by Jim Miller
Separated by half the country from his beloved Raiders, Peach still feels part of something larger than himself. By creating the site that serves as one of the main gateways into the virtual homeland, he can be at the heart of Raider Nation, even in Missouri.
Being a Raiders fan in New Hampshire can be lonely. A fan of the Silver and Black since he was twelve, Dale Pendexter remembers watching games with his uncle at his grandmother’s house and being impressed by how often the Raiders were able to come back from almost certain defeat. He liked the fact that they won a lot and has been a fan ever since. Dale goes to Oakland once a year, and when the Raiders play the Patriots he attends games at New England. Mostly, though, he gets his Raiders fix from his Sunday NFL Direct TV ticket and subscribes to Silver and Black Illustrated. He spends the off-season embellishing the “Raider room” in his house, which has black walls and ceiling and trim painted in a specially mixed shade of silver. Dale points out that “people think I’m obsessed” because of his black motorcycle, black Raidered-out pickup truck, and black lab named Raider (who, apparently, can say his own name), but he also believes that because he has a target for his intensity—he calls himself the “Number One Raider Fan in New England”—he stays out of trouble in other ways.
In Oakland and other parts of the United States, many Raiders fans are recent immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, India, the Far East, or elsewhere. Just as Raiders fans are coming from abroad to America, the increasingly pervasive distribution of the NFL product abroad is creating a Raiders World. We spoke to Canadian fans like Anthony Nardi of Toronto, whose cell phone chimes “The Autumn Wind,” and Lee Hutchinson of Calgary, whose Raider couture got him in a bit of a pickle. Hutchinson recalls:I used to own a set of Raiders boxer shorts . . . so after drinking . . . a lot, we ran into a few of the Stampeders [Canadian football team] at a bar, and they are carrying on about how good they thought they were and I had to put my two cents in and tell them that they are simply rejects from the NFL and told them that a real team are the Oakland Raiders and as I proceeded to whip down my pants to show them the boxers of the Raiders I was wearing I pretty much took a shit kicking of a life time!! From a few of the boys from the Stampeders!! A good night, a good ass kicking, and a few too many drinks!! But in the end they still suck and the Raiders are king!!
Across the Atlantic, the UK is home to the Raiders Fan Club of Great Britain. Brits like Steve Waite of Chester aren’t ceding anything to their North American counterparts in Raider Nation: “I have a memorabilia collection that fills two rooms of my house! This includes signed stuff, Super Bowl stuff, programs, and game films going all the way back to the Blanda era.” Steve has even made the trip all the way to Oakland to see a game and has a few good war stories to tell as well: “I was standing and yelling during warm-ups close to the Black Hole when this dude on the end of the line next to me throws up over the railing mid-sentence and then continues yelling as though nothing happened. You had to be there, I suppose, but it was funny as hell at the time.”
Steve Poland, also from Britain, is a private investigator whose dream is to win the lottery and be able “to buy a season ticket and stay in the U.S. for the duration of the whole NFL season.” A member of the British fan club, Steve has written articles in its fanzine about his trips to Raiders games in L.A. and his amazing memorabilia collection that includes over 9,000 items. As he told us, “I have cards that contain pieces of Game Used Jersey, Pants, Helmet, Shoe, Face Mask, Balls, and even End Zone pylons and Stadium Turf!” Derek Ryce of Paisley, Scotland (just outside Glasgow) works for a whiskey producer that bottles brands such as Chivas Regal and Glenlivet and follows the Scottish Claymores as well as the Silver and Black. Ryce, whose job is likely the envy of many a Raiders fan, wears his own “Rice” jersey in honor of the man who he calls “my idol.”
