by Jim Miller
[Back in the early days] everybody I worked with used to put down the Raiders and even though I was a 49ers fan, I started rooting for the underdog, you know. When [the leagues] finally merged and had interleague games, then I swung 100 percent over to the Raiders and no more 49ers. In fact, the two teams I root for are the Raiders and whoever the 49ers are playing. Well, after every game while the Raiders were at Youell Field, they used to have a buffet at a place called the Cactus Room in downtown Oakland, a very small little bar, but they got food out for the Raiders so the Raiders would come there after every game because it wasn’t like today, you know. There wasn’t a lot of money to throw around. So the buffet was there for the Raiders. So naturally, you could come down there and have a couple of beers and rub elbows with the Raiders, and it was great. I mean it felt like they were part of the city, and you were right there with them, but now, I mean everybody lives all over the place and you never see anybody off the field. At [another bar] Clancy’s, he used to have buses going to the games from his place every week they were in town. Then we’d go back to his place after the game. It was great. He was a good, good fan. He’s been around for a long time.
I think that now the fans get a bad rap throughout the league because when you see them on television, you see three or four of those guys with the spiked hair and shoulder pads, and they portray these guys as bullies, but they’re not. Mostly, they’re the nicest guys in the world. The guys who cause the trouble are the guys that drink beer out in the lot for four hours, go in there and raise hell. Those aren’t the real Raiders fans. Those guys are looking for trouble. Everybody always talks to the fans with the costumes on who make a big deal of themselves. When you talk to them, a lot of them will say, “I’ve been a hardcore fan since 2001!” But there are a lot more of us who were here before all of that. I’m not sure if it happened when they went to L.A. or if it’s the culture. It’s hard for me to deal with. I still want to go back. It was really more family-oriented down here. Everybody bought four tickets, the wife, and the two kids, and you. In our section, we knew everybody and they knew everybody else. It was a family. But now, you don’t see too many families at all.
When I asked Hank what he thought of the Raiders organization and the court decision in the Raiders case against Oakland, he said:[The Raiders organization] leaves a little bit to be desired. They have a circle-the-wagons, us-against-the-world attitude. Do whatever Al says. I mean everybody marches in lockstep with him, so there’s no individual opinion in a one-man organization. As for the court case, I think there were some lies told on both sides there, but I can’t believe a man of Al Davis’s intelligence and stature would be hornswoggled into believing something that wasn’t true. It’s just hard to believe. Will they stay? The court says they are going to stay until 2010, we’ll see after that.
Finally, we asked Hank about his career and what he thought about Oakland:I worked on the waterfront. I belonged to the Longshoremen’s Union, was a clerk, and spent forty-two years doing that. I retired in ’99. I did the planning for the container ships, a lot of computer work and inputting all the vital information about what was on the ship, the hazardous materials, the lifts, et cetera. Well, we went from three-by-five carbon paper to printers and fax machines, you know. The whole technology thing just turned everything around, reduced the workforce by 60 percent maybe. Containerization. We used to bring the ship in, and to discharge it and reload it would take, like, nine days. Now, they can do it in a day and a half. And with maybe twenty people where before they had two hundred people. Obviously, there’s a big savings for the employer there. Our union though, was a strong one, a great one. I mean, I never went out on strike for anything I disagreed with. Every move we made, I was in agreement. It was a solid union. There was very, very little dissent. I was a good soldier, not an officer, though.
I grew up in Oakland, went to high school there and worked there for forty-two years. I lived on Telegraph Avenue in North Oakland and I never really had any problems there. I guess now the homicide rate there, it’s like a shooting gallery. There are a few sections that you don’t go to at night, just like any other city. [The media] makes it seem like it’s rampant throughout Oakland. It isn’t. And of course that part has changed since I grew up here. I don’t even know how you would have gone about getting drugs in those days. I mean, people smoked marijuana, but they would be, “Man, I can’t get it.” Now I guess you can buy it at recess. Anyway, I always wanted to live on the other side of the [Caldecott] tunnel because the weather was better. It’s like forty degrees difference. Now I live in Walnut Creek.
Oaktown Devils
Honey, I cannot afford the ticket, the parking fee, eats, or drinks. I mean,
four dollars for a watered down sixteen-ounce glass of beer is ridiculous. See,
the owners, most of whom never played a lick of sports in their life, pay ath-
letes millions of dollars for bragging rights to say their team is the best. Then,
in order to make money, jack the price onto the consumer, us, the fans....
Understand this, TV makes people think sports is important when in actual-
ity, it’s just a game. Now three blocks from here you can find homeless, dope
fiends, kids who can’t read . . . nobody gives a damn about that ’cause some
sorry owner wants to say my team is best. Plus, now there is no loyalty....
What I mean is when I was a boy, your superstar played for your team until
his career was damn near over, today with free agency, one guy will play for a
different team six straight years, there’s no consistency. It’s like every year you
root for a different team without having loyalty to any of them. The players
go where the money’s at and I don’t blame them, it’s the nature of the beast.
