Green Light with Chris Long - Green Light Exclusive with Howie Long

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

Growing up in the Long Household - :55 seconds. Chris, Kyle and Howie JR as kids - 5:05. Raiders Talk - 7:05. Howie and the NFL Draft - 9:30. Al Davis Stories - 29:00. Quick Hitters - 43:55. About Chalk Media: Following the unfiltered voice and vision of Chris Long, Chalk Media is the interactive online community for you, the intelligent and humorous sports fan. Driven by access, Chalk delivers a unique perspective that cuts through the canned talking points and provides a variety of content from your favorite sports and entertainment celebrities. Here at Chalk, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we are rooted in challenging the perception of professional athletes. We embrace the “real” with a unique combination of humor and intelligence. Chalk is a community with a voice beyond 240 characters that brings a perspective and vibe to a traditionally brash and boastful sports media space. Subscribe and enjoy weekly content including podcasts, documentaries, live chats, celebrity interviews and more. Nothing is off limits at Chalk - hot news items, trending discussions from the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, NCAA are just a small part of what we will be sharing with you. 🌍🏀🏈SUBSCRIBE NOW ⚾🏒⛰️ http://bit.ly/chalknetwork Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So welcoming to the Greenlight Studios, a good buddy of mine. Technically, he's my dad. He's also a friend, Hall of Famer. 83 career sacks? Oh, they didn't count sex. So you had, well, you had five your rookie year. I looked it up. No, I think it was six.

Okay, so you had about 89-90. So congratulations on my retirement. I was coming for you. I just want to get that off the bat. Hey, about five more years. So, hey, and also, I mean, like, for a guy that grounded me for six months at one point, I just want to welcome you to our studio, how the tables have turned. Uncle Billy grounded me for life one time.

Mike came by the house and... What did you do? I don't know. Believe it or not, when I was in high school, how tough Uncle Billy was. Uncle Billy was tough. He's a lot warmer and fuzzier now. When I lived with him for three years, I couldn't go out during the week.

I was 6'5, 220-pound senior, couldn't go out during the week and had to be home at 9 p.m. flat. Yeah. Or if you were 9.01. Tom Coughlin time, 9. Yes, he was Tom Coughlin. He was Tom Coughlin early.

He was way early than Tom Coughlin. So you had it easy. Yeah, I know I did. Well, I deserved it a few of the times. You sure did. But welcome to the studio. And by the way, this guy, is just giving me shit since he sat down.

He said, is it okay to have a dead raccoon behind you? I said, well, I want to know, do you validate because I walked about a, I'm winded, walked about a mile down from the parking lot. We can improve the parking situation. And then I saw the raccoon and the squirrel. But for the record, I will say this, for all the dead raccoons out there. Nice Super Bowl trophies back there. Yeah, Super Bowl trophies are nice.

For all the dead raccoons out in the world, like, this one has it pretty good. You know, the other ones, they're just on the side of the road somewhere. This guy's on a big time live stream podcast. We're streaming this podcast live across the country right now as we speak. I don't know what foundation. That was a joke. I wanted to see if you squatter on because it's live TV. I know you don't do a lot of live TV.

I don't know what I do a lot of live TV. I don't know what foundation or what group monitors these kinds of atrocities. FCC. Yeah, they'll be on you and a heartbeat. FCC. There's a third C. These are way more important than some of the stuff you do on Sunday. It's great.

A lot of people watch. What's that an acronym for? I don't know. So I wanted to ask you, the reason we're bringing you on, this is a segment called Hey, Dad, because if you didn't know already, this is going to be a recurring segment, so you're contractually obliged. What's the budget here? Also, I do the budget here.

$8 million a week. Also, I want to shout you out as not only a Hall of Fame football player, but a great babysitter. Oh, God, I love those kids. Yeah. They are, I'll tell you what, they, it's, you got to get through your own kids to get to those kids. Yeah, I'm working on that. No, I mean, they, they are, Whalen and Luke are, we just have, we have so much fun. And, and, you know, the nice thing for us is we, we have a relatively big house for that circa of house.

You know, built in 1846. and when we first bought it, it was in total disrepair. And we didn't have a kitchen. We had one bathroom. And you guys were nine, five, and four. And it was kind of an adventure. So it was nice. But here we were, fast forward to your 34 years old.

Kyle's 30 going on 31 here and, you know, and how he's fast approaching the 30 number here. But he's got the wisdom of a 50-year-old. Totally. Yeah, he's like Yoda. But the house, here we were in this big house, and it's kind of empty. Yeah. And, you know, there are rooms that I don't go in or would not go in for 10 years.

There's rooms I haven't been in. Right. You know, Diane, your mom said, you know, that room down the end of the hall needs to be painted. I said, why? We haven't been in that room in 20 years. But now with Luke and Whalen, the house is full. Oh, you use the whole thing. The house is full and again.

