Charles Woodson speaks to the media March 31, 2021, during the opening of the Raiders Tavern & Grill at the M Resort. Woodson, who starred during his NFL career as a cornerback with the Raiders and the Green Bay Packers, is one of two Raiders being inducted this weekend into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Saturday, Aug. 7, 2021 | 2 a.m.
Charles Woodson now admits he knew little about the Raiders when the franchise chose him with the fourth overall pick of the 1998 NFL Draft off of a Heisman Trophy-winning season at Michigan.
Having grown up in Fremont, Ohio, the cornerback remembers watching the early slate of NFL Sundays during his childhood before heading outside to play himself instead of catching most games involving West Coast teams. It wasn’t until he flew to Oakland after the draft and almost immediately met legendary Raider cornerback Willie Brown that he started to understand the organization’s culture.
“I remember he always told us there were 31 teams in the NFL and then there were the Raiders,” Woodson recalled on a recent video news conference. “So that’s the mentality you really kind of picked up on once you got out there. I spent a lot of time around George Atkinson, some of those old players, Cliff Branch. I knew very early on what I needed to bring as a young player and I had to bring it. It was about going out there every day and working hard.”
The Raiders’ famous, “just win, baby,” ethos will be in the spotlight at 4 p.m. Sunday in Canton, Ohio, at the 2021 Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony. For only the second time in franchise history, two figures who spent the majority of their careers with the Raiders will be enshrined in the same class.
The 44-year-old Woodson will be inducted as a first-ballot Hall of Famer, representing the franchise’s modern era where he’s been arguably its most successful player over the last 25 years. One of the architects of the Raiders’ “commitment to excellence” motto will go in alongside him after having waited two decades.
Former Raiders quarterback and coach Tom Flores, who turned 84 years old earlier this year, finally got the nod. Flores was a part of all three Raiders’ Super Bowl teams — the first as an assistant coach and the last two as head coach — and can trace his time with the team back to its inception in 1960.
“I remember our very first day ever in the history of the Raiders in Santa Cruz, Calif.,” Flores said. “There were 11 quarterbacks at training camp. We couldn’t even all get into the picture. Now, 61 years later, you look back and say, ‘Wow, look at what we’ve done in that time.’ You look at how many fun times we’ve had, how many down times we’ve had but we’ve always persevered.”
Flores made the team and stuck on the roster from 1960 to 1966 before ending his playing career in Buffalo and Kansas City. He won a Super Bowl ring with the Chiefs in his final season as a player, in 1969, as a backup to Len Dawson.
Flores may have spent a season with their archrival but it wasn’t long before he made his way back to the Raiders, joining coach John Madden’s staff as a wide receivers coach in 1972. During a six-year run as a Madden assistant, Flores coached all of Woodson’s aforementioned Raiders’ mentors.
The group reached its peak in 1977 when the Raiders blew out the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl 11, a championship Flores remembers just as fondly as the two he won (in 1981 and 1984) as a head coach.
“There are a lot of memories that go through your mind when you’re on the field and the game is almost over and you realize you’re a world champion,” Flores said. “They go all the way back to your childhood, all the way back to high school. Some of the craziest things in the world go through your mind, but all of a sudden, you feel this glow and you realize we’re world champs. We did it. And it wasn’t, ‘I did it,’ it’s, ‘We did it.’ It’s a great feeling and I hope we have it again.”
Woodson came close to getting his own championship with the Raiders as a member of the 2002 team that was upset by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl 37. But that season wasn’t Woodson’s favorite as he battled injuries and it started a two-year decline that led to him leaving the franchise via free agency.
He ended up cementing his legacy with the Packers, winning the Defensive Player of the Year award in 2009 and a Super Bowl in 2011, but that doesn’t mean he was initially thrilled to leave Oakland for Green Bay.
“I never thought about going to Green Bay,” Woodson said. “You hear players that have been through Green Bay, especially black players say, ‘Hey man, that ain’t nowhere you want to be.’ So when I’m going through all this in my mind, as free agency moved along and Green Bay started calling, I was like, ‘That’s not the team I want calling me.’ But it came to a point where the writing was on the wall where if you want to play, you’re going to have to play in Green Bay. That was a tough pill to swallow for me because I couldn’t believe I didn’t have multiple teams and maybe a bidding war or something.”
Woodson got through the initial disappointment by calling on several lessons he learned with the Raiders — reaching out to alumni Packer players, working exhaustively and bonding with his teammates. He eventually thrived, and the seven seasons he spent with the Packers might be the ones for which some, if not most, football fans remember him.
But Green Bay released Woodson after an injury-marred 2012 season. The Raiders were willing to give Woodson another chance and he jumped on it, starting all 48 Raiders’ games in a late-career resurgence from 2013 to 2015.
“I think the greatest part for me really was going back the second time and being ingratiated by the fans there,” Woodson said of his favorite Raiders’ memory. “Just really bringing me back with open arms which was so cool to me because I didn’t know what to expect when I out there, but second time around, I was able to really show what it was to be a Raider to the guys who were there at that point and time.”
One member of Woodson’s final Raiders’ team still remains on the current roster as quarterback Derek Carr was a rookie during Woodson’s last season. Now the unquestioned leader of the team, Carr credited Woodson for showing him the franchise’s expectation level.
Woodson still texts Carr with advice, and the two saw each other during the offseason at a charity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.
“I can’t limit his leadership to just the confined time when I played with him,” Carr said. “He’s still a leader and a big brother to me. I’ll always be thankful to him because, and he gets mad when I say this, when I was 6 years old, I was pretending to be him. The fact that he’s in my life right now is pretty cool.”
Carr also got to know Flores, who has spent more than 20 years as part of the Raiders radio broadcasting team. Flores defended Carr and said he didn’t think there was “any question” the Raiders could win behind him even as fan debates rage with the team having not won a playoff game in 18 years.
Woodson is also desperate for the Raiders to find success in their new home of Las Vegas. He might be tired of the losing that’s haunted the franchise ever since his first Super Bowl appearance, but he’s never felt ashamed about considering himself a Raider because of the spirit they’ve continued to play with. It’s an attitude he felt compelled to uphold every time he stepped on the field in silver and black.
“Going out there each and every game, and no matter the circumstance, whether we were up and down, starting out 0-9, which we did one year, it didn’t matter,” he said. “You have to go out there and get it done and show your teammates, your coaches and your fans that you care about what’s going on.”
No one knows the mentality better than Flores, who’s quite literally seen it all with the Raiders on his way to the highest career honor.
“It’s hard to imagine,” Flores said. “When I saw the new stadium in Vegas, I must have said ‘whoa’ 100 times. Every time I turned around, I said, ‘Wow look at that.’ We had a little hut we would practice in and we had a field that would sink on one side. If a player ran a down-and-out, he’d run out of sight because the field was so lopsided, so all the things that have happened, have happened for the good. It’s a great sport and people love it and will keep loving it. Go Raiders.”
Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.
