Clem Daniels
An Oakland Raider hero meets a pair of Castlemont Knights
By James Rodrigues
It was the Sunday after a mid-1980s Thanksgiving and my friend Booker and I
were throwing the football around. The setting was the Castlemont High
School gridiron in Oakland. After making a particularly nice grab,
I noticed a solid looking, forty-something, African-American man doing some
calisthenics in the end zone. There was something familiar about him
but I couldn’t nail it down.
He watched us run pass patterns for a while. Booker had a good arm and I had
(in my opinion) Fred Biletnikoff-like hands (minus the 'stickem'),
so we couldn’t help but have a good time. He watched us run our pass patterns
for a while. He then asked me, “Why do you jump for the ball when
you don’t have to?” I replied, “Because it’s
fun!” I sensed he was about to say, “You can really
get killed by a defensive back while you’re hanging in the air like that.”
Instead, he accepted my flimsy answer and continued with his stretching workout.
After a few more catches, I asked him if he would like to join Booker and
I in our run, toss and catch. He agreed and took off, I threw it to him and
he snagged it out of the air with the greatest of ease. Seeing the way he grabbed
it out of the air and quickly “put it away,” I
knew he was a real athlete.
I asked him, “Where did you play?”
“I played for the Oakland Raiders for awhile.”
“What’s your name?”
“Clem Daniels,” he modestly replied.
Both Booker and I ‘bout jumped out of our shoes. Daniels
and his number 36 in silver and black had made many of our nineteen sixties
Sundays, winners! (Before the Raiders moved to Los Angeles, I was both a Raider
and a 49er fan.) In Jimmyrod.com’s opinion, Daniel’s heroic rushing,
pass catching and blocking made him the Oakland Raider’s greatest
running back ever. (Remember, Marcus Allen never played for the Oakland
Raiders).
We were a little embarrassed not to have recognized him right away. He didn’t
seem to mind. Our hero was having fun just “throwing it around”
with a couple of his fans. Booker asked him what he was doing spending
time on our old football field. Clem Daniels patted his stomach and said he
was “just trying to work off some of this turkey.”
True, he wasn't the same perfectly conditioned athlete he was a couple of decades
earlier. At the same time, I certainly didn’t want to try to tackle him.
Uh-uh! No way! I didn’t want to spend the evening in
an emergency room.
Speaking of toughness, Oakland fullback Hewritt Dixon was
number 35 in the backfield with Clem’s number 36.
He was a crucial piece of the Raider’s offensive puzzle. Dixon may have
been the toughest man in football at that time. Like Daniels, Dixon could “do
it all.” His powerful legs made him a devastating runner and blocker.
When tackling Dixon face to face, the defender frequently had to survive a
brutal uppercut from the Oakland fullback. If I missed a question with
Daniels that I should of asked it would have been about Dixon. Were they the
blood brothers they seemed to be or was it just their sequential
numbers that were fooling me?
I asked him how he’d decide which hole to hit when approaching
the snarling mass of American Football League monsters known as the line-of-scrimmage.
He said finding openings in the defense wasn’t really "a
thinking thing." It’s was more about fully understanding
the play and then trusting your instincts.
As I recalled, there was nobody better at those particular arts.
If there was an opening, halfback Clem Daniels would exploit it. If there was
a pass, he would catch it and run with it.
Our afternoon with our hero ended with handshakes and smiles all around. The field I’d played on as a purple and white Castlemont Knight now had another memory to cherish.