The Ballad of Lyle Alzado
The Life and Death of Raiders’ Lyle Alzado’s Are an American Legend
Lyle Alzado played for the Browns and the Broncos, but he looked most fetching in black and silver as a Los Angeles Raider. All talk of “Raider Nation” aside, this is LA’s home team no matter where Los Malosos play. And nowhere else was this more true than when the team was actually located in LA.
The team had a mystique back then it doesn’t have now as a more corporate team in America’s Family Destination Capital, Las Vegas. “They’ve been banned from Oakland” the rumor went. We didn’t have the Internet and kids are pretty credulous so we went with it.
Few exemplify this era of 1980s Raiders — and thus, the Platonic ideal of what makes a football player “cool” — than Lyle Alzado.
Alzado had something of a Renaissance with the team after being cut from the Browns. He was a living archetype of the era. Tall, fueled by test and dianobol, he shares his hulking physique with the most iconic wrestlers of the time, from the Road Warriors to the man himself, brother, Hulk Hogan.
This made for easy transmission to the small screen, where Alzado played a professional wrestler in the NWA of the era. This means none other than Jim Crockett Promotions for the cognoscente, who yes, underwrote the show. Alzado chews scenery with the actual wrestling done by none other than “Doctor Death” Steve Williams. But I didn’t care when I was 11.
Of course he had a brief run as a direct-to-video action film star. Of course. This was the 1980s and this was the entire point. The years of grinding mud and violence in the cold late autumn months, followed by getting put out to pasture at PM Entertainment.
On the field, Lyle Alzado was known for aggressive and even violent play. This is a bit rich, but about what we’ve come to expect from people who don’t understand that the entire point of football is to watch men beat the hell out of each other. It’s what makes me a Raiders fan and it’s what makes me an Alzado superfan.
The football of Alzado’s time bears little resemblance to our contemporary game, which is a pale imitation of football in the 1950s. The gorgeous violence of these contests is closest today approximated in “America’s Game,” the Army vs. Navy match up, where 20-year-old cadets casually attempt to murder one another for two yards on a rush.
In his time, Alzado hearkened back to this more primal urge in football, America’s true national sport. He was not a man of violence, but of atavism. A throwback to a day where three yards was quite literally the difference between life and death.
When I was a kid Alzado was the poster boy for steroid abuse. “Don’t pin, kids,” the PSAs of the time warned us, “or you’ll end up like Lyle Alzado.” The plain truth is, this was largely a myth of Alzado’s making. He’s even used as a cautionary tale in the essential Bigger, Stronger, Faster.
There’s no real evidence that steroid use or abuse was a contributing factor in the life of Alzado. But in the 1980s — and to a lesser extent now — “steroids” were used to paper over the very real effects of two occupational hazards for pro wrestlers and pro ball players alike: CTE and long-term muscle relaxant addiction.
But who, cares, really? Men of Alzado’s ilk pursue such things, whether they know it or not. The warlord blood of old, coarsing through his veins and trying to find a socially appropriate outlet in the customs of his time.
This is why we celebrate Lyle Alzado at Death Trips. Because Lyle Alzado died even more beautiful than he lived and bravely sought to face his death every Sunday in the Reaper’s own garb.
Shout out to the Black Hole.
