~ watch, and weep, seldom available Oakland East Bay sports documentary primer
quote from above '55 all star' link:
"'The House That Snake Built'
On the subject of hard men, you'd be hard-pressed to find a harder team than the mid-1970s Oakland Raiders. Led on offense by quarterback Ken "Snake" Stabler, and on defense by defensive end John "Tooz" Matuszak and linebacker Ted "The Mad Stork" Hendricks, the Raiders set a standard for good-humored debauchery that few have equaled and none have surpassed. Of their football skills, sports writer Jimmy Murray wrote: "The Raiders play like a guy jumping through a skylight with a machine gun." As for their tippling abilities, read on…
Dave Dalby: Stalwart center and the anchor of the offensive line, Dalby was a Kodiak bear in shoulder pads. A Raider to his core, he bled silver and black and never missed a party.
It's a well-known fact that players made less money in the '70s than they do today. Way less. The average NFL player's salary was $29,000 a year, and they weren't paid until the first game of the regular season, which meant they went to training camp and played preseason games essentially for free. This situation was hateful to Dave Dalby. How was he supposed to pay his bar tabs? His solution shows just how inventive a drunk can be when faced with a barrier between himself and his booze. Dalby bought two pinball machines and set them up in his room at camp. Games cost 25 and men lined up to play and wager. Even though they had to be repaired occasionally (in a battle between a pinball machine and a 300 lb. defensive lineman who's blitzed and pissed-off, the pinball machine always lost) Dalby's machines paid for all of his preseason bar tabs, which, according to Stabler "about equaled the national debt of Chad."
Dalby was the starting center for all three of the Raiders' Super Bowl wins, and was elected to the Pro Bowl in 1977.
Ted Hendricks: John Madden, coach of the Raiders during their glory days, was asked to describe Ted Hendricks. After a moment's thought, Madden said: "Ted's elevator doesn't go all the way to the top." In a similar vein, Stabler said: "Most Raiders loved to party, but Ted Hendricks was a party all by himself."
You never knew what might happen when you added a dose of Hendricks to your evening. He stood six-seven, weighed over 200 pounds, and physically punished his opponents to a degree that would be considered felonious in any other context. On his first day as a Raider, he rode a horse onto the practice field wearing his full uniform and pads, a spiked German Army helmet he'd painted silver and black, and carrying a stack of traffic cones as a lance. The following season, during a full-contact workout on Halloween, Ted arrived in uniform, minus his helmet. Instead he wore a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Nicknamed "The Mad Stork" in college because of his lanky frame, Ted's fellow Raiders re-christened him "Kick 'Em in the Head Ted," after his trademark maneuver of leaping over oncoming blockers, sometimes knocking them unconscious with his feet if he didn't get enough height.
Every afternoon during training camp and the preseason, employees at the nearby Hilton readied the lounge and themselves for the arrival of four giantslinebacker Phil Villapiano, defensive end John Matuszak, defensive end Otis Sistrunk, and Ted Hendricks. The men were fresh from practice and ready to do some drinking, and the bartenders knew what to pour without being asked"Left-Sides" for Villapiano and Matuszak, and "Right-Sides" for Sistrunk and Hendricks, the drinks named for the side of the defense each man played. The drinks were simple enough. The "Left-Side" was a quadruple Chivas on the rocks, and the "Right-Side" was a quadruple Crown on the rocks. This fearsome foursome usually drank three or four "Sides" to wind down after a tough day and to ready themselves for the serious drinking that would come later in the evening.
Ted Hendricks has taken a lot of crap over the years about his antics, but his accomplishments should be enough to make the naysayers shut the **** up. He shares the record for the most safeties with four, he was selected to the Pro Bowl eight times, he intercepted 26 passes, returning two for touchdowns, he set the post-season record for the most recovered fumbles with four, and during his 15-year career he never missed a single game. Not one.
John Matuszak: His teammates and friends called him "Tooz." Some sports writers labeled him the "Man-Beast." Sports Illustrateddesignated him one of the top five all-time NFL "bad-boys." He signed with the Raiders in 1976 after failing to "fit in" with the Houston Oilers, Kansas City Chiefs, and Washington Redskins. Prior to signing the big man, coach Madden asked Ted Hendricks if he thought it was a bad idea to add a loose cannon like Matuszak to the roster. Laughing, Hendricks said, "Look around you, John. What's one more going to hurt?"
