From the Super Bowl to Mountain Empire High . . . : Dahms, Football Reunited

Tom Dahms’ friends remember his days as a lineman at San Diego High and San Diego State. And they remember his days as a player with the National Football League champion Rams of 1951. And they remember his days as an assistant coach with the Super Bowl champion Oakland Raiders of 1977.

They don’t remember much about Dahms since then, because Tom Dahms had seemingly disappeared from football.

He worked as a health studio instructor who taught adults how to lift weights, as a manual laborer who put chairs together for the San Diego city schools and as an insurance salesman. Dahms was an assistant with the semi-pro Yuba City Cougars and with San Diego City College, but that was the extent of his involvement in football during the past eight years.

All the while, Dahms went from town to town and job to job looking for a team to coach.

Tom Dahms now has a team.

When talking to Dahms’ friends and colleagues this week, they all wanted to know where Tom is. How Tom is. What is Tom doing.

At 59, Dahms is head coach of the Mountain Empire Redskins.

Who? Where? What?

Mountain Empire High is about 50 miles east of San Diego in Pine Valley and has an enrollment of 400. The Redskins play in the Mountain-Desert 1A League.

They are 0-8 and have been outscored, 209-56, with one game remaining against Calipatria Nov. 15.

“I would love to win every game,” Dahms said. “I don’t like to lose at anything.”

But at 59, after what he terms a “miserable” eight-year stretch--both professionally and personally--Dahms is trying to put life and football in perspective.

“I think I’m fortunate to still be alive,” Dahms said. “I went to college and was in the service. I wanted to play pro football. I coached for 20 years. What else can you say? That’s a pretty good career.”

John Madden, the former Raider coach, remembers assistant coach Tom Dahms as a gruff man who once spent an entire night practicing blocks on assistant coach Ray Malavasi.

“They were talking about a stance at a coaches meeting,” Madden said. “Those guys were still arguing when I left and the other coaches left at about 1 in the morning. Tom and Ray stayed. They started blocking each other. The next morning I came in the meeting room and it looked like a scene from a John Wayne western. Both Tom and Ray had black eyes.”

Tom Fears, the great wide receiver for the Los Angeles Rams in the 1950’s, remembers Dahms as a rookie on the Rams’ 1951 National Football League championship team.

“Tom was a big ol’ boy,” Fears said. “He had a hard time making the team. Believe me, he didn’t have the ability.

“He wasn’t a great athlete, but he worked at it and worked at it. He worked at his back shuffle on pass blocking. He barely made the team, but he became one heck of an offensive lineman.”

As a senior for San Diego State in 1949, Dahms received a standing ovation from the College of the Pacific fans in Stockton when he was taken out of the game with just minutes remaining and the Aztecs losing, 62-14.

“The fans, who had been bloodthirsty throughout the game, gave Dahms a standing ovation,” said Bob Ortman, who covered the Aztecs for the Tribune. “That’s quite a tribute for a lineman who isn’t usually recognized by his family.”

Dahms, 6-5 and 215 when he was in college, was All-California Collegiate Athletic Assn. as a lineman for Aztecs in 1948 and ’49. Before that, he played both offense and defense for San Diego High during their glory years in 1944 and ’45.

Those were the good days for Dahms, who played with the Rams from 1951-54, Green Bay in ‘55, the Chicago Cardinals in ’56 and the San Francisco 49ers in ’57. He was an assistant coach at the University of Virginia, coached with Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys from 1960-62 and with the Raiders from 1962-1978.

After the 1978 season, Dahms was released by the Raiders.

“John Madden retired and Al Davis was making moves to get rid of the old coaches,” Dahms said. “I was the first to go. I don’t think it’s because I wasn’t doing my job.”

Said Madden: “Tom was one of those guys who was a real dedicated hard working coach. He stood up for his players, but there was never any real closeness. He would get on them. Tom Dahms never babied them or took it easy on them. He was a little like Buddy Ryan in Philadelphia. At first they don’t like him, but then they realize what he did was for their own good.”

Madden enjoys telling stories about how he would scream at officials until he was about to get kicked out of the game. At that point, he would tell Dahms to take over.

“Tom was even more vocal than me,” Madden said. “He was the designated yeller at officials.”

At 51, when he was released by the Raiders, Dahms was determined to get another job in the sport he loves.

“I tried all over,” Dahms said. “Canada, the USFL. Every time a new team started up, I tried to get in. But if they--quote, unquote--feel you’re not capable of coaching, you’ll never get a job.

