Jim Otto

Before there were Raiders the way we think of them, the silver and black and the Coliseum and all of it, there was Jim Otto snapping the ball. He was there for the very first season in 1960, he was the only starting center the franchise had for 15 years, and when they wrote the history of the team, he got the nickname that says it all: The Original Raider.

He was born January 5, 1938, in Wausau, Wisconsin, and his family had so little that some winters they couldn't afford new shoes to keep his feet dry. His hero was Elroy Crazylegs Hirsch, who'd played for the same Wausau High coach, Win Brockmeyer. Otto played center and linebacker for the Lumberjacks, and one season he broke his ankle, taped it up before every game, and played on it anyway. That was the whole career in one sentence, really.

He had 48 college offers and picked the University of Miami, where he played center and linebacker from 1957 to 1959. He was the starting center as a junior at just 193 pounds. No NFL team wanted a 205 pound center, so in 1960 he signed as an undrafted free agent with a brand new team in the brand new American Football League, the Oakland Raiders.

He weighed 217 pounds at that first camp and was up to 240 by the end of the year, and he kept building himself until he played at 255. He wore 50 as a rookie, then equipment manager Frank Hinek suggested 00, for recognition, a play on his name. AFL commissioner Joe Foss went along with it. Double zero became the most famous number in Oakland.

Then he just never came off the field. Otto started every one of the Raiders' 140 games in the AFL's 10 year history, one of only three players to play in all of his team's AFL games, and the AFL never had another all league center the entire time it existed. He was first team All AFL nine times, and first team All Pro again in 1970 after the merger, giving him 10 in all. He played in all nine AFL All Star Games and the first three AFC NFC Pro Bowls.

Those early Raiders were terrible, and he was there for all of it. In 1962 they won one game all year, a December win at Frank Youell Field that snapped a 13 game skid. By 1967, with Al Davis running things and Gene Upshaw lining up next to him at left guard, Oakland was the best team in the AFL. They beat Houston 40 to 7 for the AFL title on December 31, 1967, and played Green Bay in Super Bowl II.

From 1967 through 1974 the Raiders won seven division titles in eight years. Otto played on lines with Upshaw, Art Shell and Bob Brown, all Hall of Famers. The Raiders lost AFL or AFC title games five times in that stretch, to the Jets, Chiefs, Colts, Dolphins and Steelers, and every one of those teams went on to win the Super Bowl. He was on the field for the Immaculate Reception in 1972 and caught the only pass of his pro career in that game, and he swore to his dying day the play should have been ruled incomplete.

The price was his body. For the last three years of his career he had his knee drained and injected three times a week, and he played on a braced knee and painkillers. After his fifth or sixth knee surgery he tried to come back for 1975, but the bone graft failed. His last game in a Raiders uniform was a preseason game against the 49ers, and he retired before the season started, the last member of the 1960 team to go. He spent time teaching his replacement, Dave Dalby, the position.

He went into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1980, his first year of eligibility. He was named to the AFL All Time Team, The Sporting News ranked him 78th on its list of the 100 greatest players in 1999, and in 2019 he was one of only four centers named to the NFL 100th Anniversary All Time Team.

What came after was brutal. By his count it was nearly 74 operations, 28 on his knees alone, and multiple joint replacements, three life threatening infections, and in 2007 his right leg was amputated. He said he had no regrets. He worked for the Raiders, built a small fortune around Oakland with Burger King franchises, liquor stores, a walnut orchard and real estate,.

Jim Otto died on May 19, 2024, in Auburn, California, at 86. Mark Davis lit the Al Davis Memorial Torch for him, and the team's statement called him what everybody already did: The Original Raider.

For a center, clutch means one thing: be there. Otto was there for 210 straight regular season starts and every playoff game the Raiders played in his career, through knee surgeries and injections and a body that was falling apart. He never missed a game.

And he wasn't just present, he was the best at his position for a decade. Ten first team All League selections, the first player in pro football history to reach ten, a mark only Jerry Rice has matched since. The AFL never named anybody else its all league center.

Look at what those Raiders did with him snapping the ball. They led the AFL in scoring three straight years from 1967 through 1969, won seven division titles in eight years, and made six conference championship games plus Super Bowl II. The offense ran through the middle of that line, and the middle of that line was double zero.