MEXICO CITY. When the defensive end John Matuszak He pulled out his .44-caliber magnum and bragged about some of his fellow Raiders, everyone thinking the gun wasn’t loaded. Suddenly he pointed at a stop sign on the street, pulled the trigger, and smashed it. Then the faint voice of Tom Flores: “OK, Tooz, put the gun away, let’s go ”.
Those who were contemporaries of Flores, whether in his role as player, assistant coach or head coach, agree that his calm to speak was his hallmark. “He let everyone be who they were and wanted to make a group that way,” said Matt Millen, linebacker for the Raiders from 1980 to 1988. Sports Illustated. “It was not something easy, because we had very strong personalities; we were a rebel group ”.
But hey, the son of Mexican immigrants managed to manage such Raiders, so much so that he led them, first in Oakland and then in Los Angeles, to win the Super Bowls of the 1980 and 1983 seasons.
Few have seen him angry or out of his mind, except for his family, who saw his anger grow on the eve of Super Bowl LIII, in Atlanta, when they were informed that, once again, he had been left out of the game. American Soccer Hall of Fame. Flores was so upset that he wanted to travel the next day home to Indian Wells, California, even though that meant missing the big game between Rams and Patriots.
In his second season as head coach, he won the Super Bowl.
Tom was crowned with the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders.
He had to wait two years to enter Canton, which happened last Sunday, August 8. The octogenarian arrived in a wheelchair, but he managed to get up himself to give the long-awaited speech.
The reason why I am the second of the night is that I am 84 years old and I have to go to bed before 9:00, where is my pillow? ”He joked. With difficulty, but he managed to sort his sheets, “I’m done the old-fashioned way, I don’t like to use the prompter,” he commented.
The remembrance reached the years in which his parents migrated to California, settling in the small town of Sanger; They both worked in the fields and tried to keep their two children relatively away from hard work and focus on study, urging them, among other things, not to speak Spanish … only English.
When I was young I played all possible sports, because I loved school and needed scholarships, “he said. “I did all the things I could in high school: I was in the band, where I played the trombone, in the orchestra and in the choir … my voice was quite good.”
He was received as a teacher, but he sought to make a path on the grills. “My mom cried when I told her that I was going to play football professionally, instead of becoming a teacher, but I followed my passion,” he recounted in Canton. After a brief stint with the Bakersfield Spoilers, of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League, he tried it in Canada, with Calgary, and then in the US, with Washington. Seeing that nothing was bearing fruit, he decided to please his mother. But then he received a call from a team in the nascent American Football League (AFL). “Most of the players had no idea where Oakland was!” He recalled.
Flores was one of 11 quarterbacks who reported in Santa Cruz, California, for the Raiders’ inaugural season in 1960. Salaries weren’t high then and Tom had to figure out how to get more money home; two twins and a girl were waiting for him, under the tutelage of Barbara. “I dated her for five years … it took me to convince her that I was the one … today we have been married for 60 years,” he recalled.
While carving a path with the Raiders, he sold fireworks, obtained his license as a real estate dealer, and served as a journalist on the Oakland Tribune when tuberculosis marginalized him from the 1962 season. “I would go to home games and write what I saw, and they published it. They did not pay me, because I was disabled, but they gave me credit in a store, so I could have a good Christmas celebration and buy toys for the children ”.
Flores was traded to Buffalo in 1967 and ended his career with Kansas City in 1970; as a backup quarterback he won Super Bowl IV.
Two years later he found work as a wide receiver coach for the Raiders and in January 1977 he won his second SB ring (the XI) as part of John Madden’s staff. Later, team owner Al Davis spotted him to succeed the legendary head coach; thus, Flores became the first Latino head coach in the NFL. “I never imagined that I had been hired because of my ethnic origin, but because of what I could do on the field, as a player and as a coach, I still think so,” he told Los Angeles Times.
Just in his second season at the helm, Oakland won the SB XV (Philadelphia 27-10) and Flores joined Mike Ditka as the only ones in history to win Super Bowls as a player, assistant coach and head coach. Three years later he repeated, but with the team in Los Angeles: he defeated Washington 38-9 in SB XVIII, in January 1984; That is the last title of the big game of this franchise that since 2020 resides in Las Vegas. “You have to be ready to act and you have to be able to win, otherwise you will be unemployed, whatever your color,” he told the Dallas Morning News.
Tom was replaced by Mike Shanahan after the 1987 season.
Two years later he took over Seattle as president and general manager, the first Latino in history with such positions in the NFL; he became head coach of the team from 1992 to 1994; his record was 14-34 and left him with a total of 97-87 in his entire career in the regular season. For some analysts, the gray passage with the Seahawks delayed their entry to Canton, since it occurred in their third round, which requires being out of the league for at least 25 years. Today he is the second Hispanic in the Hall of Fame, after Tom Fears.
The proud son of migrants took time, during his induction, to tell what one of his assistants, also a Latino, told him when the clock expired at that SB XV.
“Not bad for a couple of grape pickers, right, Tom?”
“Right,” he replied calmly and looking up at the roof of the Superdome, “not bad for a couple of grape pickers.”
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