The fifteenth week of the season, Todd [Marinovich] made his first trip to New Orleans. After a long night of rum drinks in the Quarter, he ended up in bed with two stewardesses; he barely made it back for the pregame meal. The Superdome held seventy thousand screaming fans. “The noise was deafening. My head. I was in hell,” Todd remembers now. “I was barely able to make it through warm-ups. I was sweating profusely, trying not to vomit.”

Midway through the game, the Raiders’ first-string quarterback, Jay Schroeder, was hit simultaneously from both sides, injuring an ankle. “Coach Shell looks at me, like, Are you ready to go?” Todd recalls. “I shook him off like a pitcher on the mound. I was like, Are you fucking kidding me?”