Doctors told him he would never walk again. His response? He played 308 straight games without missing a single day of work.
In January of 2024, an old man in a wheelchair rolled into the Raiders locker room.
He was smiling.
The players didn't know it yet, but they were looking at a legend.
They were also looking at him for the last time.
No one in that room knew it was goodbye.
It seemed routine.
Just an old-timer, stopping by after a win.
Four months later, Jim Otto was gone.
He was 86 years old.
And his body had been fighting for its life since long before that final visit.
Let's go back to the beginning.
Because nothing about Jim Otto's story should have worked.
He grew up poor in Wausau, Wisconsin.
At one point, his family lived in a chicken coop.
Not a metaphor. An actual chicken coop.
He was undersized. Overlooked. Not a single NFL team drafted him in 1959.
Not one.
Most people would have taken the hint.
Jim Otto took it as homework.
He signed with a brand-new, upstart league instead — the AFL — and joined a franchise that didn't even have a stadium of its own yet.
The Oakland Raiders.
He built his body up from scratch to hit 250 pounds.
He earned the number 00.
"Aught-oh." A pun on his own name.
Nobody remembers the pun anymore.
Everyone remembers the number.
For the next 15 seasons, Jim Otto did something almost no professional athlete has ever done.
He never missed a single game.
210 consecutive regular-season starts.
308 straight games including preseason and playoffs.
Through nine knee surgeries during his playing career alone.
Through pain that would have ended most careers in year two.
He played anyway.
Then everything stopped.
Not because he wanted it to.
His body simply couldn't be pushed any further.
He retired in 1975, a Hall of Famer in waiting.
For Jim Otto, it was barely the beginning.
What came after his career is almost unbelievable.
Nearly 74 surgeries over his lifetime.
Multiple knee replacements. Two hip replacements. Two artificial shoulders.
Infections that nearly killed him — more than once.
He once said he could smell death's breath and feel its fingers reaching for him.
And still, he chose surgery after surgery just to keep living.
In 2007, after two devastating infections, doctors amputated his right leg above the knee.
He tested his first prosthetic leg like it was just another Sunday practice.
He tripped. He caught himself.
He kept going.
Jim Otto said, flatly, that he'd rather be a disabled Hall of Famer than a healthy man who never tried.
And yes — that same man, wearing double zero and a trademark neckroll, helped build the Raiders' entire identity from nothing.
He was there for the franchise's very first snap in 1960.
He was part of the Raiders' first AFL Championship in 1967.
He played beside a wall of future Hall of Famers — Gene Upshaw, Art Shell, Willie Brown, Fred Biletnikoff, Ken Stabler.
Twelve All-Star and Pro Bowl selections.
Ten All-Pro nods.
Inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1980, his very first year of eligibility.
The undrafted kid from the chicken coop became the standard every Raiders center after him would be measured against.
Jim Otto passed away on May 19, 2024, at his home in Auburn, California.
He was surrounded by the family who watched him rebuild his body, piece by piece, for nearly 50 years after his last game.
He never once said he regretted it.
#JimOtto #MrRaider #RaiderNation #NFLLegends #ProFootballHallOfFame #DoubleZero #OaklandRaiders #TheOriginalRaider #NFLHistory
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