So Much for the Fire in Houston : Oilers Are Team That Fans Would Like to Like, If Only They Could

Fairy tales still come true, but these days they come in modern, updated versions, like the one the brash, young Oilers are demonstrating.

After all those years of being laughed at, they’re a playoff team once more. Is this a heartwarming story or what?

Their tale goes like this:

Once upon this time, there is a beautiful young girl named Cinderella, who is forced to sit by the fire. This is somebody you really want to feel for, but she makes it tough. Cinderella isn’t only mad at her stepmother and her ugly sisters, but at the Fantasyland Gazette, which has run a story about local maidens who weren’t invited to the ball.

And given her big break--Cinderella is fitted for the glass slipper by the Prince--she even gets some kind of ticked off at him.

“Now you get around to me!” she accuses. “Where were you the last six months, when I was pushing cinders up and down the hearth? And who was that bimbo you took to the Mad Hatter’s tea?”

By midnight, the entire kingdom is tired of her nagging and is praying for a reverse miracle. Lo and behold, Cindy’s coach turns into a pumpkin. The day is proclaimed a national holiday throughout the land, to be celebrated by a feast, with pumpkin pie for dessert. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Thus we come to the real Oilers, who beat the Seattle Seahawks in a dramatic overtime playoff game last weekend and will play in Denver against the Broncos Sunday. This is a team you’d really like to feel for, but the Oilers make it tough.

After seven years out of the playoffs, and recent finishes of 5-11, 5-11, 3-13, 2-14 and strike-shortened 1-8, were they happy or what?

“Coach, the press in this town has been unbelievably negative,” a TV type suggested to Coach Jerry Glanville in the postgame press conference. “What would you say to them now?”

“Well,” drawled Glanville, “if I wouldn’t go to court, I’d show them my best side.”

This is an inside joke. Ladd Herzeg, the Oilers’ general manager, is already involved in a court case in Buffalo. It’s an assault charge, growing out of a dispute with guests at a wedding reception who were partying late at a hotel where the Oilers were staying.

Herzeg is said to have, uh, shown his best side during that dispute, though he denies it, and there is a question as to just who in the Oiler party chose to show his best side. Among the Oilers, the pointed derriere is becoming an institutional response.

Glanville doesn’t always need prompting.

“We’re just two games away from the Super Bowl,” he said. “I think if we win those two, even our local media could be on our side. I give you no guarantees.”

This media problem, however, is turning out to be more than just local.

“The New York Times was here to cover a bowl game,” said Glanville. “They were shocked to find out we’re in the playoffs. I think we’re Rodney Dangerfield. We really don’t want to get anyone’s respect, though, until the season’s over.”

Well, as players like to kid writers, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

“He has it backward,” said the New York Times’ Gerald Eskenazi, who covered the American Football Conference wild-card game. “I came here for the playoff and went to the bowl game.”

What’s going on here? How did a football coach and a team in a football-mad city find themselves feeling so lonely, and in the heart of “Luv Ya, Blue” country, so unloved?

It took some doing.

When the ‘80s began, “Luv Ya, Blue” was a folk movement. The Oilers had Earl Campbell, the oh-fish-ul state hero. Their coach was the beloved Bum Phillips, your basic good ol’ boy.

But Bum was fond of hoary veterans and he made an unfortunate trade for another country boy, the aging Ken (Snake) Stabler. (Undaunted, Bum would later do it again in New Orleans, when Snake was so far over the hill he couldn’t find it with a telescope.)

And though he made the playoffs annually, Bum kept bumping into the Steeler dynasty, and losing.

And Bum had a young general manager above him named Herzeg, who suddenly axed him in 1980, when the Oilers were 11-5 and still a playoff team. Short of blowing Santa Claus out of the sky on Christmas Eve, you couldn’t imagine a bigger PR fiasco.

Now it’s 1987. Having tried and failed with coaches named Biles, Studley and Campbell, the Oilers are flailing around under Glanville. Average attendance has fallen from 52,712 in Bum’s last season, to 37,824.

What can the problem be?

Well, they’ve been drafting at the front of the line for so long, they have blue-chippers piled on top of each other, so it couldn’t be the level of talent.

The coaching?

Management? The team hasn’t had a top pick in training camp since 1984.

Surprise, it was their deal with the Astrodome!

Owner K. S. (Bud) Adams came up with a bold move: He’d consider moving the franchise to Jacksonville, Fla. While Jacksonville was slaying fatted calves for him--in vain it turned out, since Adams ate and ran--attendance in Houston stiffened. In only one of their 1987 home games did the Oilers draw a crowd larger than 38,683.

The exception was Nov. 22, when the Oilers, tied with the Cleveland Browns atop the AFC Central Division at 6-3, played the Browns before a sellout crowd--and lost, 40-7. Two weeks later, when the Oilers started their late-season surge by beating the San Diego Chargers in the Astrodome, the crowd was 31,714.

