Leroy Keyes | 1947-2021
The Newport News native, who finished third in voting for the 1967 Heisman Trophy at Purdue University before playing in the NFL, was voted the Peninsula’s No. 2 all-time high school athlete.
Leroy Keyes, regarded as one of the greatest high school athletes in Peninsula-area history, died Thursday. He was 74.
Keyes excelled at Carver High in Newport News in football, basketball and track before playing football at Purdue University. A multi-position player who led Purdue to its first Rose Bowl appearance in the 1966 season, in 1968 he became the first player in school history to run for more than 1,000 yards.
Keyes was second to O.J. Simpson in Heisman Trophy balloting in 1968, after finishing third a year earlier. He then played five seasons in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles, mostly at defensive back.
Keyes went on to become a desegregation specialist in Philadelphia for more than 16 years, then returned to Purdue as a fundraiser. He reportedly suffered in recent years from congestive heart failure after battling prostate cancer.
“I talked to him a little more than a week ago,” said Landstown football coach Tommy Reamon, who, like Keyes, attended Carver in the 1960s. “I knew he was struggling, but I’m very saddened that we lost him, because he is the best and single-most influential athlete to come out of the Peninsula.”
Joe Buggs, who played and coached at rival Huntington High, said Keyes rates “right at the top” of the greatest athletes ever to play in the Virginia Interscholastic Association — the state league for Black schools before full school desegregation in the late 1960s.
“As great an athlete as he was, he was a better person,” Buggs added.
Keyes, ranked No. 2 among the all-time greatest high school athletes on the Peninsula by the Daily Press in 2004, was one of the first Black athletes from the Peninsula to succeed athletically in a predominantly white Division I football program. Because of that, he was a role model to Reamon and scores of others.
“He gave us the dream that you could go from Carver High School and be a Heisman Trophy candidate,” said Reamon, a running back who played for a junior-college national champion and for the University of Missouri, then played briefly in the NFL and earned MVP honors in the World Football League. “He gave young Black athletes a figure on television from Carver High School.
“That was a powerful thing in my eyes, and he became the single-most influential (athletic) figure and biggest inspiration in my life.”
His exploits at Carver were legendary. Keyes started at cornerback for the Trojans as a freshman in 1961 and helped them win their only state football title. He went on to score 44 touchdowns the next three seasons and ran for more than 1,000 yards as a senior – a rarity in those days.
“He was a fearsome rusher,” said Eric McCaskill, who played cornerback for Huntington, then joined Keyes on Purdue’s football team as a walk-on. “He was about 6-foot-2, 190 pounds and I remember when I tried to tackle him I just bounced right off of him.”
Keyes led the Trojans to two VIA state basketball titles, establishing a career mark of 2,016 points that stood as a Peninsula-area record for 25 years. Although he did not focus on track and field, he nonetheless became the first athlete in state high school history to long jump more than 24 feet.
“People tell me that I set the standard for the athletes like Allen Iverson and Michael Vick,” Keyes told the Daily Press in 2004. “That’s something I’ll cherish until I say goodbye.”
Reamon said, “Before Allen Iverson and Ronald Curry and Michael Vick, he displayed the personality and charisma those athletes later showed.”
McCaskill says that Keyes was about more than athletics and displayed a social consciousness in college.
“We had some challenges as African-American athletes at Purdue,” McCaskill said. “We protested, peacefully, and got into what (late Congressman and Civil Rights icon) John Lewis called ‘good trouble.’
“It lent credibility that he was an All-American (consensus in ’67 and ’68) and was taking a stand for what was right.”
Reamon said, “Everybody loved Leroy. He was a figure beyond.”