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Happy Birthday Fred Biletnikov

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Who is Fred Biletnikov?

He played professional football for the Oakland Raiders when I was growing up as a worshipful fan of his arch-enemies, the New York Jets.

Thus, in my juvenile universe, Biletnikov, a receiver, was an evil genius – a shifty Boris to Raider coach John Madden’s plump Natasha. Yes, football fans thought Madden was the wily one but I believed Biletnikov authored all my troubles. He was said to be too small and too slow to play professional football, and yet through cunning and guile he appeared in just the right place at exactly the right time for the Raiders to complete an impossible pass and put my beloved Jets in deep trouble or worse, send them home as miserable losers. Ugh!

As with most villains, it was easy to believe the worst about Biletnikov. He used a substance called Stickum on his hands – a goopy glue that, not surprisingly, made it easier to catch the ball. He’d slather it on his hands and other parts of his body too. Rumor was they had to bring out a new ball after every Biletnikov catch because the old one was too sticky for the others to use. John Madden said Biletnikov once caught a ball with his forearm. After Biletnikov retired, the league banned Stickum.

I despised Fred Biletnikov and at the same time, admired him in the overly dramatic way pro football loyalists view players. Here’s someone’s You Tube video of the display at the Biletnikov exhibit at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. You get to see him with action with his skinny frame and his dirty blonde hair peeking out from under his helmet. And you have to love the music – the NFL’s orchestral march version of “What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor”.

I’m grown now and don’t care about the NFL very much at all. I’m mature enough to want to wish my tormentor a happy birthday. It can’t be easy to be an old football player. The game takes a physical toll on top of the aches that nature delivers … naturally. But still, Bilentikov, why were you so intent on crushing my dreams?

Who was your childhood villain?

43 thoughts on “Happy Birthday Fred Biletnikov”

  1. One of them would have to be Sherry Wilson. I was new to West School in first grade, and I was jealous of her from day one. She seemed to have everything I wanted – friends out on the playground, teacher approval, she was very pretty with dark curly hair and more dresses, and she had ankle strap shoes.

    Will think of others, I’m sure…

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      1. My mom let me try on some at the shoe store that year, but even though I could have had them, I ended up choosing a different pair with 2 thin straps… I somehow thought they would be more practical. As an adult I have bought a pair, but hardly wore them because they felt like they’d fall off.

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  2. Good morning to all. Like you, Dale, I was also a big football fan when I was young and I’m not now. The guy who I remember as a villian from those days is Ed Meadows, the Chicago Bear player who is know for knocking the hero of the Detroit Lions, quarterback Bobby Lane, out of a game. Medows blind sided Bobby after he had handed off the ball.

    I thought Ed Meadows stood out as a evil player because he did something that shouldn’t be done, he hit a quarterback too hard. Actually, I think Meadows only mistake was doing what he did out in the open where everyone could see it. Rough play like that was probably a regular part of football in those days and still is. As a young sports fan I somehow thought that Meadows was an unusually bad player who did something that other players, who were heros of mine, wouldn’t do.

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  3. Rise and love your Villians Baboons!

    The evil Debra Lee was my villian from 7th grade on through High School. She was once a close friend, then she became what would now be called a “Mean Girl.” She tormented me all the way through Junior High and High School.

    Maybe she is the reason I became a therapist. I’m still trying to figure out Mean Girls?

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  4. I didn’t liked the New York Yankees baseball team when I was a boy and I still don’t like them. My brother claimed to be a Yankee fan. I think he was just trying to give me a bad time. He wasn’t much of a sports fan and he did like to tease me.

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  5. There seems to be a pattern in my mother’s family that people have to have one enemy all the time. My grandmother was at odds with her sister from 1960 until she died in 1999 at the age of 99. My mother was always at odds with my dad’s sister, and after Aunt Lois died, my mom transferred her enmity to a real estate agent in town. (It’s a complicated story). I find that unless I am careful, I perpetuate the pattern, too. There was always somebody prettier, better dressed, or who got more attention or better grades or who hurt my feelings or who was rude, and I secretly hated them with fervor and intensity. I say secretly because I was always too timid or repressed or whatever to do or say anything to them. I am an expert at revenge fantasy. I made a point of having a Best Enemy until the last couple of years. I really try to watch myself now so that I stop this enemy habit, since it makes me crabby and takes up too much energy.

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  6. Who was my childhood villain? That’s EASY! Benny Mell was the bully who lived a block from my house. Benny haunted my childhood. He would force me into games of shooting marbles and soon he’d have all my most attractive marbles. He loved to give guys unexpected gooses, and you sure didn’t want to come out of the showers if Benny was there with a wet towel in his hands.

    Benny was so dumb they held him back in school. That meant he hit puberty a year earlier than the rest of us. With a creepy, sniggering delivery, Benny told dirty jokes at school that I couldn’t even understand. He was a classic argument against holding kids back in school, because he was such a nasty influence on the class.