Matuszak was hugesix-eight and close to 300 pounds. His voice was huge. His appetites were huge. He was an intimidating presence and liked it that way. With his unruly brown hair and thick bushy beard, he looked like Bigfoot, and his eyes were unmistakably those of a man who could, if he chose to, hit you so hard your great-great grandfather would feel it.
His flair for the theatrical is clearly seen in his customary manner of entering a bar. He would grab his shirt collar in both fists, rip the garment from his body, throw his head back, and roar like a lion. He was arrested several times for public intoxication and once for DUI and damaging city property after he blasted apart a bunch of road signs with a .357. All things considered, it was nice of Matuszak to offer the following to newcomers in his circle: "You can get bruised when you cruise with the Tooz."
The Raiders made it to the Super Bowl again in 1981, squaring off against the Philadelphia Eagles in the New Orleans Superdome. Turning this particular Raiders squad loose in New Orleans gave the League great pause. They imagined ugliness heaped upon ugliness and warned Raiders' owner Al Davis that he had better keep a leash on his team or else. Davis passed the warning along to Tom Flores and the rest of the coaching staff, and Flores handed it to the players in a team meeting, after which he went over it again point by point in a private chat with Matuszak. But the big man surprised everyone: "I'm going to see that there's no funny business," he said. "I've had enough parties for 20 people's lifetimes. I've grown up. I'll keep our young fellows out of trouble. If any players want to stray, they gotta go through Ol' Tooz." League and team officials breathed a collective sigh of relief.
At 3am the morning of the Super Bowl, Tooz was caught at a blues joint in the French Quarter, shirtless, marvelously hammered, and roaring like a lion.
Twelve hours later he was celebrating his second Super Bowl victory.
John Matuszak retired following that game and had some success as an actor, appearing in such movies as North Dallas Forty (the best football movie ever made in my opinion) and Caveman, but most fans remember him as Sloth in The Goonies. He died in 1989 from an accidental overdose of painkillers. He was only thirty-eight.
Ken Stabler: Snake's reputation for carousing was on a par with fellow University of Alabama alum Joe Namath's, but with some stylistic differences. Broadway Joe was a celebrity playboy at home in the glitz and glare of New York, but Snake was pure Alabama honky-tonk, a southern renegade bathed in the flickering light of a neon beer sign.
For Stabler and the rest of the team, the parties started on the first day of training camp. Among veterans, camp has a rote, eat-your-spinich quality, and Stabler, already uncomfortable with schedules and rules, felt it more acutely than most. But rather than letting it sour their moods, Stabler and his cronies decided that, since their presence was mandatory, they might as well kick out the jams. As Stabler put it: "The monotony of camp was so oppressive that without the diversions of whiskey and women, those of us who were wired for activity on no more than six hours sleep a night might have gone berserk."
Shortly after arriving in Oakland, Snake hooked up with four like-minded players, forming a hedonistic club he called the "Santa Rosa Five." In addition to himself, there was halfback Pete Banaszak, receiver Fred Biletnikoff, defensive end Tony Cline and linebacker Dan Conners. They lived in a two-room suite at the El Rancho Motel in Santa Rosa and it quickly became party-central for Raiders in need of a good time. The Five bought three refurbished refrigerators and lined them up side by side in the suite's main room. One was for snacks, the other two were exclusively for beer. Properly packed, they could hold 20 cases.
The team was shackled with an 11pm curfew during camp. Adherence was monitored by bed-checks and a parking lot patrol (to ensure all player-owned vehicles were accounted for). Practices usually ended with a team meeting that lasted, roughly, from 8 to 9:30pm, leaving the players 90 minutes of "social time" before curfew. To the Santa Rosa Five this meant "The Circuit"five bars before bed-check. At the meeting, the Five took seats by the door and the minute the meeting adjourned they would sprint to their rooms, clean up, and pile into Pete Banaszak's huge Buick. The idea was to drink as much as possible, pick up as many girls as possible, and get back before 11pm. After bed-check, they'd sneak out, jump into one or more of the girls' cars (thus dodging the parking lot check) and party until the wee hours. Stabler claims they never got caught and the coaches never got wise.
Later in his career, Stabler decided that since he was spending so much time in bars he might as well open one of his own. He ended up opening two in Florida, one called Lefty's and the other The End Zone.
