Former Oiler a loveable linebacker
Once a 'party animal,' Mike Dukes settled down in Beaumont02:13 AM CDT on Sunday, June 22, 2008
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In the loopy, seat-of-the-pants days of the upstart American Football League, players weren't sure what could be worse: Rodents running loose in locker rooms or the occasional rat in a front office.
When his Houston Oilers won the league's inaugural title in 1960, a dizzy Bud Adams promised bonuses and championship rings. He delivered neither, thereby establishing a modus operandi.
Adams tried making it up to his players by holding the next training camp in Hawaii, and the players responded to the gesture in kind.
"The trip was a fiasco," Al Jamison told Jeff Miller in his engaging 2003 book, Going Long, an oral history of the AFL. "Everybody was playing and partying and just raising hell.
"As soon as the coaches made bed check, the coaches would go out one door and the players would go out the other."
Chief among the evacuees was a 6-3, 235-pound linebacker out of Clemson named Mike Dukes.
Drafted by San Francisco, Dukes defected to the new league, where he was All-Pro his first season. Big for the era at his position, he was still athletic enough to drop into coverage, yet tough enough to be a force at the point of attack. Even returned kicks.
He soon developed another reputation, as well.
"Nobody could run the streets better than Mike," former teammate Bill Groman told the Beaumont Enterprise.
Groman, a star wide receiver, called Dukes a "party animal" perpetually in the company of beautiful women.
Dukes played four seasons in Houston before splitting his last two years with the Patriots and Jets. At 29, he called it a career.
In the mid '80s, he moved to Beaumont, Texas, where he eventually became general manager of a valve company. Immersed himself in the community. Became a fixture in local golf tournaments.
A picture of Dukes after an Oilers game – curly hair framing a mud-splattered smile – hung for a decade at Carlo's Greek and Italian Restaurant.
But Beaumont friends didn't hear much about Dukes' exploits with the Oilers. They didn't know the party animal. He was the husband of Carol Jean and father of four daughters, two sons, a stepdaughter and stepson.
Driving home to Beaumont one afternoon last week on I-10, Dukes was killed when his truck collided head-on with another truck that had veered across the median. Dukes was 72.
"He was a big ol' teddy bear," Ed Burks, his former employer, told the Enterprise. "He had never met an enemy."
If he did, it was long ago, in another life.
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