SUMMER HEAT : Hilger Warming Up to Hot Seat He’s on as Raider Quarterback

OXNARD —  Mornings at 11, the Raiders spill off the practice field, past Mini-Cam Alley where the interviewers are lined up all in a row, hoping for a word with the quarterback. Marc Wilson would have been shy and reluctant. Jim Plunkett would have been dutiful but reluctant.

Rusty Hilger? He’s home.

Enjoy it while you can, world. Never again will you see such innocence at the helm of the silver and black.

Despite an organizational bias against youths taking snaps in games, the kid nobody ever wanted has ridden his meteoric rise all the way to the top spot. As a 23-year-old sixth-round draft pick, he almost became the first rookie quarterback ever to start a game for the Raiders. At 24, he was given a brief shot to win the job (he promptly gave it back). At 25--after an apprenticeship shorter by one year than that imposed upon even Ken Stabler--Hilger is up.

Is he enjoying this or what? Boyish, enthusiastic, ostensibly loving every second of it, he is a torrent of cooperation. Nor does it take a list of probing questions. “You got a couple of minutes, Rusty?” will do, after which it’s a merry chase through his life’s story.

Who ever saw interviews like these? Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Hilger was straight-jacketed at Oklahoma State, where the coaches would have as soon killed him as let him throw long.

Why? “They were fools !” Hilger says, eschewing the normal diplomacy and shattering the lunchtime calm of the dining room.

The writer’s eyebrows go up. Is this on the record?

You bet.

“You can print that!” says Hilger. For emphasis, he bends over the table, puts his mouth to the man’s tape recorder and addresses the OSU staff, directly.

“You were fools ! You were fools! Don’t you ever forget it!

“Those people knew I could throw deep. The reason why we didn’t was because we were chicken! We were too chicken!

“We went 10-2 with losses to Oklahoma and Nebraska and all they could tell me after those games was, ‘We’re sorry we didn’t throw the ball more.’ And I begged ‘em. During games, I begged ‘em!”

“Pat Jones, we’re at the University of Oklahoma and we line up on the goal line at the half-- Pat! (Speaking directly into the recorder again, to make sure his old coach can hear.) He calls two running plays. We get stuffed on the first one. Time is running out, it’s 12 seconds and counting and the referee, thank God, stops play so everyone can get lined up.

“We had another running play called. I winked at my wide receiver and he winked back at me. We threw a TD and it was 7-7. All Pat could say was, ‘Uh, uh, uh--good play.’ I guess he took credit for it, I don’t know.”

Fools and chickens notwithstanding, Rusty Hilger has triumphed. They’re still back there, he’s here.

It’s a new era, all right, unlike anything the Raiders have ever seen before, and all that remains to be determined is its duration.

WELCOME TO L.A.

There isn’t any easy way in. To quarterback the Raiders is to have one of those jobs that invites the fullest scrutiny, like managing the New York Yankees, coaching Notre Dame or, in the old days, being the USC tailback.

Everyone seems to expect a superstar and indeed, recent Raider dreams have encompassed names such as John Elway, Jim Kelly and Vinny Testaverde, all denied them (Elway by active interference of the league office, the Raiders whisper). Since only a certified blue chip will do, writers arrive in camp now to do stories with working titles like “If Al Davis is such a genius, why can’t he get a quarterback?”

But Davis has very specific ideas about what a quarterback is. Tall is good. Mobile is nice. Able to throw the ball 120 yards on a line is very good. He has little use for the relative soft-throwers like Steve Young, or the suspected head cases like Neil Lomax, or the people who think he’s desperate enough to trade a No. 1 pick for a backup like Doug Williams.

And besides, Davis likes Hilger. Hilger is tall. Hilger can run. Hilger can throw. Hilger has confidence bursting out all over him.

“If you were only going on confidence, ‘he’d be in the Pro Bowl now without playing a down,” says Raider Coach Tom Flores.

So what was Hilger doing there on the sixth round of the 1985 draft? Did the school bury him, the offense?

That’s the story you hear around the Raiders, but not everywhere.

“He was on our list,” says an NFC scout. “His coaches recommended him. He had plenty of exposure (Hilger started in one Independence, one Bluebonnet and two Gator Bowls at OSU and shared time with Randall Cunningham in the East-West Game). Everybody studied him. If he does become an effective starting quarterback, then we were wrong.”