“People I knew in the past said you should be coaching, but nobody gave me a job. Nobody told me I wasn’t any good or I was too old. If someone would say, hey, you’re no good, that would have been all right.”

And nobody was offering him a job.

“I recommended him around,” Madden said. “It was a tough thing for Tom, who was an assistant coach in his 50s. It’s tough to get a job then. There aren’t really very many assistant coaches who are hired in their 50s.”

As if losing his job with the Raiders wasn’t painful enough, a year after his release, Dahms separated from his wife of 24 years.

Losing his job and his wife came on the heels of the death of Dahms’ twin boys, Timothy and Jeffrey. They died of muscular dystrophy in 1972 when they were 12 years.

Dahms has four children who live in the Bay Area, but he said he has not seen them recently because he does not have enough money to visit them.

“I haven’t made enough money to fly or travel,” said Dahms, who lives in a modest apartment in Alpine. “My wife (ex-wife) doesn’t like me to talk like that.”

But that’s reality, he says.

“I’m still looking to get some more furniture,” Dahms said. “I’m trying to live on a minimal amount now . . .

“I get a retirement check that allows me to keep around $300 a month and send $300 to my wife.”

If Dahms had coached in the NFL until he was 65, he said he would have earned a pension of about $2,500 a month. (His top salary with the Rams was $4,500 in 1951.) Players’ pensions were implemented in 1959, two years after he stopped playing.

“If I was making a grand a month (in retirement pay),” Dahms said, “I’d go out on the beach. As a player, no one told me to put my money away. If I was playing pro football now, I’d probably be making $250,000 a year.”

Instead, he is working full-time at Mountain Empire.

Sitting in his cramped office in the locker room at Mountain Empire, Dahms makes it clear he does not want sympathy.

“I don’t want it to sound like I’m down,” Dahms said. “I was down when I got this job.”

How did a guy wearing a Super Bowl ring end up coaching a high school team that has only 18 players?

After spending three weeks in the hospital for high blood pressure last summer, Dahms was released. The first thing he did was check the classified advertisements in the newspapers.

“I saw an advertisement for a football coach,” Dahms said. “I applied. I got out of the hospital and they hired me.”

It was almost as easy as Dahms makes it sound.

“He basically told me, ‘I’m in my twilight,’ ” said Mountain Empire principal Fred Kamper. “He also told me, ‘I’m to the age where I’m not going to get down in the stances and demonstrate things to the kids.’ I asked him how much mileage could we expect to get out of him. He said five or six years.”

Kamper said he was quite surprised to hear from a man with Dahms’ background. He had 12 applicants, most of whom were high school assistant coaches.

Before hiring Dahms, Kamper decided to check with the Raiders.

“The big thing the Raider organization had to say was that he was a good teacher,” Dahms said.

But teaching Otis Sistrunk how to pass-block is quite different than life in the high-school classroom and on the high-school football field in 1986.

As an instructor who teaches math and history, Dahms finds his students quite a bit different than when he used to substitute in the off-season during the 1950s.

“The late 40s and 50s were fun days,” Dahms said. “The war was over. Girls still wore dresses. Boys had short hair. You could tell the difference between boys and girls.

“Nowadays they (students) think they’ll miss something if they don’t do everything at once.”

On the field, Dahms is facing both a generation and a talent gap. The more Dahms tries to teach, the more frustrated he and his players become.

“I try to keep the right perspective,” Dahms said. “I realize I’m not the coolest or sharpest guy around. But I can teach them football. If they want me to, I can make them good football players.

“It’s just that they are very touchy about being taught. I used to tell adult football players, if you’re out late, you’ll be fined. What do I tell these kids?

“A lot of times you get tired of fighting an uphill battle. This year has been a learning situation for me.”

The Redskins were quite competitive last season, but they lost the nucleus of their team and gained a new coach who took some getting used to.

“Getting to adjust to his philosophy takes time,” said junior starting quarterback Tom Johnson. “He stresses review a lot. He goes over plays a lot. It’s good, but after a while, it gets old.”

Said Kamper: “He’s real low key. He doesn’t do a lot of ranting and raving. And he’s kind of humble. Kind of like a Gentle Giant.”

How much longer does this Gentle Giant, who sort of swallows your hand when he shakes it, plan to stay at Mountain Empire?

“I want to stay a few more years,” Dahms said. “I want to contribute more.”

And besides, Dahms said: “This is an ideal climate for an old (guy) like me.”