This Is Where You've Seen Piney From Sons Of Anarchy Before
It's right there in the name. When you call your motorcycle club the Sons of Anarchy, you imply the existence, somewhere in the universe, of a "Fathers of Anarchy." Someone had to be there at the beginning. Someone brought the thing into existence.
Chief among those someones, then, is the big granddaddy of them all, Piney Winston. Piney co-founded the club along with his war buddy, John "JT" Teller, was forever honored as one of SAMCRO's First 9, and remained active as a senior adviser even after his emphysema — and the oxygen he hauled around to battle it — limited his ability to take part in the runs. He was the father of club member Opie Winston (Ryan Hurst) and a father figure to series protagonist Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam), who is JT's son.
Now, if you can mentally edit out the nasal cannula attached to the oxygen tank he tends to wear on Sons of Anarchy, then chances are that the actor who played Piney, William Lucking, looks familiar. He's been a film and television mainstay since the 1960s, and a genre TV legend dating back to the days when genre TV meant Lancer. Chances are you've seen him somewhere, but at the same time, chances are that the place you saw him was his only episode on any particular show.
William Lucking was a bowling ringer on M*A*S*H
Like many working television actors, Lucking would eventually do his tour on M*A*S*H. But when it came time for him to make an appearance on the TV classic, he wasn't enlisted to fight or tend to the wounded; he was brought to Korea to bowl.
In the 1982 episode "Sons and Bowlers," Lucking played former professional bowler Marty Urbancic, a Marine sergeant who's recruited by Colonel Pitts (Dick O'Neill) of the Marines for a bowling face-off against the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Having already lost to the Marines in football, basketball, and softball, a desperate Colonel Potter (Harry Morgan) will do anything to win, including asking Margaret (Loretta Swit) to use her feminine wiles to throw Urbancic off his game.
Later, B.J. (Mike Farrell) and Klinger (Jamie Farr) trick Urbancic by taking purported "pep pills" in front of him in order to prepare for the match. They give him one too, but don't tell him the only effect the pill has is to turn urine blue. Urbancic panics, and the medical staff tell him he'll be fine so long as he doesn't bend over, which severely limits his bowling ability. Margaret comes off the bench to bowl the winning strike for the 4077th, explaining that Urbancic taught her everything he knew on their date.
William Lucking was a resistance fighter on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Lucking appeared on three episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, playing the Bajoran rebel Furel, who fought against the Cardassian occupation as a member of the Shakaar resistance cell. It was this cell that a young Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) linked up with when she joined the resistance, though Furel didn't want her to be allowed to join and had to be convinced by Lupaza (Diane Salinger).
Furel would later visit the Deep Space Nine station with Lupaza to speak to Kira Nerys about the deaths of some of their comrades. They were killed by an explosive planted by Silaran Prin (Randy Oglesby), a Cardassian who was badly wounded by a Shakaar cell bomb that went off in the house of his master. Though Furel was gone, Lucking would return to Star Trek to appear as Harrad-Sar in a 2005 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.
William Lucking was a crossover hero in Marvel's early screen work
Lest his time in the 24th century not be enough to prove his genre bonafides, Lucking also had a big part in the classic X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space." He played Roky Crikenson, one of the narrators behind the accounts nested in that episode's Rashomon-style narrative. Crikenson was a electric company lineworker who believed he witnessed two teenagers be abducted by gray aliens and is interviewed about his experience by Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny).
He turned his account into a screenplay, in which one of the aliens takes him to the center of the earth and tasks him with an important mission, but he tells the agents that, for his trouble, he was visited by a pair of men in black played by Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek, who told him the UFO he saw was the planet Venus and threatened to kill him if he told anyone otherwise.
William Lucking bossed Dwayne Johnson around in The Rundown
You don't spend as much time on television as Lucking did without falling into a few movie parts. Perhaps most prominent to modern audiences is his role as the bounty hunter boss Billy Walker in Dwayne Johnson's early effort The Rundown. As Walker, Lucking sends Johnson's Beck into the Brazilian jungle to retrieve his son, Travis Walker (Seann William Scott). Beck succeeds, as characters played by Johnson tend to do, but when Travis is brought back to his father and Beck sees his poor treatment of his son, the bounty hunter double-crosses him, feeding him and his men a toxic jungle fruit that causes temporary paralysis before freeing Travis.
It's been a while since you've seen Lucking in anything new. The actor, who is set to turn 80 later in 2021, got the last of his 161 screen credits in 2014 on the TV series Murder in the First. But with a CV like his, chances are if you're ever doing a rewatch of something a little older, there's a good chance you'll run into Lucking eventually.