Rainbow Jordan in Renay Jackson’s Oaktown Devil
Throughout the season we continued on our quest for authentic blue-collar Raiders fans. We spoke with Joe and John Spinola, two ironworkers from Crockett, a former C & H Sugar company town northwest of Oakland. Our photographer, Joe, had shown me a photo of them working on one of the local bridges wearing construction hats decorated with Oakland Ironworkers Local 378 stickers that had the Raiders shield fused with the union logo. When we talked with them over beers at the Pacific Coast Brewing Company, they had just completed work on the Al Zampa Memorial Bridge project. Both men are robust and clearly have a zest for life. With his cropped salt-and-pepper hair and dark moustache, Joe was casually attired in a gray-collared shirt and black jeans. John, who has a stocky build like his brother, has a full beard and was wearing blue jeans, a blue shirt, and a black cap.
On the subject of working-class Raiders fans, Joe explained, “Stereotypical ironworkers are likely to be a Raiders fan more than anything else.” His brother John added, “It kind of fits the mold. In general, most ironworkers are not 49ers fans.” Joe continued, “Our local is Ironworkers Local 378 out of Oakland. So naturally we’re not going to support the 49ers. Maybe it’s just the image, the Raiders image. They just follow them. I was working at a Volkswagen plant and one of the main mechanics was a big-time Raiders fan and had season tickets. That was when I went to my first Raiders game, around 1977, and it was wild back then.” John added, “Actually some of the best times I’ve had were in the parking lot before the games. Sometimes you get so involved in that you’re late for the game.” As for what makes ironworkers natural Raiders fans John pointed out that “ironworkers, a lot of them, are just kind of belligerent fans.” Joe added:Ironworkers are of the same nature as Raiders fans. They are fanatical about anything. They don’t take crap from anybody. They just tell you how it’s going to be. We’re not popular with the management-style people on the job. We don’t always see eye to eye, but at the end of it all we get our work done, and we’re productive, very safe at what we do, considering the scope and the danger that we’re exposed to. It’s kind of fun. It gives eve
rybody a little bit of an attitude, and yeah, sometimes, a chip on your shoulder when you do this kind of work, but it goes with the territory. You know, it wouldn’t be worth doing if you didn’t have a little bit of moxie in you, a little backbone. On a platform four hundred feet in the air and there is nothing around you, you might have some nerves but you’ve got to shake them off, and you never know what’s going to happen. So it’s all interesting and fun—kind of hairy work really. A lot of guys being put in the air like that. It’s not for everybody.
John and Joe Spinola on the Zampa Bridge
John continued on talking about the nature of ironworkers and their fraternity. It was clear the two were having a good time discussing it:It’s in our nature to drink beer and like to eat and just have friends around and party when we’re off work and everything. We work with guys sometimes on a project, we’ll work with [a guy] for six months or a year, maybe less, and maybe you won’t see him for ten, fifteen years, and then you wind up on another job together somewhere. It’s all like a little family reunion when you see those kind of guys, especially the guys you’ve worked with over the years, you know, and sometimes you remember a guy from when you were twenty years old or something and then you grow up, and you’re thirty-five or forty years old and now he’s retired. It’s great how the whole thing works.
When I asked them about unions and the state of labor, John replied by talking about their father:Me and Joe, we used to come down to the port when I was young. My father was a longshoreman for thirty years, a working-class guy. That was in the old days of Oakland. He worked through the containerization before he retired. They have a very strong union, but even they have lost ground. They move thirty or forty times more than they ever did with maybe a tenth of the people they used to have. It’s unbelievable.
Back in the eighties, [the ironworkers] did a couple of things. At the steel mills that were retrofitted by nonunion help from out of state and everything. There were probably four ironworkers to every other craft on the picket lines. The most belligerent were the ironworkers. They had to call the police all the time. Organized labor, though, is having a tough time. The company seems to have the ball on their side more and more. They do all these conniving little things. It’s tougher to strike or to do anything to try to stop it now.
Like Kevin and Hank, the Spinola brothers worked in Oakland much of the time but didn’t live in the city itself, a trend that was true for much of the Bay Area white working class in the skilled trades from the sixties onward. As Robert Self notes, this happened as “the promise that home ownership could be made available to ever larger numbers of workers—through a combination of mass-produced tract developments and the conversion of inexpensive peripheral agricultural land—produced a more stable class order.” Hence, many workers who might once have lived in the city were able to relocate to an affordable suburban “garden-like home.”
The hope was that a “metropolitan Oakland” could support the economy while defusing the combustible industrial working class centralized in Oakland. While suburbanization may have helped accomplish the former, it did little to keep the economy of the city of Oakland running smoothly as what Self terms “homeowner populism” created working-class suburbs with middle-class amenities while ringing Oakland with what Donald McCullum, president of the Oakland NAACP, called in 1967 a “white noose of suburbia.”
