Memories of Joe Delaney endure 20 years after his heroic death

[The_Philster]

Carolyn Delaney doesn't plan a visit today to the country cemetery where her husband is buried. After 20 years, the pain is still too much to bear.

So Delaney will spend today at home in Haughton, La., surrounded by loved ones. They will quietly commemorate the life of former Chiefs running back Joe Delaney, who drowned 20 years ago today while trying to rescue three boys floundering in a Monroe, La., pond.

"There's not a day that passes by that I don't think about it," Carolyn Delaney said. "I think about how things would be now if he was still here, how life would be....

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[The_Philster]

No Ordinary Joe

Remembering a heroic act that ended in tragedy.
Why in creation did Joe Delaney jump into that pit full of water that day?

Why in the world would the AFC's best young running back try to save three drowning boys when he himself couldn't swim?

Nobody -- not his wife, not his mother -- had ever seen him so much as dog-paddle. A year and a half earlier, when he went to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii as the AFC's starting halfback and Rookie of the Year, he never set even a pinkie toe in the ocean or the pool. "Never had," says his wife, Carolyn, who'd known Joe since they were both seven. "In all my years, I never had seen him swim."...
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