Hannah Is Leader of Old Guard on Patriots

John Hannah kneels on the sideline of a local practice field and squints at the reporters before him. It won’t be long now before one of the little varmints asks . . .

Yup!

“Have there been instances in the past when you felt this team . . . “

“I’m not going to answer about the past,” Hannah says evenly. “The past is best forgotten, right? You can’t do anything about it. It’s gone.”

It’s gone, all right, like most of Hannah’s career. This is his 14th season, and he had to play that long before one of his Patriot teams won a playoff game.

He has made the Pro Bowl every year but one since 1977. That was in ‘78, the season he held out for three games.

Numerous teammates asked for raises and were traded. He asked for raises and tried to get traded, too--to the Raiders in 1983--but the Patriots wouldn’t cut him loose.

And then this season, when it looked as if it was getting a little late, he hit paydirt. The Patriots became a wild-card team, journeyed to the Meadowlands, where they were an underdog to the New York Jets, and won their first playoff game in 22 years.

Then they went to Los Angeles, where they were a bigger underdog to the Raiders, and won.

Now they’re here, underdogs, of course, to the Dolphins. No one seems to take the Patriots seriously, but . . .

The Dolphins have trouble against the run. Last Saturday, they gave up 251 yards and a 6.8-yard average to 8-8 Cleveland. The Browns ran left at the undersized Dolphin right end, 255-pound Kim Bokamper, a converted linebacker.

On the Patriot left side are 288-pound Brian Holloway at tackle and the 265-pound Hannah at guard. The Hannah-Holloway tandem has just been named to its third straight Pro Bowl.

Holloway is fresh from dueling the Raiders’ 285-pound Howie Long. Long, whose postgame adventures with Patriot management earned him 10,000 headlines, arrived in town Thursday to accept an award and announced his rooting favorite. This might come as a surprise, but . . .

“I would like to see John Hannah go on and win the Super Bowl,” Long said.

“Growing up, I always admired him. He was one of the five-six guys in professional sports who, when you meet them later, you still admire them. Joe Greene, Art Shell, John Hannah. Everyone else, it’s like you see the girl in the picture, and when you meet her, she’s chewing gum and smoking a cigarette.

“John’s a class guy. Very hard-working, very intense. He puts in everything he has. I know a lot of people getting by second-hoofing it.

“He came to our postgame party in Tampa Bay (after the Raiders had won the ’84 Super Bowl), and I saw how distraught he was. It was a combination of distraught and elated for his brother, Charley. When he saw the ring with ‘Hannah, 73,’ on it. . . . “

John Hannah wears No. 73, too.

“I was really happy for Charley, but heck, I was envious, you know?” John said. “Charley’s ring was sitting there, with a big diamond on it and it’s got ‘73, Left Guard’ on it. It even fit my finger pretty well, too.

“Yeah, I was tickled to death for Charley. I was really proud of him. At the same time, yeah, I’d have given anything to be in his spot.”

John Hannah was a wishbone lineman at Alabama, which meant he did no pass-blocking. He was so overpowering that the Patriots made him the fourth pick in the ’73 draft, anyway.

In his rookie camp, he showed just how overpowering he could be. One day, he knocked a defensive lineman clean out.

“Everybody went, ‘Oh, my God!’ ” Jet personnel chief Mike Hickey, then a Patriot scout, told Newsday’s Greg Logan. “John stood over him and snorted. Chuck Fairbanks said, ‘We have a starting guard.’

“John wants everybody to think he’s just a pig farmer. But he’s really a very smart guy with a great knowledge of football.”

He’s smart enough not to air out old gripes with Patriot management, since it’s basically unchanged. Owner Billy Sullivan has just made younger son Patrick the general manager and bumped older son Chuck upstairs.

It was the Billy-Chuck regime that traded off Leon Gray, who had played in two Pro Bowls alongside Hannah, and who had held out with him for the first three games of the 1977 season.

After which . . .

“John Hannah just had a fit,” said the Raiders’ Mike Haynes, a former Patriot. “John went berserk. He said some unkind things to Billy Sullivan.”

They patched things up for a few more years, until Hannah had enough of the newest coach, Ron Meyer. Hannah held out until the last game of the exhibition season, trying to force a trade to the Raiders, who had just acquired his brother.

“Close but no cigar,” John said. “They talked about it, but the Patriots wanted more than I was worth.

“It was funny how Charley got there. He was having a contract problem with Tampa. The guy at Tampa said nobody was going to pay any more money. Charley said, ‘Why don’t you make me a free agent, and I’ll find out?’

“We were sitting there at dinner one night, and he got a phone call. It was from Al Davis. He offered him a little more money. The first year, Charley came back with a diamond ring. I don’t think he missed Tampa after that.

“Because my brother’s there, I think there are some ties. I know the Raiders are going to be pulling for us. As a matter of fact, they told us they’d be pulling for us. All except Lester (Hayes). I think he was a little upset.

“I really like Howie. I think he’s a class act. I think a lot of their guys are. You got Howie, you got Matt Millen, Lester, Mike Haynes.

“I got to know Howie basically through my brother. We went out at the Pro Bowl together. Howie’s real loose. I’m a little tense during practice. He was laughing at me all the time.

“I’ve heard that, about people pulling for me, a couple of times. . . . I’m happy so many people think that way. I appreciate it a lot. I guess that’s the best way to describe it.”

For his first 10 pro seasons, Hannah lived in Alabama in the off-season, where he farmed and helped run the family farm-supply business.

After ‘83, though, he moved to Boston, where he works as a broker for the international investment firm of L.F. Rothschild. He may even remain after he retires.

“I had no idea that I’d ever live up there,” he said. “When I first went up there, people in Boston made fun of my accent. They laughed at it. It took awhile to get used to it.

“But our kids started gettin’ on up, and we wanted to get them situated.

“Am I a New Englander? Well, let’s put it this way, if they drew the Mason-Dixon line again, I’d have to have the stars and bars.”

He’s still a Patriot, anyway. In New England, they’ll settle for that.

AFC Notes

Howie Long and Marcus Allen were given awards as the NFL’s outstanding defensive and offensive players of the year. Allen said later that he wasn’t likely to get the same kind of opportunity again. “I don’t think I’m going to handle the ball as much,” Allen said. “I talked to Al Davis after the Patriot game. He said he didn’t like relying on me so much.”