Even when the Oilers pulled the mild upset of making the playoffs, and the bigger upset of being the host team for the wild-card game, the city warmed slowly. The playoff game didn’t sell out, and a local TV station had to buy the last 1,500 tickets to get the blackout lifted.

A reader wrote to the Houston Post, pointing out that without their 2-1 strikeball record, the Oilers wouldn’t have made the playoffs. The Post ran the letter under a headline that said, “Love Ya, Scabs.”

Happy days are here again, though.

It’s the day after the overtime victory over the Seahawks and Houston Loves Ya, Blue, once more. Both local newspapers carry the game story across the top half of Page 1.

“There never was a strain between the city and the football players,” Glanville says at his day-after briefing. “I think that’s probably been misread by a lot of people. I think the strain has come from other directions, rather than the people.

“When you’re in the street and meet the people, like our players and our coaches do, we find people who have great compassion for the football team. I think the attendance we had yesterday and the way the crowd was, it was fun to be there.”

But that season-long attendance dive, didn’t that suggest a problem?

“The problem is, we just had empty seats,” said Glanville, obviously a believer in fundamentals.

“I think what happened, we had a lot of distractions the whole year. We’ve not been a sports-page team, we’ve been a front-page team, with the strike, with the move.

“With the employment rate as it is, it’s hard for some people that want to be here to be here. What people are unaware is, in the NFL, your largest amount of seats is sold to industry. And the companies in Houston, Tex., have had to cancel their season tickets.”

If the economic hardships of the region are undeniable, Glanville’s explanation fails to account for the latest Texas phenomenon: In the two biggest cities, Dallas and Houston, the professional basketball teams now play to sellouts while the pro football teams find that interest has crested.

Of course, a few victories and the crest turns right around.

Of course, with this team, even winning didn’t satisfy everyone.

There were manifold complaints by opposing coaches that the Oilers were a dirty team. After backup nose tackle Charles Martin, of KO-Jim McMahon fame, knocked Pittsburgh’s Earnest Jackson out of action for a month, Steeler Coach Chuck Noll complained to the league.

Then after their final meeting, Noll latched onto Glanville’s hand during the postgame handshake and wouldn’t relinquish it while giving Glanville a salty piece of his mind.

In the rout at Indianapolis, the Colts angered the Oilers by scoring a late touchdown to take a 50-27 lead, whereupon Oiler cornerback Patrick Allen blasted Dean Biasucci, who was kicking the extra point, with a forearm to the neck. Allen told the press he’d done it on purpose, a bit of candor that cost him $5,000 when the league office heard about it.

Against the Saints, a rookie bomb squadder named Walter Johnson blocked Morten Andersen cleanly but solidly on a kickoff, after which Andersen, generally considered the best kicker going, missed two field-goal tries. Johnson said he’d been told to block Andersen.

Also, four other Oilers were thrown out of games.

“At least we have a name now,” said nose tackle Doug Smith, who was one of the four. “If they want to call us the Dirty Gang, that’s all right.

“We’re playing the same way we’ve played the last two, three years, but we’re winning now. We always tried to get three, four helmets on the ball. We hit just like we hit last year. Didn’t no one care when we were at the bottom of the stick.”

Someone cares now. The Oilers are loaded, but they’re young--they average 25.6 years, lowest in the National Football League--and they’re a little on the wild side, too.

Take star running back Mike Rozier. On a one-yard touchdown run against the Seahawks, he started to sweep to the left, reversed his field and ran 40 yards to get over the goal line. This would have been great, except that Rozier started reversing his field on every other carry--and was dropped for losses--like a kid with a new toy.

Rozier, a noted slouch in practice, recently told the Houston Post’s Ray Buck: “When the time comes (that) I have to work hard at playing football, it’s time for me to get out of the game.”

The Oilers were the most penalized team in the league.

But make no mistake, this is a budding monster. Of the 22 starters, 11 were premium draft picks--first, second and third rounds--and that doesn’t count Rozier, a Heisman Trophy winner who came out of the United States Football League, or quarterback Warren Moon, who cost $5.5 million in open bidding when he arrived from Canada.

They’re agile, mobile and hostile, but also volatile. Despite their 10-6 record to this point, they’ve been outscored by opponents.

Glanville’s attacking defense combines a furious pass rush with man-to-man coverage in the secondary but it’s risky, especially when the furious pass rush doesn’t arrive in time. Seeing as how the Oilers ranked 24th in sack percentage in regular games this season, and the cornerbacks aren’t All-Pros, you might infer that their necks are never too far from the blade.

Thus it was that the Oilers completely dominated a Seahawk team that was without Curt Warner and still had to go overtime to win, then did so only after getting a break on a controversial instant-replay call.

But if their style makes them, say, a challenge to get behind, their talent is a menace to all in their path. There are probably few teams they can’t beat, or lose to. Their pumpkin still has its wheels on.