Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  Michele took a sip of her Diet Coke and told us about the kids she serves. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “they’re certainly not constructively directed. Many of them are idle. They are hanging out waiting for whatever is coming, and there is nothing coming.” Because of this, Michele thought, the kids she serves are vulnerable to the unconstructive impulses that Raider fandom can bring:There is a significant community voice that says, “We must stop hurting ourselves.” That voice is very deep, and that is why in all these idle circumstances there are enough community people saying, “Okay, let’s not beat ourselves up over this. We’ll just end up worse.” The Raiders stuff was too big and that voice couldn’t be heard. The Raiders stuff is too provoking. They are provoking to the teens and to the adults. The way the Raiders reach the community is about rage. I’m sure you saw the [Rich] Gannon incident and interview [where Gannon exploded at his coaches and then was unapologetic in the media right afterward], right? The day after all that, we had kids who were doing the postures, who were imitating Gannon. They were role-playing exactly what happened in the Gannon interview less than twelve hours later. I was trying to think of what analogy I could draw from this, and it was handed to me in an editorial in the newspaper where it talked about the whole thing as the equivalent to road rage—they called it “Rich rage.”

  And the kids were talking about it, but they weren’t talking about it, like, “Look at this bad behavior.” They were saying, “Did you see how Gannon was telling the coach off? He got right back in his face.” They were proud of this. And I have to say the exception is Jerry Rice. You know, they adore him, and when they imitate Rice, we don’t get that same behavior. So I watch the counselors scramble for the redirect—you know, “Look at Jerry Rice. He’s not doing that stuff.”

  But these kids are such a small part of the population. Look at what’s happening. Did the Raiders sell out again? No. It’s funny, none of the kids I work with have ever been to a game, could ever afford to go to a game. Ninety-five percent of them live in poverty, so how could they ever even buy a ticket? The kids and some of the people in my office don’t care so much that [the city of Oakland] is losing [because of the Raiders lawsuit]. All they care about is whether or not the 49ers have lost one more game than the Raiders. It’s amazing.

  Most of the middle- to upper-middle-class blacks in Oakland are 49ers fans. They don’t care about the Raiders. It’s the poor people who are Raiders fans. The Raiders are street. I know a lot of people who scramble to get 49ers tickets, but they are not interested in entering the Raiders culture. The kids don’t know about the institutional contributions that Al Davis has made to football, their main connection to the Raiders is the rage. The [Raiders] culture doesn’t operate on an intellectual level. It’s the rage—that in-your-face, don’t-be-pushed-around, walking-away-like-you’re-spitting-on-somebody thing. After a wicked game, they come in to the Center and they’re body banging.

  After we interviewed Michele, I pondered her point about rage and wondered if the phenomenon was limited to the Raiders. A week before, a Giants fan had shot a Dodgers fan after a baseball game in L.A. and, during the course of the 2003 season, there were two football riots involving mostly white, middle-class college kids. In Mankato, Minnesota, three thousand kids went on a rampage that led to forty arrests after they lost the homecoming game to North Dakota State. Later that fall, in West Virginia, Mountaineers fans took over the streets, overturned cars, fought with police, and set ninety fires after an upset victory over Virginia Tech. Even the American heartland seemed to be afflicted with this sports related mania.

  The Autumn Wind

  The Autumn Wind is a Raider

  Pillaging just for fun

  He’ll knock you ’round and upside down

  And laugh when he’s conquered and won.

  Steve Sabol, “The Autumn Wind”

  Later in the season we caught up with one of the co-workers Michele had mentioned. Mark Henderson, a genial family man who came to meet us in Raiders gear, had a distinctly different take on the Raiders from Michele’s:I’ve been a Raiders fan since 1977. My family moved to the Bay Area around that time and, being a young boy, I was really interested in football. My real interest came after their last Super Bowl victory in Oakland, I remember coming downtown, people going crazy and jumping on top of cars and going wild, but it was a different type of crowd back then than it is now. I think people evolved and, as a society, we seem to be a little more to the extreme. Now you have a couple of different mixes of Raiders fans. You have your older fans who know about the Kenny Stablers and Lester Hayeses and all the greats, and these fans know about football. Then you have the younger generation who represent more the Generation X, and a lot of their tendencies are more toward violent confrontation. So they embrace the Raiders image, the Raiders mystique, the bad boy image. It’s more like [these younger fans] are adopting an image whereas the older fans know more about football. The fans who know football are into the intricacies of the game and the other fans are like, “Oh, did you see that hit?” They go for the violence of the contact.

