A RAIDER SHRINE : Hendricks and Dalby May Have Retired, but Their Jerseys Are Still Hanging Around

Ted Hendricks had seen the tableau before: tears flowing, heads hanging between the knees.

He watched as the big screen displayed the crushing disappointment of the Syracuse basketball players, when the only difference between them and Indiana’s Hoosiers had been Keith Smart’s final shot.

“They go into a fit of depression, and I don’t think that’s right,” Hendricks said. “My philosophy was that when the clock went double zeroes and I could walk off the field feeling that I’d tried my best, it was over with, and then you prepare for the next year.”

Hendricks knew both victory and defeat, intimately, in 15 years as a linebacker for the Baltimore Colts, Green Bay Packers and Raiders. He naturally preferred victory--nobody had more fun playing football than Hendricks--but he could tolerate defeat, too.

This week, while the Hoosiers were hooping it up, Hendricks and Dave Dalby rejoined some former Raider teammates to be enshrined as the first inductees in the unofficial Raider hall of fame at Pancho’s saloon in Manhattan Beach, a favorite watering hole. The ceremony consisted of owner Ab Lawrence nailing their jerseys to the rafters, and that was about it.

Hendricks, who lives in Miami, and Dalby flew in from Lake Tahoe, where they attended a reunion of the 1977 Super Bowl champion Raiders in conjunction with former Coach John Madden’s 50th birthday celebration. The Raiders, it seems, will go anywhere, on any pretense, for a party.

Hendricks recalled that after the 1984 Super Bowl he flew from Tampa to his fourth consecutive Pro Bowl appearance in Honolulu. Several Washington Redskins, Super Bowl losers to the Raiders, also were on the plane, casting gloom everywhere.

“It was like a supreme depression,” Hendricks said. “You could see the same faces on the Syracuse team. It’s normal. That’s what happens when you’re second best.”

Second best, though, never bothered him a great deal, Hendricks insisted.

“It’s sort of like pain,” he said. “I’d been exposed to it so many times that I had a very high threshold of pain, because you build it up. The more you get hurt the higher the threshold goes. You learn to tolerate it until you’re impervious to it.

“You always want to win. It hurts when you lose, but if you’re smart enough at the time, you realize that when the clock reads double zeroes, the game is over.

“There’s nothing you can do. Why should you be so sad? Maybe you made some mistakes, but you tried to do the best you could do, and when it’s over with there’s nothing more you can do.”

Dalby put in 14 years as only the second center in the team’s history, succeeding Jim Otto, a real Hall of Famer. He did not retire.

“I was cut,” he said.

The blow fell in training camp at Oxnard last summer.

“The worst part was that there was an air hockey tournament that night and I really wanted to play in it,” Dalby said. “They let me play, anyway, and I won. I think they felt sorry for me.”

Dalby, who now runs a boat motor business at Angel’s Camp, told his former teammates: “I don’t miss football, but I miss being with you guys.”

Oh, there were great times, many of them created by Hendricks, the 6-7, indestructible, irrepressible one.

Wearing hastily fashioned knight’s “armor,” he once rode a borrowed horse into Madden’s practice at Sonoma State. Another time he and linebacker Rod Martin set up table and chairs under a Cinzano umbrella on the 50-yard line at practice and sat sipping Gatorade until their teammates arrived. Running back Kenny King, a towel over one arm, was their waiter.

The problem with football practice, Hendricks said, is that “it gets kind of monotonous. You’re going through the same thing every day. It’s like rote. If there’s no diversion, it’s very boring, and boredom leads to complacency, and I would not let that happen. I always had to excite their minds again to where they enjoyed it.”

His coaches? “They tolerated me,” Hendricks said. “I’ll have to give ‘em credit for that.

“I changed Madden around. He used to have sideburns and his hair greased back, wearing a tie with a pin-striped shirt.

“We had an altercation in Denver that showed exactly what I was made out of, and he respected that. I came in late for a curfew--2 o’clock in the morning. I was out with George Blanda. It happened to be my birthday and I wasn’t starting with the Raiders.

“I’d had three Pro Bowls with the Baltimore Colts, one with the Green Bay Packers, and I came into the Raider organization and they put me on the bench, which really upset me at the time.

“Then he had to rely on me because there were a couple of injuries (among) the linebackers, especially in the middle, and I’d never played middle before until he put me in the game at halftime.

“We were behind, 17-10, and we won the game with Kenny Stabler, 34-17. He never fined me.”

During a Monday night game, also when he wasn’t playing, Hendricks put on a harlequin mask with a smile on it.

“I’m not a real history buff, but I like the Renaissance period, especially with the Shakespearean quotes back and forth,” he said. “They’re very subtle. I like things that have a double meaning.

“We were beating Denver, but I wasn’t playing, and underneath I was very sad. It was tragedy and comedy, the two masks they use (to symbolize) the theater.”

Now Hendricks spends his time “managing my properties” and running an annual fishing tournament on the Kona Coast in Hawaii.

“I’d never change anything,” Hendricks said. “A lot of people go through changes because of pressure that’s put on them from other areas. They try to be somebody they’re really not. I like to be myself, and I’m proud of that. If you’re true to yourself, you can be true to everybody.”