NFL Strike Turns Guard Into Safety

A year ago, Ron Foster was a Coliseum security guard who prowled the field at Raider home games, keeping reporters and photographers from getting too close to the action.

Today, when the Raiders, or a reasonable or maybe unreasonable facsimile thereof, return to the Coliseum after a one-week layoff because of the NFL players’ strike, Foster again will be on the Coliseum field.

But this time, instead of wearing his law and order uniform, he’ll be in silver and black.

And his responsibilities will have changed. The people he’ll be trying to keep away from the action won’t be the media but the wide receivers of the Kansas City Chiefs.

The strike, you see, has turned Ron Foster, security guard, into Ron Foster, strong safety.

How strong he’ll be remains to be seen.

Now it’s not as though the Raiders just looked down the sidelines and plucked out the strongest-looking body they could find. The 6-1, 205-pound Foster has some credentials.

He was a running back and defensive back at Taft High and was named the team’s most valuable player one season. But an ankle injury sidelined him his senior year.

Foster went on to Cal State Northridge where he was an honorable mention All-Western Football Conference defensive back in 1983. He also ran back punts, including one for 63 yards and a touchdown. But that ankle injury turned up again, causing him to redshirt for the 1984 season. He played his senior year in 1985 and then was met by a roar of silence from the NFL.

No call on draft day. No call in the days that followed.

But Foster wouldn’t give up. He worked in a bank and at a health spa, along with his security job, while continuing to work out.

“I still had a burning desire to play,” he said. “I decided to keep trying because I always thought I had the talent.”

He got his chance to demonstrate it last spring when he was invited to off-season camp by the Raiders. Foster did well enough to be invited back for preseason camp, but he was cut after three weeks, before a single exhibition game had been played.

“I didn’t look at it as the end,” Foster, 23, said. “To me, it was a learning experience. A guy might get cut two or three times before he makes it. But if you think you’re good enough, you have to keep trying. I’ve been playing football for 14 years. It’s something I’ve put a lot of time into and I’m not going to stop until I can’t play any more or I make a pro team.”

When the strike hit, Foster had made his first pro team. Sort of.

The Raiders called back and asked whether he would cross the picket line.

Suddenly, Foster had an offer to turn his dream into reality, but there were strings attached.

How badly did he want it?

“It was a hard decision,” he said. “I made a lot of friends when I was in camp. But you have to look at it as a business and there are no friends in business. Your friends don’t pay your bills for you. I figure if I hadn’t come out, there would have been somebody else to take my spot.

“The regular players don’t have a gripe with us, but they are using us as scapegoats. If they don’t want to play, there are guys who do.”

Foster talked it over with several Raiders, including Stefon Adams, a striking defensive back.

“He understands I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do,” Foster said. “He’s not too happy about it, but he understands there are two points of view. I couldn’t honor what the players’ union is doing because I’m not a part of it. He couldn’t honor my point of view, but he knew I was in a tight spot financially.”

Foster hasn’t gone back to work since getting cut by the Raiders in the summer. Instead, he continued to work out and hold onto his hopes of landing a professional football job.

“For me, this is a second opportunity,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to show what I could do the first time. It’s hard to show anything in practice.”

So now what? He has made his decision, but where can it lead him? He’ll play today, perhaps another if the strike lingers. But eventually, the real players are going to come back and where will that leave him? Tackling overzealous photographers again?

“Whether I make the team or not, hopefully someone else on another team will see me and what I can do,” he said.

“People are really going to be surprised at the quality out there. We are not going to be the Bad News Bears. We are going to be playing serious ball. We feel we have to establish ourselves as the big, bad Raiders and uphold that tradition. We are going to have to play hard like the Raiders would do.”

Foster and the other new players are being asked to execute the game plan the striking Raiders would have used. There have been no alterations of the playbook to fit the new personnel.

Coach Tom Flores told Foster and the other new recruits, “The coaches will change, the players will change, but the system will stay the same.”

Foster and Co. are inheriting a 2-0 record. Whatever they do today and however many future Sundays they play will count in the drive toward the Super Bowl. That point hasn’t been lost on Foster. He hopes it hasn’t been lost on the regulars.

“I feel we will have made a major contribution,” he said. “We won’t just be guys coming in who have won maybe two games. Hopefully they’ll remember that and we’ll get a piece of the pie.

“I think we’ll be exciting and entertaining. I’ll be making history and I want to get my name in the history books in a positive manner.”