For years, Tom Flores – the first Latino pro football full-back and head coach – has doubted that he will be selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But his fans were sure he deserved the honor and helped get him there.
Flores, 83, a Mexican American, was inducted into the Hall of Fame over the weekend, an acknowledgment that many fans said he would appear years ago.
“Congratulations to Singer Alumni Tom Flores. It’s about time,” read a comment on a Twitter account dedicated to Singer Union High School Apaches in California. Flores attended high school, where the football stadium was named after him.
Flores was Latino’s first quarterback in pro football when he played for the Oakland Raiders in the American Football League in 1960. He went to the fourth Super Bowl in 1970 as a rugby quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs.
He was an assistant coach at the Oakland Raiders when they won Super Bowl 11 after the 1976 season, and he was the head coach when the Raiders won after the 1980 season Super Bowl 15 and when the Los Angeles Raiders after the 1983 Super Bowl 18 won. season. Everyone as a coach and player was first for a Latino.
He and Mike Ditka are the only men to have won the Super Bowls as a player, assistant coach and head coach.
Nevertheless, Flores was often not nominated for the Hall of Fame, or he just made it to the semifinals, a fact he did not lose; Flores mentions his disappointment that he has been transferred in interviews in recent years.
Flores’ absence from the hall is considered a major failure by his fans, Latinos and other sports figures, given his barrier in football. Some have publicly referred to it as ‘racism’.
After having had enough of it, fans launched social media campaigns and Twitter storms and tackled some hometown rally.
Alfredo Arteaga started using his Twitter profile last year to make the case for Flores: “Tom Flores won a Super Bowl as a player, won 2 as a head coach and as an assistant, 4 Super Bowls & is not in the #HOF , “the top of his Twitter profile read.
He was also part of a list of fans who would regularly write information about Flores and had to tweet claims to be in the Hall of Fame. The tweets were regularly tagged to Hall of Fame voters, football writers and other journalists.
“I grew up a fan of Raiders in the Bay Area, so he was the first coach the Raiders had when I was, probably 5 or 6 years old, when I really knew what football was. He had to be inaugurated a long time ago. “It’s too late,” said Arteaga, 47, of Orange County, California.
The Raiders website reported that Pablo Mora, who paints the grounds at Tom Flores Stadium in Sanger, has called for a Hall of Fame spot for Flores with a plea he made two weeks ago on the painted stadium’s field.
A Coors light beer beer ad inspired by fans this year also grabbed the lobbying work and used Flores’ nickname “Iceman” which he deserved for his cold attitude. In the ad, Flores appears and shrugs her shoulders when the narrator asks, “Why is he not in the hall yet?”
“It is no longer necessary,” said Domingo García, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the Latin civil rights and education group, which in 2018 adopted a resolution incorporating Flores.
In 2017, LULAC honored Flores with its Lifetime Achievement Award for its support of comprehensive immigration reform legislation and its work for inclusion and diversity in government. It also earned his Trailblazer Award for his Latino representation in the NFL.
During the ceremony, Flores expressed hope that he would end up in Canton, Ohio, the site of the Hall of Fame.
‘A Proud Chicano’
In a 2016 interview with NBC News, Flores said fans helped him understand his impact on the Latino community.
‘The fact that I was a quarterback on national TV has had a huge impact on many Spanish children and their families. “You don’t think about it that way when you do it,” Flores said.
“I made people come up and say they were proud of me. One person told me that his father cried when I won the Super Bowl. I did not know who he was, but the fact that I was it as’ “Achieving Spanish was a proud moment in his life. It makes me feel better. This is where my ethnic background comes into play,” said Flores, who called himself a ‘proud Chicano’.
Flores’ father, originally from Mexico, immigrated to California as a guest worker in the Bracero program. His mother was born in California. He said during the LULAC ceremony that his father worked tirelessly to buy a house to replace the house where the family initially lived and eventually start a small shop.
“It happened. It really happens. Think about it. I’m sorry, I get tears in my eyes again,” Flores said in an interview with Raiders.com.
In the interview, he said he was inducted into the Hall of Fame ‘was my last dream’.
The induction ceremony is in July.
When Flores coached the Raiders to the Super Bowl 15 Championship – the first Super Bowl victory by a wildcard team – and Super Bowl 18, Jim Plunkett was the starting quarterback. Plunkett, who is also a Mexican American, was the first Latino and the first minority quarterback to lead a team to a Super Bowl victory.
Flores’ fans want Plunkett to join the Hall of Fame.
Flores’ election follows racial reckoning last year over the death of George Floyd and during a coronavirus pandemic that highlighted racial inequalities across the country.
‘I hope they did, because it’s the right thing to do,’ says Garcia LULAC, ‘but I’m sure the national climate has changed dramatically just two years ago, when you were this anti-Latino, had anti-immigrant, anti-black atmosphere emanating from the White House. ‘
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