RIP, Jim Otto, 1985

My visit with the best and most beat-up center of all time

I’ll be honest. There was a time not long ago when I thought Jim Otto had already died. He hadn’t. He passed away this past weekend at the age of 86. Why did I think he was already among the dearly departed? Because when I met him almost 40 years ago, I must have thought: How could anyone survive all he’d gone through?

Lightly regarded out of the University of Miami because of his size, he was passed over by the NFL and hooked up with the Oakland Raiders of the old AFL. He went on to play in every AFL regular-season game ever played. The two leagues merged in 1970 and Otto kept playing, earning induction into the Hall of Fame on his first try.

He was not only an ironman and the best center of his and probably anyone else’s generation, but a man who lived with pain on the field and off.

You know how when you go to the doctor for the first time and they ask for your medical history and your list of surgeries? Imagine being Jim Otto. You’d have to ask for more paper to document the 74 surgeries, 20 concussions, and an amputation. And that was just for starters.

He always insisted that had he stayed in his hometown of Wausau, Wisconsin, he’d spend his life as a welder. Which made all the pain and suffering worth it, in his eyes. Oh, and speaking of eyes, Otto said he had even suffered a detached retina while going up against the likes of Green Bay’s Ray Nitschke. yet kept on playing. His words in 2014: “Broke my cheekbone, and my zygomatic arch bone here, and detached my retina in my left eye…I was blind for six months in my left eye. It was really bad. It all swelled up, and I couldn’t see, but I kept playing. I never went out of the game.”

His autobiography was fittingly entitled “The Pain of Glory.”

He was both a decorated superstar athlete and the poster child for the toll a career in the trenches of professional football can take. on a man.

I’m not sure what prompted our 1985 visit to Jim at his home in Auburn, California. I was working at TBS and maybe it was just one of those “Where are they now?” pieces. He was 47 years old, ten years past his last game, and owned some Burger King franchises in Northern California. But I think more than anything, we were simply fascinated by a man who would endure so much pain, and still maintain that, given a chance, he’d do it all over again.

Here’s to the Original Raider. Rest in peace, Jim Otto.