Yet this image of Oakland as “a chocolate city with vanilla suburbs,” as Chris Rhomberg explains, “was never wholly true and is becoming even less so” as gentrification has taken hold in recent years. What has happened, within Oakland, its immediate suburbs, and the country at large is economic stratification. With the movement toward a two-tier economy, however, the affordable housing and the solid working-class jobs that sustained working-class suburbs have become rarer and the future is less bright for the working class (white, black, brown, and yellow) as the movement toward a service-sector working class makes the blue-collar American Dream a thing of the past.2
Blue-collar Raiders fan Renay Jackson, the godfather of “gangster lit,” lives in East Oakland, where he is raising his three children as a single father while working as a custodian for the Oakland Police Department. We first saw Renay on the News Hour with Jim Leherer on PBS where he talked about his writing while sporting large wire-rimmed glasses under a Raiders hat. He was also wearing a natty suede black-and-white Raiders jacket. With his moustache, goatee, black jeans, and trim build, Jackson cut quite a figure. This, of course, piqued our interest, so we got in contact with him to discuss the Raiders as well as the state of the Oakland flatlands and how his life there has informed his writing.
When we met at the Pacific Coast Brewing Company he was wearing the same gear. We started with the Raiders:I’ve been a Raiders fan since 1972. The Raiders was always my team, man. Lamonica was throwing the bomb, the Snake. Shit, the man threw the bomb in Oakland. We had outlaws on the team. So it’s kind of identified with the gangster mentality, you know. It was like the Raiders were the gangsters of football, that was the feeling to us. You know the 49ers fans, they drink wine, eat cheese and sliced salami, watching the games with their kids. Raiders fans drink beer and have a hot dog or something, cursing, and you wouldn’t want to bring your wife and children there. You might get into a fight there and you have a totally different atmosphere. And blind loyalty, basically, is what it is. So when they become a Raiders fan, it was like becoming a fan for life. The Raiders probably have the rowdiest fans. You’re taking a chance if you’re going to a Raiders game wearing the other team’s colors. You know, because they are stupid, man. They will deck you for that. So that makes it a bad environment for a lot of people because you should be able to wear the other team’s stuff—but not in Oakland, Jack.
The Raiders had a reputation that it was “us against the NFL,” and it seemed like we always get the short end of the stick with a close game or close call. We get cheated all the time. I mean it happens every year, the most penalties and stuff, and most Raiders fans I know, we kind of feel like, well, that this is kind of questionable. It’s basically the league against Al Davis. It’s not only Al Davis who believes this about the Raiders, it’s the fans. We lose, you know. But sometimes, the Raiders are messed up. You know, when Romanowski hit Williams in the face, nothing happened to him for that. It was like, too soft, something was supposed to happen to him.
Back in the day, man, when the Raiders lost, that made Sunday a bad day. I was miserable the rest of the day. Now with everybody after the money, and no team loyalty and stuff, I don’t really care too much anyway. I like football for football and the Raiders are my team, but it’s like sports in general. It’s different from when I was little. Too much money, because they jack it onto the fans. They make it too expensive to go. Two beers, for $15 and $61 for a lousy seat. For me to go to the game, I’m going to be bringing some peanuts with me. For two tickets and something to eat, it’s maybe over $200. It’s like a day and a half’s pay at work. So man, it’s too expensive for me. The price is too high. Al Davis fools everybody. I think he’s probably trying to move now. But on Sundays, man, everybody puts on their Raiders outfits and there we are. It is like now we already know that when Sunday comes, you’re going to see the Raiders on TV and stay home. [If they are blacked out] I have the TV on during the [other] games and the radio on the Raiders game, and I’m barbecuing.
On the subject of the post–Super Bowl disturbances, Renay took a hard line:
After the Super Bowl, as a black man, you know, you look at the news and say, “Don’t let it be none of the brothers,” and you see all the Mexicans breaking all the Mexican businesses, I mean, it was like Jingletown. As a race we do a lot of damage, but that was Latinos. After the Super Bowl, if there is anything about the Raiders that relates to Oakland, it’s that Oakland has a reputation as a gangster city. It is the people from Oakland, like those people [that got] on the news all around the country. People all over the United States think Oakland is the dirtiest
team in football, and the fans, the image they project across the country is like the rowdiest fans. So they tie in together like that.
As for blaming the disturbances on tension with the police:That’s full of shit, man. People just want to get out there and do wrong. It doesn’t have anything to do with the game. This has nothing to do with the police. This is a mob scene. I mean like with the Rodney King verdict thing and people burning down their own neighborhood, but there was a lot of people stealing and this thing here, that’s all they were doing. Everybody hit the streets and they were doing wrong, turning over trashcans on the corners, breaking into businesses. They broke into the bank, spattered paint all over East 14th and International Boulevard. That didn’t have anything to do with football. The folks were getting out there and all of them weren’t youngsters, either. They get that liquor in them. One thing I’ve noticed about Raiders fans, they just get sloppy drunk when they watch the game, and the mentality is stuck on stupid. That’s why I told you, they are still in that Raider gear and I’m a Raider die-hard, but, man, I’ll tell you that [even when the Raiders are getting] their asses kicked, my homeboys were still up there hollering “Raiders.” It’s like they were still talking at you, and most Raiders fans, that’s the mentality they have. It’s beyond loyal.
When we moved to the subject of Oakland, Renay explained:
