DT Golic Fit Right in With Raiders

Bob Golic joined the Los Angeles Raiders and instantaneously fit into a tough group of guys that loved the game of football.

Defensive tackle Bob Golic came to the Los Angeles Raiders near the end of his career and showed he had plenty left in the tank.

In fact, after playing four seasons with the New England Patriots who selected him in the second round (No. 52 overall) in the 1979 NFL Draft out of Notre Dame, and spending seven years with the Cleveland Browns, the 6-2, 250-pound Golic fit right in with the renegades who wore Silver and Black

“He’s from the old Raider mold,” Coach Art Shell said when Golic joined the Raiders. “He’s a character. I could imagine him and guys like Ted Hendricks and Dave Dalby at the same time. It would have been unbelievable.

“Bob has had a great career, and I wish that I could have played with him as a Raider. He was the type of guy who has always left everything he had on the football field. He’s always given whatever he had when he played.”

Golic signed a two-year contract worth $600,000 for one year and $650,000 for the next season in 1989 but wound up playing twice that long for the Raiders.

And if he needed any more motivation, Shell’s comments on that first day gave it to him.

“That’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever had,” Golic said when told what Shell said. “I know the type of players they were. They played the game aggressively, and you can’t play that way unless you love the game.

“You’re basically playing for someone (Shell) who’s one of the guys, one of the boys. It’s easy to play for him and do things his way because everybody knows that when he played he was the type of player everybody respected. I’m excited to be part of the Raiders' defense.

“He was the guy who loved the game, the guy who went out there and played under any condition. Healthy, injured, no matter what, he loved playing the game.”

While Golic moved into the starting lineup when he first arrived in Los Angeles, he also showed some of the characteristics of Hendricks, Dalby, and other Raiders who had reputations for being a little different.

Golic was constantly confused with another Raiders character, defensive tackle Lyle Alzado, so one day he stole Alzado’s stall in the locker room and wore Alzado’s jersey out onto the field for practice.

“I formed the Golic Liberation Front for the capture of Alzado’s locker,” Golic told reporters. “I’m going to get a T-shirt made up and on the front it will say, ‘I’m not Lyle Alzado,’ and on the back it will say, ‘but I hope to be when I get older.’”

Raiders linebacker Jerry Robinson said: “Bob has a few screws loose in his head, but anybody who’s going to play nose guard in the NFL has to be crazy. … But unless he’s in a cast, you can count on him being out there on the field.”

Added defensive end Howie Long: “Bob’s the biggest ham I’ve ever seen in my entire life. He’d talk to a wall if it had a note pad on it.”

In addition to his off-the-field antics, Golic plugged the middle of the Raiders defense, starting immediately in 1989 and for the next four seasons in 57 of 61 games and recording 8½ sacks and three fumble recoveries.

Unfortunately, we again don’t know how many tackles Golic made because that was not yet an official NFL statistic, but we know he made plenty because he was a tackling machine who once made 26 tackles for Notre Dame in a game against Michigan.

The Raiders went 8-8, 12-4, 9-7, and 7-9 in the four seasons Golic played with the Silver and Black, in addition to beating the Cincinnati Bengals, 20-10, in the Divisional Round of the 1990 playoffs and being routed, 51-21, by the Buffalo Bills the next week in the AFC Championship Game at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, and suffering a 10-6 loss to Kansas City Chiefs in the 1991 AFC wild-card game at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.

The 35-year-old Golic retired before the 1993 season, although he would have loved to keep playing.

“Football has been my life,” Golic, a three-time Pro Bowl selection, said with tears in his eyes on the day he announced his retirement. “I know that I’m old and beat up, but I want to play so bad. But, the time comes when you just have to face it. I think that I’ve been playing too long to deal with just standing and watching. It’s way too hard.

“I had hoped and wanted to keep playing. I had played 14 years, and 15 sounded like a good number. I was content with ending my career with the Raiders, but I was just hoping that it would have been later.”

Golic was part of other teams for longer stretches, but as Raider Nation knows, “Once a Raider, Always a Raider.”

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