by Mike Siani
“After that we blew up the coaches’ room maybe once a week. Good old John never got after us. At first I thought he just got used to the explosions. Then I noticed that whenever he entered his office he stuffed wads of cotton in his ears.”
A COLLECTION OF MISFITS AND JOKESTERS
“Madden knew the kind of team he had.” said offensive tackle John Vella. “He knew he was coaching a gang of distinctive individuals. Some called us characters. Others called us ruffians, mavericks, renegades, oddballs, intimidators . . . and there’s no point in mentioning the curse words. But all the labels were fair enough. And I think that Madden decided that with the type of players we had that it was necessary to give us a certain amount of room to roam. We had more characters than any other team and John realized that we didn’t care for a lot of restrictions—were happier without them—and as a result played better. John handled individuals very well, and I feel that was a prime reason why the Raiders had the best win-loss record in pro football while he was coaching the team.” We all knew that we just needed to show up on Sundays at 1 o’clock, play our balls off and win and John would be a happy camper—so we did, and John was very happy.
“Al Davis liked to pick up so-called ‘misfits’ from other teams,” recalls quarterback David Humm.
“He obviously figured that, while they may not have fit in elsewhere, they sure as hell could fit in with us. And those of us who were already Raiders welcomed anyone who could help the ballclub, and maybe even add another dimension to our festive occasions.
“In August 1975, Al grabbed veteran linebacker Ted Hendricks from Green Bay, where he had not meshed in the Packers defensive system. His nickname was ‘Kick ’em in the Head Ted’ because he had no qualms about applying his feet to opponents when the urge seized him. Hendricks had no qualms about anything.
“The day he reported at Santa Rosa he didn’t turn out with the rest of us for practice, and we wondered where he was. Then we saw him coming over the hill that rose just beyond the field. He was riding a horse, in uniform. Except on his head was a spike-topped World War I German helmet that he’d painted silver and black, and on the sides were the Raiders symbol, patched-eyed pirate decals. Everyone cheered. Ted rode right up to John Madden and said, ‘Okay, Coach, I’m ready to play some football.’”
In early 1976 during training camp, the Washington Redskins released six eight, two hundred and eighty pound defensive end John Matuszak. It didn’t bother Al Davis that this was the third team to dump “The Tooz.”
Ted Hendricks was standing next to Al Davis when John came out to the field.
“The day Matuszak arrived at practice; he suited up with us, but also delayed joining us on the field. Then he came running at full speed and let out a god-awful scream that made spectators cringe and the rest of us laugh like hell. Al Davis was not amused. He was standing next to me and Al, kind of thinking out loud said, ‘I wonder if John’s worth the gamble?’
I gave him a you’ve got to be kidding look and said, ‘Al, what difference will one more make?’
When Pat Toomay joined the Raiders, he was ecstatic after playing the first seven seasons of his career with the Dallas Cowboys, the Buffalo Bills, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “All my life I knew that somewhere in the league there must be a club like this!
“From what I learned in thirteen years, the Raiders were the only team that couldn’t wait to get to training camp,” Phil Villapiano said. “Santa Rosa was a little town and when we arrived, we were treated like gold.
Pete Banaszak compared the Raider workouts of the ’70s to the NFL workouts of today.
“Madden worked the piss out of us in training camp. These guys today go out in their underwear, baseball caps, and sunglasses and don’t put pads on. We practiced twice a day in pads.”
When things got a little boring, Phil Villapiano came to the rescue.
“I thought I’d send a treat in for the boys. I got a girl from one of the clubs and gave her fifty bucks. She put on white sneakers and white socks and nothing else! She was to run around the practice field.”
Banaszak remembered . . .
“They always kept the fence around us closed because they didn’t want people watching. Then all of a sudden the gate opens just a crack. And here she comes, buck-naked. She was a pretty girl. She was a very appropriately-built young woman. And she starts running the entire length of the field. She then turns around and starts to run on the other field, and she gets winded—she can’t run. She has to start walking; she’s lost her breath. Madden doesn’t know if he should be mad or laugh.”
“Was she really pretty?” asked John Vella. “I don’t know if I was looking at her face.”
