NFL PLAYOFFS : Hostetler Comes to Town to Change a Football Flat

Jeff Hostetler has two concerns today--the Denver Broncos and his clothes. Things have a strange way of happening to the quarterback’s garments after big victories. There was the time when he found them cut to ribbons after guiding the New York Giants to their one-point Super Bowl XXV victory over the Buffalo Bills, forcing him to leave the greatest game of his life in duds scrounged up by a clubhouse boy.

Then there was an experience a couple of weeks ago at the Coliseum, when once again Hostetler returned to a dressing room to discover that he had places to go but not a thing to wear. His instincts settled on Steve Wisniewski, the 285-pound bouncer who spends his Sundays providing the Raider quarterback with protection.

“The Wiz, that’s who did it,” detective Hostetler deduced. He swore vengeance, in his own sweet time, in his own sweet way.

Days later, Hoss was all who-me innocence when Wisniewski found a smelly fish in his hotel bed.

Hang around the Raiders long enough and much will be said about Hostetler’s knack for the give and take, about how in such a snappy manner he became not only the team’s new leader but one of the guys.

Hostetler himself recognized this need. He made the observation soon after setting foot in camp and recalled it the other day while rehearsing for today’s AFC playoff game, saying: “The guys here were just looking for someone to play hard and be a leader by example, rather than just throwing out words.”

It pleases him, grown men playing follow the leader.

“It’s something I’ve always been able to do,” Hostetler said of setting an example. “It’s the most powerful type of leadership there is.”

Faith, too, can move mountains. This is something Jeff Hostetler believes with all his heart. He is a Mennonite who is quite familiar with the power of natural phenomena, this farm boy from Pennsylvania, having grown up a near cry from valleys laid waste in 1889 by the great Johnstown Flood. Out there along lonesome Pennsylvania 601, near the signpost now marked “Hostetler Road,” was where he learned early that self-reliance linked with faith can carry someone through any storm.

There was, for example, the terrible fire that tore through Norm and Dolly Hostetler’s property when Jeff was only 6. Their barn burned. Nine heifers were killed. Insurance covered little more than half the loss. The unincorporated 120-acre hay and dairy farm with the Hollsopple, Pa., mailing address was devastated. Had it not been for a “Mennonite Disaster Team,” 30 strong, that came voluntarily to lay in 3,000 bales of hay in two days, the Hostetlers could have been ruined.

Sunday church services, morning and evening, saw them through every crisis. There was the Hong Kong flu that same summer that sapped the strength of Jeff’s father when the haying needed to be done. Late at night there at Dolly’s Delight, the farm that bore her name, seven children drew strength from a mother who read Scripture to them or were entertained by quoted passages from Thornton Wilder that she had committed to memory. She even cited an emotional condition she called alexithymia that discouraged some people from communicating and sharing an experience.

Such spiritual strengthening got Hostetler through the darkest days of his life, times that made a mere football game pale in importance. It enabled him to endure months of operations and setbacks after his firstborn son had turned blue from a pulmonary disorder within 12 hours of birth. He fought successfully for life, with Jeff by his bedside, whispering: “Hang in there, buddy.”

It steeled him so he could remain businesslike on Super Bowl Sunday when the mother he adored was so frail from arthritis and knee replacements that she needed cortisone shots to sit through the game. It was the last game of Jeff’s she ever saw.

So, no need to wonder how strong Jeff Hostetler is, how resolute. He demonstrates it daily to a Raider organization that prides itself on toughness. He’s been pounded and intentionally grounded. He had a leg tugged like a wishbone at his debut in Los Angeles and was knocked senseless and hospitalized on a cold day in Green Bay. Like most quarterbacks, he wakes up Sundays praying for strength.

“He takes a shot, picks himself up, takes another, picks himself up,” says another of his bodyguards, Max Montoya, who has been lining up in front of quarterbacks for 15 pro seasons. “The man’s tough as nails.”

Art Shell, too, was an offensive lineman before becoming a Raider coach. He, too, has seen quarterbacks come and go, good and bad, hard and soft. He is a man who understands toughness, whose very name implies it.

Says Shell of Hostetler: “This guy has taken some hits, a normal man wouldn’t have gotten off the ground.”

Only so much is clear to a football club when it demands toughness from someone new. The only thing the Raiders really knew about Hostetler was that he had an accurate arm, nimble legs and a good head on his shoulders, having carried a 3.92 grade-point average in college and having been smart enough to marry the West Virginia coach’s daughter, prompting Don Nehlen to laugh and say: “Well, at least I know where he is.”

But how tough was he? The Raiders wondered.

Then they picked him up at the airport. Mike White, one of the coaches, was there to meet the new quarterback, as was another representative of the team. Off they rode together to introduce Hostetler to his new town and his new team, to escort him to their El Segundo training camp, where he was so unfamiliar to his new employers that they asked Hostetler to toss a few dozen passes and demonstrate his arm. Him, a quarterback who had won a Super Bowl.

On the way from the airport, the car had a flat tire. Some might have taken that as a bad omen, a discouraging sign on a quarterback’s first day in town. Instead, that was a day when the Raiders got a new slant on their new leader, a really good look at their new quarterback in action. They got a pretty fair indication of what kind of individual had come to California to take this team’s football into his strong hands.

Hostetler changed the tire.