There are those three games he scored two touchdowns in five ridiculously different ways.
There are his six Pro Bowls, a number not topped by any Bengals defender until Geno Atkins more than 40 years later.
There is the iconic nickname, born the day the rookie stole the ball from appreciative veteran wide receiver Speedy Thomas at Spinney Field.
But there is also the day Bengals founder Paul Brown borrowed his psychedelic-era fedora, plus one of his shimmering mink coats. This one with leopard stripes racing down the back and the 1970s.
That day tells you just how great Leapin' Lemar Parrish is in the annals of the franchise.
Here was Brown. Stern and sixty-something. A Hall-of-Fame coach. An American innovator. The no-nonsense Massillon health teacher who pretty much raised pro football from the black-and-white train ride days of his 1950s dynasty in Cleveland.
Now he was in NFL-AFL merger technicolor in front of his team, twirling Parrish's hat like he was on a Paris runway. Then he tossed it into the desks, and the players went scrambling for it as they rolled in the aisles in hysterics.
That's how good Parrish was. The all-business Master went out of character to salute one of his best players.
"That was classic," says Dave Lapham, who goes into the Bengals Ring of Honor with Parrish later this season. "Walking into the meeting with that on. That brought the house down. No doubt about that. Paul was trying not to crack a smile. But he was.
"PB would make comments. 'Check out Lemar today. What kind of animal is that? What animal has that color? What do you think of what Lemar is wearing today?' Guys were hitting the floor laughing so hard."
One of them was Parrish.
"I was surprised. I thought it was hilarious. And everyone in the locker room thought it was so funny because you never see Paul in that mood," Parrish says. "But he was in a good mood. We beat the Browns, I think. He was feeling good about the team and that it was in a good place. He seemed very happy.
"He's the bossman. He was just having fun. Paul knew how it was. We had fun in that locker room."
As Lapham says, that tells you a lot about Paul Brown. The game never passed him by because he never let the people go beyond him.
And, of course, the vignette says so much about Lemar R. Parrish, the Joe Willie Namath of those Baby Bengals, the youngest expansion team ever to make the playoffs at the time (in their third year and Parrish's rookie season of 1970) and who got Brown to the postseason three times in his last six seasons.
"It was sharp," Parrish says of his mink. "Joe Namath had an all white one. I had to do something different. So I had it made."
Parrish, who had a Cincinnati seamstress as one of the game's great fashion plates, was tailor-made for the '70s NFL. At 5-11, 185 pounds, he was long and lithe in a short, sledgehammer league.
"He had long arms," says Bengals president Mike Brown," but what he really had was phenomenal quickness. He was a dynamic runner. Quick, fast, and it showed in his punt returns."
Only Pro Football Hall of Famers Deion Sanders (18) and Rod Woodson (14) scored more non-offensive touchdowns in the 20th century than Parrish's 13. Four of them came on punt returns, and in 1974 he racked up a league-leading average of 18.8 yards per return that remains the longest in the Super Bowl era.
That was the year Nixon resigned and Parrish went to Washington to retire George Allen's Over-The-Hill gang with a 90-yard punt return touchdown and a 47-yard fumble return touchdown to deliver a 28-17 win.
By the time he had done that, Parrish had already orchestrated a 43-14 win in Buffalo during his rookie year with a 95-yard kickoff return and an 83-yard blocked field goal return for a touchdown. And two years later, he fueled another road rout with pick-sixes of 25 and 33 yards in a 61-17 win in Houston's Astrodome.
"I was blessed with great speed and quickness. I had great instincts," Parrish says. "I could feel things around me, and it was just spur of the moment. It was spontaneous. But to see it and to do it … to wiggle, to drop and jump back, that was just God-given talent."
The Bengals knew they had a wondrous athlete when they sifted him out of the seventh round of the 1970 draft from tiny Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo., where he scored 15 touchdowns that final year as a running back. What they didn't know is they had just taken a Hall-of-Fame-caliber cornerback even though he had never played the position.
Parrish, a future Lincoln head coach, chalks it up to his ability to self-teach that was bolstered by Chuck Weber, Paul Brown's defensive coordinator and secondary coach.
"Coach Weber was the greatest coach I ever had. I didn't need another coach after him because he taught techniques and fundamentals," Parrish says. "He taught how to play rotation, in your face, we could do a lot of things. I was green. I didn't know anything about cornerback. But the things he taught me stuck with me. I didn't have any bad habits."
It also helped immensely his road roommate and lifelong friend played on the opposite corner. Ken Riley had arrived the year before from Florida A&M, and the two had everything in common. Both Florida natives had played only offense at small historically black colleges where they would eventually become head coaches. And after they conquered cornerback in such dominating fashion, they became the first at their position in the Bengals Ring of Honor.
"And we were both scared," Parrish says. "You have to perform playing for Paul Brown. You had to. It was all good, though … It's every day, all day. Backpedaling, coming out of breaks, and balance, and keeping the head up. After awhile it became natural for you. I could come out of breaks in my sleep. That's what Paul Brown does. Surround you with good people, quality people. I was trained well.
"Kenny and I became students of the game. We had notebooks on every receiver we played. We shared those notes and talked about their speed. The way they came off the line on certain routes … One more time. That's my friend. That's my ride or die. We had a ball. We enjoyed each other."
After those 25 interceptions in eight seasons, the Bengals traded Parrish following a contract dispute and sent him to Washington, where he added to his Hall of Fame resume with 22 more interceptions in his final five seasons, the last in 1982 with Buffalo.
No hard feelings, he says.
"I got along with Paul and I get along with Mike. It's a business," Parrish says. "I enjoyed the team and the coaches. Cincinnati is my team. I was drafted there. There were great coaches there."
Not to mention great receivers. One of them, Charlie Joiner, is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Another one, Isaac Curtis, should be.
"He was the best I ever faced," Parrish says. "When I left and (Washington) had to play them and I had to go against him, oh. He was a nightmare with the speed he had. We won the game, but he was something special.
"Chip Myers was an underrated third-down possession receiver. Isaac Curtis gave me everything I needed. Once I played against Isaac Curtis and Charlie Joiner and those guys in practice, the game wasn't that hard."
It was in one of Parrish's first Bengals' practices where another wide receiver bestowed him his nickname.
"Speedy Thomas was one of the great move men. He could give you great moves," Parrish says. "He gave me a great post-corner move. That's where he takes me to the post and then takes me back to the corner. I overplayed the post route, and he broke back to the corner and he thought he had me beat. I came out of the break, and by the time the ball was there, it seemed like I was sitting on top of his head picking it off.
"Speedy gave me that name. 'Oh my God. You're Leapin' Lemar.' So the name stuck with me."
The name fits him like one of his mink coats or one of the shirts his mother made sure were never wrinkled when he was growing up in Riviera Beach, Fla.
"I still like to match," Parrish says.
He will during the Oct. 26 Ring of Honor ceremony at halftime of the game against the Jets at Paycor Stadium. But he says he won't wear anything from the '70s.
"A suit," Parrish says
His idol, the man who taught him to dress so well and play so hard and fast, his older brother, plans to be at the ceremony. Rev. Leroy Parrish, who leads the Pleasant Heights Missionary Baptist Church in their hometown, is part of an expected contingent that includes Parrish's wife Lynda and five of his six children.
He laughed when told that maybe the suit jacket each new Ring of Honor member receives should be mink for him.
"Let it be what it is. I heard the jackets are really nice," says the man who wore the label of game-breaker so well. "I googled them and saw them on the phone. They're really nice. That's something I can sport."
