Chris Hinton: on Halloween night in 1988, the offensive lineman's Colts scared the dickens out of John Elway's Broncos

Football Digest, Nov, 2005 by Chris Hinton

WHEN WE PLAYED THE DENVER Broncos on Monday night--Halloween, as it were--in 1988, it was one of those games where everything went right for us.

It was funny--I think Dan Dierdorf was one of the announcers for that game. They had given out masks that night, and a fan threw one down from the stands. I took off my Indianapolis Colts helmet and put it on. So on the sidelines, I was wearing a mask of Dan Dierdorf. It was just one of those games.

I think we scored every time on our first six or seven possessions. I'll put it this way: It was so bad that in the second half, Denver kicked an onside kick. Our tight end, a guy named Pat Beach, who was one of the front guys, caught the ball on, like, the first bounce and took off and ran it back to the five-yard line. He damn near scored a touchdown on an onside kick.

Our running back, Eric Dickerson, went on an absolute tear in the first half. He then took himself out of the game. If the coach had said, "Stay in the game," he could have potentially broken the single-game rushing record. He was on that kind of a pace. Every time he touched the ball, he picked up a minimum of 10 yards. It was unbelievable.

We ended up winning 55-23, and I would have to say that was the game never forget.

We went 9-7 that year. Eric had one of his typically huge years. We had six guys named to the Pro Bowl, including me and two other offensive linemen. As a team, that was one of the more successful seasons in Indianapolis until the recent years. That was the first year in Indianapolis that we really put something together.

I had seen a lot of losing in Indianapolis. I was excited to play in Indianapolis because I'm from Chicago and played at Northwestern, so a lot of family and friends got to see me play. But there was a lot of turnover with the coaching and players in those years. That's rough. There's no consistency when you have that kind of turnover. I mean, just with coaches, there were Frank Kush, Rod Dowhower, and Run Meyer.

Being on a losing team for years wears on you. In my case, I had a lot of practice being on losing teams after playing four years at Northwestern and losing 31 games in a row there.

But we started to build a good team by 1988, and having Eric come to the team in a big trade helped a lot. A lot of people remember him as being the prettiest runner they had ever seen, but they underestimated how powerful he was. That was one thing I was impressed with: his power. I mean, he ran people over.

Blocking for each running back is different. With Eric, you knew being on the back side of the play was just as important as being on the front side, meaning that he could very well break the run by cutting back. He cut back a lot. Some guys are pretty much straight-ahead runners who don't improvise a whole lot. He wasn't a cutback runner to the degree of a Barry Sanders, but Eric did have great vision where he took advantage of cutting back against the grain. As an offensive lineman, you had to do your job on the back side. You couldn't take a play off.

That Halloween night was one of Eric's best. He ended up with four touchdowns in his first 15 carries. He had 159 yards on 21 carries, and he only ran the ball three times in the second half. They fumbled the ball three times, all of which we turned into scores. After Eric scored for the fourth time, we were up 31-0. Up to that point, the Broncos had just one first down in whole game. It was that one-sided.

I had no idea we would come out and beat them so decisively. No idea. At the time, they were a decent team. That might have been the second Monday night game of my career. You know how big Monday night games are with players, because that's the one and only game that all the other guys are watching. Your peers are watching. It was just a great feeling to win that game the way we did.

I think I played the whole game. Offensive linemen, they don't take you out. All the skill players got out, but we stayed in. But we loved it because all we were doing was running the ball. As offensive linemen, that's what you love to do--run the ball. That's what we did in the second half, so it was fun.

The other subplot of that game was John Elway and me. We are forever linked in a way. Denver drafted me and eventually traded me to the Colts with Mark Hermann and a first-round draft pick for John. A couple of years ago when John went into the Hall of Fame, I got a lot of calls from reporters. One wrote, "Thank you for being trade bait." But they did in a fun way.

I have to admit, that Halloween night it was fun to beat John. Not in a rub-it-in-your-face kind of way. More playful. Guys on my team in Indianapolis would kid with me all the time, "Man, we could have had Elway instead of you." It was kind of a running joke.

But not on that night.

--As told to Chuck O'Donnell

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