EVEN YOUNGER RUSTY

Wrong on Rusty? If he turns out the way Davis hopes, the world is going to have to apologize to Hilger for a solid decade just to even it up.

Even NAIA schools passed him up as a prep. Boss quarterback in a non-powerhouse program at Jackson High School in Oklahoma City, he got one offer--the last scholarship offered by Oklahoma State.

“I was a camaraderie-builder in high school,” Hilger says happily. “Older guys still come back to me and say, ‘You know what? The funniest thing I can remember is when we were getting beat by 30-some points.’ That must have been the Midwest City Bombers, a big suburban school. I just walked in the huddle and said, ‘All right guys, what do you want to do now?’

“We really couldn’t block ‘em. We just went with a group of guys who had fun together. Most of the guys were so tight but I was always so loose out there. I don’t know where that comes from, my upbringing or what, but I was always so loose.

“Bob Leahy (quarterback coach at Oklahoma State) came to see me against Midwest City. I’m sure he did it so he could see me and the Midwest City players at the same time. They beat us, 56-7. He went back and told the head coach, Jimmy Johnson, ‘Well, he’s tough. They kept knocking him down and he kept getting up.’ ”

That’s the amazing thing about Hilger, his resilience. Without a lot of people running up to him, telling him how good he was--in fact, with just the opposite circumstance--he seems to have maintained an unshakeable belief in himself.

He credits his parents, John and Betty. They encouraged him to participate--once Betty vowed to ground him if he quit Little League--and attended all his games. They found things to applaud after 56-7 defeats. They never got down on him.

He says he always had coaches for that.

“When I first got to Oklahoma State, people looked at me and said, ‘No way!’ “ Hilger says. “I was 6-2 and weighed 165 pounds. They looked at me and said, ‘This is one of our signees? You’re kidding.’ It was a joke with them, like, ‘Let’s not hit him, we’ll break him.’

“I walked in the first day. The first thing Bob Leahy said to me was ‘How long will it take you to get to the weight room?’

“I didn’t realize I had gotten the last scholarship that Oklahoma State gave. Nor did I realize that they wanted two other quarterbacks who went somewhere else.”

With a start like that, the only way he could go was up. It took a series of accidents, dropouts and failures on the depth chart above him, but he did it.

“My sophomore year, we had a kid who graduated. That made me third team. They told Jim Traber they wanted him to play football or baseball. Trabes says, ‘The hell with you’ and plays baseball (eventually making the big leagues with the Orioles). So I moved up to second team without ever taking a snap.

“Jimmy Johnson (the head coach who’d go on to Miami) didn’t like me anyway for one reason or another. Never did. We’re up at Nebraska and our kid has just gotten knocked out of the game. Jimmy Johnson comes up to me at halftime. He looks both ways and says, ‘Do the best you can.’ Then he walks out. I thought, ‘Great confidence builder, Sir.’ I’ll never forget it.

“So here I go, no turning back. We ended up 8-4 and went to the Bluebonnet Bowl.”

By the time Hilger was a junior, Jimmy Johnson was a Hurricane. Hilger and other Cowboy players asked that no one new be brought in, and Johnson’s defensive coordinator, Pat Jones, got the job.

Of course, Rusty and Pat didn’t hit it off, either.

Does there seem to be a pattern emerging here? Hilger considered himself confident, maybe just on the verge of cocky (a ledge everyone else swears he leaped over years ago).

His coaches thought he was crazy as a banshee.

Or as an OSU official said last week: “Rusty obviously did a great job here but he was a little off-the-wall.”

Hilger: “I was getting that vibe. They knew I was crazy. I’d come to the sideline and (curse) them: ‘What the hell are we doing? We’ve got to throw!’

“Maybe I’m not your basic coach’s player--back then, I am now. But coaches don’t play the game. Players do.”

Together, more or less, Hilger and Jones led the Cowboys to a 10-2 record, with only a 17-3 loss at Nebraska after leading, 3-0, at the half, and a 24-14 loss at Oklahoma. They beat South Carolina in the Gator Bowl, with Hilger throwing a last-minute touchdown pass to become the Most Valuable Player.

