When Jason Witten snagged his second-quarter touchdown just before halftime in the Cowboys’ Week 2 game against Washington, viewers of the television broadcast were treated to a graphic putting his latest score in historical context. It was the 70th scoring grab of the tight end’s storied career. With his next touchdown reception, possibly this Sunday against Miami, the 16-year veteran will move into a second-place tie on the franchise’s all-time leaderboard in that category.

The Cowboy currently with 71 touchdown catches is one of the most fascinating stories in the team’s illustrious history. Any fan who’s been to a Cowboys home game has seen his name in the stadium’s Ring of Honor. Take a trip to Canton, and there’s his bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In the grainy films of yesteryear, he wore No. 22 for Dallas a full generation before Emmitt Smith. But it’s his nickname- and the way he literally changed the sport- that endure even today as the stuff of legend.

Old Man Witten- never the fleetest of foot and now downright lumbering at 37 years old- is about to catch up, somewhat improbably, to the World’s Fastest Human.

Bob Hayes played wingback at Florida A&M University in the early 1960s. He had played football in high school, and in fact, attended FAMU on a football scholarship. But it was in track and field that Hayes made himself a household name. He broke records. World records. All of them. This was a time before 40-yard-dash times were archived for posterity, so it’s difficult to truly compare Hayes to the league’s more recent speed legends like Bo Jackson, Darrell Green, Deion Sanders, or Devin Hester. In the days before automatic timing, when guys with manual stopwatches determined official marks, Hayes often did the unimaginable. Sixty yards in 5.28 seconds… on a cinder track. A hundred yards in 9.1. A 220-yard time of 20.6 seconds… while running into an 8 mph headwind. Once, he did a quarter-mile on his coach’s spur-of-the-moment request; he finished 48.6 seconds later.

Despite not even being allowed to compete against some non-integrated schools of that era, Hayes was chosen to represent the United States at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. He was considered to be so vital to the U.S. team’s medal hopes that when his football coach was reluctant to give Hayes time off the gridiron to train for sprinting, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a personal phone call to Tallahassee to intervene.

In Tokyo, Hayes made history. He started by tying the world record and winning the 100-meter. On a chewed-up track. And in borrowed shoes. But his true crowning moment came in his next event.

The US team was running fifth in the 4×100-meter relay; Hayes was the anchor. When he took the baton, Hayes was two meters back. When he crossed the finish line, he was more than three meters ahead of everyone else. He had run his leg in 8.6 seconds, still the fastest time ever. Thirty-eight years after the fact, the New York Times referred to Hayes’s run as “perhaps the most memorable 100 meters in track and field history.” The French team’s anchor, speaking to the leadoff runner for the US team after the race, reportedly said, “You haven’t got anything except Hayes.” The American’s reply? “That’s all we need, pal.”

The Dallas Cowboys took a chance that the Olympic champion might provide a boost to their struggling young team. They had finished 4-10 the year prior, and picked Hayes in the seventh round of the 1964 draft as a futures selection, before his college eligibility had ended. (The Cowboys took Roger Staubach in the same draft, knowing he would have to fulfill his obligations to the Navy before joining the team. Patiently waiting for draft picks to pan out was a thing back then.)

The track star, who had already been dubbed ‘The World’s Fastest Human’ and ‘Bullet Bob,’ adapted quickly to his role as an NFL receiver. His Dallas teammates got a preview during training camp of what was about to be unleashed on the rest of the league. “It was like he was melting, he was so fast,” said fellow receiver Frank Clarke, according to an ESPN piece from 2002. “Scary,” said Gil Brandt, the Cowboys director of player personnel back then. “The speed he had was… well, frankly, it was beyond belief.”

Pro football, like all of Hayes’s previous competition, had to scramble just to try to keep up. Zone coverage was, in essence, invented out of necessity. Since no individual player could keep pace, zone was the only hope opposing teams had in combating Hayes’s otherworldly speed. (Before Hayes came along, all pass defense was man-to-man.) The bump-and-run technique? That was also created in an attempt to give defensive backs a chance at slowing down Hayes before he could hit stride.

“He changed the game because of his speed,” legendary coach Don Shula is quoted as saying on the Cowboys team website. “He wasn’t just the world’s fastest human, he was a great athlete and football player. Put that together, and he made you change everything on your defense when you played the Cowboys.”

Despite these extreme countermeasures, Hayes still torched the league right out of the blocks. He led the NFL in touchdown receptions his first two seasons, accumulating over 1,000 yards in both 1965 and 1966 (in just 13 and 14 games, respectively). Over his ten seasons in Dallas, Hayes was named to three Pro Bowls. And he ended up with 71 touchdowns, a tally which stood as the club record until Dez Bryant topped him in 2017.

‘Bullet Bob’ posed a home-run threat every single time he touched the ball. Those 71 touchdowns? They came on just 365 career receptions as a Cowboy. That’s over 19 percent. Think about that: Hayes ended up in the end zone on almost one out of every five catches. Across a ten-year career. By contrast, Bryant needed an additional 166 receptions to get two extra touchdowns. Witten currently has 1,159 receptions- more than triple Hayes’s total- to go with his 70 touchdowns, a 6% touchdown rate.

Hayes wore the star for several landmark Cowboys moments. He was on the original frozen tundra in 1967’s Ice Bowl at Green Bay’s Lambeau Field; he inadvertently tipped off the Packers defenders as to the coming play when they noticed the Jacksonville native sticking his hands down his uniform pants for warmth on run plays. Hayes played in the Cowboys’ first two Super Bowl appearances, and claimed a championship with the team in their Super Bowl VI victory over Miami. To this day, Hayes is the only person to have won both an Olympic gold medal and a Super Bowl ring.

Hayes’s Cowboys tenure ended with a trade just before the 1975 season (he went on to play four games with San Francisco before being waived), and he left with an insane average of 20.0 yards per reception, still a franchise record (and sixth in league history in career receiving average). Cowboys Wire recently ranked Hayes 13th on its list of the 100 greatest Cowboys of all time. He was inducted into the Cowboys Ring of Honor in 2001, in an emotional ceremony just days after 9/11. Hayes died on September 18, 2002 after battling prostate cancer and various heart and kidney ailments. He was 59. In 2009, Hayes was selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“He redefined what the position was all about,” former Cowboys teammate and NFL coach Mike Ditka once said.

Very few players ever caught up to ‘Bullet Bob’ Hayes. Jason Witten will do just that with his next touchdown catch. With the one after that, he’ll take the baton from the track star-turned-Cowboys great who’s responsible for one of the most remarkable and influential runs pro football has ever seen.