He Doesn’t Fit Team’s Image but He Fits In Rather Nicely

When people think of the L.A. Raiders, the catch phrase most often associated with them--right after “Just win, baby!”--is, “Go long, baby!”

The Raiders aren’t your basic grind-it-out, win-in-the-pits-type of ball-control team. The Raiders are what their name implies--a swift-striking, reckless force that pursues the game with a breakneck, take-no-prisoners abandon.

Not for them the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust attack. The Raiders don’t clinch, bunt, lob or stall. They go for the one-round knockout, the home run, the ace or the three-point basket.

Theirs is a history of mad bombers at quarterback, and the pictures on the wall are of the human streaks, Warren Wells, Cliff Branch, Art Powell, the guys who disappeared into enemy territory like saboteurs only to reappear, suddenly circling alone under a high spiraling pass in the end zone.

The mystique of the Raiders is the long ball. In baseball, they’d be a big-inning team. They’re the masters of the instant touchdown. They earn their money the new-fashioned way. They take it out of your ear.

So how come the leading pass receiver for the Raiders the last several years is not one of those fleet, undersized after-burners of the wide outs, but rather a highly visible, skyscraper-sized dreadnought who moves just faster than a New York waiter?

What is Todd Christensen always doing with the ball while every defensive back in the league is getting a lump in his throat trying to keep up with Dokie Williams, Jessie Hester and company?

Todd Christensen doesn’t get to run those dazzling free-form routes like an impala over a hill. First he has to knock a couple of 280-pound troglodytes off the line, take a swipe or two at an outside linebacker, shake off a blitzer and then turn his attention to catching the ball.

The ordinary receiver can be bumped only once on his way through the five-yard retaining zone near the line of scrimmage. Then, he’s free to circle and leap unimpeded, often with only a sideline to watch out for. Christensen hardly ever leaves the five-yard combat zone.

And yet he caught 92--count ‘em, 92--passes in 1983. No other tight end in National Football League history had caught that many in a season.

That’s a good career for some people, but Christensen caught 80 last year. He’s caught 32 this year.

More than 200 passes in a little more than two years is hard to believe when you consider that nearly every pass Todd Christensen catches is an afterthought. His position, tight end, is possibly the most diabolical in modern football. It combines the worst aspects of mine-clearing, wire-cutting and trench-storming in the game.

The tight end is the point man, the lightning rod of the attack. His job is to draw a hostile crowd. It may be the most punishing position in football.

Christensen likes to think that he is the last “pure” tight end in the game. “I’m the dinosaur of the line,” he says.

Like the rest of the game, the position has undergone a metamorphosis since its invention. In the age of specialization, Christensen points out, teams now have tight ends for all occasions--passing downs, running downs, first downs, third downs and halftime shows.

Because the tight end seldom reaches the demilitarized zone, he is fair game for the uncontrolled mayhem that occurs near the line of scrimmage. Tight end is a schizophrenic position. He is either a down lineman with delusions of grandeur, as Buck Shaw used to say, or a glamour receiver who occasionally has to take the garbage out or do windows.

Christensen credits Mike Ditka of the Bears and Kellen Winslow of the Chargers with taking the position out of the stoop labor category and making it a profession. “They put the football into the position,” he said. “People notice you when you’ve got the football.”

Winslow was more of a slotback than a classic tight end. Because of his great speed, they gave him less barbed-wire cutting to do on his way downfield. “I can run maybe a 4.6 40--wind-aided,” Christensen said.

An athlete who originally set out to be a running back, Christensen is really the man who makes the Raiders’ long game go. The attack basically consists of Marcus Allen at the line of scrimmage and the speed demons far downfield.

Christensen holds the middle ground. His presence there complicates life enormously for the cornerbacks and linebackers, who would like to double up on the deep threats but can’t leave Christensen standing there like a lighthouse.

In Sunday’s game against Kansas City, with Los Angeles in the lead, 7-3, the Raiders had the ball on the Chiefs’ 34-yard-line. It was fourth and one with a minute to the half.

Everyone in the ball park knew what the play was. Marcus Allen would carry on a slant.

Quarterback Marc Wilson faded back and threw the ball over the center to Christensen for a first down on the 21.

It was a two-yard completion but Christensen, characteristically, carried a linebacker the other 11. It meant the game. The Raiders kicked a decisive field goal four plays later.

Christensen, though, would rather talk about a play that had occurred several minutes earlier.

The Raiders had the ball on the Chiefs’ 35, third and 19. Wilson dropped back and lofted a high pass into the end zone. It was intended for Christensen, of all people. He just failed to get to it.

“I was still in truck gear,” he said ruefully. “Damn, if I’d got to that ball everyone would have said ‘Wow! Look how fast that guy is! They better watch out for him going deep!’ ”

Bunters dream of being Babe Ruth. Playmakers want to be Dr. J. Ground-strokers dream of Bill Tilden’s serve and, just once, Todd Christensen would like to get out of that blue collar and find out what Cliff Branch felt like, to work with a mad bomber once instead of a guy fixing the boiler.