| It wasn’t long ago, and everything was well
in Oakland. It was back in December, and I was in the Raiders’ locker room after a
midweek practice. A couple of local reporters and I were asking FB Jon Ritchie about how
he was dealing with the lumps he had on his forehead. During the past few games, they had
begun to bleed, making for quite a vivid sideline camera shot when the networks came back
from commercials. "It’s all been kind of blown out of proportion,"
Ritchie said of the current fascination with a football player whose face is full of blood
every time he removes his helmet. "I’m not doing anything special out there;
it’s just that I have this ridiculous tissue-like skin on my forehead that cuts
easily. It’s not an injury as far as I see it; it’s just kind of a cosmetic
thing."
"It’s obviously caused from the helmet rubbing, isn’t it?" asked a
writer who was clearly on top of his game that day.
"Well, it’s from the horns, you know," Ritchie deadpanned.
"Whatever these horns are that are growing out of my head, it makes it hard for the
helmet to fit."
The crowd around his locker shared a laugh, and that was the general mood in the locker
room that day. Loose and confident. After all, the Raiders were poised to make another
Super Bowl run with additions such as Jerry Rice and Charlie Garner, along with a host of
other seasoned veterans who had come so close the year before. And leading this group was
Jon Gruden, who only weeks earlier had allowed for a collective sigh of relief to be heard
from Oakland to Baja when he said his interests did not lie with the Notre Dame vacancy
but rather with getting the Raiders to the playoffs.
How times change.
The Raiders, of course, came up short in the snow against New England in the playoffs,
and earlier this week Gruden left one bay area for another, heading to Tampa on the
strength of a new five-year deal to man the Buccaneers’ ship.
In December, Gruden, at least to me, appeared to be a man content with his life. He
told me of how he got goose bumps when he walked out onto the field for warm-ups before
games, AC/DC blaring on the loudspeakers, OG Steve Wisniewski with that look in his eye
and the infamous Black Hole cheering section going crazy in the endzone. He told me of how
fun it was to bring his oldest son to practice and let him blow the horn that signals a
change in drills.
I was entranced by the general excitement he was showing, and this was in his office in
the wee hours of the morning. I knew he was telling the truth. This was no act for an
out-of-town writer. He loved what he was doing.
And his players weren’t shy about their love for their coach.
"A man that loves the game of football with all his heart and has passion for the
game and just wants to win," is how TE Roland Williams described Gruden, who lured
him into the Raiders’ scheme off the free-agent market last summer. "That’s
something that’s so simple but is so underrated in this day and age of the NFL, how
it is with so much politics and the salary cap and all these things, but here comes Coach
Gruden with a schoolboy love of the game that I can relate to."
Everybody I talked to that week, it seemed, could relate to that love of the game.
"As long as he’s here, I’ll stay," Williams went on to say.
"Who else would you rather play for than Coach Gruden? The man, I love him."
According to Ritchie and several other players back in December, the Notre Dame issue
should have died out long ago. It wasn’t even something they talked about. It only
came up when his parents and friends asked him about it.
"I love the guy, and we all hope that he sticks around," Ritchie said.
"I think he’s enjoyed the success that he’s had, and the community loves
him, so I think that it would be hard for him to leave."
When Raiders owner Al Davis called him early Monday morning with the proposition to go
back to where he grew up and coach the Bucs, it turns out it wasn’t that hard after
all. Gruden’s agent, Bob LaMonte, had said after the season was over that there was a
zero percent chance of Gruden coaching the Raiders after his contract ran out following
the 2002 season. Raiders fans and players cringed.
Then, Gruden said in his Wednesday press conference that Tampa Bay was where he had
wanted to be for some time. Raiders fans and players cringed more.
"He’s a players’ coach," Raiders DT Grady Jackson told me back in
December. "He talks to the players. He listens. I love playing for him.
"Anybody would want to play for him because he brings excitement and enthusiasm to
the game. He’s the type of coach that makes you want to play. Play hard, and you know
he’s going to reward you at the end. As long as you play hard, Coach Gruden’s
going to take care of you."
Now, Gruden will be taking care of Derrick Brooks, Keyshawn Johnson and the rest of the
Bucs’ roster, and the Raiders, suddenly rich with extra draft picks and $8 million in
compensation for their beloved head coach, are at a crossroads.
They definitely have the makeup for one more serious run at the title, currently sans a
head coach. But so many players — QB Rich Gannon, WRs Tim Brown and Jerry Rice, CB
Eric Allen, etc. — have expressed time and again that they probably would play only
as long as Gruden coached. As the Raiders sort through the daunting task of replacing the
most popular man in Oakland, not to mention one of the hottest commodities in the coaching
world, many of their veteran leaders struggle with the need to move on in the final stages
of their illustrious careers, still in a state of shock from how fast it all happened. And
there is little doubt the Raiders are due for a major rebuilding process in the very near
future, which could have been another deciding factor in Gruden’s departure.
Both teams will move on, and I guess the moral of the story is that no matter how
content people appear to be in their current situation, there is always something that
will make them happier. And another moral is that change is the only constant in
today’s NFL.
Which reminds me of something I told Gruden back in December. I mentioned that a lot of
the local writers who covered the Raiders told me they would ask to switch beats if Gruden
were to ever depart. He made that much of a difference to so many people.
Gruden folded his arms and chuckled.
"I guess all of us will just have to open up a restaurant together so we’ll
be able to tell stories about the old days," he said.
The restaurant thing hasn’t happened yet. But the stories of the old days have
already begun. |