Australian fans like Paul O’Shanassy of Melbourne get up at 4 a.m. to watch their beloved Raiders play while living down under, but also make trips to the heart of Raider Nation. One of O’Shanassy’s trips to Raider Mecca almost ended in ruin. After coming a few thousand miles to see a frustrating loss, O’Shanassy and his friend were in a foul mood and almost got arrested after field-goal-kicking a beer bottle into a police car only to be released “after I was able to convince them that [we] were Aussie tourists” and “they felt sorry for me because of the look of terror on my face.” The only kicking eighteen-year-old Polish student Artur “Fred” Chielowiec enjoys is that done by his hero, Sebastian Janikowski, the “Polish Cannon.” “I follow the Raiders because I like hard game and faithful fans just like Black Hole,” he told us. “I like Sebastian Janikowski” and thanks to him “I’m Raiders Fan.” From Italy, Raiders fan Massimo Corsi told us, “I work for create the first Oakland Raiders Booster Club of Italy, I have sent the request to Raiders Booster Club and I waiting for the answer. My dream is to watch a Raiders match in the Coliseum Stadium.” Mark Phillips of Liberia, Costa Rica, was born and raised there but has family in California. He was out of luck in terms of watching games until about ten years ago “when the cable companies took all over the country. So now we can watch the games, most of them, live, in Fox Sports, NBC, or ESPN.” His football-watching crew, he explained, is a blend of locals and expatriates: “There are six Americans, four Costa Ricans (including myself) and even a Canadian.”
In Mexico City, Barujo, an electrical engineer who works for the Mexican government, told us, “Obviously, I would rather watch a Raiders game than go out with a girl. If I do go out, I make sure that we go to a place where the game is playing, but for the most part I avoid dates when the game is on.” He became a Raiders fan when he was seven years old and he “watched them beat the Eagles in Super Bowl XV.” Barujo says that “the Raiders for me are more than a football team, they are a way of life, a way of being, because they represent liberty without reaching the extremes of licentiousness.” The Raiders’ “El Señor Al Davis represents a unique figure that is to be followed because he is a person that is vastly cultured and with revolutionary ideas.” Also important for Barujo is the fact that Davis “has always given opportunity to people based on their qualifications thus becoming the first to hire a Latino coach, Tom Flores, and a black coach, Art Shell.” As for the fans, they represent “liberty” as well but “also represent the working class, something that I identify with since my family is of this origin, without representing the hypocritical glamour of other teams such as the Dallas Cowgirls or the 49ers . . . the Black Hole is a must see, that is truly an atmosphere. You can truly feel the passion in that stadium.”
Barujo has many memories of watching the Silver and Black in Mexico. When he was a kid and “would gather up all my action figures and have them watch the games with me so the Raiders could have more fans.” As an adult he has watched games in “a hotel room in the Dominican Republic” as well as in the rural Mexican countryside:The strangest place I have watched a game was for the last playoff game against the Jets. I was in my father’s small hometown in Jalisco for a town fiesta. I was sure that I would miss the game, but to my surprise I walked by a bar and could see that the game was playing. I went into the bar and saw about 10 Raiders fans watching the game with a lot of excitement, yelling after every play. I was very excited and happy to be able to watch the game with other Raider fans.
At home, Barujo’s mother reports that “my son becomes unbearable and wants no one to bother him when he is watching the game. And when the Raiders score I think the entire block can hear him.” His love of the Raiders actually drove him to seek a job at New Mexico State University, where “I will be able to travel and watch the games in person. That was one of my motivations for taking the job.”
Moving in the other direction, Jon Cariveau of Guayaquil, Ecuador, grew up in Livermore, California, and spent many years as a Raiders fan in San Diego. Now that he has been transplanted to South America, Jon is happy to report that the Caliente sports gambling empire stretches through southern Mexico and Central America all the
way to Guayaquil, where he can place bets on three-team parlays and compare notes with his friends in the East Bay, San Diego, Panama City, Panama, and Guayaquil. He can watch the games either in the sports bar or at home on the dish with his lovely wife, who, unfortunately, roots for the Rams. Together with a band of expatriate English teachers from the United States and Canada, Jon has not had to miss a crucial Raiders game in nearly a decade. “I’ve seen Raiders fans all over the country. In Guayaquil, in Quito, in Cuenca, in small towns in the Andes. It’s a trip.” Indeed it is.
MVP
Four
Training Camp
As a matter of general philosophy, the National Football League is the last bastion of fascism in America.