  I think being in L.A. had a lot to do with it, because when they were in L.A., more than any other place in the world, you are more likely to be viewed because of all the TV and movies, so anything that happens in that media epicenter gets out there. That was when a lot of rap groups came out. So a lot of the hip-hop generation back in the day were creating a rebel image, a public image of being tough, and a lot of it centered on the Raiders.

  I have a daughter, and I don’t think I would take my daughter to a Raiders game. The fans that go to Raiders games or even a lot of football fans in general go to release a lot of tension, release a lot of aggression, you know, in a nondamaging way, but it’s still loud and boisterous, and with the alcohol, some people get loaded on liquor, dope, or whatever. All of this is experienced at Raiders games. The bottom line is that a lot of people have different reasons for following the Raiders. The whole Raiders mystique may be a fallacy. It may just be a reasoning or justification to release a certain amount of animosity caused by societal pressures. But I think in a way it’s good because it gives people a proper release and I think that’s one thing sports has done in America overall. It gives people something on Sunday to think about other than the pressures of their jobs, their family, whatever may be going on in their lives. For three hours or so they can get caught up in something that is bigger than themselves, is bigger than a game, but is more like a way of life. You know, some of the youngsters follow the Raiders more than they do religion.

  As a fan from way back, for me it has to do with being from Oakland and having pride in where I live, “Commitment to Excellence,” you know. The Raiders are always the team of misfits who come together, come out there and play tough. I associate that with Oakland, the old shipyard town, a lot of military ties, an industrial town, you know. Although I would say that Oakland is in the midst of a change. Oakland is rebuilding projects, redeveloping, redesigning itself, redefining itself, and I think that because of the way the economy is going, the high cost of living, that Oakland is fast becoming a higher end place. But at the same time, Oakland is still a tough city. Oakland has a very high crime rate, high death rate, mainly among the African American and Latino populations. Jerry Brown has brought in a lot of businesses. Some people would argue that that has made it more expensive, but I think that would have happened anyways.

  I work for an organization associated with the Youth Employment Partnership, and basically what we do there is run a regional job-training program. [We serve people with a] low income in an enterprise zone, and the youth we serve are very diverse in ethnicity. A lot of them are for the Raiders. But they get frustrated sometimes. A lot of the problems probably have to do with the fact that they are on the lower economic level. They don’t have any way to get their feelings out or don’t know how to express themselves. With the economy in California and around the Bay Area the way it is, people that are true fans don�
�t have the $80, $90, or $100 to pay for one Raiders ticket. [But] again, some of the younger people aren’t into the sport or the team itself. A lot of them are just into the image of the bad boy that they put out there associated with the toughness of “I’m a Raider.”

  As for Al Davis, Mark was critical but philosophical, “[Al Davis] pays the cost to be the boss. A lot of the decisions he makes, I don’t agree with, but the Raiders are more than just a football team, they’re a business, and his main thing is to make money, and I could see how and why he would rather be in L.A., even though I wouldn’t like it myself.”

  Dennis, one of Mark and Michele’s colleagues, is another longtime Oakland resident and a Raiders fan. A trim, handsome man with a quick wit and endearing smile, Dennis was enthusiastic about sharing his thoughts with us over a couple of beers:I grew up in the Lake Shore area, and that area had a bar called Art’s with a pretty solid Raiders connection. They had post–Raiders game parties there. Art’s was one of the places where [the players] would go and hang out. The owner would take you out to the Coliseum to watch the game and take you back to Art’s. I mean, we would party until midnight after the game. The tailgate parties were with nice guys; there was a big Raiders fan thing. That bar isn’t around anymore.

