Remembering The Legend

Here at Raider Take, we coined the phrase "WWTD," for "What Would Tatum Do?"

It's a question that we've had to ask with regretful frequency in recent years, having been subjected to watching guys like Stuart Schweigert do their best Cirque du Soleil impersonations.

You know, clowns flying around, hitting nothing.

We know what Tatum would have done. He would have hit something. He never played the clown.

And today, alas, we must say goodbye to the man and the legend. Jack Tatum has passed away at the young age of 61.

It's odd to think of him being just 61 in 2010. Part of it is because in the 1970s, seemingly every football player, and especially the Raiders, looked hard and grizzled and manly in the "mountain man" sense of the word (at least in the eyes of us kids).

It's been 34 years since Tatum's epic helmet-separating hit in the Super Bowl in Pasadena, and 38 years since his hit that created the Immaculate Deception. He was in his 20s then, but he and his teammates looked like they'd already been pillaging the earth for decades.

At the beginning of Raiders games at the Coliseum, they always play these video vignettes of current players giving lip service to it being "our house," or something like that. Yes, it's our house, half empty, with clowns flying around, giving up 275 yards rushing.

I propose a change. No more current players in the vignettes. Only Raiders legends. All asking the same question: WWTD?