    To my utter astonishment, in the late 1980s my phone rang one evening. It was Benny. He wanted to reminisce about all the fun we had had in the 1950s when we played together. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that any time I saw him, I fled in the other direction.

    My mother believed in saying nothing unless she had something good to say about a person. She made an exception for Benny. He walked by our house one day. Mom said, “Poor Benny! If he had a brain, he’d take it out and play with it!”

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  7. Clearly I was raised by closeted Quakers (they claimed to be Lutheran, but I wonder…). No villains, no enemies, no violent thoughts, nothing bordering on more than a vague dislike. I don’t remember any arch nemesis or villain that is worthy of any note. Even the TV shows I remember mostly don’t seem to have a consistent “bad guy” – the Pink Panther cartoons had Clouseau, but he just bumbled about, “Little House on the Prairie” had Nellie Olson, but I found her more obnoxious than loathsome. There was one girl in my choir who I kinda wished would just get over herself (her mom was the sort who perpetuated her own vanity by training her daughter to be extremely vain as well – yuck), and one girl in 6th grade who decided she wanted to bully me for a while (that only lasted until the teacher noticed – which wasn’t too long) – but neither of those girls were villains in my world, and in retrospect they were probably both girls just demanding attention for some reason or other. Now villains on “Buffy” and “Angel”…that’s something else. Those were villains that worth disliking (all in fun, of course).

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  8. There was a bully girl in sixth grade, with a bevy of doting “it” girls around her. They had nice dresses and bows in their long hair. My hair was cut in a pixie and my dress was invariably dark blue or brown. This girl’s family was one of the wealthiest families in the Owatonna area. They still are, so I’ll refrain from using her name. She called her little clique the “kicking club,” and if you weren’t in it, you might be kicked. I got kicked in the shins once because I was wearing heavy stretch pants under my dress in the cold. I tended to be rather shy and anxious in those years and my mom wouldn’t hear anything about the situation. I was to stand up tall and not make a fuss. I think I might still need therapy for those feelings…

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  9. Morning–

    There was a bully in jr. high school. Roger and his gang of thugs. I bumped his desk once and the mere psychological threat caused me to run for my life to the boys locker room. I ran so therefore they chased.

    Being in the country I only had one neighbor boy my own age to play with. I’d get mad at him and we’d break up for awhile, but really, he was all there was so we’d make up and play some more. My Mom still laughs at the day that kid said we had to play ‘his’ way or he would go home. I said fine, go home, and then the poor kid didn’t know what to do.

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  10. Hmm…Facebook tells me it’s tim’s birthday today – he must be off celebrating since we haven’t heard from him yet today (either that or he over-celebrated last night in anticipation…). Happy birthday tim!

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    2. Happy happy birthday to every girl and boy…
      Hope this very special day brings you lots of joy!
      Hope those birthday presents you get from Mom and Dad
      will make this very special day the best you’ve ever had!
      Happy Birthday!

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    3. thanks anna and gang. just a couple of business meetings this mornig that kept me form the blog. its nice these days to get facebook buzzes in your pocket from the 400 people on facebook who check that stuff. fred and i have a great deal in common. we both did what it took and played within the rules at the time. after we moved on they changed the rules because of what we did with the ones they gave us. i though freddy was a genius and dale what is an illinois kid doing rooting for broadway joe and the new york jets. i guess they hadn’t really invented sports super star followings yet and he was so outrageous with his fu man chu and the nylons he wore in the commercials that he got your attention. fred was the raiders answer to a blue collar worker. not fast not tall just able to hold on to everything within 100 feet of him. that is all there is to being a great football player.
      my villains were not very big in my outlook as a kid. bad guys in tv shows got shot at the end, bad guys in school always got their just rewards. life worked out the why it was supposed to until we got to richard nixon and the beginning of the rape of america. i am disgusted with the turn america has taken and take refuge in the trail as my spot where edith is the only really bad person we know and we can handle her. she did her time and now she is a contributing member of society. freddy is 69 this year and i find it hard swallow that all my heroes of youth are very decrepit now. it was hard when i realized all the sports figures i saw on tv were younger than me. then i realized that all the presidents of the business world were young too then i realized that i am just a breath away form 60 and many of the people i see who look old to me are younger than i am. there is a villain if i ever saw one. time. it has been stealing form me while i wasn’t looking for years and now i can protest but what good will it do? who will listen to the loud old coot over in the corner. time, i would like to lock you up and put you on hold for a while, just until i get caught up with the stuff i am a little behind on. but my kids would object. they want time to fly by so they can get to where they will be 5 years down the road. i cant convince them to plant the seeds well so they will enjoy it when they get there. they have to learn it themselves and as i have always said a’at out house it is like the bible 50% of the stories coome form examples of how to do it correctly and 50% come form examples of how not to do it. if you miss out on the how not to do it examples at my house, you are missing some of my best stuff”
      a little word even for me but birthdays are a day of reflection and i am running late on my reflection time. what does that say about me and my villain?