Hilger went on to the pros and is now venerated back in Stillwater, almost.

“I was on a talk show back there with Pat Jones this summer,” Hilger says. “I did it from here by telephone. Before I came on, I heard Pat saying, ‘Rusty was the type of kid who never had much ability. He just found a way to get it done.’ ”

Hilger shakes his head. “Didn’t have much ability,” he repeats.

Hilger also recently got an invitation to contribute to the OSU athletic fund. He’d like to think it over first, for about 1,000 years.

ROOKIE RAIDER RUSTY

It was love at first sight. What Okie State deemed insubordination, the Raiders deemed, well, a silver and blackism. Besides, if Hilger could throw long, they weren’t likely to hinder him. If he couldn’t, he’d have been on the first bus home.

Thus a lowly No. 6 pick began to be talked up as soon as he appeared in his first mini-camp, a couple of weeks after the ’85 draft.

Not that there wasn’t a period of adjustment.

“Rusty was a cowboy who was used to hanging out with cowboys,” says Mark Pattison, his roommate in three training camps. “He comes out here and all of a sudden, it’s bright lights and blue ocean. I think it kinda caught him off stride a little.”

Awed? Hushed? Almost.

Whatever trepidation Hilger was feeling inside--and he says there was some, all right--on the field, he was Mr. You Go Here and You Go There.

Pattison: “Rusty would just go off in a corner at night and play these tapes (a self-affirmation course by a man named Louis Tice). He told me I ought to get into it. I used to go, ‘Right, right, right, why don’t you go blow it someplace else?’

“Then you’d look out on the field and he’s directing traffic, doing all the kind of stuff rookie quarterbacks aren’t supposed to do. . . . He came in shooting his mouth but he was backing it up.”

Of course, there was also the standard period of indoctrination.

“When you’re a guy who has a lot of confidence a lot of people are going to be after you,” Hilger says. “These guys didn’t want to hear that, not from a rookie. I didn’t understand that when I came here.

“I just wanted to be one of the guys. I didn’t have any idea they were going to look at me as a rookie. I’d never been a rookie before. I’d hear ‘em cutting up and joking. I figured, that’s my game. I like to cut up, too. Once in a while, they’d look at you like, ‘Wait a minute, you haven’t even taken a snap yet, what are you talking about?’

“I do know a couple of players who I really, really looked up to--Lyle Alzado, Howie Long, Bill Pickel--those guys will stick in my mind until the day I die. They gave me a vote of confidence--no praise, just a comment like, ‘Hang in there kid, you’re going to do all right.’ Those guys mean more to me than anybody else singly on this team, I can tell you that.”

That was on the flight home from the last game of the exhibition season, time for Hilger to go from quarterback to clerk, the kid with the uniform, sun visor and clipboard.

Even then, opportunity came knocking. Jim Plunkett was knocked out of the ’85 season in the second game. Marc Wilson was dispatched to the sideline midway through the fourth at New England.

This was just like OSU. Guess which rookie was in there?

Hilger: “I came into a huddle at New England where they said, ‘Get the snap, don’t worry about anything, just get the snap, you can do it, just stay calm, just don’t fumble the first snap, you’ll be all right.’ All 10 guys were doing this to me. That’s strange.”

He didn’t fumble the first snap or the second, although he did throw his first seven passes all over Foxboro before completing one, a low shot that Todd Christensen dug out of the turf in the end zone to break the game open.

With Wilson hurting, there was even a chance that Hilger might start the next week, but Marc returned. Hilger made two more rookie appearances, both noteworthy: against the New Orleans Saints, with Wilson knocked out for a series, he took the team 60 yards for a touchdown in two plays; in the ’85 Kingdome massacre, he ran onto the field, joined the huddle and couldn’t get his chinstrap snapped up.

“I don’t know,” Hilger says, exasperated. “For some reason, it just wasn’t set up the way it was supposed to be set up. Of course, I look like a child behind my facemask. The offensive line tried to help me out (with the chinstrap). It turned out to be a big thing in the press.”

One would hope so. But it was almost time to put away childish things. In his second camp, Hilger was supposed to be getting a shot at the No. 1 job but that ended when the San Francisco 49ers sacked him eight times in half of the exhibition opener. Of course, Raider players were already whispering that the competition talk was nonsense, that Wilson had the job and everyone knew it.