Ex-Raider Tom Keating
Any society that will put [Hells Angel Sonny] Barger in jail and make
Al Davis a respectable millionaire at the same time is not a society to be
trifled with.
Hunter S. Thompson, after visiting a Raiders practice
[When] a team plays for a city, it plays for the idea of a team and the idea of a city.
John Krich, Bump City
Our trip into the heart of Raider Nation started strangely at the Universal City Walk in Los Angeles, a mall attached to Universal Studios. After wandering through the bewildering maze of themed restaurants and specialty stores, we saw a man with a Raiders shield tattooed on the back of his shaved head. We followed him and he led us to pay dirt. Outside the Raider Image store, families were lining up to pose for pictures under the giant helmet that framed the door. A man stood behind a headless number 00 Jim Otto figure for a portrait. We waited patiently, then snuck in after his wife got the shot. Inside we whipped out our handy notepads and began to document our experience. There were party-helmet barbeques, foam pirate swords, Raider thermoses, nutcrackers, flasks, billiard cues, dog leashes, license plates, tire covers, bathrobes, silk pajamas, beer mugs, shot glasses, baby onesies, silver-and-black hair color and face paint, and much more. I picked out a pirate shield binky for our incipient Raider baby and glanced over at the linebacker-sized fellow next to me, who smiled back at me sheepishly as he evaluated a onesie. We moved on to the wall of jerseys and surveyed the t-shirts and all the regular Raider gear, plus a whole line of shirts in Spanish “Compromiso a Excelencia,” “Orgullo y Porte,” and “Viva Los Raiders.” There was even a cholo-style Raider Nation shirt. I noticed that Kelly and I were the only Anglo shoppers in the store and walked over to pick up a hat. In the city of angels, the Raiders clearly were still the Chicano team of choice.
After we bought our stuff, we spoke to Jim T., who helps manage the City Walk and other Raider Image stores in Los Angeles. Two days before, he told us, five thousand people had showed up to get autographs from Tim Brown. Starting at five o’clock in the morning, the Raider hordes had essentially taken over the mall with their sheer numbers. “Tim Brown came out on the balcony across from the store like Caesar with his arms upraised,” Jim told us. “Imagine that.” When we asked how it all went with such a huge crowd, Jim seemed relieved, “People get pretty angry when they don’t get in, but things went pretty smoothly. You see some of the same guys at every signing,” Jim explained. “Like one guy who comes in a wheelchair, every time. These guys are pretty hardcore.” The day after the Tim Brown event, five hundred more Raiders fans were there for the second day of the grand opening weekend. Raider Nation was alive and well in Los Angeles.
Next it was time to deal with the Raiders organization itself. Here was my plan: get a press pass for our photographer for training camp and the entire football season, set up interviews with players and organization spokespeople, then angle for Al Davis. I had heard the stories about the Raiders’ inept public relations, hostility to the media, and general paranoia, but how threatening could a book on their loyal fans be? We were fans ourselves, for that matter—not really media by any stretch of the imagination. We’d just call them and set it all up. When Kelly called the Raiders’ front office they referred us to the public relations guy, whose immediate response was derisive laughter. “A book on fans? I’m not going to give you a press pass for a book on fans.” We were, it seems, mere pissants to the Raiders hierarchy. After some explaining and cajoling, we were instructed to send the PR guy an e-mail describing our project and requesting a pass for a single game, perhaps in the preseason.
While our lawyers have instructed us that reproducing our correspondence with PR Guy would be ill-advised, let’s just say that dealing with the Raiders’ disingenuous doublespeak was a frustrating experience that left us scratching our heads. We were denied requests we had not made, generously granted permission to walk through the parking lot, told that the NFL and 9/11 were to blame for the denial of a press pass, and then informed that our requests had not been denied. PR Guy speaks with forked tongue, we thought. Still in limbo with regard to our photographer’s press pass, we were, at long last, granted a one-day pass to the training camp in Napa to interview some of the Raiders players.
