By Ron Borges
Thursday, December 24, 2009
For a father, wanting his son to enter the family business is a natural thing. When the family business is football, however, it is an entirely different matter.

The odds of reaching the NFL even for a minute are long. The odds of a father and son doing it are far longer. For Matthew Slater, Shawn Springs and Bruce Davis, Jr., it seemed the natural path, one well traveled by their families.

But for the men who blazed the trail, it was an entirely different matter.

Only Ron Springs wished pro football for his son, although he did little to cajole him into it. Jackie Slater played 20 years in the NFL so well he was selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame eight years ago in his first year of eligibility. He had no interest in seeing his son follow his footsteps.

As for Bruce Davis, after 11 seasons at left tackle with the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders and Houston Oilers, his concern was not that his son plays sports but that he never face the lost moment he’d known when the game was taken away from him by Al Davis.

“I related a story to him once about when I was with the Raiders,” recalled Davis, now a high school history and geography teacher in Maryland. “We were playing the ’85 Bears and all the quarterbacks went home hurt. Richard Dent was lined up inside me twice and he got a sack and a half. My assignment wasn’t to block him but the Raiders believed in bigs on bigs. When Al saw what happened I got benched. It was the only time in my career that happened. I got my job back the next week and he kind of apologized once he knew the blocking but for six days I felt so bad. It’s hard to describe. It did something to who I thought I was.

“Most men tend to define themselves by their job. I never wanted Bruce to feel that way. I tell him all the time, ‘You are not the right outside linebacker of the New England Patriots [team stats]. It’s what you do. You’re Bruce Davis.’ If he didn’t hear anything else I said about sports, I hope he took that to heart because we always insisted he be a good student and a well-rounded person. Athletics was up to him.

“He just showed up at home one day with a helmet and pads and said, ‘Dad, I’m on the football team.’ It wasn’t planned from my point of view. I’d gone to the opening of Pop Warner fields as a player and seen some of these fathers on their kids and I always thought, ‘Give the kid a break.’ I was determined not to do that.”

And so he didn’t.

“He was into it from a distance,” said the younger Davis, a practice squad player after being a third-round draft choice of the Steelers in 2008 who made the transition from UCLA defensive end to NFL linebacker. “He didn’t try to coach me. If I had questions he’d answer but he felt I had to find my own way.

“It’s a great thing to share with him now. He’s told me a few stories about the Raiders. I guess it was pretty wild, huh?”

Asked how specific he got about his years with Ken Stabler, John Matuszak, Gene Upshaw, Ted Hendricks, Lester Hayes and the other Raider miscreants, the father said slyly, “I talk to him about football specifically but the Raiders in broad generalities.”