Gold Jacket Spotlight: Receivers buckled under Mike Haynes’ coverage

MIKE HAYNES once professed, “I’m a belt buckle defender. Receivers do a lot of things to try and break your concentration — moving their arms, shoulders, knees, feet, what-have-you. That’s why I watch the belt buckle. It’s pretty hard to move that part of the body if that’s not where he’s going.

“If I am in the vicinity of the belt buckle, I’ll be in good shape when the ball arrives.”

That “belt buckle defense” and success as a kick return specialist led to Mike’s arrival and enshrinement into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997 and into this week’s Gold Jacket Spotlight.

Collegiately at Arizona State University, Mike was moved from wide receiver to cornerback, a switch coach Frank Kush made out of necessity.

“We put Mike at cornerback as a freshman because we needed help there,” explained Kush. “It was my intent to move him (back) to receiver, but he was so valuable to us there he stayed the full four years.”

Valuable indeed.

Opposing North Carolina State head coach Lou Holtz once approached Mike in pregame warmups when Holtz’s team was playing against Arizona State and informed Mike, “He was the best collegiate defensive back I’d ever seen. I also told him he wasn’t going to see very much of the ball because we were throwing away from him.

“As it turned out,” Holtz recounted, “the only time he touched the ball all game was when he returned a kickoff for 97 yards for a touchdown.”

Attempting to rebuild their defense, the New England Patriots selected Mike with their first pick (fifth overall) in the 1976 NFL Draft. He was the first defensive back selected in that draft.

“Quarterbacks avoid throwing the ball in his direction,” Jack Clary wrote in 1978. “It seems the better a man becomes, the less he may have to work.”

A Patriot’s assistant coach noted, “If Mike has a problem of any kind, it is that he might go for a while, even a couple games, without ever seeing the ball thrown in his area. His biggest problem may be to keep from getting too relaxed.”

As a kick return specialist, Mike scored the Patriots franchise’s first touchdown via a punt return his rookie season by way of an 89-yard effort against the Buffalo Bills. He led the AFC in punt return yardage that season, amassing 608.

“When I get the ball, I think about returning it all the way. I guess that goes to my positive thinking,” Mike told Clary in the story “How to Avoid Mike Haynes” in Pro Quarterbacks in 1978.

In 1983, Mike became a member of the Los Angeles Raiders and quickly noticed the Raiders’ winning attitude.

“They say attitude is everything in sports. Being around the Raiders when I came in 1983, they had the proper attitude to win,” he said. “They knew they had the best team. Their attitude was ‘we believe in ourselves.’”

That belief and attitude led the Raiders to a 38-9 Super Bowl XVIII victory against Washington, prompting Mike to tell the “Raiders Newspaper” in 1991, “I never enjoyed playing with a team more than I did that 1983 Super Bowl team. They were a bunch of characters and a lot of good guys.”

Pro Football Hall of Famer Willie Brown (Class of 1984), Mike’s position coach for six of his seven seasons with the Raiders, declared: “Mike has that big arm span. He really put receivers in a box. He could shut them out. Mike made my job easy. He did everything you wanted a cornerback to do.”

The “belt buckle defender” earned Brown’s praise as “playing man-to-man better than anyone” and was rewarded with an iconic Bronzed Bust in Canton, Ohio.