Dickerson Enjoys a Nostalgic Half

Eric Dickerson clutched an orange toothbrush. Another football game was done and gone, but at least the taste this one had left was not a bitter one. What a pleasure to be entrusted with the football again. He had lugged it for 99 yards in the first half alone. No way he wouldn’t crack that 100-yard barrier for the first time all season.

“I was thinking maybe 200,” he said.

Goals. It goes without saying that Dickerson has always set high ones for himself. And why not? The yardage he eventually accumulated Sunday at the Coliseum left him six yards short of 13,000 for his NFL career. The man in the goggles has jogged nine miles of high grass and hard rug, back and forth, forth and back.

Yet while he is no stranger to the league, Dickerson is still a virtual newcomer to the Raiders, an organization that remains as much a puzzle to its insiders as it does to millions of outsiders. The players themselves are rarely sure from week to week who their quarterback will be, or which running back will do most of the running, or when and where the running will stop.

Dickerson doesn’t want to make a big deal about it, any more than Marcus Allen does. “All the guys, like Marcus, want to play more,” he says, careful not to appear selfish, particularly after a 24-0 knockdown of Denver that revealed once again just how good this season’s Raider team could have been.

Being unselfish doesn’t come easily for Eric. All his life, he has been The Man. He is accustomed to being handed the ball. Know how many 100-yard games Dickerson had in college? Twenty-seven. All a quarterback pretty much had to do was shove the ball toward Dickerson’s stomach and be careful not to trip over his feet. Eric would do the rest.

The Raiders felt they needed him. Roger Craig was gone. So was Bo Jackson. Marcus Allen had somehow wandered into some sort of weird El Segundo limbo. Nick Bell was an up-and-comer seen as not quite there. Steve Smith was still the starting running back who had to settle for two carries and a cloud of dust. Dickerson felt needed. Like a heavyweight champion, he was ready to rumble.

But something peculiar keeps happening to the Raiders on their way to the two-minute warning. Dickerson disappears. For a quarter or two he goes out there and goes forward. And then he goes directly to the bench. And he waits. And he waits. As does Allen. As does Bell. Before this season is over, somebody is going to penalize the Raiders for having their backfield not in motion.

“When was the last time you ran the football in the fourth quarter?” someone asked.

“Uh, never, I think,” Dickerson said, laughing.

There they were Sunday, sitting on a 17-point halftime lead. One would assume the Raiders would be working the clock, running the football, eating up minutes. One would assume wrong. Jay Schroeder passed and passed and passed. He passed from his 13--on second down. He passed on third down, too, and got sacked. This ended the third quarter. Schroeder’s first play of the fourth quarter--an incomplete pass. Two plays later--incomplete pass.

Even when the Raiders landed a yard from the opponent’s goal, they passed. Twice Schroeder tossed the ball to Andrew Glover, successfully the second time, for the game’s first touchdown. All three Raider touchdowns were passes, none longer than 11 yards. Know how many touchdowns Dickerson has rushed for in 11 games? Two.

They gave him the ball three times in the second half. Three times for eight yards after a 99-yard first half.

“Did it surprise you to get the ball only 16 times?” Dickerson was asked.

“It surprised me I got the 16,” he replied.

Again, he wasn’t angry. He was more, like, wistful, as though he wished someone would permit him to race his motor after he gets it warmed up. He even compared himself to an automobile at one point, saying: “You jump into a car in the morning and it’s sputtering. But once you get it going, it’s like you can’t be stopped.”

Dickerson stopped, smiled.

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “You have to be a running back.”

Considering the serious shortage of available running backs among the media, Dickerson took another crack at it, which is more than the Raiders let him do near the goal line. He recalled those golden, olden days in Anaheim, where he took his first step toward becoming the No. 2 ground-gainer in NFL history behind Walter Payton, which Dickerson now happens to be.

“It was like John (Robinson, the coach) would say to me: ‘I can tell when you feel like you’re invincible.’ There are days when you do feel invincible out there,” Dickerson said. “There are days when everything clicks and you feel like you can run as far as you want.”

This was such a day?

“Well, I ran as far as halftime,” he said.