True (or, not so much) tales of a football tough guy
Portions of what you read below may and/or may not be true.
To honor baseball Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew, who passed away Tuesday after a long and painful battle with esophageal cancer, NFL.com’s Adam Rank listed his favorite NFL tough-guy names. Among the familiar bad-asses like Cliff Battles, Mack Strong, Jack Youngblood, Steve Stonebreaker, Kevin Mack and Otis Sistrunk was an often-forgotten player, Murder Killingfield.
Killingfield's 1977 Topps card.
You might be asking yourself, “wait a freakin’ second there mister, who was Murder Killingfield?”
Well, most who passionately followed professional football during its romping-stomping 1970s heyday will remember Killingfield for his time of glory with the Oakland Raiders, with whom Killingfield was really just one of many renegade athletes (and, we use the term “athlete” very loosely here) who found safe refuge on Al Davis’ motley crew.
The story, as far as we know, begins in the early 1960s with Killingfield being discovered in some northern California semi-pro football league by a member of the coaching staff of Cal Poly, who’d heard something about some ruffian who was crushing locals on Saturday mornings.
At Cal Poly, while the team wasn’t competitive, Killingfield was a tour de force at both defensive and offensive tackle. John Madden, a Cal Poly alum and the new linebackers coach of the Raiders, convinced then-Raiders head coach John Rauch to give Killingfield a chance. Killingfield arrived as a non-roster, free-agent invitee to basically be training camp fodder for what was a budding American Football League powerhouse in 1967.
Al Davis has a famous saying: “You don’t adjust. You just dominate.” Killingfield took that to heart. Killingfield’s first order of business as a member of the Raiders was to establish dominance, and to do so, he picked a fight with the team’s biggest bad ass, the handlebar-mustachioed Ben Davidson. Davidson was no match, and Killingfield was equally respected and feared (maybe mostly feared) by his new Raiders teammates. Killingfield made the Raiders’ regular-season roster, and what followed was more than a dozen injured-riddled years with periods of absolute pestilence on the pro football gridiron.
The Raiders’ 1967 season ended with a crushing loss to the Green Bay Packers in the second AFL-NFL World Championship Game (later called Super Bowl II). Killingfield took the loss particularly hard, and subsequently spent the offseason crushing can after can of Kingsbury Beer at his northern Wisconsin cottage.
As the Raiders rose to prominence, the enigmatic Killingfield was just one of many peculiar personalities on the rebellious Raiders, who also featured “The Assassin” Jack Tatum, “Dr. Death” Skip Thomas, “The Snake” Ken Stabler, John “Tooz” Matuszak, and Otis Sistrunk from the “University of Mars.” B. Grantford “Ol’ Typewriter Finger” Price, the long, long, longtime Raiders beat writer for the Oakland Enterprise, once wrote of Killingfield, “that Killingfield plays football as I would imagine an ogre would, sporting abundant hair and beard, a voracious appetite and strong body, then exploiting opponents and devouring his victims, feeding on the weak.”
NFL Films narrator John Facenda‘s famous poem, “The Autumn Wind,” is said to have been inspired by Killingfield.
With a silver hat about his head
And a bristling black mustache
He growls as he storms the country
A villain big and bold
A 1972 AFC divisional playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers turned out to be particularly haunting for Killingfield and his Raiders teammates, but mostly for Killingfield. In a game that would be forever known for Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception,” Killingfield suffered a torn ACL on a play in which he slipped on a patch of ice on Three Rivers Stadium’s Astroturf surface ["I always (expletive) hated (expletive) Astroturf (expletive) ... (expletive)," Killingfield was known to say] and as he fell to the ground had his right knee stepped on and ripped to shreds by the cleats of Steelers defensive end L.C. Greenwood.
In the weeks that followed that horrific setback, as the Raiders tried to come to grips with the nightmarish end to their season, Killingfield tried to ease the severe pain in his remote Alaskan homestead with whiskey and opium binges. When that didn’t work, Killingfield decided to take matters into his own hands and perform ACL surgery on himself … using only a sledgehammer, a welding torch, miniature pickaxe, fishing line, rubber bands and staples.
In 1976, the Raiders — one of the league’s most dominant forces, but also one of its greatest postseason disappointments — finally put together a championship season. Unfortunately for Killingfield, he was not a part of it. In the sixth, and final preseason game against the expansion Seattle Seahawks (yes, they played six preseason games back in those days), Killingfield fractured the fibula and tibia in that same right leg he repaired himself just a little more than three years prior.
In 1980, the Raiders, now under the guidance of head coach Tom Flores, made an unlikely championship march as a wild-card playoff entry. Once again, Killingfield missed out on being a part of the title-winning effort. In the famous “Red Right 88″ game at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, Killingfield suffered the most horrific injury ever seen during a coin flip. In a freakish accident while practicing his long-snapping skills on the Raiders’ sideline, Killingfield stepped on an errant football while backpedaling following a snap. He broke his left fibula and tibia. The Raiders released Killingfield following their Super Bowl XV triumph.
Killingfield's doppelganger, Gerard Butler.
Killingfield’s NFL career came to an inglorious end on one of the worst teams in league history, the 1982 Houston Oilers, who finished just 1-8. Starting five of those nine games was Archie Manning, who Killingfield — now a permanent fixture along the Oilers’ defensive line — was not particular fond of, since Manning replaced Killingfield’s former Raiders teammate Ken Stabler as the team’s starter.
Somewhere between the end of his playing career with the Raiders and the present day, Killingfield lived in seclusion in the rural nether regions of a faraway, mystical land called Turkey (his ancestors hailed from the old Ottoman Empire). Summers are hot and dry. Winters are mercilessly severe, with temperatures dropping to as low as negative-40 degrees Fahrenheit and snow may lie on the ground for at least 120 days of the calendar year. This mattered little to Killingfield. The locals, completely unaware of Killingfield’s American football playing background, but totally aware of his mastery of the unforgiving Turkish wilderness often refer to Killingfield as Ayiboğan, which literally means “man who can choke a bear with his bare hands.”
Fiction can be fun! For the record, Rhino’s Sports Pub and Bacon Bistro does not support murder or killing (of anything, except for maybe spiders), but does support fields.
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