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      1. Here is another wish for a happy birthday to you, tim. And here’s hoping you have good luck with not letting that old villian, time, get the upper hand on you.

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      3. Great video, Linda. That should give tim some encouragement for over coming that devil or villian, old devil time.

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  11. I think the villains of my childhood were mostly cartoon ones.

    I do remember, though, that there was a neighborhood campaign to oppose the NSP plant that was slated for construction near Bayport in the 60’s. NSP seemed a sort of corporate villain to me then – the first time in my life I perceived a company that way, though not, I am sorry to say, the last.

    We wore protest buttons – white with red lettering spelling SOS – which stood for Save Our St. Croix. I think I was about 7 or 8 then.

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  12. There was another villain when I was very young. I’ve mentioned before that I spent most of my youth and all of my summers at our cabin on Cannon Lake (went to grade school in Owatonna but lived on Cannon Lake). A couple of places to the north of us was the small, decrepit, yellow cottage of an old man named Charlie. Charlie used to get very drunk and had a strong dislike for my dad, my paternal grandma, dogs, kids, and apparently most people in general. He carried his shotgun over when he came to visit my dad.

    One day we were swimming in front of our own house. It was a little windy and when you’re a kid and you’re swimming you don’t necessarily hear things like you should. You might hear them all right, but not put together in your mind what it is you’re hearing. Well, I was hearing this pop, pop, pop! and then my dad was running down to the lake and pulling me out of the water by the hair! Then I saw that bullets were skipping past me on the water! Charlie was shooting at us! I could see the flashes from the muzzle of his shotgun across the neighbor’s yard. “RUN!” dad yelled. I ran to the house while he fished my brothers out of the lake and sent them up the shore and into the back door. Mom had already called the sheriff, who came about 20 minutes later. By then the entire neighborhood had gathered at our house. I don’t remember what happened with Charlie but he wasn’t around there much after that. We avoided his property for years, walking along the shore to get to our friends on the other side of his cabin. The cabin gradually moldered down in a pile of yellow and orange painted boards and the shrubs and trees grew up on the property. His son inherited the place and built a weird two-story garage on it and then eventually sold it.

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      1. I’m not sure I remember correctly, tim, because I think it was a dog but we didn’t have a dog when I was that young, so… I’m not sure. I can pick Mom’s brain to see if she remembers but her memory is pretty selective and that’s the type of thing she edits out.

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  13. OT – Verily Sherrilee and others who have done so. I’m making that African Peanut Soup you gave the link for a day or so ago. Do you peel the sweet potatoes/yams before baking? Cut them up? Put in a pan or directly on the oven grill? There are precious little instructions for us kitchen-challenged folks.

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    1. Ahhh, can’t wait. I had 2 ginormous sweet potatoes from food shelf, so I peeled them, cut them into thirds, slathered on the peanut oil and put them in a pan to bake. Hope that’s OK.

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      3. Nice ideas, but I’m sticking to my recipe. Sengalese Peanut Soup is delightful — even without those scary serrano peppers. Although next time I might try a milder pepper and amp up the curry. It’s delightfully delicious!

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  14. Actually, I supose that there aren’t any villians. There are only poeple behaving badly that seem to be villians. I guess Dale didn’t think that Fred Biletkinov was really a villian, he just seemed to be one when he got the best of Dale’s favorite team.

    Well, maybe some of those guys on Wall Street who don’t seem to have any trouble destroying the economy while they are lining their own pockets are really villians.

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  15. Now that I think of it, there was a villian in my neighborhood, a dog named Sparky, a terrier cross, I think, who would chase you if you rode past his house on your bike and bite you if he caught you. He lived at the bottom of a hill, and it was fun to ride down the hill but also easy to wipe out when you got to the bottom.

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  16. Greetings! Now that my soup is done, I can get to the villains at hand — cookbooks or recipes without sufficient instructions! Just kidding … A real villain from school days was a boy named Butch. In third grade, I was standing up in class, trying to give the answer to a math question — kept trying to say “three”, but I stumbled and stuttered on “th.” Butch the Bully chimed right up with his mocking voice and made fun of me. That incident is forever etched in my mind and was an extremely painful memory with all my fears, self-consciousness and stuttering wrapped around it. I think of it as my “index case” like they do for the beginning of an epidemic outbreak. From then on, I remember stuttering all the way through high school and college. Renee, Jacque – is there such a term in the psychological dictionary for such an incident? Whether I stuttered before that, I don’t recall — but I most certainly recall stuttering from then on. I guess it’s all in my head, though and I’ve overcome most of the stuttering. Can one painful incident change your life like that?

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