Horton’s Success Teaches Patience

For three quarters, it was like a struggle between two woolly mammoths in a tar pit--or, maybe, an Ohio State-Purdue matchup, circa 1938.

The Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Raiders circled each other warily, like two fighters falling into clinches afraid of a KO punch, two gamblers afraid to bet into a pat hand.

With 2:29 to go in the first half, for example, Cincinnati, one of the most explosive teams in the conference elected to go with four running plays and run out the clock. The Bengals put the ball in the air only 15 times in the whole game. Their game plan seemed to be modeled around patience.

So, the game was decided in the middle of the fourth period. With a play that caught the patient Bengals by surprise.

No wonder.

On a team that has three Heisman trophy winners, three Olympic sprinters and a lot of names right off a cereal box, the Raiders are still in the Super Bowl hunt because of a player who, as recently as two years ago, was as unwanted as dandruff.

If someone were to ask you before Sunday’s game who or what an Ethan Horton was, you might guess it was the hero of a 19th-Century New England novel or the name of the leader of the Green Mountain Boys during the American Revolution.

On a team with Bo Jackson, Marcus Allen, Willie Gault and Tim Brown on it, to say nothing of Olympic gold medalists Sam Graddy and Ron Brown, Ethan was as overlooked as the guy who comes to collect the towels.

But this unlikely hero, in the middle of the fourth quarter with the teams locked in a 10-10 tie like two guys fighting in the dark, made an over-the-shoulder catch on a 41-yard pass play that was as pretty as anything Jerry Rice or Paul Warfield or anybody named Crazy Legs ever hauled down in a big game and raced into the end zone for the season’s most important score for the team.

It was hard to believe the guy who did this couldn’t get a job in football two years ago.

The Raiders found him serving as an academic counselor for the athletic department of the University of North Carolina.

The Raiders didn’t just send him a perfumed or form letter. Al Davis himself was on the phone. Would Ethan be interested in a tryout with the Raiders?

Horton hesitated. His experience in pro football had been, to say the least, checkered.

Actually, he had been drafted in the first round--as a running back--by the Kansas City Chiefs. It is a part of football lore that he was drafted one spot (15th) before San Francisco’s Jerry Rice, which had always been held up as Exhibit A of pro football’s myopia. After all, Johnny Unitas had been drafted off a steam shovel.

Horton’s experience with the Raiders was not instant they-lived-happily-ever-after. He managed to get in four games. You could tell right away he wasn’t Bo Jackson. The Raiders, too, cut him adrift.

Horton shrugged and went back to lunchpail America.

The problem was, in spite of being a leading collegiate rusher with 3,074 yards and 22 touchdowns in his career at North Carolina, he was miscast as a running back.

Davis was on the phone again with a novel suggestion. Had Ethan ever given thought to becoming a tight end?

Now, tight end is not one of your glamour positions of football. It’s hod-carrying stuff, mine-clearing before the main attack. You do not get to run these gaudy, fanciful routes like the gazelles of the team, the split ends, the wideouts.

First of all, you have to knock somebody down. Most often this is a linebacker who most often looks--and acts--like somebody they might call Jack the Ripper (or Chain-Saw) if he did on the streets what he does on the 10-yard line.

It is a nosebleed, head-ringing position. You get to catch a pass only after you have flattened one or more 240-pound replicas of something you might expect to find swatting airplanes off the Empire State Building--and then only if all the graceful, flying swans of the game are covered.

You often catch the ball in a crowd. You are basically a short-yardage receiver, which can make you feel you are trying to get to a ball through the subway rush hour with a finger sticking in your eye, a hand on your belt. You don’t normally get 5-foot-11 cornerbacks or reedy safeties to beat. You get guys who look like they might bite.

When you’re in a backfield with three Heisman winners and three receivers who probably could give Carl Lewis a close chase, you put away your clippings, leave a note for the milkman and set out for one more try at the brass ring.

Sunday’s catch for Ethan Horton could be, like Kirk Gibson’s World Series home run, a watershed play. It didn’t put the Raiders in the Super Bowl, but it kept them from falling out of it. It was his fourth catch of the game, his 37th of the season and his 310th lifetime. It was only his fourth career touchdown pass. It came on, for him, a luxury pattern. He didn’t have to pause to knock anybody down or hurl himself into some furious mass of muscle. He just sprinted for the sidelines, swept by a pursuing linebacker with his superior running back speed, reached up and made the fingertip catch that kept the Raiders in the tournament and will keep Ethan Horton from a 9-to-5 job in a three-piece suit.

He won’t have guys back home asking what he’s been up to lately, and he won’t have guys traipsing around a locker room any more, trailing microphones or cassettes, asking “Anyone know what Ethan Horton looks like?”

For the record, Ethan Horton is a tall (6-4), strong (245 pounds), pleasant young man with brown eyes, a thin mustache and ringless ears who laughs easily and shrugs off his near-brush with quasi-anonymity in the professional ranks.

“People don’t realize how hard it is to make it up here, what a fine line it is between excelling and failing,” he said.

His trip to the limelight required an early-season injury to the Raiders’ regular tight end, Mike Dyal. It also required Al Davis wondering idly: “Have you ever thought of becoming a tight end?”

For a guy who spent two years on the beach waiting for his phone to ring, it is pretty heady stuff to make what could be--if the team goes on to Tampa--one of the most important catches of the Raiders’ year and maybe in their history.

He doesn’t have a Heisman or a gold medal, but he had the football in the end zone as shadows fell Sunday afternoon, and it was because of him, of all people, that Cincinnati finally ran out of patience.