The origins of fandom are elusive. Perhaps the most common notion is a kid, hand in hand with his or her father, going to a ball game.

It wasn’t quite like that for me in the mid-1960s. My father was not much of a sports fan and I wasn’t pointed at this or that team, or this at that sport, beyond the reality of certain teams and sports being in the air — on TV, on the radio, in the newspaper.

One of the prominent teams, in greater Los Angeles, was the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, whom I associate with being on television upon returning home from church on Sundays, and one of the unforgettable players was David “Deacon” Jones.

Deacon Jones was a great player when the Rams were a bad team, and he became even more impressive/noticed when George Allen took over as coach in 1966 and turned the Rams into the contenders they would continue to be for nearly the whole of the ensuing 25 years.

Jones was probably the best player of the defensive front line dubbed by some inspired sports writer as the Fearsome Foursome. He died today at the age of 74, and the news set off a chain reaction of memories and images rattling through my head.

Starting with the Fearsome Foursome. From left end to right end they were Jones, Merlin Olsen (another fantastic player), Roosevelt Grier and Lamar Lundy, and they made the Rams formidable in at least one department: The front four.

They otherwise were a bad team, during the Bob Waterfield/Harland Svare years of the early 1960s. Seriously bad. They had a Fearsome Foursome, but they didn’t exactly have Seven Blocks of Granite on offense, nor any particular skill players of the Mr. Inside/Mr. Outside ilk, beyond the young (and always erratic) quarterback Roman Gabriel.

But Jones and Olsen and Grier and Lundy were always fun to watch, quick, enormous men, and you didn’t have to expect the Rams to win to tune in and listen to announcer Gil Stratton talk about them.

Jones is considered one of the first elite defensive ends who combined speed with size (6-5, 275). He was unblockable, in part because he also refined the “head slap” — the flat of his left hand applied with force to the right side of the offensive tackle’s helmet. (Soon to become illegal, but then devastatingly effective.)

He is thought to have invented the word “sack” to describe a quarterback being tackled for no gain while attempting to pass. Makes sense, in that he was going it so often he needed a word to describe it.

He probably was one of the greatest pass-rushers in NFL history; the tricky part is that the NFL did not keep track of sacks as a statistics until 1982.

Pro Football Weekly attempted to reconstruct Deacon Jones’s sack history, and they suggest he had 191.5 career sacks, which would make him No. 3 all time, and had as many as 26 in a single season, 1967, which would still be a record.

And this was in an age, it should be remembered, when teams passed far less frequently than they do now. In the modern NFL, a pass-rusher as good as Jones was … almost certainly would have been lined up at right defensive end, where he could terrorize a quarterback from the blind side. Instead, he was first a run-stopper on the power side (the offensive’s right), back when most offenses were right-handed.

Thus, to get as many sacks as he did, in a running brand of football, and on the left side of the line, Deacon Jones much have been in a quarterback’s face pretty much every time he had a chance to do so.

So, memories. I see him angled in a three-point stance over the right tackle, wearing No. 75, and next to him is the run-stuffer, Merlin Olsen, No. 74, and to have those two guys there was to know that half the field was taken away from the opposition.

When George Allen took over, he brought in more help in the defensive back seven, and the Rams were a defensive machine in the late 1960s. They had Eddie Meador at safety, Clancy Williams and Irv Cross at corner, Jack Pardee, Maxie Baughan and Myron Pottios at linebacker.

From 1967, when the Rams went 11-1-2, until the 1980s, the Rams were huge in Los Angeles, which is a bit hard to imagine, now that the city has been without an NFL team for nearly two decades.

As big as the Dodgers were, the Rams were at least as big. As big as the Lakers were, playing for an NBA title almost every year, the Rams clearly were bigger.

And Deacon Jones was probably their best player.

I’m pleased and a bit surprised that so many flattering stories have appeared, concerning Deacon Jones. Those of us of a certain age always worry that the greats of the pre-internet era will be forgotten or overlooked or, at the least, downplayed.

Deacon Jones, however, is getting his due, in part because the consensus of people who saw him play is unanimous. Because he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as soon as possible.

The man was a beast. The most fearsome of the foursome, and that was saying something.