Strike Cripples More Than Chiefs’ Record
Sometime before their 1 p.m. football game Sunday at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, players from the Chargers and the Kansas City Chiefs will bump into each other. They will shake hands.
“So,” they will say to each other, “How was your strike?”
The Chargers will shrug.
“Not too shabby,” they will say. “Easy picket lines, a couple of shouting matches, three road victories, first place, kind of nice. And yours?”
The Chiefs will stammer.
“You don’t want to know.”
No team suffered a worse reaction to the past month than the Chiefs did, and few teams have come out of it more weakened.
“It was, uh, a very demanding time,” said Coach Frank Gansz, a former fighter pilot who says he kept cool the time he had to land his crippled plane on a bed of foam.
Albert Lewis, safety and team leader, put it a different way.
“During the strike,” he said “we looked like total idiots.”
The Chiefs’ replacement team went 0-3, dropping the potential AFC West power into last place at 1-4. And the regular team was in a bigger slump.
“The whole thing kind of haunted me,” Lewis said. “Our players were totally ignorant of the situation.”
Strike One: It is the first day of picketing. Many of the Chiefs, surrounded by picket signs and television cameras, are gathering for an initial demonstration.
The masses part. Up rolls a pickup truck. On its flatbed stand players Dino Hackett and Bill Maas and Paul Coffman. They are dressed in army fatigues. They are carrying rifles. They have brought a growling dog.
The entire thing appeared that evening on national television. The Chiefs were labeled thugs. The three players were forced to apologize.
“It was done as a joke, but because none of the TV stations carried sound, nobody heard us laughing,” Lewis said. “But it was still our own fault. You don’t go pulling pranks in a suggestive situation. We were wrong.”
Strike Two: Later that day, two players are picketing, former USC star Jack Del Rio and Hackett. A local small-college student comes to Arrowhead Stadium for a replacement-team tryout. His agent drives him over. After the tryout, the agent walks out and discovers the tires on his car slashed.
The agent confronts Del Rio. They begin arguing. Out walks the player, escorted by scout Otis Taylor, a former All-Pro wide receiver and a member of the Chiefs’ Hall of Fame.
Del Rio doesn’t recognize Taylor. Del Rio screams at him. Taylor screams back. They grab each other and roll around on the ground.
The Chiefs have already embarrassed themselves, now they are embarrassing a historic figure.
“I came to practice the next day and heard it and could not believe it,” Lewis said. “Jack was a new addition to our team and didn’t know anything about Otis, and should have walked away. All I could think of was, ‘What else is going to happen?’ ”
Strike Three: The morning after the initial disturbances, a season ticket-holder walks past picketers to the Arrowhead Stadium ticket window to get a refund on his tickets for the canceled game against Minnesota. While walking away, he tells the players he thinks they are fools for striking. They disagree. There is a shouting match. There is cursing. And all of it rolls neatly into a nearby television camera, which splices neatly with footage of Chiefs’ picketers rocking the replacement team bus and pelting the windows with eggs.
“I got to a point where I couldn’t watch television anymore,” Lewis said. “You can’t be doing all that stuff, throwing eggs and things. They can’t stop apartheid with that kind of action, how are we going to settle a strike?
“The problem was, our guys started feeling insecure and turned on the only person who was right in this strike, the fan. And they did it on TV, which was terrible, because they had to ‘beep’ everything out. Beeps every second word. That was not a good situation to be in.”
While all of this was happening outside the stadium, inside was a disturbance of another sort, thanks to one of the worst replacement teams in the league.
They lost their first game, to the Raiders, 35-17. In their second game, at Miami, they lost starting quarterback Matt Stevens of UCLA on the first series with a separated shoulder. His backup, Alex Espinoza, went down in the third quarter with a concussion. The third-string quarterback was backup tight end Stein Koss, but earlier in the game he had sustained cracked ribs, so he was unavailable.
So Stevens re-entered the game, bad shoulder and all. It was all he could do to hand off and get out of the way. They lost, 42-0, and by then the regulars were so panicked, they actually recruited another replacement quarterback for the third and final non-union game.
As soon as it was obvious the strike was over, the veterans--knowing the non-union team had already lost twice--called up quarterback Doug Hudson and begged him to come in and lead the team against Denver. Hudson, who had been a late training camp cut, signed two days before last Sunday’s game. On the second series he fumbled into the end zone, fell on the ball for a safety and never played again. The Chiefs lost, 26-17, putting them three games behind the first-place Chargers.
“I watched a little bit of one replacement game, I don’t remember which one, but it was so hard,” Lewis said. “Even on strike, we still represented the Chiefs, and when you are losing, you still feel the loss, strike or no strike.
“We have understood that the replacements did the best they could for the situation they were put in. We put them in there. We have to live with it.”
There are 10 weeks left, and the Chiefs must play nine playoff-contending teams.
“It will take a lot of commitments, lot of sacrifices,” Lewis said. “It will take a devotion like we never had before.”
Charger Notes
Seven replacement Chargers have made the active 45-man roster for Sunday’s game: Defensive back Elvis Patterson, defensive ends Joe Phillips and Les Miller, linebackers John Taylor, Jeffrey Jackson and Randy Kirk, and tackle Curtis Rouse. They will replace these regulars: defensive back Lou Brock Jr., defensive end Dee Hardison, quarterback Mark Vlasic, guard Ken Dallafior, and linebackers Andy Hawkins and Angelo Snipes and David Brandon . . . “Much of that is based on what Kansas City did to us in the first game,” said Saunders, referring to his team’s 20-13 loss to the Chiefs in the opening game of the season. “We need the size for this game because of what they did to us on the ground. Our replacements were based on that.” . . . The replaced regulars don’t need to worry about being cut until Tuesday, when the 73-man roster must be trimmed to 55. . . . With Vlasic out, tight end Pete Holohan will be the third quarterback. . . . Rod Bernstine, the Chargers’ 1987 top draft pick who had been on the injured reserve list, was activated and will replace offensive lineman Broderick Thompson.