The Raiders of the 1970s and early '80s were a team like no other. Stabler sums them up this way: "The players partied hard and played hard, and that combination may have been no small factor in why we won.""
https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/5-things-about-dan-pastorinis-short-tenure-as-raiders-qb-1999350/
quote from above '55 all star' link:
"'The House That Snake Built'
On the subject of hard men, you'd be hard-pressed to find a harder team than the mid-1970s Oakland Raiders. Led on offense by quarterback Ken "Snake" Stabler, and on defense by defensive end John "Tooz" Matuszak and linebacker Ted "The Mad Stork" Hendricks, the Raiders set a standard for good-humored debauchery that few have equaled and none have surpassed. Of their football skills, sports writer Jimmy Murray wrote: "The Raiders play like a guy jumping through a skylight with a machine gun." As for their tippling abilities, read on…
Dave Dalby: Stalwart center and the anchor of the offensive line, Dalby was a Kodiak bear in shoulder pads. A Raider to his core, he bled silver and black and never missed a party.
It's a well-known fact that players made less money in the '70s than they do today. Way less. The average NFL player's salary was $29,000 a year, and they weren't paid until the first game of the regular season, which meant they went to training camp and played preseason games essentially for free. This situation was hateful to Dave Dalby. How was he supposed to pay his bar tabs? His solution shows just how inventive a drunk can be when faced with a barrier between himself and his booze. Dalby bought two pinball machines and set them up in his room at camp. Games cost 25 and men lined up to play and wager. Even though they had to be repaired occasionally (in a battle between a pinball machine and a 300 lb. defensive lineman who's blitzed and pissed-off, the pinball machine always lost) Dalby's machines paid for all of his preseason bar tabs, which, according to Stabler "about equaled the national debt of Chad."
Dalby was the starting center for all three of the Raiders' Super Bowl wins, and was elected to the Pro Bowl in 1977.
Ted Hendricks: John Madden, coach of the Raiders during their glory days, was asked to describe Ted Hendricks. After a moment's thought, Madden said: "Ted's elevator doesn't go all the way to the top." In a similar vein, Stabler said: "Most Raiders loved to party, but Ted Hendricks was a party all by himself."
You never knew what might happen when you added a dose of Hendricks to your evening. He stood six-seven, weighed over 200 pounds, and physically punished his opponents to a degree that would be considered felonious in any other context. On his first day as a Raider, he rode a horse onto the practice field wearing his full uniform and pads, a spiked German Army helmet he'd painted silver and black, and carrying a stack of traffic cones as a lance. The following season, during a full-contact workout on Halloween, Ted arrived in uniform, minus his helmet. Instead he wore a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Nicknamed "The Mad Stork" in college because of his lanky frame, Ted's fellow Raiders re-christened him "Kick 'Em in the Head Ted," after his trademark maneuver of leaping over oncoming blockers, sometimes knocking them unconscious with his feet if he didn't get enough height.
Every afternoon during training camp and the preseason, employees at the nearby Hilton readied the lounge and themselves for the arrival of four giantslinebacker Phil Villapiano, defensive end John Matuszak, defensive end Otis Sistrunk, and Ted Hendricks. The men were fresh from practice and ready to do some drinking, and the bartenders knew what to pour without being asked"Left-Sides" for Villapiano and Matuszak, and "Right-Sides" for Sistrunk and Hendricks, the drinks named for the side of the defense each man played. The drinks were simple enough. The "Left-Side" was a quadruple Chivas on the rocks, and the "Right-Side" was a quadruple Crown on the rocks. This fearsome foursome usually drank three or four "Sides" to wind down after a tough day and to ready themselves for the serious drinking that would come later in the evening.
Ted Hendricks has taken a lot of crap over the years about his antics, but his accomplishments should be enough to make the naysayers shut the **** up. He shares the record for the most safeties with four, he was selected to the Pro Bowl eight times, he intercepted 26 passes, returning two for touchdowns, he set the post-season record for the most recovered fumbles with four, and during his 15-year career he never missed a single game. Not one.
John Matuszak: His teammates and friends called him "Tooz." Some sports writers labeled him the "Man-Beast." Sports Illustrateddesignated him one of the top five all-time NFL "bad-boys." He signed with the Raiders in 1976 after failing to "fit in" with the Houston Oilers, Kansas City Chiefs, and Washington Redskins. Prior to signing the big man, coach Madden asked Ted Hendricks if he thought it was a bad idea to add a loose cannon like Matuszak to the roster. Laughing, Hendricks said, "Look around you, John. What's one more going to hurt?"