You throw your Fitbit on for that exercise watching them, because you probably cover a couple miles a day. Oh, and it's great. They are great, and it's a ball, and you're watching things and doing things that, you know, the technology is so much better now than when we brought you guys up. It was pretty primitive.

Throw something in the back seat and hope that you don't kill one another. Well, like, yeah, yeah. How many stitches combined? Well, I didn't realize this, but until I went to when Kyle took a line drive at a, he was eight years old at one of your practices. At Darden Tau.

Yeah. It wasn't a live drive, a line drive. It was a pop fly. Whatever. Pop fly line drive. It was batting. Faster than a, it was a towering shot.

It was batting practice. And batting practice, for those you don't know, in Little League, there's about 10 kids out in the outfield. And it's, oh, I got it. No, I don't got it. And one kid puts his glove down. And it's Kyle. Well, we go to the emergency room and come to realize that, you know, I'm starting to kind of figure out the questions the woman at the computer is asking me are leading towards, you know, do you feel like, you know, do you feel like you're in peril at home, you know, those kind of questions?

And I figured it out that if you're in there a certain number of times, you know, there's a red light that goes up. Yeah, it's called a watch list. They have them for all types of things. Well, we were on the watch list for sure. Yeah, we had stitches and, you know. 36 for Kyle. I accidentally hit him with the bat. Oh, that was a bad bad bad. It was a rough one. We don't need to go into details, but that was an accident.

I was covered in blood. And then Howie hit Kyle or Kyle hit Howie with a picture frame? Howie always went with the foreign object. Yeah, wasn't it? I mean, it was a size thing. You know, he was like Toro Tanaka. He pulled out of the salt, salt out of the belt and, you know, throw in your eyes and then whack you. Yeah.

You know. But I mean, when you're dealing with Kyle, Poor Howie, you know, I mean, I'm hiding behind the door with a bat too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no doubt about it. Yeah, so, you know, fast forwarding to the, the reason I brought you on wasn't to recount how fucking insane our childhood. You could get two shows out of this. You could.

But it was mainly to talk about the Raiders in the last game to Coliseum. Obviously, you, when you read about the Raiders, and this is something for me that I lose, you know, because when I was a kid, you were just my dad, you guys did a good job of driving that home. We tried to. You tried to, and you did. And so for me, I can remember, like, when you played in that AFC championship game against Buffalo, I had really half of one eye on the game. I was playing Sega Genesis.

Sure. That's how it can backfire. If you convince your kid that your dad's regular, I treat my dad on TV like it's regular. Well, I think for you guys, it was regular. Yeah, yeah. And we didn't make a big deal out of it. Yeah, yeah. And if you're in our house, up until, you know, X number of years ago,

we had all this stuff stored in closets. And your mom actually was, you know, the nexus for, you know, hey, we need to take this stuff out and put it up. Exactly. And we turned the gym. I said, that's fine. I don't want it even in the house. Yeah, yeah.

I don't want to walk in the house and look at myself. I don't want to look at jerseys. I don't either. But down in the gym, it turned out to be a nice thing, and it's spilled over into your careers. So is there one piece of memorabilia that you really liked? down there not to tip anybody off? I would probably say the Hall of Fame bust.

You know, there's one bust at the Hall of Fame, and they give you an additional bust for your own personal. You know, I read an article the other day where people keep their Academy Awards. I mean, I don't know where I put ahead of myself. I mean, it's not like you've got a statue. Yeah, you're like... So I would say, yeah,

it would be the Hall of Fame bust and the jerseys. of some of the best because you got some NBA ones in there well I've got a lot of Raiders in there I've got you know Archel and uh Marcus Allen Ronnie Lott you know just a slew of Bill Pichel your yeah my godfather your godfather who is as good as it gets so a lot of those guys played the Oakland Coliseum and and obviously when you read about it my point being when I read articles now as somebody who's studying in the media and like they you know they talk about the perspective of the players that played there, your name always comes up out of the five, six guys they talk about or six, eight guys they talk about. That's pretty cool. You know, you were the last Oakland Raider

at one point, right? Yeah. Well, I graduated or didn't graduate from Villanova at the time, ended up going early out to Oakland once the draft occurred and had never been west of West Virginia. Right. And you got to remember, I'm... West Virginia is pretty far. West. Yeah. I mean, we played West Virginia my freshman year, but had never played on, played on television maybe once or twice in four years of college. So we really didn't know, I mean, when you're a small school guy when people don't realize is, you know, when you're a big school guy, for example, take your situation, let's compare the two situations. And you were a high draft pick. You were a high first round draft pick. People wanted you to play in the same.