THE FAMOUS BAMBOO ROOM AND OTHER PORTS OF CALL
Many of the Raiders frequented the ‘spirit’ facilities of Santa Rosa. One of those taverns was The Bamboo Room.
Pete Banaszak recalls a few fond memories of the old watering hole.
“One pitcher and you’d be shit faced. At five we would shower and by five-thirty we would in the Room slompin’ ’em down. Then we would walk over to the El Rancho for dinner. One night Jim Otto was stumbling, bouncing off the wall. ‘Rooster,’ he said, ‘it was too much, too soon.’
“We’d have those two a day practices,” said linebacker Duane Benson, “and after those, in the heat, after a beer and a half you were so shit faced you couldn’t make English a language. You’d suck them down, because it was a pretty cheap high. Pitchers of beer were the stable offering. Everyone was into volume. I don’t remember anyone drinking out of a bottle.”
John Matuszak remembered a particular night when a bar patron challenged him to a fight.
“One night I was sitting in the Bamboo Room with Dave Dalby and Ted Hendricks. Seated at a table, I suppose we looked like average sized guys. We were shooting the breeze when some guy I’d never seen before walked up to the table and interrupted our conversation. He was looking at me.”
“What’s your name, Fatso?” he asked.
“I didn’t respond.”
“I said,” he repeated, “what’s your name, Fatso?”
I unfolded myself from the table and stood straight up. The guy didn’t look quite as cocky then.”
“How would you like to eat this table,” I asked the wise guy, “whole or in splinters?”
“Sometimes you have to speak to people in a language they understand.”
It was at the Bamboo Room where Phil Villapiano got his nickname from Benson.
“I was trying to say ‘Phil,’ but due to the copious amounts of liquid refreshment, the syllable came out slightly askew. All I could say was ‘Foo.’”
The Bamboo Room may have been one of the favorite watering holes of the Raiders, but it also served as an interview facility in finding a Queen.
“When Phil arrived to training camp, he had a fantastic inspiration,” said linebacker Dan Connors. “He was going to find a Queen to reign over the Air Hockey Championships. There was just one requirement: she had to be ugly, ugly, ugly.
“Phil came up with the lady after many hours of interviews and elimination contests. He sure can pick ’em. The lady accepted the honor of being our Queen and we held a special coronation. Kick ’em in the head Hendricks, so named because of his favorite maneuver during a game, built a throne from old crates on the back of his pickup truck and drove Her Royal Majesty up and down the streets of Santa Rosa.”
The Bamboo Room was also the venue for a wedding ceremony where, Phil Villapiano was the ring bearer.
“We called the Bamboo Room bartender ‘the queen’ (not to be confused with the Queen of the Air Hockey Tournament) because she served us pitchers and was nice to us,” said Benson. “One night Queen announced that she was going to marry one of the patrons of the bar. So, the Raiders decided to host the wedding. Pat Toomay performed the ceremony in which he was paid one hundred dollars. Toomay was bestowed the name of ‘Reverend Tombstone’ from the Church of the Holy C-note.
&nb
sp; “She came in a white dress. The guy she married was in a cowboy hat and boots. She thought it was legit. It wasn’t, of course. We all chipped in and got them a week in Lake Tahoe, and a police escort on the way out of town.”
BAR HOPPING WAS DOWN TO A SCIENCE
“We’d hit five bars in two hours,” said Pete Banaszak. “The Bamboo Room, the Music Box, Melendy’s, the Hilltopper, and the Hofbrau. The Music Box was a strip mall tavern. Melendy’s featured a long bar with a jukebox and booths. We’d roll dice. Whoever lost the dice game bought the first round.
“Melendy’s was out on the highway. It didn’t have much local color. Local people didn’t go there. You’d get the riffraff coming through. Exactly. We’d accuse Snake of studying his playbook by the light of the jukebox at the Music Box—although Stabler by his own admission seldom, if ever, studied a playbook.”
Kenny Stabler loved it.
“We couldn’t wait to get out of meetings and do the circuit. There was always a game plan to the madness. We had all the stops worked out; the same music stations on the radio. We ran in cliques like a pack of dogs, like a pack of wolves.”
Stabler, at the time, like most of the Raider players, was not married. They drank hard and chased women even harder.
