America at Large:  Over a year has passed since the last time I got together with Emery Hicks. I was covering an NFL play-off game in Kansas City, and we'd arranged to meet afterwards. His reliability was legendary, so I was surprised he wasn't waiting when I returned to my hotel., writes George KimballAmerica At Large

After I got to my room he phoned from downstairs. Hicks explained the sight of a large, crippled black man lounging around the lobby had seemed to put so many people ill at ease he'd grown uncomfortable himself, and decided to wait outside.

We headed off for a bistro named Frondizi's, which might have been created with Hicks's epicurean tastes in mind. The restaurant had a four-page menu accompanied by a 50-page wine list. We spent three hours catching up, by the conclusion of which Emery was in no shape for the 35-mile drive back to Lawrence.

This presented yet another problem. The room I'd checked into had a single bed and I told him, "Hicks, I love you like a brother, but I'm not sleeping in that bed with you!" The hotel manager agreed to move me to a room with two beds. As tired as we both were, we lay there in the darkness talking about the old days and the future, about wives, children, and grandchildren. It was barely dawn when Hicks shook me and explained he was leaving. "I just remembered I have a chemo treatment in Lawrence this morning. I've got to go."

I'd known he had been suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma but had been assured it was in remission and everything was under control. This was my first inkling it might not be. We spoke on the phone several times after that, but that was the last time I saw him alive.

Although he never played a down in a regulation NFL game, Hicks' prowess on the field remains the stuff of legend at the University of Kansas. In a poll undertaken a few years ago he was named the starting linebacker on the college's all-time team, alongside Football Hall-of-Famers Gale Sayers and John Riggins and NFL stars John Hadl, John Zook, Dana Stubblefield and Gilbert Brown.

The most accomplished running back in the state of Oklahoma as a schoolboy, he had been switched to defence at KU, and become the most fearsome linebacker in the old Big Eight Conference. In the 1969 Orange Bowl, a game which 36 years later still represents the crowning moment of Kansas football, he made three straight stops to prevent a touchdown after Penn State had reached the two-yard line. (The Jayhawks lost 15-14). He was drafted by the Oakland Raiders, but the knee injuries which would follow him all his life had begun to take their toll, and he was cut just before the 1970 season. He made it back to Lawrence in time to serve as the best man at my wedding that fall.

The ceremony was one of those free-form outdoor, countercultural affairs. The refreshments included two varieties of punch, one of them undiluted and the other liberally spiked with psychedelic substances. The highlight of the day came when someone - Hicks swore it wasn't him, but I always had my doubts - served my new mother-in-law from the latter.

He never got another NFL shot, but he did spend five years playing for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in Canada before his knees gave out. One year when the Ti-Cats reached the championship game I travelled to Canada for the Grey Cup, but Hicks was hurt and didn't play. A few years after that he came up to Boston to visit me, but eventually he returned to Oklahoma and spent two decades working the oil fields before moving back to Kansas.

He was born on August 10th, 1947, but when he got to college a mix-up in the records had listed his birthday as May 1st. Since the latter gave him a draft lottery number of 327, he decided not to correct the oversight until years later. "It might have saved my life," he pointed out.

The late 1960s were turbulent times, and Lawrence had been a particular hotbed of unrest. A sometimes uneasy alliance existed between leftist white counterculturalists - ie, hippies - and the radical black movement, while varsity athletes tended to be more conservatively aligned and kept their distance from both groups. Hicks may have been the only man I knew who moved easily through all three camps, although the closest he ever came to radicalising the football team came when he helped lead a strike prior to the 1969 season that succeeded in appointing a black cheerleader and allowing the players to grow longer hair.

He had come from an impoverished background in Oklahoma, and the full scholarship to Kansas didn't provide much cash. Then, as now, players received an allotment of tickets for home games, which they were expected to discreetly sell at inflated prices to alumni and boosters. Hicks, as far as I know, never sold his tickets: he either gave them to his friends or traded them for pot. The result was he had to earn his pocket money hustling pool.

In the end it wasn't the lymphoma that killed him, but rather an infection his ravaged immune system was powerless to repel. The memorial service in Lawrence was delayed until last Friday, because many of his old team-mates would be in town for the annual alumni game at Memorial Stadium that weekend.

By the time I last saw him the knee had given out, and it had been fused by surgery. He couldn't bend it at all, and had to climb backwards when he went up or down stairs. I found myself thinking about that night a lot after he died. Here was a man whose life had been defined by his athletic prowess, and now he could barely walk. He was in the grip of a life-threatening disease, but in the time we spent together that night in Kansas City there hadn't been a moment of self-pity. That we could all live - and die - like that.