senior bowl, you know, thankfully you did not. It was more exposure to your body. But when you're at Villanova, I mean, oddly enough, I had gone to high school with a guy named Joe Restick, try to follow this. It's a, it's a little bit of a breadcrumb trail here. I played with a guy named Joe Restick, who ended up going in Notre Dame and was a captain at Notre Dame, and he played on the same team with Rudy. Right. His dad was the coach at Harvard. Who was an asshole, by the way, Rudy, by all accounts. I don't know. You're not, you don't need to say that. No, I've never had the conversation. That's what the people are saying. I've never

had the conversation with Joe. Yeah. Joe, by the way, is a dentist now. Joe's dad was the head coach at Harvard forever. Right. For 25 years, legendary coach. Joe's dad was on the selection committee for the now defunct blue-gray All-Star game. Right. So at this point, people don't know whether Howie Long's black or white.

Right. Because I've never been on TV. I mean, we played down in Clemson. We were that, we were that team that they scheduled, you know, to beat by 52 early on. And that was like the number one team in the country at the time. So a player, from what I gathered, got hurt that was going to play in the blue-gray game. And it was kind of a secondary All-Star game. And get a call, and Joe Restick's dad facilitated getting me the offer to come down and play. And it was played down in Alabama on Christmas Day.

And ironically enough, the head coach was Jimmy Johnson. Right. Of the team from, I think we were in the north. We were the north team. Jimmy Johnson was at Oklahoma State. But you see every week now. Yeah. And Jimmy was coming from Oklahoma State,

and Dexter Manley played the game and, you know, some people. And I had the opportunity to play against, I think it was a guy from Texas A&M and end up winning the MVP. And then it begins. I don't have an agent. You know, typically when you're at a big school, you have a pro day where you had a pro day.

And, you know, every team that wants to look at you comes in and you do one workout. And you maybe do one or two other workouts for teams that are at the top of the draft. Maybe, you know, for your case, it was Miami, maybe someone else. I worked out for maybe 26 separate days. You were in good shape then. Oh, I worked out one time. A scout from the Colts came by. I think it was the Colts.

It was on a Sunday. He knocked on my dorm room door, and I ran a 40 in sneakers on the front lawn of my dorm. Right. One time in a pouring rain, because we didn't have great facilities of Villanova at the time. It was the old Jake Nevin, Jim. Pittsburgh came in,

and I desperately wanted to be a Pittsburgh Steeler because Joe Green and all that. And there was no place to run a 40, because it was a, you know, a driving rain outside and there was no place to run. And there was no indoor facility to facilitate running a 40. So what I did was we started in the corner of the staircase outside the gym and ran caddy corner across the gym into the other stairway area and ran out of room and you end up hitting the wall twice.

Boom. boom twice because there's just not enough just palms your hands on cinderbox no i mean literally there's not enough runway so your mom and i are and i don't even know where we were i mean i had no expectation of being drafted high oakland hadn't really showed any interest to me earl legged came by but never said a word to me and earl was kind of holding his cards close to the vest and you know didn't want to tip anyone that he was he was interested and all of a sudden, get a phone call that the Oakland Raiders

who drafted you in the second round. Right. Went through four years of college without a dime in my pocket, worked at Kelly's bar where I think $10 a night down in Philly, outside of Philly,

by Villanova. Greatest city on the East Coast? Yeah. And... Did you disagree with me? No, I don't want to get you in trouble. No, Philly's great. Philly's great.

You know, you playing there, you know, your mom and I going to school there, we had, you know, some, some kind of connection, and we had a lot of friends there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, you playing there gave us a greater appreciation, but here I, I hear I am in Villanova and I've got zero dollars. I have no agent. When I was down at the blue gray game, not one agent spoke to me. Right. I might as well, I was, I was space ghost. You just press the space goes button. I disappeared. No one, this guy, is not going to go anywhere.

Right. So I end up with a used car salesman from Tucson, Arizona, as my agent, because he represented a guy from Colorado, who was also kind of a mid to late round guy and obscure, and I end up, he ends up negotiating a contract for me with Oakland, with Ron Wolf, who's now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and one of the great general managers, one of the great talent evaluators in the history of the NFL.