“It relieved the monotony of training camp and the pressure of games, said Stabler. “And, goddamn, it was fun.
“My roommates and I had a pact. We all took seats by the door at the 8 p.m. and met up the moment it broke up, which was around 9:30. We then sprinted to our rooms, where we’d comb our hair, slap on face juice, and dash to the biggest car we had, usually a Banaszak Buick. We only had ninety minutes to complete what we called ‘The Circuit.’ That consisted of hitting at least five bars before we had to be back for the 11 p.m. curfew.
“The Circuit started each night at Melendy’s and ended at the Music Box. The Music Box had a large dance floor, the best live music in Santa Rosa, and also had the best looking women.
THE SIXTY MINUTE PLAYERS AND THE OT GIRLS
“Every year during training camp the women of Santa Rosa turned out in droves to greet the Raiders. Some of the women were beautiful, a great many were attractive, and the balance ranged from plain to ugly as a mud fence. We tried to be selective.
“We usually played Boss dice on the Circuit to see who would pay for the drinks. All the while, at each stop, we’d check out the women who appeared to be what we called ‘players.’ As we had to be in by the eleven o’clock curfew, all cars parked, dates would be set for 11:30. The experienced female players knew the routine, while others were quick to learn. They would drive to the El Rancho, pick you up, and haul you to their place or to another motel. Those players not familiar with the word ‘shy’ would join you in your room, uninhibited by the witnesses to the performances. There were a few tireless spirits who would attend to all five of us. They were known as the ‘60-minute Players’ or the ‘OT Girls.’
“When one of the roomies came in real late with a girl, those of us who appeared to be, but were not quite asleep, would peek at the action. Freddy liked to crawl on the floor and get right up close. I bought a kid’s plastic periscope to peek around the doorframe into the inner room, but the damn thing didn’t work unless all the lights in there were on.
“Many nights we’d go right back out after curfew, and many times I didn’t return until just before breakfast. We left and returned the same way—through a back door and a hedgerow of bushes rimming the driveway. If I had a midnight date, she would pull in, turn off the headlights, and then slowly circle the driveway. Meanwhile, I’d creep through the bushes in a crouch and look up the driveway for her—and usually see about fifteen other veterans hunched down waiting for pickups.
“We had a teammate who kept professing how religious he was. He enjoyed reprimanding some of us for our womanizing. Then one night I went through the hedgerow and who was right beside me but that God spouting hypocrite. A woman stopped her car and he made for it as if she had the keys to the pearly gates. ‘Caught, caught!’ I half hollered. The next day he denied that it was him. For the next week, though, whenever I saw him I’d yell, ‘Caught, caught!’ and watch him turn red.”
CURFEWS AND FINES
No matter the amount of late-night shenanigans the players embarked upon, Coach Madden was a stickler for curfew and the fines that went along with them.
“I never got caught with a woman in the El Rancho, though roughly half of our partying occurred right there,” said Stabler. “But every year in camp a few guys would get nabbed by coaches. They knew the program. The coaches had been around longer than us and periodically would run a spot check after curfew, around 1 a.m. Invariably, it was a veteran who was found with a girl in his sack.”
John Madden did this just to maintain some kind of control. He was not a guy to lay down rules and try to stop the fun completely—as most coaches did—because he knew that football players needed some relaxation. He drew a line, and it was a long one, beyond which you were not to tread. We just rubberized that line and stretched the hell out of it.
“Still, there had to be some policing, and at each camp six or eight players would be fined $200 for missing curfew, and four or five spot-check felons would have to cough up $500. The fines went into a fund for the end of the year team party.
“Coach Madden enjoyed standing up in the dining room and announcing the fines at breakfast, particularly when a player got busted with a woman in his room. ‘I’d like to thank John Matuszak (or whoever),’ John would say, ‘for his contribution to the party fund. He was found to have given some poor, homeless young woman shelter last night. She had to be homeless to stay with him. And while we admire his big heart, we appreciate more his $500 party donation.’
“Then everyone would laugh and raise hell razzing the guy who had gotten caught.
