Strolling Memory Lane Former Seahawks Receiver Recalls Good Old Days

Curt Warner owns a car dealership in Vancouver.

Sam McCullum runs a kosher meat processing plant in Kirkland.

John “Country” Sawyer beats alligators to death with a ball peen hammer.

Much has gone down since Steve Raible last wore Seahawks blue.

For 19 seasons the analyst on Hawks radio broadcasts and a Seattle TV news anchor, Raible was in Cheney last week, talking about some of the characters on the earliest Seahawks teams.

A 1976 second-round draft pick of out Georgia Tech, Raible was overshadowed, of course, by Steve Largent, but he had his moments in an 83-game career over six seasons with the Seahawks.

His 80-yard TD reception from Jim Zorn in Minnesota is still tied for third-longest in the team’s 24-year history.

Raible also holds the unofficial record for enduring the longest training camp, he and the 50-some-odd teammates who made up the Seahawks’ first team in 1976.

“Our training camp was six weeks long,” Raible said. “We had six preseason games (compared to four now). It was brutal. We were here from July 7 ‘til October, it seemed like.”

A life of playing and covering the game has affirmed his admiration for the savvy player, the Howard Ballards of today, and the Keith Butlers of yesterday.

Keith Butler?

“I like guys who are where they’re supposed to be all the time,” Raible said. “Chad (Brown, Seahawks linebacker) always seems like he’s where he’s supposed to be. Remember Fredd Young? Linebacker in the ‘80s? Great speed. All over the field. But you could never depend on him being in the right place.

“Keith Butler, who got no credit for it, was the glue of that Seattle defense because he was always where he was supposed to be - and had one eye on where Fredd was supposed to be.”

Raible sees the same kind of influence now, on the other side of the ball, in Ballard, Seattle’s mammoth right tackle.

“`House’ knows every angle,” Raible said. “He’s played against every great contemporary defensive end. And he’s played a long time on bad wheels. You can’t buy that kind of experience.”

Ballard is a throwback to Raible’s day, and before.

In the 1970s, “You played with pain and in many cases you played with injuries, not just pain,” Raible said. “Today, a guy stays out if he’s got a sore calf. Steve Niehaus (a defensive lineman and the club’s first No. 1 draft pick) was playing with spaghetti in his shoulder.”

Sports medicine, strength training and rehab procedures have advanced light years from the days of Steve Niehaus.

“Steve would admit that he didn’t do enough to rehab the shoulder. But that first step he had was so quick, you could have compared him to Cortez (Kennedy),” Raible said. “He wasn’t a great physical specimen - he looked soft - but he was quick and smart and he could flat play.

“It was just too bad. That first coaching staff had a lot of older veteran coaches led by Jack (Patera), who expected a lot out of him. When that didn’t pan out, or he didn’t step up to the challenge right away, he took a lot of grief from those guys.”

Patera laughs a lot more these days, now that he’s long out of coaching.

“I saw Jack for the first time in about five years at Jacob Green’s golf tournament about two months ago,” Raible said. “Silver-haired now, and silver beard. Still big, still has that deep voice and great laugh. We can actually talk about it now, knowing we really had some laughs in those days.”

Efren Herrera, the former kicker, is living in Los Angeles, Raible said, “still believing in his heart of hearts that he should still be kicking somewhere in the NFL. Or passing. He did a little of that, too (when Patera would order the fake field goal).

“Sam McCullum has a business in Kirkland,” Raible said. “He lives in the same house on Mercer Island he had when he was playing. He has a son, Jamien, who’s going to be a starting receiver at Stanford.”

Zorn is quarterbacks coach of the Detroit Lions. Largent, of course, is in Congress. Norm Evans continues to head professional athletes outreach in Seattle.

And Country Sawyer lives outside New Orleans, where he has a license to hunt alligators.

Sawyer tells of the time he was summoned by a petro-chemical company.

“They had drained a storage tank and there was like a 10-foot gator at the bottom of that thing,” Raible said. “Normally, he’d go over with a pistol and shoot it between the eyes and drag it out.

“But he couldn’t fire a gun in there, with all the old petroleum fumes, so he takes a hammer and goes after this gator - hand-to-hand combat - with a ball peen hammer.”

And?

“He still has all of his fingers,” Raible said, “or did the last time I talked to him.”

And then there was Don Testerman, a running back on the 1976 team.

Testerman, on a dare, once ate a dinner plate, or part of one.

Testerman said the story was blown out of proportion. He didn’t eat plates. He just nibbled on the corners.

“He was nuts,” Raible said. “He came to us after he’d been to Clemson, and after he’d been in the Marines. He had tattoos on his chest. One side was Don. The other side was Phyllis. I think it was Phyllis. A girlfriend, anyway.”

When that relationship went sour Testerman had the name covered over with tattooed ivy.

“Eventually, with all his ex-girlfriends and tattoos in their honor, he had like a forest on his chest,” Raible said.

On the field, Raible quickly discovered that when the going gets tough, the tough get dirty.

“We were at Pittsburgh (in his second season, in ‘77) and I’m crossing the middle,” he said. “Jack Lambert (the great former middle linebacker) swings an arm back and catches me right in the throat.

“Just drops me. Zorn gets killed because he doesn’t have his underneath route and I get yelled at.”

Lambert unloaded, then Patera. And later that night, with his throat still tender, Steve Raible might have had some inkling of what Don Testerman felt like after nibbling on the corners.