And my contract was 38, 48, 48, 58, 68, 68, 88, $88,000, with an option for an additional year at $10,000 more. My signing bonus was $80,000, but they told me they couldn't give that to me all at once. That would be a lot. So they had to, yeah, they had to deferred. fur it out. So I bought myself a used coup de ville from my used car salesman agent. And that was the whole play. Yeah. He looked at you and your Charlestown get up. Right. And he said this guy wants a

Cadillac. There's no doubt about it. And I'm thinking, I'm going to get in this Cadillac. And I don't know how far Tucson is from Oakland, but I'm driving Oakland. And I drive that thing straight to Oakland by myself and get out of the car and first person I run into is a guy by name Mike Ornstein, who is, you know, one of the great characters in NFL history. And you got to remember, I'm coming from Villanova where there's a priest on every floor. Right. There's a church in my dorm. I have a church, a gym, the cafeteria, the communications major, all in St. Mary's Hall. And there's a priest on every floor. And there's a priest on every door. I have a church, a church, a gym, floor. Yeah. And then I walk into the Oakland Raider locker room. Guys are smoking Salem lights and

playing cards. Yeah. Yeah. To say it's a culture shock and really what hammered the point home that I was no longer in college, aside from the fact that there's grown men, I'm making 38 grand now. my check is a little over $1,000 a week after taxes. First day of training camp, right off the bat, they're going down the line pit drill, pit drill one-on-one run blocking. And I'm sizing up the number two kite, because at this point I'm the number two right end

in a three-four defense. So it's a two-gap defense, and it's Dave Browning. and they get to Dave Browning and Earl unbeknownst to me had worked something out with Art Shell prior to the drill

and so he kicks Dave out and puts me in now here's Art Shell fully grown man 34 years old 33 years old 300 and God knows what

they didn't weigh art art never weighed in no need you just don't weigh art in I think John Madden said if if I can can't see the sun through his legs when they're together.

I know he's too big. And Art, for those who don't know, is one of the, you know, one of the top tackles of all time, left tackle. And not a classic left tackle, a power left tackle, who also, you know, is a dancing bear and great and pass protection. But Art would come off the ball and hit headbutch you and do, double fist pump you into the chest. So now I'm not sure if my ribs are broken

or my cheek is fractured and I'm doing my best not to show that this is painful. Painful at all. And I survived it and, you know, it was to be in a locker room with Art Shell, Gene Upshaw, Mark Van Egan, Cliff Branch, Ted Hendricks, Rod Martin, Matt Millen, you know, Lester Hayes, you know, the names go on and on and on. It was a culture that I never realized how unique it was until after I left and started broadcasting

and covering other teens because my only frame of reference was the Oakland right. It was the 13 years that I spent there and particularly when you start your career in Oakland. We played in Oakland for one year and practiced in Oakland year two and played every game in L.A. So every game for us in 1982 was a road game. And my roommate, not by choice,

by kind of edict, was Lyle Al-Zato who said, hey, what are he doing for a place to live? I said, well, I have no idea. I already have one. I don't have a plan. No, I didn't even have a plan. I mean, I was, you know,

I was kind of staying at the Oakland Airport Hilton. So Lyle and I got a single room with two queen beds. And I lived with Lyle the entire season. That sounds like some fear factor shit, to be honest. Oh, Lyle would get a piece of chocolate cake every single night at like 9 o'clock with a glass of milk. And I could be watching TV or whatever. He shut the TV off, shut the light off,

go to sleep. Yeah. Not, hey, are you watching that? Yeah. You know, and I'm... You're not really going to argue with it. I'm 22 years old. Was he the baddest man on the Oakland Raiders?

Discounting me? Yeah, I know you got to do that. No, I don't have to do it. No, I... Hey, listen. You know, I think we were a lot like Russia and USA. You know, we could both press the button and... Yeah.

Lyle was... We were very close with Lyle. your mom and I and his wife Cindy and Justin their son. Lyle was a rainbow of emotion. I nicknamed him Three Mile Lyle after Three Mile Island because you never knew when he was going to explode. And at one point I actually got him a mood ring because you based how the day was going to go off the first,

hey, good morning, Lyle. And you could kind of judge the day, from that point on. Yeah, I do that. Same thing with Waylon. Oh, he was a car carrying bad man. Yeah, he was a bad man. Yeah.

I mean, we're at Gold's Jimmy's benching 570. He says, spot me. He said, what am I going to do if you drop 570? What's going to happen? What am I going to do? We're both going to be stuck here. You're going to be dead, and I'm going to be trying to explain to your wife how I couldn't pull 570 off of you.

Yeah. Was there one Raider with all the Raider grades that never got in that Oakland period, the credit they deserve? I'll give you a guy that I think you go back and look at the big games. Rod Martin. Rod Martin was a guy who you go back and look at big games.

You know, playoffs, AFC championship, you know, Super Bowls. Rob Martin always played great. And the other guy was Cliff Branch. Cliff, who we just lost this year, sadly, who should have been in the Hall of Fame prior to his passing, and I think that's an unfortunate slight.

