Tom Flotes Left Out of Hof Again

Tom Flores tried beingness a junior high teacher but the students were likewise out of command.

So he coached the Raiders instead.

"I'll never do that again," the two-time Super Basin winning motorcoach said of his stint every bit a substitute teacher. "Too many hormones going on on that campus. Holy Toledo."

It was all part of his winding path that at long last has brought Flores to the doorstep of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where he nearly certainly will be enshrined side by side summertime.

Flores, 83, is the lone coach named a finalist for the class of 2021. He was selected in Baronial by the Hall's coach commission and is in a skillful position to be approved by the required lxxx% of voters when the 48-member panel convenes at the Super Bowl.

"What am I going to do, pat myself on the back? No," Flores said. "The pat on the dorsum is when you see something that you developed and information technology worked. Similar the cease of a Super Basin game when you lot're ahead with two minutes left and they crack the champagne. What a great feeling that is."

It isn't just Raiders who applauded the Hall of Fame news. Opponents did also.

"I'm but and so glad he's going in," said sometime New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms, now a CBS analyst. "Information technology has to mean a lot to him. He simply kind of gets done away in the history of the game. Everybody else who wins two Super Bowls, '`Oh my god, they've won two. Put him in the Hall of Fame.' Merely for some reason, his name never came upward."

Flores quarterbacked the Raiders during their countdown 1960 season, beating out x others at grooming camp to do so. And when illness sidelined him for the 1962 season, he worked as a sportswriter, writing columns about the squad for the Oakland Tribune.

Oakland Raiders head motorcoach Tom Flores talks over a play with quarterback Jim Plunkett during AFC playoff game on Jan. four, 1981 in Cleveland.

(Associated Press)

A potent work ethic was never an event for Flores, who grew up in the tiny Fundamental California town of Sanger, and was the son of a sharecropper who arrived from Mexico at historic period 12.

"My dad was a serenity man, like I am," he said. "My mom and dad wanted the states to abound upward speaking English, so that's all we spoke at our dwelling house. The only time we spoke Spanish is when we went to meet my grandparents, but all but one of them died past the time I was v."

Flores would go on to become an unassuming pioneer, the offset Hispanic head autobus in the NFL, Super Bowl winner, and after with the Seattle Seahawks, team president and general manager.

"Every time he and I cross paths, he takes the time to talk with me," said Washington Football Squad coach Ron Rivera, who has a profound appreciation for the trail Flores blazed. "This goes back to from when I was playing until now. I've always admired him, who he is, and what he's accomplished."

After a football game career at Fresno City College and College — at present University — of the Pacific, Flores was ready to give up on football to become a teacher. Only in 1960, an opportunity came forth with the Oakland Raiders of the fledgling American Football League, and he decided to give information technology one last effort.

"It was never an issue of, `'Oh no, what happens if this doesn't make it,'" he said. "I figured I'd just move on and do something else."

In the offseason, in fact, he did. He sold fireworks.

"I'd mainly sell to the Boy Scouts, the Kiwanis, the Boys and Girls Clubs," he said. "At that place's like a 1,000% markup on fireworks. Y'all'd purchase $100 worth and it would price them a dollar."

Like those pyrotechnics, Flores' playing career near went up in fume in 1962 when he contracted tuberculosis.

"I was in isolation for 10 days," he said. "Doctors didn't know what I had. Finally, they discovered it was a form of tuberculosis and that I wasn't infectious. We had no insurance in those days and twins who were a year sometime. But I wasn't worried about surviving."

When the Raiders needed a new coach in 1963, owner Wayne Valley asked Flores what he knew about a certain assistant motorbus of the San Diego Chargers, a immature upwardly-and-comer named Al Davis.

"I remember hearing almost Al when I was at College of the Pacific and he was at USC," Flores said. "Some of the things I heard were non very good. When Wayne Valley asked me near him, I said, `'What I've heard is he'south a different guy, a tough guy.' I think Wayne liked that. That was the kind of guy he wanted, I guess."

Davis would not only autobus the Raiders, only would maneuver his mode into becoming their controlling possessor.

Flores coached wide receivers for the Raiders from 1972-78, winning a Super Bowl equally part of John Madden's staff in 1976, and taking over as head motorcoach 3 years later.

Coaching the Raiders first in Oakland then in Los Angeles, Flores led his teams to Super Bowl victories at the cease of the 1980 and '83 seasons.

Simply his first Super Bowl ring came every bit fill-in quarterback for Kansas Metropolis in 1969. That was him on the Chiefs sideline, shrouded in a full-length coat, making sure Hank Stram didn't get tangled in the phone lines. Flores makes a cameo in those famous NFL Films shots of a mic'd-upwards Stram bouncing down the sideline, urging his players to "matriculate" the ball downwardly the field.

For much of his career, Flores operated in the shadows of larger-than-life personalities. Few in sports attracted a brighter spotlight than Davis, who never allow Flores feel too secure in his job – fifty-fifty during that championship 1980 flavour.

"There were rumors Al was going to fire me," Flores said. "Al might have considered doing information technology. Information technology was only my second year as a head coach. I had some serious meetings with him, and then he kind of backed off and left me solitary for a while to figure it out."

The pressures of the job were not lost on his players.

"A lot of people want to give all the credit to Al," said Hall of Fame cornerback Mike Haynes, a defensive fixture on the 1983 Raiders. "But a lot of it was actually Tom. How many coaches could really get along bully with Al, somebody calling you at 2 o'clock in the morn? But it really didn't affect Tom's mental attitude. He knew how to manage his relationship with the players, knew how to manage his relationship with Mr. Davis, and I really think that's why we won then many games."

Onetime Oakland Raiders caput bus Tom Flores, left, takes a photograph with a fan earlier a game confronting Indianapolis Colts in Oakland, Calif. on Dec. 24, 2016.

(Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)

Perhaps most impressive in their out-of-nowhere rise were the 1980 Raiders. They lost starting quarterback Dan Pastorini to injury and replaced him with Jim Plunkett, got off to a 2-3 start, yet wound up the first wild-bill of fare team to win a Super Basin.

"Footling by little it kept getting better," Flores said. "Our defence started to peak. Past the time we got to the playoffs, nosotros were on a roll, crime and defense. We were peaking at the right time."

Amidst the legendary players on that Raiders defense were John Matuszak, Matt Millen, Lester Hayes, and a time to come Hall of Famer in linebacker Ted Hendricks.

"Hendricks was a dominating player," Flores recalled. "He would exist my option as the best overall defensive thespian I coached. He would make a tackle for a sack, he'd block a punt, block a field goal, become an interception, knock downward passes. And that's all in one game."

For Flores, an indelible memory from that Super Basin came in the waning moments, when he was approached past Raiders offensive line bus Sam Boghosian, who had a like humble background, having grown upward in Fresno.

"Not bad for a couple of grape pickers, huh?" Boghosian said. "We're world champions."

Bang-up at all.

robinsonyouldrals.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2020-11-05/tom-flores-raiders-hall-of-fame

Share this post