But duration is everything.

STUFFED GOOSE CITY

You’ve got to feel for quarterbacks, hyped to unreal heights and then relegated to anonymity to satisfy the public’s need for pre-season heroes and in-season scapegoats.

Remember John Elway, the golden boy of golden boys coming out of Stanford, dismissed as a blond, surfing semi-cretin after failing to get the Denver Broncos to the Super Bowl in his first three seasons?, And Tony Eason, the withdrawn Patriot who was ridiculed and marked for demotion after his Super Bowl stomping by the Chicago Bears, after which he returned to have a terrific ’86 season?

And Vinny Testaverde, the $8.2 million man who was just pictured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, served up to America in all his youthful promise like a Christmas goose? What do you think everyone will say if the Tampa Bay Buccaneers remain the Buccaneers? Nice try, kid? Perhaps a little buzzing about how Vinny never really responded well to pressure at Miami?

The problem is assessing the quarterback’s contribution. If baseball can agree that pitching is 90% of the game, why can’t football assign a realistic value to the quarterback?

Except in exceptional cases--say Jim Kelly in Buffalo--a quarterback is going to be sorely pressed to be more than a product of everything around him--the scheme, the line, the backs and receivers.

On the other hand, no other single player can do as much to raise his team’s level of play.

And besides, everyone lives for the exceptions.

Thus you get the common dichotomy, wherein, on one hand, Al Davis is quoted in 1985 as saying:

“We don’t think the quarterback is the dominant factor as far as who wins the Super Bowl. In fact, we think the only team in recent years where the quarterback was the dominant factor was the Steelers (with Terry Bradshaw). I’m glad the preponderance of thinking in America is that you’ve got to have a great quarterback and you’ve got to have a great running back. I think those are great things if you have them but I don’t think that’s necessarily what wins Super Bowls.”

And on the other hand, the same Al Davis has tried to trade for Elway and dreamed of deals for Kelly and Testaverde.

Let’s leave it at this: If you’re a quarterback, a lot is expected.

If you’re a Raider quarterback, it’s a whole lot. Other schemes may be molded to the personnel but Raider quarterbacks are molded to the scheme or, not infrequently, carried off trying.

For a Raider quarterback going south, there are few allies. His coaches may understand and his teammates. Raider offensive players were very supportive of Wilson and, amazingly, remain sympathetic today, publicly and privately. It was on the defensive unit, the true repository of personality on this team, not to mention macho, that impatience reigned supreme.

But a quiet quarterback has to lead by example and for whatever reason--an aging line, young receivers, booing fans, his injuries, his poise--Wilson couldn’t. And so the torch passed again.

Hilger watched Wilson’s travail. What ran through his young mind?

“I thought about that one, long and hard but I feel it’s in my best interests not to answer it,” Hilger says.

“I could write a book on that one, I bet. Because that’s very, very important to me: What happened to a guy who was one of the best in the game coming out of college? I look at that and I’ve answered and asked lots and lots of questions to myself about that.”

If Hilger wants to know how he’d handle it, he’ll find out soon enough. He had to face the 49ers Saturday night with a makeshift offensive line and the same ever-young receivers, with Flores making the Obligatory Raider Gesture before allowing James Lofton into the starting lineup.

Hilger’s first pass was incomplete. He was sacked on his second attempt. Jessie Hester dropped his third. If the supporting cast isn’t going to be better than that, Hilger is going to find out how it feels to be Marc Wilson first-hand.

But Lofton waits on the sideline, and Don Mosebar, John Clay, Mervyn Fernandez. Hope still abides in silver and blackdom.

“I want all the bad things to happen to me in the pre-season,” Hilger was saying last week. “I want to see everything you can possibly see. Sometimes when things happen out of the ordinary, you have to ad-lib. Well, I want all that ad-libbing to happen early, so we can talk about it and get it out of the way. And then run smooth the rest of the season.

“I’ve gotten so much negative reinforcement in my life. This is the first organization I’ve been in where I got any kind of positive reinforcement. With the confidence I have in myself and what I I’m hearing from outside people, I’m looking for the biggest years of my life to happen right in front of me.

“That’s what I feel. I feel the biggest years of my life coming on.”