Hopefully that will be remedied this year. I'll be it too late. But Cliff Branch is one of those guys, and I always say, great players are the players that on Monday morning, the first job a team has is to figure out, I'll give you an example,

Aaron Donald. Yeah. Aaron Donald, every team that's playing the Rams, the first thing they deal with in game planning on Monday morning is, how do we deal with him so he doesn't destroy our entire game plan? Cliff Branched through the fear of God. At one point he was, you know, if not the fastest guy on the planet, he was one of the fastest guys on the planet,

a remarkable player. Jim Plunkin, another guy that, doesn't get enough credit, and in my mind should be in the Hall of Fame. Right, especially with a few of the quarterbacks that have been in with win-loss records that are in range there. Tom Flores, as a coach, two Super Bowls with, try handling that football team. Right. Particularly the one that won in 80, 81. Yeah, it's child's play because, I mean, you look at now, I mean, you give Tomlin a lot of credit these days because you're seeing some people leave.

Yeah. And when the Band-Aid's off, you're like, holy shit, it was crazier than I thought. Mike Tomlin should be our UN ambassador. Right. But still, child's play compared to what Tom had to deal with. Oh, our group? Yes. Ted Hendricks wrote a horse onto the practice field one time.

That actually sounds pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, guys were disappearing, I mean, guys were disappearing for a couple of days at a time. You got to remember, this is a time when... You could disappear for a couple days of times. There were three networks. Take me back. There were three networks.

works. ESPN was working out of a garage in Bristol and it was it was doing tractor pulls and you know, I mean, there was just some coverage. But outside of the locker room, there was one, two cameras a day. That's it. It was the local guy and you had your local beat writer who you were buddies with and maybe had a beer with. Right. Things could be covered up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those teams would not be able to function. And the venue, which obviously we'll get to in a the way it closed out last week in very unfortunate fashion fit the persona of the team.

What was the... I don't know of a fan base that better personified... You know, hey, listen, Philadelphia's a tough city. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pittsburgh's a tough city. You know, particularly in their heyday in the 70s when they were winning all those Super Bowls

and, you know, somewhat it's been gentrified and like Philadelphia. but Oakland, I can't think of a city that more embodied a football team. And, you know, if you played there once, you're always an Oakland Raider. What's the loudest you ever heard that stadium? Well, it probably Monday night because it was Pittsburgh. We played Pittsburgh, my rookie year on Monday night. And, you know, here you are, you're lining up against Mike Webster.

And it's like, yeah, that's Mike Webster. And you're seeing all the people, you know, Franco Harris and, you know, all the legends. And Jack Lambert, I remember playing in a Pro Bowl with Jack Lambert. And Jack Lambert was exactly the way you would think Jack Lambert was. Smoking a cigarette, no tea, got a hat on that he should have thrown away. Like 15 years ago. Yeah, 15 years ago. And he was meaner than dirt.

But that Pittsburgh, Oakland rivalry was so much more intense. And was that the week that you got to eat dinner with Joe Green the night before you. Yes. I lived my roommate, my rookie year was a guy of the name of Cedric Hartman, who passed away sadly this past year. And Cedric was part of the gold rush and looked that up in San Francisco with Cleveland Ealing and Jimmy Webb. One of the more underrated players. They were great.

From that era. And Cedric had over a hundred sacks and, you know, just a dynamic pass rusher. and he was Joe Green's teammate and roommate at North Texas State. Right. And here we are. I'm a rookie. I'm fresh out of Villanova. And Joe Green's my,

I took 75 because of Joe Green. And Cedric said, Joe's going to stop by. He's going to stop by and have dinner. And we were at the house. Why does he sound like a fucking guy down at LSU? He did. If you go,

Cedric, Cedric was, he called me junior. Junior? What's you doing? How about all? All week, you were probably like, so Cedric, is anybody coming over this weekend to dinner? No, I, you know, it was one of those deals where, hey, look, my head was barely above water.

I'm, you know, I'm a rookie in the NFL. I'm rushing on third down and Cedric was a huge help. I mean, I had some moments in our meeting room, which I won't get into specifically, where, you know, my temper was probably a lot tighter, and it was a lot easier to go off the deep edge for me at that time. And Cedric was good at reeling me back. And here Joe Green comes over for dinner, and we're sitting down, and I'm sitting there with Joe Green.

What did y'all have for dinner? I don't even remember. You were just like Joe Green. Yeah, I was just stared at Joe Green. Right. And, you know, it's like you can't get any better than that. And then we played them and we beat them, and I ended up, I think I had two sacks that game.

Right. When you look at Al, you know, you guys had an interesting relationship. Up and down, up and down, like any front office might with a player who's going to spend 30. You spend 13 years with an organization now. Yeah. You know, it's, one, it's probably not going to happen. Two, there's going to be your ups and downs. One, what do you think of Al and what do you think of him now and his legacy?

