Leroy never showed emotion. He never got angry. Not about anything. Even Mitchell and the other black players had trouble knowing what was inside. So when he fumbled against the Steelers it made sense he was gone the next day.
Something died in Leroy when he was cut. Soon after the release Lou Saban, the coach of the AFL’s Buffalo Bills called. He had coached Jackson in a college all-star game. He loved Jackson’s speed and thought he could put him in a backfield with stars Jack Kemp and Cookie Gilchrist. But to Jackson’s friend, Edgerson, who was on the team, something had changed in Leroy after Washington.
“I just think he didn’t want to play the game anymore,” Edgerson says. “He played the game because it was a paycheck coming in.”
After Buffalo, Jackson tried out for two Canadian teams – Calgary and Montreal – but he didn’t like the league with all of its strange rules. Edgerson was right, he didn’t want to play football anymore.
“I didn’t lose heart for the game but it was just something I couldn’t pick up,” Leroy says. “The system was easy to learn, no problem with that. But it was just motivating myself to play, to want to play, play as hard as I can. That cutting probably took a lot of my heart out of it.”
He went back to Washington and married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy, who had been his next door neighbor in Chicago Heights. They had two children, a daughter, Mia, and a son, Leroy III, who was born a month early with a hole in his heart. Jackson got the job driving the bus and when he retired from that in 1994 he worked security jobs – something he continues to do to this day.
Dorothy died of a heart problem in 2009, Leroy III, never got over her death and died seven weeks later. It was a bad year, but like everything else, Leroy almost never brought up his wife and son. Friends learned not to ask.
“Leroy is a simple person,” Edgerson says. “He doesn’t demand a whole lot. He keeps things very simple. He was always a good soldier. Even in college he never complained to the coaches about anything.”