck Buchanan: Chief Concern for Kansas City's Opponents

Black History Month has been celebrated in some form since 1924. For sports fans, it is a chance to reacquaint themselves with those who broke down barriers in all areas of competition and all segments of society. Many are now household names and American icons: Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, Muhammad Ali, up to Tiger Woods, Tony Dungy and Venus and Serena Williams today.

Throughout February, FanHouse will shed light on the other figures in the history of sports whose breakthroughs were as significant as those mentioned above, but who aren't as instantly recognizable as pioneers. During Black History Month 2010, FanHouse aims to give them their due.

Imagine a defensive lineman who is 6-foot-7, 287 pounds. Imagine that he can run a 40-yard dash in 4.9 seconds.

High draft pick? Depends on what league you were in in 1963, when Junious (Buck) Buchanan was coming out of Grambling. In the NFL, he was a 19th rounder, taken by the New York Giants.

In the American Football League, which was entering its fourth season? No. 1 overall by the Kansas City Chiefs, where he turned into a Hall of Famer, one of the major players on a Kansas City team that lost the first Super Bowl to Green Bay, then beat Minnesota, 23-7, in Super Bowl IV, establishing once and for all that the win by Joe Namath and the Jets over Baltimore the previous year was no fluke.

Growing up in the 1950s in segregated Birmingham, Ala., Buchanan excelled in football and basketball at A.H. Parker High School, then went on to Grambling to play for Eddie Robinson. For an African-American in the South, it was the equivalent, on a much poorer scale, of a white youngster going to Alabama to play for Bear Bryant -- Robinson ended up producing dozens of professional football players, including four who made it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Buchanan was one of them, a player who Robinson later described as "the best lineman I ever coached.''

In 13 seasons, he played 181 of a possible 182 games, including 166 straight. He was the linchpin of a defense that featured a number of black players in an era when pro football was predominately white. The team that beat the Vikings in the Super Bowl included defensive linemates Aaron Brown and Curley Culp along with linebackers Bobby Bell and Willie Lanier and cornerbacks Emmitt Thomas and James Marsalis, all African Americans.

Buchanan was the best of the bunch, playing briefly at defensive end as a rookie before being switched inside to right tackle..

"He revolutionized the game,'' said John Madden, who was an assistant coach and then the head coach of the Oakland Raiders, who as division rivals played Buchanan and the Chiefs twice annually. "Guys that size usually played on the outside. Buck was the first tall guy to play the inside. When a tall guy with his type of speed is rushing, he takes a couple of steps and then -- boom -- he would be on the quarterback."

Added another Hall of Famer, the late Gene Upshaw, who faced him a dozen times:

"I was big, but Buck was bigger and stronger and turned me every which way but loose. When you played Buck, you couldn't sleep the night before a game. You don't imagine a guy 6-8, 300 pounds being so quick. You'd go to hit him, and it was like hitting a ghost."

There are no sack records for those seasons. But in 1967, Buchanan, with his push up the middle, was credited with knocking down 16 passes. During his career, he was All-AFL four times, All-AFC in 1970-71; played in six AFL All-Star games and two Pro Bowls after the merger in 1970.

In 1999, he was ranked 67th on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Football Players. The Chiefs retired his uniform number 86. He also was honored with the Buck Buchanan Award, given annually to the best defensive player in the Football Championship Subdivision, the former Division I-AA.

In 1990, he was diagnosed with lung cancer a week before his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He died in 1992 at the age of 51.