He Went From Raiders to Gladiators

I could never figure out what Todd Christensen was doing on the Raiders. He wasn’t wanted by the police anywhere. He never busted up a bar in Tampa. He didn’t even drink. He paid his bills, shaved every day. He didn’t arrive at the line of scrimmage in a foul humor, he didn’t particularly hate anybody in a different uniform, he smiled a lot.

He loused up the team photo. Also its image. Call himself a Raider? What was he--chaplain?

So, what was a nice young man like this doing in a joint like that? Lose a bet, did he? Get lost on his way to the Denver Broncos?

Then I found out. Todd Christensen is the black sheep of his family. They speak of him in hushed whispers, if at all, back in the old homestead in Eugene, Ore. If this was an old English family out of Jane Eyre, they’d keep him locked in an attic when company came.

Consider this: His father is a full professor at the University of Oregon. His mother has two doctorates from universities. A brother teaches at MIT, no less; another brother is on his way to being a judge.

How’d you like to play football for a living in that family? No wonder they refer to him as “Poor Todd,” and act as if he’d run off to join a commune or the circus.

In a way, the Raiders are a cult. But for 11 years, Todd Christensen was a member of that rollicking crew, kind of like the angel in the school play where the scenery keeps falling down.

The Raiders of those days were deadly on the field and not much better off it. Being on a squad with the likes of Lyle Alzado, John Matuszak, Ted Hendricks and Lester Hayes was the next-best thing to finding yourself in the hold of a pirate ship.

“I remember once we were flying back from New Orleans,” Christensen says, “and Matuszak sat next to me and said he wanted to read me some poems he had written. I said, ‘Not now, Tooz, I want to grab some sleep.’ And the next thing I know, I hear this roar and I’m being strangled to death. Till I agreed to listen to his poetry.”

Matuszak got tears in his eyes over his sentimental rhymes--unless you got up to go to the bathroom. You could walk out on Robert Frost. But not the Tooz.

But if Christensen didn’t fit the Raider image off the field, he more than made up for it on the field. On a team that had the legendary Cliff Branch, the reliable Bob Chandler and such highly touted imports as James Lofton and Mervyn Fernandez, Christensen was the team’s annual pass-catching leader. He was their bread-and-butter receiver. “He could catch a burning log,” assistant coach Sam Boghosian once said of him. He got so good at catching in a crowd of hostile cornerbacks, it was said he could take a steak from a cageful of lions.

If it stayed in the air, Christensen caught it. When everyone was covered, the Raiders got the ball to Christensen. Whether he was covered or not. He led the team in receptions five years in a row. He led the league in receptions in 1986 with 95, the most any tight end ever had. He had five 11-reception games. Fourteen times in his career, he rolled up 100 or more yards receiving. Three times, he gained more than 1,000 yards a season.

His postgame interviews leaned more to Spinoza than George Gipp. Christensen often seemed to regard the game with the aloof detachment of a vicar at a hanging.

His whole career was an attempt to get people to take him seriously while he reserved the right not to. He left the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants because he thought he was a qualified running back and they thought he was--well, too white. He was a star running back at Brigham Young, but most scouts figured running back at BYU made you a potential linebacker in the NFL. The only things that could run fast in Utah had hooves. Most teams put him to work snapping for punts or blunting kickoffs on special teams. “I thought I was a blue-chip runner, and they told me to take the ball and bend over--on three.”

If there was anything the Raiders didn’t seem to need, it was a tight end. They had greats like Dave Casper and Raymond Chester when Christensen came along, but Christensen redefined the position. At 6 feet 3, 235 pounds, he was big, mobile and faster than anyone thought. “I played down my speed,” he smiles. “I liked people to think I was doing it all with my brains. Sounded better.”

What happened to the Raiders? Christensen is asked. Gold chains, loafers with no socks, fuchsia BMW’s, discos, show business, proximity to the sound stages?

“Nah!” Todd scoffs, “they had most of those things in Oakland. They just didn’t get the players. They used to get all those misfits, good players who were unhappy where they were, tired of being hassled. But the rest of the league wised up to that gimmick. They got to those players themselves. The Raiders weren’t picking up the Toozes, the Alzados, Matt Millens, the born Raiders. And then look at their drafts--Sean Jones, Jessie Hester, Bob Buczkowski. Two of them aren’t even in the league any more.

“The Raiders didn’t get too soft, they got too slow. And too late. It wasn’t geography, it was gristle. It’s not so easy finding Raider players in classrooms. Pool rooms, yes.”

It’s not so easy finding Todd Christensens either. Todd has left the Raiders, but no one is sure he wants the family to know what he’s doing now, either.

Todd is co-host of a TV show called, “American Gladiators,” which kind of looks, in poor light, like the Raiders’ Christmas party. Or an embassy stoning.

It’s a game show, of sorts, in which contestants, men and women garbed like road-show Flash Gordons, zap each other with crossbows and cannons armed with tennis balls, knock each other off 10-foot high pedestals with jousting poles or by crashing into each other on ropes like Tarzans swinging from a vine. It has almost as much mayhem as the Raider 10-yard line in the fourth quarter with the score tied, so Christensen feels right at home. At the Raider camp, this kind of behavior used to be called “discussion,” or as Lester Hayes put it, “First, discussion, then, concussion.”

It’s probably not the career the family Christensen would have picked for their son. They probably had something more Tom Brokaw-ish in mind. But after 11 years on the Raiders, a man can’t be expected to go directly back to civilization. In fact, the Raiders think the show is fine as far as it goes. But if they’re going to have gladiators, why not a few lions? Real ones, not those pansies from Detroit.