And two, you think he gets not enough credit for being progressive because not just, he had first Hispanic coach to win a Super Bowl, first blackhead coach, and then he had Amy Trask working under him as the president. Well, that's once he owned the football team. Prior to him owning the football team, what people don't realize is he was a coach. Yeah. And a matter of fact, he was a coach for the Raiders when they first came into existence, which I'm not sure exactly what year it was maybe 62, but the Raiders came into existence the year I was born, 1960. Right. And he had led the Raiders to the single greatest turnaround in NFL history.

And that record stood for, I don't know how long, forever. A brilliant football mind. Right, right. And, you know, not to say that... Look, Jerry played college football. Jerry Jones played college football. Jerry Jones is a brilliant businessman and knows football. I'm not saying he doesn't know football.

This was a different level. Al could coach every position on the team. Right. He knew X's and O's, Scott and Report. It's a lot like Bill. Yes, yes. I always said Bill could walk around and could out-coach the position coach at Will, at the drop of a head.

I'm not sure that he had what Bill has. in terms of the actual physical coaching. Yeah. But his knowledge of every single position and the nuance of your defense, your offense, and building a football team and the types of players, it was bigger, stronger, faster. Right.

And that was reflected in our drafts. That was reflected in our personnel. That was who we were. He was benevolent. He was at times, tyrannical. Right. People might find this hard to believe,

but I think we probably had two significant, lengthy conversations in my 13 years. I mean, we had the obligatory, I'm holding out, he won't speak to the agent. He calls me on the phone. Howard, called me Howard.

My grandmother, Bob Capone, and Al called me Howard. Howard, I can pay you one-nine-five. Yeah. But that's all I can do. And you'll always be the highest paid guy in the defensive front as long as you're playing. And that turned out not to be true that year because they paid Anthony Smith, which led to me kind of wanting to just move on.

But the two conversations were when I retired prematurely in his mind, well, three conversations. Retired prematurely, he was upset. You know, with age comes perspective, I certainly understand that. And your mom was in the meeting and it was a rough meeting. Yeah. And it was some graphic language being used. And he wanted me to come back. And he offered me a guaranteed deal for two years, three years that was far more than I was making.

But at that point, I had checked out mentally. Where's time to go? It's time to go. I checked out mentally. The other time was why I had gotten in a bad fight at work And didn't start it never started a fight at work But you know I could fight

Yeah, it's one thing I could do well And you know plastic surgeon had to be brought in It was bad Right They did a good job on you Not me I'm joking It was quick and it was bad

He called me up and just tore me up. Yeah. And said, I don't want you to beat another player up on this team. Yeah. And that was it. Yeah. And then the third one was when I was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I got the call from Fudgee, who was longtime assistant.

And your mom and I were over in Hawaii because they introduced the Hall of Famers at the Pro Bowl. Right. And she called me. up and said, Mr. Davis would like to talk to you. We hadn't spoken for over 10 years. No, five years. Oh, okay. Five years.

So you're right, yeah, because that would have been like 98. Yeah. So I don't know whether he knew I was playing basketball with Sherman the boys. Yeah. Back in Virginia, because I could still run them. Right, right, right. But he calls me up and he says, congratulations. You were, you're, you know, one of the.

greats, you know, all that. And thanks, Mr. Davis. You always call him Mr. Davis. And he said, I know you're in shape. He said, you know, no Hall of Fame has ever come back. And he offered me a two-year guarantee contract

to come back at about to be 40. It was just turned 40, I think. And he said, I'll only play you on third down. and you could just come in and rush the quarterback. Yeah. And that was it.

And for a, a millisecond can seem like an eternity. You can't not think about it. You can never not think about it. And then I said, you're out of your freaking mind. Yeah, yeah. And moved on from it,

and that was it. But it was an organization. I couldn't imagine being in a, I couldn't imagine playing anywhere else. I couldn't imagine wearing a different helmet. I couldn't imagine not playing, in Oakland. It's unfortunate that the team couldn't come up with a solution. And I know, I know for a fact that Mark Davis exhausted every conceivable. Yeah, because there's one thing

when an owner has the money to just snap your fingers and make it's a family business. Yeah. And it's not like Stan Cronky in St. Louis. If you want to compete in this business in the NFL today, because of the new, you know, upfront money and guarantees and you've got to essentially put that money in escrow. By the way, cap went up is going to go up next year. Right. I saw some projections. So let's say you're guaranteeing $90 million or $100 million of someone's contract. You have to

put that money essentially in escrow. Right, right, right. For the last seven years of the contract or the last six years of the contract, right now. You have to fund it right now. You're not paying it to the player right now, but you have to fund it. That's the same. You can't compete. It's the reason why Kaleo Mack in my mind

is still not an Oakland. Right. But when you go to Vegas, which is a whole other deal, a city has to come up with $750 million. How do you do that? How many hotel rooms do they have in Vegas? 750 million. Well, if you put a 20, 30 cent kind of tax on, you know, tourism on each room for each night, you come up with the $750 million.

