Raiders Could Rely on Fast-Living Lefty

I called a pitchout.

But as I rolled left, I spotted (Ray) Perkins breaking clear on a crossing pattern. So I whipped the ball to him for a score.

I ran to the sideline beaming. Coach (Bear) Bryant put his hand on my shoulder and I thought he was going to congratulate me for improvising and getting a touchdown.

“One thing you should know, son,” he said, “is you never can trust left-handed crapshooters, and left-handed quarterbacks.”

--From Ken Stabler’s autobiography, “Snake”

Talk about left-handed compliments.

But Bryant was just expressing the sentiments of a lot of coaches who are as enthusiastic about handing their offense over to a left-handed quarterback as they would be about handing their paycheck over to Joe Isuzu.

The left-handed quarterback is a rare breed, and Stabler was the rarest of the rare, a superstar equal to any of his right-handed counterparts. Pending the outcome of Super Bowl XXIII next week, Stabler remains the only left-hander to win football’s big show, having led the Oakland Raiders to a 32-14 victory over the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl XI in 1977.

Even with Stabler, there were adjustments to make. A left-handed quarterback sets up differently, he looks across the field differently, he throws differently, and the defense has to react differently.

But it took John Madden, Stabler’s longtime coach, to come up with a difference nobody else ever thought of.

But let Madden tell it. Only he can do it justice.

“The left-handed thing is something you only think about the first year,” Madden said from Florida, where he is preparing for next week’s Super Bowl telecast. “For example, you can’t talk about putting the right foot back and planting the left, since a left-hander does it opposite. So after a while, you just talk about the front foot and the back foot.

“But I’ll tell you about one of the first things I had to do. I don’t know if you remember, but they used to have these night footballs with white rings painted on the ends.

“Well, the way a quarterback held the ball, his thumb would be on the painted part, which could make it real slick. These balls consisted of four separate panels. Now what they’d do is, they’d scrape the paint out on the third panel so the fingers would still be on the strings, but the thumb would be on an area without paint. You follow me?”

Of course.

“That was fine for right-handers, but a left-hander would still have his thumb on the paint, because he’d be holding it opposite. So I told them I need left-handed night balls. They thought I was goofy. Everybody laughed. Ha, ha, ha. Left-handed night balls. But they did scrape out the paint and made balls without stripes on two of the panels for left-handers. Little things like that came up.”

Dave Casper, one of Stabler’s favorite targets over the years, has his own theory on left-handers.

“Stabler had a good arm,” Casper said from Minneapolis, where he’s now in the insurance business, “and he could throw the ball where it was real easy to catch. But I think the whole thing has to do with research physics conservatism of angular momentum. That’s what keeps bicycles up, tops spinning and keeps the earth in rotation.”

Uh huh. And keeps left-handed night balls in the air. You can tell who this guy’s coach was.

“But what it all means to football,” Casper went on, “is that with a left-hander throwing, the nose of the ball would only turn to the left, not the right. It makes a big difference, because the hand configuration is different. So if a receiver put his hands where he thinks the ball will be because he’s used to catching from a right-hander, the nose of the ball coming from a left-hander could break his finger.

“When the Raiders traded Snake for Dan Pastorini, a right-hander, I had trouble. Then when I got traded to the (Houston) Oilers, where Snake was, I had to get used to him all over again. . . . I didn’t ever want a right-hander to throw me the ball.”

At first, Madden wasn’t sure he wanted Stabler throwing the ball. It wasn’t the man so much as the image.

“Most left-handers in all sports seem to be wild,” Madden said, “and you worry about that. . . . You think maybe this guy is not going to have a lot of control.

“But he turned out to be a great football player. He had the arm strength and the touch.”

Said Casper: “Even if you’re covered by a guy, he can only cover half of you. Stabler would hit the other half. He never threw high to get you killed.”

Being left-handed, Stabler also caused other defensive problems.

“Defenses like to come at you from your backside,” Madden said. “They like to blitz in the direction the quarterback looks away from. If you face left, they blitz from the right because they want to sneak up on you. Left-handers force them to change.”

