Houston Oilers Fight Song
late 1970s
During an Eagles vs. 49ers game in December, Fox caught a member of the San Francisco staff obviously stuffing a large plug of chewing tobacco into his mouth. Which made me wonder: where have all the chew fiends gone? There was a time when you couldn’t escape the stuff. Every big league ball player used it: Rod Carew flirted with batting .400 while having a chaw in his mouth the size of a small tangerine. There was usually some dude in your circle of friends who had a worn circle on a back pocket of his jeans signaling that he indulged. Invariably, someone would be encouraging you to try Skoal Bandits if you wanted to get your feet wet. Hell, they used to advertise the stuff on television. Who can forget the classic Copenhagen/Skoal/Happy Days “a pinch is all it takes” commercials where you could choose your own adventure? The best chewing tobacco commercial featured maybe the best running back in football, but I’m getting ahead of myself …
The Houston Oilers were one of the more enjoyable NFL teams of the late seventies. Great uniforms, a character of a coach in ten-gallon-hat-wearing Bum Phillips, a devastating running back in the great Earl Campbell, irrepressible kick returner Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, and a quarterback who was known to wear a flak jacket to protect his injured ribs in Dan Pastorini. But they couldn’t get past great Pittsburgh Steelers teams in two straight AFC Championship Games, leading to the great Phillips quote: “Last year we knocked on the door. This year we beat on it. Next year we're going to kick the son of a bitch in!”
Earl Campbell was one of the all-time great runners, he’d just as soon run over you instead of flashing his breakaway speed. He appeared in a great Skoal commercial that finished with him saying “Skoal, brother” to us as he walked off with a beauty on the beach.
And the Oilers had a fight song! It featured lyrics such as:
We’ve got the offense
We’ve got the defense
We give the other team no hope
We're the Houston Oilers
Houston Oilers
Houston Oilers number one
It also had an incessantly catchy melody. My brother and I spent too much time one afternoon reciting this fight song after hearing it. Thing is, a week or two later a Miami Dolphins game was on NBC and they were using the exact same song with “Miami Dolphins” being used in the lyrics for the team name. Weird, and somehow further cemented the legend of The Houston Oilers Fight Song in my mind.
So circa 1992, I was helping my cousin and his wife move their belongings out of their apartment and into a moving truck. His friend Steve and I got into a rhythm of putting boxes onto a cart and shuttling it on an elevator and down to the parking lot. Steve is a total goofball, the best. He started talking about the Houston Oilers of the late seventies and asked me if I remembered their fight song. Ummm, yeah! He suggested we sing it, so we started in but after a bit he stopped me. “You’re going down in pitch for the ‘Houston Oilers number one’ but you’re supposed to go up, like this …” So we started over and I got it right. We sang the song for the slow ride down the four floors. The elevator and its shaft didn’t have much for insulation. The doors opened on first floor and there was a dad and his young daughter staring at us in disbelief and probably some suspicion. We said hi and continued on with our work.