That's how they do it. The only non-shared revenue in the NFL and the reason why people make a big deal about stadiums is luxury boxes. So in other words, everything else is shared equally. That's how you got to make your money. That's how you got to make your money.

So you have to have a big stadium. And for example, the Rams and the chargers are in L.A. It's a challenge to sell those luxury boxes at the prices that they're selling them at. in Las Vegas, what's the business? It's casinos. If you're a casino, do you have to have a luxury box? Yeah.

So the luxury boxes are sold, the $750 million. Yeah, you walk in and it's just like ready made. The stadium sells out faster than any stadium is sold out. But they have given up, it seems to me. They've given up the family. They've given up the home field advantage. They went from one of the most iconic home field advantages to being their existence being predicated as,

hey, we are voluntarily giving up this home field advantage because we want fans to travel here as a destination to come to a year. The Bucks are playing? Well, I don't know that they're saying that. I mean, I think part of the process, because we have someone in the family who was involved in the sale of tickets

and what they went through in trying to, for example, brokers. They tried to limit the access of bulk tickets to brokers. you had to verify your address, and they sold to a certain, they sold to Oakland first, they sold to Las Vegas, Los Angeles second, maybe, I don't know,

I don't know the order, but then they sold to Vegas. So it was broke down in three or four tiers, and then they opened it up to the mass. Right, right. But the stadium sold out, you know, it's close to sold out now.

How would that 1981 team do in Vegas on a road trip? Oh. So moving forward, like the future of the Raiders. Are the technology the same? No. What if the 81 Raiders, and we got to get going soon, but what if the 81 Raiders had a night in Vegas on the road and they were playing somewhere else?

Lock the women and children up. Just like, I mean, come on. So, you know, looking forward to the future with the Raiders, there's a lot of questions anyways. But first off, the way that game ended last week, that was not really a playoff implication thing, but like as bad a call. You know what? The game had significance to the fan base.

Which is bigger than sliding in the playoffs this year. And the organization. And I've seen every conceivable angle there is. I've seen still photography from the end zone shooting up the sideline. He's a good half a yard in bounds when he slops. Oh yeah. And he's celebrating because he thinks the game is. effectively over.

So not only is it not ruled that he gave himself up in bounds, he's essentially, they're running the clock, it's down to two minutes, they lose 40 seconds to a minute that they could run off, which inevitably gives Jackson Bill the ability to drive the length of the field with Minchu Mania and get the game winning score. And to not win that, game in the final game

at the Oakland Colise and the way they lost it brutal brutal but in the future there are some there's some reasons to be excited one is your friend Mike Mayock yeah first off talk about the job he's done because of you know Gruden they both took a lot of shit getting the jobs

because people these days don't want to see TV people they perceive as you know names that are just getting jobs but Mike has earned his money and then also is Derek Carr part of that future You know, I'm not sure how they feel. You get the impression at least, you know, from a public standpoint that they feel strongly that Derek Carr is part of the future there. Okay.

You know, but as you know, public perception and what you're, you know, giving to the public and the media could be totally different than what you're thinking. but Derek Carr is a talented quarterback. He's very talented. Very talented quarterback. Where do you, you know, I always say with a head coach or a quarterback, everyone's quick to want to make a move. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At head coach or quarterback.

What do you do? Who are you replacing with? Right, right. Okay. So Mike, truth be told, I've known Mike Mayak since I was 16 years old. I was a 16-year-old senior at Milford High School. living with Uncle Billy and Anne Ada. And I played football for a year and a half.

Right. And take a trip to Boston College as a recruit. And who's my host? Right. As 16-year-old, Mike Mayock, and that group at Boston College was wild at that time. Mike and that group that played at Boston College, they played Texas was the number one team in the country.

They beat them that year. They had a really good team of Boston College. guys had tattoos on the rear ends of eagles. I'm 16 years old. I'm not sure I had hair under my armpits. So, you know, my grandmother, you know, grandma wanted me to get out of the neighborhood and head down to Villanova.

And it turned out to be the perfect place for me, no slight on Boston College. But so I have a relationship with Mike Mayock. I know what Mike Mayak is all about. Mike Mayock is 24-7 football. Right. He is the polar opposite of a TV guy. Right, exactly.

Even as a TV guy. That's why I think a lot of people gravitated towards Mike, not only did it appear that he knew what he was talking about, and everybody misses on picks. It's funny as hell to me. Everybody, you know, calling back to, oh, well, he missed, he, you know, he had Kamara going late. Or he had tried doing that for a living for years.