The most lasting image of Stabler is that of a cool riverboat gambler, calming marching his team down the field against all odds, the clock ticking, the fans screaming and the defense blitzing, kind of a knowing smirk visible under the helmet and the whiskers.

No argument from Madden.

“That’s right,” he said, “just because the guy threw left-handed did not mean he thought left-handed. He played in the days before coaches called the plays, one of the last guys who was a real field general. He was as good at that as anyone.

“He had a great ability not to worry when a bad thing happened on the field. He would call a play, and if it didn’t go right, when they came back to the huddle, he’d say, ‘Easy to call, hard to run.’ Or if he’d throw a ball too low, he’d say, ‘Lowball thrower, highball drinker.’ He had these little sayings for every one. It was a finishing thing for that play, and then he went right on to the next thing.”

To this day, Casper remains amazed by Stabler’s methods on the field.

“I would always remember the game plan,” Casper said. “Snake always said he never read a game plan in his life, and he meant it. He called the same plays we had been using for the last 3 years. I would remind him of the situation, the defense and the game plan, and he’d go ahead and call the same stupid play he had called for the last 3 years.

“And it would work!”

Perhaps the play that Stabler will be most remembered for, bigger than anything he did in his Super Bowl appearance, was in a 1974 playoff game against the Miami Dolphins that longtime broadcaster Curt Gowdy called the greatest pro football game he ever saw.

Down, 26-21, with a little over 2 minutes left, the Raiders, who were 68 yards from the end zone, began to march under Stabler. They marched all the way to the Dolphin 8-yard line.

But by this point, the options had nearly run out.

Thirty-five seconds to play.

No timeouts.

Heavy rush.

Defender Vern Den Herder had Stabler by an ankle and was pulling him down.

A sack might be fatal with no way to stop the clock. But it was times like this, times when he slithered out of almost certain disaster, that earned Stabler his nickname.

Even as he headed for the ground, and perhaps playoff elimination, Stabler spotted running back Clarence Davis surrounded by two defenders.

“He was the kind of quarterback who always knew where everyone was on the field,” Davis said from Oakland, where he works for a computer company. “It was a desperation play, but he kept his cool and knew where I was.

“He arced the ball perfectly over the heads of the defenders, taking some of the loft off. It started drifting toward a linebacker, and it was just a matter of who could get to it first. There were a bunch of hands wrestling for it.”

But it ended up in the hands of Davis, and the Raiders had one of their most memorable victories.

“I can’t think of anyone who could work better with less time on the clock,” Davis said.

And what does Davis think about when he remembers that magic moment against Miami?

“That today,” he said, “it would not have even counted, because Stabler would have been considered in the grasp, and the play would have been stopped.”

But it wasn’t, and neither were a lot of others when Snake put on his Cool Hand Luke face and pull out yet another win.

“I remember I was scared to death before one big game against Pittsburgh,” Casper said. “I went up to Snake and said, ‘You scared?’ He said, ‘Nope.’ I thought he was the sickest guy I ever met, because nothing scared him.

“He would never acknowledge the crowd. He never cared about nothing but the game. Never cared about nothing but throwing that stupid football.”

Not quite. Stabler was almost as reknowned for his off-the-field exploits.

In his book, he said, “People think all I do is drink, raise hell and stay out all night--and they’re pretty close to the truth.”

But he still managed to last 15 years in the NFL--10 with the Raiders, 2 with Houston and 3 with the New Orleans Saints--make 3 Pro Bowl squads and get the Raiders into the AFC title game 5 straight years.

After retiring in 1984, Stabler returned to Alabama, where he became an author, a television commentator and a businessman. He is on the move a lot and could not be reached for this article.

He has had his share of marital problems. He has been linked in print with a gun-runner, a gambling figure and the drug frame-up of a newsman. But nothing was ever proven, and he eventually sued for libel on the gambling story, settling out of court.

Goes with the territory. Couldn’t expect anything else from a man whose philosophy on life is: “Play hard, live fast and throw deep.”

‘People think all I do is drink, raise hell and stay out all night--and they’re pretty close to the truth.’

--KEN STABLER