“I did get tapped for not making curfew once. Our standard procedure was to drink in the last bar on the Circuit until 10:30. Then we’d jump in the car and race back to camp. But one night we blew a rear tire a couple of miles from the motel. ‘Leave the car until tomorrow,’ Freddy said. ‘We can run for it.’
“Given my bad knees and all that booze in me, I wasn’t about to run two miles. ‘To hell with that,’ I said. ‘We’ll speed-change the tire. Pete, you set the jack. Dan, you pop the hubcap. Tony, you get the spare. Freddy, you grab the lug wrench.’
‘What are you gonna do, Snake?’ Freddy asked.
‘My duty. Go down with the ship if necessary.’
“Pete was so drunk he couldn’t set the jack properly. I jumped in and it took me over ten minutes to get the flat off the blacktop. It’s not real easy changing a tire in the dark—drunk. We didn’t stomp into our rooms until 11:35. There was a note on the floor: THAT’S $200 X 5.”
Pete Banaszak had his own way of letting it be known that he wasn’t late for the 11:00 p.m. curfew.
“I’d come in there every night, and there was a long, long driveway to the back [of the hotel]. I’d peel off down that driveway, squealing the tires at about fifty miles an hour, at five till eleven. That was my way of letting the coaches know I was there. They’d hear the tires and say, ‘OK, Banaszak’s in, we don’t have to check his room.’
“One night I was hurrying home to beat the curfew and I ended up scraping Stabler’s Corvette. I go in the room and I see Snake sleeping. I bang him on the shoulder, ‘Hey, I kind of hit your car coming in. It didn’t look too bad. Rub it out with Turtle Wax. He got up real early and saw that I’d torn the fender off. Next morning he’s banging on my door raising all kinds of hell.’
Shortly after the fender incident, Stabler’s car was repossessed.
“A few mornings later I woke up and found that my wheels were missing. I accused Banaszak of hiding my Corvette. Banaszak said, ‘No, I didn’t fuck with your car. They’d repossessed it.’ I got on the phone and said, ‘You motherfuckers, you cocksuckers, you come up here and take my goddamn car? People are out there robbing people and you
’re repo-ing cars?’ I ended up having to buy back my own car.”
There was a lot of skill involved in sneaking out after bed check. The rooms at the El Rancho opened onto a courtyard, but they also had a door on the backside, right on the parking lot. Coach Bob Zeman would pull back the sliding glass door on the inside, say, ‘Are you here?’ then leave. The moment that happened, as soon as they would turn the corner, guys were bailing out the back door into their cars. It was like the Daytona 500 leaving the parking lot. Everyone knew it. But that was part of Madden’s philosophy: ‘I don’t care what you do as long as you show up Sunday and play your heart out. And don’t let anything happen that will have an impact on Sunday.’”
One night tight end Bob Moore got caught by Madden as he tried to escape the El Rancho.
“One night I snuck out and was headed for my car when I ran into Madden. I took off back to my room with Madden on my heels. He was knocking and shouting, ‘Let me in! Let me in!’ We didn’t let him in.
“We get up the next morning, thinking, ‘Holy shit, this is gonna be really bad.’ But we pass him at practice, he’s going the other way, and he just says, ‘How ya doin’?’ I don’t know if he had his boots full that night or what. But it did scare the hell out of us.”
During training camp, everyone had their own way of sneaking out, but Fred Biletnikoff thought his way was smarter than most. His roommate, Pete Banaszak declined Fred’s offer to go with him. It was the smart move.
“One night I didn’t feel like going out,” said Pete. “Fred wanted to go out after bed check. I was tired. I said, ‘Fuck it, Fred. I’m staying in.’ So Fred puts two tennis shoes under the covers, took the pillows and rolled them like legs, then he grabbed the lamp off the table and put it in there, and tucks his hat in there. It looked pretty real.
“I knew Coach would be doing bed checks that evening. I knew it was him because he never wore shoestrings in his sneakers and you could hear his feet dragging on the sidewalk outside the window. Well, he came to our room and turned the light switch on. Freddy’s bed lit up and Madden walked out. The next morning at practice, Madden calls the team together. He says to Fred, ‘By the way, Biletnikoff, I came in last night and your head lit up. It’s gonna cost you big time.’”