And there's guys. in front offices who get paid to do it and miss routinely. Camara split time in college. So what do you do? So what was Tennessee thinking? So Mike's doing a good job. Tennessee, right? Yeah, Tennessee.

I think Mike's doing a good job. I think the future's bright. And I think with this team this year, at least my opinion of it is they aren't as good as people thought they were in the middle of the year. In the beginning of year, they were underrated and then they became overrated. And now they're back down to earth. And it's a project.

I agree. There's things to feel good about. I want to get some quick, quick hitters before. we let you go and we'll bring you back for hey dad another day you didn't know that you signed a waiver on the way and that's a contract for 10 of these segments so um unpaid uh and you don't even you don't even validate parking no we don't uh worst rivalry chiefs or broncos and was there an underrated rivalry the best rivalry well when i say well for me for me it was look when at that time everyone in the nFC west afc west hated us right

and it was Raider Week, wherever we went. If it was Kansas City, they had the red coats back. Which means they brought back all their best players and they were all red coats and they wore red sport coats. And I remember we went up there one year and Bo was on the team

and he was playing for the Royals and Bo gets his first carry and a sea of baseballs get thrown on the field. There was also, I believe, maybe in that same game, there was a, when I say a melee, of a fight. Yeah, I heard about that one. Yeah, it was bad. But every week, whether it was San Diego, whether it was Kansas City, whether it was Denver. For me, it was John in Denver. Yeah. And

you know, kind of always felt like John was as good as it gets. And he was kind of a glimpse at the future. Yeah. How many times you miss him? Oh, 200. Yeah. Okay, so if you could zap back into one defense right now, which one? I probably play on the Bears 85 team. Really? Well, what about current? Well, I get the scheme part.

I look at them, I look at them on film. Playing in a three-man two-gap scheme, they're playing in a bear front with... Everybody's in one gap. Everybody's in one gap, and you're guaranteed a single. Yep. Or you're unblocked.

Yep. You know, not... And look, I'm a big Dan Hampton fan. I'm a big Richard Dent fan. I'm a big McMichael fan. You know, love that team. But they had great matchups. It was the perfect blend of talent and scheme,

and nobody knew how to block it. So in today's world, where would I, in today's game? Yeah. What scheme? I probably, golly, maybe Minnesota. Yeah. Seattle. Seattle.

Seattle, probably. That was on my list. Well, who's a player since you that's reminded you of yourself? I was told early on by Wade Phillips that J.J. Watt. Y'all are different, though. We're different, though. He's longer. You're a better inside rusher.

He's a better edge rusher. And people calling me a defensive end is like putting a ribbon on a pig. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The closer I got to the ball, 80% of my- Most people tell me we played the same position. I know. And you and I are, you're a defensive end. Yes.

You're a pass-rush defensive end. who could do both things. Right. I felt like the air was too thin out there for me. I like, if I were a fighter, I'd want a 10-foot ring. You'd want a 15-foot ring. Yeah, you'd be more like Tyson.

Yes. I'd be more Lennox-Lews. If I get you in a phone booth, I'm pretty good. Yeah. Okay, so who's the DPOY this year? Boy, that's a complicated one. It really isn't.

I hadn't really thought. about players of the year. You take Gilmore off the Patriots. Oh, yeah, you know what? And making it look easy. And so fundamentally, and part of that's being there. Yes, but,

but no, I'm saying from, no, I'm not talking about talent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just talking about being sound. Yeah, yeah. Not being,

he's not doing it. You know who was like that? Mike Haynes was like that. Right. Mike Haynes was so good, it was boring. I guess to me, if you're going to do DPOY, the guy who's altered the trajectory of a great defense the most,

you know, like, I could argue Minka Fitzpatrick, but there's a DPOI candidate up front for them who I don't think should win it because Gilmore should win it in T.J. Watt. T.J. Watt's been tremendous. Of all the guys up front, if you're going to discount Aaron Donald because he didn't get 20 this year,

I mean, TJ's the one. But even if you took T.J. off that Pittsburgh defenseers, by the way, I think is the best in the league, this point because of what they have to work with offensively. I mean, they're consistently scoring in teens with like Duck Hodges. Out of those guys, I think Gilmore's here. And it's Fitzpatrick because he changed the Pittsburgh defense so much since he showed up there. And then like a TJ Watt, to me, I think Gilmore's the guy. So we'll see how it shakes out. We'll have you back pops for more as much as you can tolerate here on the new podcast guy. I'm going to get a,

with the money I make from this, I'm thinking, about going down to what's the place that has the chris long sandwich uh little johns little johns we don't get that because i've never gotten one well i can talk to him about maybe a sale because i didn't know i didn't know you were making well technically i guess i'm not making any money well why should this be any different than the rest of your life yeah exactly exactly that's what family's for yeah appreciate you man love you buddy appreciate you being here