Jim Otto lay on the floor of his empty office late at night, long after everyone else had gone home. The lights were off. He tried to get up and couldn’t. As he fell, one thought crossed his mind: “This is the end.
”
The man on that office floor was the toughest player professional football has ever produced. A man who started 210 consecutive regular-season games and never missed a single one for any reason. Now, alone, he couldn’t stand up on his first attempt. Jim Otto was from Wausau, Wisconsin, a high school hockey goalie who became a football linebacker.
He grew up in the cold and learned early that the only way through pain was to go through it directly. At the University of Miami, he stood 6-foot-2 and weighed 210 pounds—a build the American Football League considered too small to matter. When the AFL held its 1959 draft, the Minneapolis franchise selected him. That team soon moved to the AFL and became the Vikings, but not before Otto’s rights shifted elsewhere.
He was then picked by Houston. A league procedural move no one expected to matter sent his signing rights to a brand-new team in Oakland that hadn’t even settled on a name yet. Otto bulked up to 260 pounds and took the first snap in franchise history in a 1960 exhibition game against the Dallas Texans. He never gave up that starting spot for the next 15 years.
He wore No. 50 in his first season before switching to the number that would define him forever: No. 00. The demanding team owner Al Davis called him by that number, and Otto called Davis “Mr.
Davis” for the rest of his life—a respect he granted almost no one else in professional football. Otto started 210 consecutive regular-season games. Including playoffs, that streak stretched to 308 consecutive games over 15 seasons, all in the same silver and black. He never missed one—not for injury, not for anything.
The streak remains one of the greatest feats of pure endurance the sport has ever produced. He earned 12 AFL All-Star selections and Pro Bowl nods, was named All-Pro 10 times, and became the only center ever chosen for the All-Time All-AFL Team. Decades later, he was also added to the NFL’s 100th Anniversary Team. He led the Raiders to their first Super Bowl appearance after the 1967 season and to seven division titles in his final seven years alone.
Then came a hit that changed everything. In a game against Vince Lombardi’s Packers, Otto took a blow from running back Ray Nitschke so violent it detached part of his retina mid-play. He didn’t leave the field. He didn’t tell anyone how bad it was.
For the next six months, he played effectively blind in one eye, calling blocking assignments toward the side he couldn’t really see, relying on instinct and memory to do what his eye no longer could. No one in the stands had any idea. Otto had his own explanation for all of it, one he repeated for the rest of his life without a hint of regret. Pain, he said, is a state of mind.
He was used to it. If his nose wasn’t broken after a game, he wondered if he’d played hard enough. If his helmet didn’t show fresh scratches, he wondered if he’d hit anything at all. He described the sport as an equal mix of teamwork and war—literally, not metaphorically—and compared himself more than once to a gladiator, a word he used with pride rather than complaint.
What almost no one watching in the 1960s and 1970s knew was what had been quietly building beneath that philosophy, invisible to fans in the stands, viewers at home, and even most of his teammates. Nine knee surgeries during his playing career alone. More than 20 concussions over the years, some severe enough that he couldn’t find the bench without a teammate guiding him. One cost him his memory for two full days—he looked at his own wife and asked who she was.
None of it showed up in the game statistics. Otto retired after the 1974 season and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1980, his first year of eligibility. He was the first Raiders player ever honored in Canton. The franchise would call him “Mr.
Raider” and “the original Raider” for the next 50 years. What followed over the next three decades was not a retirement—it was a second career, spent entirely inside operating rooms. By his own careful count—he refused to lose track of numbers—Jim Otto underwent at least 74 post-football surgeries. Twenty-eight of them were on his knees alone: six replacements of his right knee, four of his left, plus two artificial hips, two artificial shoulders, and back and neck procedures that never stopped hurting.
Three separate infections spread around his artificial right knee over the years. Each one, according to his doctors, was genuinely capable of ending his life. During a six-month stretch, he lived without a right knee joint at all, waiting for the infection to clear before doctors dared install another prosthesis. He moved around on crutches in his post-retirement work, without complaint.
By July 2007, the infection had spread so far that his doctors gave him a choice that wasn’t really a choice: his leg or his life. On August 1, 2007, Jim Otto’s right leg was amputated above the knee at a Utah hospital. Al Davis announced the news to reporters back home before Otto had fully woken from surgery. Otto described the amputation itself—not the years of surgery that led to it—as the most physically painful experience of his entire life, including everything football had done to him over 15 seasons.
Afterward, he told interviewers about phantom pain in a leg that no longer existed. He replaced the missing limb with a $40,000 carbon-fiber prosthesis decorated with the Raiders logo and a small silver No. 00. He wore it about 12 hours a day for the rest of his life, with the contact points pressing uncomfortably against his pelvis with every step.
Even then, Otto never considered any of it a mistake. Not in a single interview across four decades, when journalists asked the same question in different words, year after year, expecting a different answer than the one he kept giving. Between surgeries, he built a walnut farm and a chain of Burger King restaurants in the Sierra foothills outside Sacramento, running them himself. Memorabilia from his playing days decorated every wall.
His handshake stayed as strong as ever for anyone who walked through the door. He stayed close to the team long after his playing days ended, organizing reunions for old teammates and appearing at fan events in luxury suites into his late years. When asked in his 80s whether, knowing exactly where it would lead, he would do it all again, he answered yes without hesitation. He told his wife Sally, whom he was married to for over 60 years, that losing his leg didn’t bother him at all, as long as she still loved the man attached to whatever was left of him.
She made clear she hadn’t married him for his leg in the first place. Jim Otto died in May 2024 at age 86 at his home in Auburn, California, surrounded by family. The Raiders lit the eternal flame in his honor that same night. Decades earlier, in that empty office, a man had fallen and thought: “This is the end.
” He didn’t know then how many more times his body would ask him that same question before he believed it, finally and truly. Ten knee operations during his playing career. Seventy-four surgeries after it. Two hip replacements.
Twenty concussions. Three infections that nearly killed him. One leg.
Zero regret.