Robert Newhouse, 64, Rusher Whose Pass Secured a Title, Dies

By WILLIAM YARDLEYJULY 23, 2014

Robert Newhouse (44) in 1978. Earlier that year, he helped Dallas beat Denver in the Super Bowl, throwing a touchdown pass. CreditAssociated Press

Robert Newhouse, a hard-working running back for the Dallas Cowboys who played in three Super Bowls and helped win one of them not just with his legs but also with his arm — throwing a game-clinching touchdown pass against the Denver Broncos in 1978 — died on Tuesday in Rochester, Minn. He was 64.

The cause was complications of heart disease, the Cowboys said.

Newhouse played 12 seasons in the National Football League, all of them for the Cowboys under Tom Landry. Selected by Dallas in the second round of the 1972 draft out of the University of Houston, he soon became essential for the Cowboys, playing mostly as a fullback expected to grind out three or four yards. He was quick and strong, propelled by thighs once measured at 44 inches around. In 1975 he led the team in rushing, with 930 yards, and was ninth in the league at 4.4 yards per carry.

Newhouse’s fortunes began changing in the late 1970s with the emergence of Tony Dorsett, the Cowboys’ top pick in the 1977 draft. Over the next few seasons, Newhouse became more of a blocker than a runner, opening holes for the speedy and dazzling Dorsett. He did not start a game after 1980.

Newhouse may be most remembered for making a spectacular play that would not be expected of a fullback. In the Super Bowl in 1978, Dallas was leading by 20-10 with seven minutes remaining when it recovered a Denver fumble in Denver territory. Landry, sensing that his opponent was rattled, called a trick play the Cowboys had been practicing all week: brown right, X-opposite shift, toss 38, halfback lead, fullback pass to Y.

The ball was on the Denver 29-yard line. Newhouse was nervous in the huddle.

“I was worried because I had all this stickum on my hands,” he told The Dallas Morning News in 1978, referring to the sticky substance that was often used to help players catch the ball but is now banned. “So Preston Pearson handed me this rag, and I was in there” — the huddle — “scrubbing it all. They’d seen us run the play right but not to the left and so didn’t recognize it in time.”

When the ball was snapped, Newhouse took a pitch from quarterback Roger Staubach and began moving to the left, as if he would try to run up the sideline. Instead, he stopped suddenly, turning and throwing back to his right. Wide receiver Golden Richards caught the ball over the outstretched hand of Broncos defensive back Steve Foley for a 29-yard score that secured the Cowboys’ 27-10 win, their second Super Bowl victory.

Newhouse’s pass play, Landry said later, “won it for us.”

Robert Fulton Newhouse was born on Jan. 9, 1950, in Longview, Tex. He played at Galilee High School, in Hallsville, before accepting a scholarship to Houston. He holds the university’s single-season rushing record (1,757 yards).

His survivors include his wife, Nancy; twin daughters, Dawnyel and Shawntel; and two sons, Reggie, a former receiver for the Arizona Cardinals, and Roderick.

Newhouse retired from the Cowboys before the 1984 season, finishing his career with 4,784 rushing yards and 31 rushing touchdowns. He continued to work for the team for many years, including a period as director of alumni relations and player programs.

“If we needed three yards for a first down, we knew we had it,” John Niland, a former Cowboys guard, told The Dallas Morning News. “Give Robert the ball, and we had it. We’d block a yard and a half, and he’d get the other yard and a half on his own. It was a given.”

Kenneth Noble, Ex-New York Times Reporter

Kenneth Noble, Ex-Times Reporter, Is Dead at 60

Kenneth B. Noble, Former Times Reporter, Dies at 60

By PAUL VITELLOJULY 22, 2014

Kenneth Noble in 1988.CreditJack Manning/The New York Times

Kenneth B. Noble, a New York Times reporter who covered business and finance in Washington and civil war in Africa, and who headed the newspaper’s Los Angeles bureau during the O. J. Simpson trial, died on Thursday in Gainesville, Fla. He was 60.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Dr. Lorna McFarland, said.

Mr. Noble graduated from Yale in 1975 and from the University of Southern California Law School in 1979, but he had no journalism experience when he was selected by The Times in 1980 to be trained in its minority internship program.

After two years in the New York headquarters, Mr. Noble was sent to Washington, where he covered financial and economic news and soon developed a specialty in articles on finance and law. He wrote about commodities fraud, insider trading and the savings and loan crisis, and about the government regulators who caught — or had overlooked — the wrongdoing.

Mr. Noble, who had attended a segregated grade school in Gainesville, Fla., told family and friends that the most deeply affecting assignment of his career was the Africa beat. As head of the West Africa bureau of The Times from 1989 to 1994, he covered the two dozen countries along the continent’s west coast, including Ghana, the country from which he believed his ancestors were probably taken by slave traders in the 18th or 19th century.

“It wasn’t something he talked about very much, but he went through a lot of emotional sorting while there,” said Richard S. Carnell, a friend since childhood and an associate professor at Fordham Law School.

During his posting, Mr. Noble chronicled the lush life of the Liberian strongman Samuel K. Doe, the first of his country’s leaders who was not a descendant of freed American slaves, and the 10-year civil war that led to his execution by rebels in 1990. He covered civil war in Angola, the AIDS pandemic in Zaire and coup attempts in Nigeria.

In a 1991 dispatch from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, he wrote about the palm trees: “The trees began disappearing last fall when, as starvation spread in this war-shattered capital, thousands were cut down and their edible hearts eagerly and desperately consumed.”

“The trees will take years to grow back, but they surely will,” he wrote. “Monrovia’s future is less hopeful.”

Kenneth Bernard Noble was born in Manhattan on Aug. 14, 1953, to Ella Jeter, a social worker for the city Department of Social Services, and John Noble, whom he saw infrequently after one searing encounter.

“The first memory Ken had was of his father stabbing his mother,” Mr. Carnell said in an interview on Monday. “That was when he was about 4.”

Mr. Noble’s mother survived, but he was raised mostly by his grandmother, Florence Waldon Smith, a secretary for a school district outside Gainesville who pushed him to excel and planted the idea in his head at a young age that he would attend Yale someday. “She saw something in him, and she was right,” said Mr. Noble’s wife, Dr. McFarland, from whom he had been separated for four years.

Besides Dr. McFarland, he is survived by two sons, Eric and David.

After leaving The Times in 1997, Mr. Noble taught journalism at the University of Southern California and at the University of California, Berkeley. About four years ago, he returned to Gainesville from Los Angeles, where he had lived for many years.