Hot damn! “Family Day” for fans may have been cancelled, but we were in. I e-mailed PR guy back and thanked him for his help. We had been all wrong about him. He returned my e-mail and requested that we call before we came. I decided to strike while the iron was hot and e-mailed yet more thank-yous and yet another “reminder request” about the press pass for our photographer. No response. Undaunted, we called and left a message for PR Guy at both the Raiders’ headquarters in Alameda and at the public relations office in the Napa Marriott. Then we packed our bags and headed up to Napa, driving eight and a half hours to an affordable Travel Lodge about a mile from the nearly $300 a night Marriott where the Raiders were staying. After finding a Nation’s Giant Burger where we ate our late-night dinner next to a psychotic homeless man who assaulted a napkin holder, we returned to our hotel where several groups of middle-aged wine drunks were stumbling around and yelling after a successful day of sampling merlots and cabernet sauvignons. Some of them had apparently forgotten to spit.
We didn’t sleep well after the long drive and the loud drunks, but we managed to get over to the Marriott bright and early nonetheless. Outside the hotel a large bus awaited another gaggle of gauche winery tourists. Inside, the lobby was flush with affectless splendor. The well-groomed man at the front desk directed us to the room where we could pick up our press passes, and an amiable teenager leafed through a stack of envelopes and informed us that there was no room in the inn. My partner and I exchanged suspicious looks and got directions to PR Guy’s office. Bleary-eyed, with coffee and notepads in hand, we made our way to the Raiders’ PR brain center, a cramped, dimly lit hotel room where PR Guy and his colleague were hanging out in Raiders caps, t-shirts, and shorts.
We were received aloofly as PR Guy informed us that we should have called first. “We did,” Kelly said as she glanced over at the other man she had spoken to on the phone the day before. He kept his poker face. PR Guy said he never got the message. The other guy asked why we needed to talk to players if we were writing a book on fans. “For their perspective on the fans,” I explained, a little taken aback by the Raiders’ official disdain for their loving admirers. Did they think that the Raiders were a public service organization, selflessly donating their time to the ungrateful masses? I smiled at him. He seemed utterly unmoved. It was then that the Raiders’ PR strategy crystallized before my eyes in a moment of football satori: Fuck you, we’re the Raiders. I mentioned that we had driven all the way up from San Diego, and it seemed to break the standoff. PR Guy folded and told us to sign in, and we got our passes—even one for Joe, who was driving in from San Francisco as we spoke. I asked again about Joe’s press pass for the preseason game, and PR Guy told me that we’d know by the end of the week. That was the last we heard from him. So much for the interview with Al Davis. For the time being, however, we had done an end-run around the royal Raider blow-off.
To be honest, once we had the press pass, I found myself feeling strangely blessed to ha
ve been touched by the Raiders’ notorious official paranoia and rudeness. I could now take perverse satisfaction in knowing that I was being tolerated for a brief period of time. After years of loyally following my team and shelling out thousands of my hard-earned dollars, I would be allowed to stand in their godly presence for three hours. Sure the Raiders granted “special privileges” to the booster clubs and occasionally gave tours of Raider Mecca to deserving fans or made their players show up to sign autographs, but I was Dr. Nobody from Nowhere and managed to get in just like Hunter S. Thompson did during the glory years. Now that was an accomplishment only to be surpassed by my brief interview with Raiders great Tim Brown, who responded to my request for a thirty-second chat with, “No, no, no, leave me alone! It’s my day off!”
After we got our credentials, we walked back out to the lobby, and I was struck by how ungritty the whole setup was. There was a huge display of fresh flowers in the middle of the lobby and a stack of brochures outlining the advantages of the Amadeus Spa. I cringed at the thought of my beloved Raiders getting aromatherapy, a mud bath, and a manicure. I glanced over at the faux library and tried to imagine the Tooz driving down the freeway in Oakland shooting at road signs. Could this corporate utopia really be home to the Raiders’ working-class rebel mystique? We got another cup of coffee and waited for the 8:45 practice to start. As I sipped my java, I cycled back through the Raiders glory years’ legends.
