Raiders All-Time Top 5 QBs: Hang at the Bar and Have Fun.
An American journey from muscle cars to family trucksters, starring Ken Stabler and Derek Carr.
This week: the Raiders, starting with a quarterback about whom a whole encyclopedia could be written.
Next week: the Chargers, as well as a look at some current events. We’ll then kick into high gear with the NFC North. Wait, is covering the Bears’ quarterback history really “high gear?” It doesn’t matter: I want to get the Bears off my plate, and I want to hold the Eagles/Giants/Cowboys segments until closer to training camp, when more readers might be itching for some football content.
1. Ken Stabler
“Hell, my life-style hasn't changed in 20 years. It was all right when we won the Super Bowl, but then we lost some games, and all of a sudden I'm a fat drunk, out of shape, overweight and all that."
Stabler insists he doesn't intend to reform. "To be perfectly honest," he says, "I'm not going to change, because I don't know any other way. I'm going to live the way I want to live. I don't think it distracts me from doing what I want to do during the season. People say, 'You can't do those things as you get older.' Well, if I can't, and it hurts my game, I'll get out. But I'm not going to let football control my entire life. I play and I work as hard as I can, and in the off-season I do the things I like to do. That's not going to change." – Stabler, via Ron Reid, Sports Illustrated, August 1979.
If I tried to write one of the full-length mini-biographies I’ve been assembling throughout this series for Stabler, it would run at least 50,000 words, take three months to complete a rough draft and would derail any effort to do anything else.
The Reid feature quoted above, prompted by Stabler’s late arrival to Raiders training camp in 1979 (at 11 PM, driving a newly-purchased Porsche 928), touched on such topics as:
Stabler’s ongoing feud at the time with Raiders owner/general manager Al Davis;
Stabler publicly criticizing teammates, including top wide receiver Cliff Branch;
Stabler’s requests for a trade throughout his 1979 holdout;
Stabler and teammates holding court with “one or another idolizing young lady in one or more of the half dozen Santa Rosa watering holes that comprise what the Raiders call ‘the circuit’” after practices and meetings;
A year-long 1978 media boycott;
A feud with Sacramento Bee reporter Bob Padecky which may or may not have involved Stabler or some loyal companion planting cocaine in the reporter’s rental car and then calling the police;
The Padecky incident alone could fill a book. Here’s a link to one detailed version of events.
That’s a lot for one camp story. Reid’s feature doesn’t have time to mention Stabler shooting pool with Hell’s Angels founder Sonny Barger or drinking with Black Panthers bigwig Huey Newton at Uppy's in Jack London Square. Nailing the panties of his sexual conquests to the wall of his training camp bedroom is left to the imagination. And all of this happened two years before Davis leaked Stabler’s alleged relationships with gamblers to the New York Times, which resulted in all manner of litigation.