Q & A With Tom Flores : His Toughest Off-Season: Where to Play Golf?

This has been a difficult off-season for former Raider Coach Tom Flores--the toughest he’s ever had.

Every day poses a hard new problem. Where, he keeps asking himself, should he play golf today?

Last week Flores was in Hawaii, where he went from one golf course to another, playing four days out of five. This week he’s playing at Lake Tahoe, and on Monday he’ll be back at Riviera.

“It’s getting a little easier, but not much,” he said. “My game is finally better than my handicap (17).”

An even-tempered, soft-spoken executive-type, Flores is, of course, more than a golfer. The other day, he became an international celebrity, of a sort, when he was named to coach the Australian national football team, the one that plays American rules.

As they have in recent years, the Australians will train at San Diego in October before taking off on a tour of Europe.

“It’s really just an advisory or honorary job,” said the man who coached the Raiders to two Super Bowl championships in nine years before retiring last February. “I won’t be going to London, or even Australia.”

Flores, 51 and living at Manhattan Beach, would love to coach overseas, he said, but just can’t take that much time away from his golf game.

Question: Does American football have a chance in Australia?

Flores: It’s growing fast. Like in Europe, there’s more interest every year.

Q: Can it ever be like football here?

A: That won’t be easy because they don’t have Pop Warner or even high school football there. It will take time.

Q: So what else is Tom Flores up to these days?

A: I still have the Hyundai agency in San Bernardino, and I’m partners in a Coors agency with (former football player) Tommy Mason--also in San Bernardino, by a coincidence. And as you know, I’m a Raider consultant.

Q: Is John Madden still a Raider consultant, too?

A: I believe so, yes.

Q: What is it that former Raider coaches do when they become consultants?

A: Not too much. I’m out there some, and I talk to Al (Davis) some. There’s no heavy decision making. I may work on the new stadium or community projects.

Q: How about working on a new quarterback?

A: We consultants don’t get into that.

Q: Are the Raiders serious about starting the season with Steve Beuerlein, Rusty Hilger and Vince Evans at quarterback?

A: You might want to include Jim Plunkett, too. Jim has the experience, and he’d like to play one more season. With Marc Wilson possibly gone, I’ve been wondering what two names (reporters) will decide on for the quarterback controversy this year.

Q: One thing seemed clear last year. You were still a Wilson supporter.

A: Marc is a very talented, very tough quarterback.

Q: Many Raider fans didn’t think so. Were they wrong?

A: I don’t know if they were wrong. I’m not saying the fans were wrong. You’ve got to respond to the fans, and play well, or people will jump on you. They’ll read something and jump on you.

Q: Looking back, would you say that the Raiders’ worst mistake of the last five years was their failure to get a good new quarterback?

A: No, I think you have to think about the price it takes to get a John Elway or Jim Kelly, and you have to think about philosophy. Our philosophy is that you win if you surround a quarterback with enough talent. The price it would have taken to get some of the quarterbacks the fans talk about would have hurt the rest of the team.

Q: But isn’t a quality quarterback a mandatory first step toward a championship?

A: Keep in mind that we won the Super Bowl (in 1984) with Plunkett at quarterback--and that Wilson had taken over that season before he was injured. We were 12 and 4 (in 1985) with Wilson at quarterback. The things that hurt us last season were the strike and all the injuries we had in the offensive line. We could never get any continuity in the offensive line.

Q: Didn’t the strike affect all teams equally?

A: It was hardest on the teams that had the most injuries. After the strike, (the Raiders) couldn’t get in sync with all the (lineup) changes we had to make. In a 15-game season, we started 15 different offensive lines. That’s the one place where you have to have continuity on a football team, and we didn’t have any at all.

Q: Was last year your last as a coach?

A: I think so. If I miss it tremendously, I’ll go back to it, but I don’t expect to. I got out because coaching exhausts you every year in the National Football League, and I got so I couldn’t recharge in the off-season.

Q: Is exhaustion the same as burnout?

A: No, burnout is different. Burnout is, you get so you dread going to work. It wasn’t that in my case, it was simple exhaustion. Every NFL coach gets tired out every season, of course, but in my earlier years I didn’t have any trouble recharging. In recent years it’s been different. It’s been much worse--probably because of winning (two Super Bowls). The pressure to repeat gets to be unbelievable.

Q: Al Davis says every NFL coach wears out in 10 years or so--with no exceptions. Reminded that Tom Landry, Don Shula and Chuck Noll are still around, he asks: What have they done lately? Is Al right?

A: Most NFL coaches don’t last 10 years. It doesn’t take that long to learn that the ideal place for a football coach is the first tee.