Matuszak was hugesix-eight and close to 300 pounds. His voice was huge. His appetites were huge. He was an intimidating presence and liked it that way. With his unruly brown hair and thick bushy beard, he looked like Bigfoot, and his eyes were unmistakably those of a man who could, if he chose to, hit you so hard your great-great grandfather would feel it.
His flair for the theatrical is clearly seen in his customary manner of entering a bar. He would grab his shirt collar in both fists, rip the garment from his body, throw his head back, and roar like a lion. He was arrested several times for public intoxication and once for DUI and damaging city property after he blasted apart a bunch of road signs with a .357. All things considered, it was nice of Matuszak to offer the following to newcomers in his circle: "You can get bruised when you cruise with the Tooz."
The Raiders made it to the Super Bowl again in 1981, squaring off against the Philadelphia Eagles in the New Orleans Superdome. Turning this particular Raiders squad loose in New Orleans gave the League great pause. They imagined ugliness heaped upon ugliness and warned Raiders' owner Al Davis that he had better keep a leash on his team or else. Davis passed the warning along to Tom Flores and the rest of the coaching staff, and Flores handed it to the players in a team meeting, after which he went over it again point by point in a private chat with Matuszak. But the big man surprised everyone: "I'm going to see that there's no funny business," he said. "I've had enough parties for 20 people's lifetimes. I've grown up. I'll keep our young fellows out of trouble. If any players want to stray, they gotta go through Ol' Tooz." League and team officials breathed a collective sigh of relief.
At 3am the morning of the Super Bowl, Tooz was caught at a blues joint in the French Quarter, shirtless, marvelously hammered, and roaring like a lion.
Twelve hours later he was celebrating his second Super Bowl victory.
John Matuszak retired following that game and had some success as an actor, appearing in such movies as North Dallas Forty (the best football movie ever made in my opinion) and Caveman, but most fans remember him as Sloth in The Goonies. He died in 1989 from an accidental overdose of painkillers. He was only thirty-eight.
Ken Stabler: Snake's reputation for carousing was on a par with fellow University of Alabama alum Joe Namath's, but with some stylistic differences. Broadway Joe was a celebrity playboy at home in the glitz and glare of New York, but Snake was pure Alabama honky-tonk, a southern renegade bathed in the flickering light of a neon beer sign.
For Stabler and the rest of the team, the parties started on the first day of training camp. Among veterans, camp has a rote, eat-your-spinich quality, and Stabler, already uncomfortable with schedules and rules, felt it more acutely than most. But rather than letting it sour their moods, Stabler and his cronies decided that, since their presence was mandatory, they might as well kick out the jams. As Stabler put it: "The monotony of camp was so oppressive that without the diversions of whiskey and women, those of us who were wired for activity on no more than six hours sleep a night might have gone berserk."
Shortly after arriving in Oakland, Snake hooked up with four like-minded players, forming a hedonistic club he called the "Santa Rosa Five." In addition to himself, there was halfback Pete Banaszak, receiver Fred Biletnikoff, defensive end Tony Cline and linebacker Dan Conners. They lived in a two-room suite at the El Rancho Motel in Santa Rosa and it quickly became party-central for Raiders in need of a good time. The Five bought three refurbished refrigerators and lined them up side by side in the suite's main room. One was for snacks, the other two were exclusively for beer. Properly packed, they could hold 20 cases.
The team was shackled with an 11pm curfew during camp. Adherence was monitored by bed-checks and a parking lot patrol (to ensure all player-owned vehicles were accounted for). Practices usually ended with a team meeting that lasted, roughly, from 8 to 9:30pm, leaving the players 90 minutes of "social time" before curfew. To the Santa Rosa Five this meant "The Circuit"five bars before bed-check. At the meeting, the Five took seats by the door and the minute the meeting adjourned they would sprint to their rooms, clean up, and pile into Pete Banaszak's huge Buick. The idea was to drink as much as possible, pick up as many girls as possible, and get back before 11pm. After bed-check, they'd sneak out, jump into one or more of the girls' cars (thus dodging the parking lot check) and party until the wee hours. Stabler claims they never got caught and the coaches never got wise.
Later in his career, Stabler decided that since he was spending so much time in bars he might as well open one of his own. He ended up opening two in Florida, one called Lefty's and the other The End Zone.
The Raiders of the 1970s and early '80s were a team like no other. Stabler sums them up this way: "The players partied hard and played hard, and that combination may have been no small factor in why we won.""
https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/5-things-about-dan-pastorinis-short-tenure-as-raiders-qb-1999350/