  Why I’m a Raiders fan has a lot to do with me growing up here. I mean the bottom line is that Oakland was a tough city to grow up in and the social world in which you were raised, the tough environment, the schools. If you go to public schools it’s tough, and then the economic situation, the types of jobs available to you. Everything was just kind of hard in Oakland. And when you grow up here, you tend to be tougher because you feel like the tougher you are, the easier it is to survive in this kind of environment. And the Raiders represented the ultimate in tough, you know? When I was growing up, Jack Tatum was the hardest-hitting cat in football. And so in coming up, that toughness is the thing that gets you respect, you know: “I will back this up.” The Raiders were the manifestation of that whole philosophy. I admired it. Not just the defensive guys, but the offense with Ken Stabler, Lamonica. When you throw the bomb, you are in somebody’s face. Those cats invented the bomb.

  So that was a way that you never had to participate in anything violent in your life because the Raiders took care of that. It’s a feeling of revenge that you may feel. All that kind of stuff, it was taken care of. It was kind of an outlet. If you believe in something like the Raiders, it translates over to you as a person. If you believe you can walk into any type of situation and know you’re going to win and have that attitude you can approach all kinds of situations that way. School was always very easy for me because I had the attitude of, “Bring it on. I can handle anything.” And it was part and parcel of the fact that I like the Raiders, not just the Raiders, but the Raiders were definitely supportive of that philosophy. It was about overcoming adversity.

  When they played the Redskins in the Super Bowl, I just called a [random] number in the [D.C.] area code, and it was like two o’clock in the morning there, and I woke this cat up, and I started talking shit, and he says, “Who is this?” [I told him.] “I’m from Oakland, but it don’t matter who I am. We’re going to win.” And then the guy wakes up and says, “Oh man, you’re crazy. We’re going to kill you guys.” So I called him back the day of the Super Bowl and said, “Man, remember me? I called you at two in the morning a couple of nights ago and told you this would happen.” The guy couldn’t believe it. It was stuff like that, that outrageous attitude, with no harm intended. I didn’t have any malice. It was the excitement of, “Hey, here we are!” [The Raiders] were heroes in a lot of ways.

  In the pre-L.A. days there was a lot more loyalty because people knew [the players] as individuals. Nowadays they are just images on a TV set. People don’t get to see them anymore. The only thing we have now are sound bites or misquotes in the paper. The media is playing this role of divide and conquer. It goes in and takes the players apart and isolates somebody and tries to get them to give somebody up. They never used to do that kind of thing. The press was more in line with the fans back in the day. Now everybody is looking for an angle to exploit.

  [Back in the sixties and seventies] football wasn’t big money to the players. And some of them had businesses in Oakland—a laundry place, a bar. It was stuff to supplement their incomes. Lamonica had a restaurant where he would come and mix drinks. Jim Otto had a restaurant. Other players had liquor stores. They were part of the community. [Now] they’ve isolated themselves to the point where they are images to us. There is no connection. There needs to be some type of breaking down of that. They could go to schools. Why can’t the Raiders talk to schools in East Oakland? Why can’t they go to a high school football practice? They don’t have to do anything special.

  Dennis also spoke passionately about the community and the kids he serves as a lawyer helping out the Youth Employment Partnership with federal compliance issues, and then explained that his other career was as a jazz musician who has played with the Jerry Garcia Band and with other jazz and world music groups. The Grateful Dead/Raiders connection had come full circle, I thought to myself. We ended speaking a bit more about the nature of Raiders fans:Raiders fans get more outrageous than any other fans on the planet. You know, there are Raiders fans in Paris. There are Raiders fans all over the place. It is amazing. I would like stock in the merchandising of their stuff because you can get Raiders stuff anywhere on this planet. Wow! What is the image of the Raiders to a French person, you know?

  [Other teams don’t like to play here in Oakland] because they have to come and deal with the Raider Nation people. They come out of the locker room, people spit on them, throw beer on them. It is a tough place to play. It is because Oakland has that reputation for being tough. [The fans] are letting all that craziness out. It is like, here is a chance, you know, “On Sundays I can be crazy, people expect it. The more crazy I am, the better.” Do I get it out of my system? No. We might get into checking each other out. You gotta outdo the guys. It’s almost a competition: who can do more. And people let all their frustrations out. People go crazy. You can’t walk down the middle of the street stripping, you know, but you feel like you can do that at a Raiders game. As long as you’re a Raiders fan, you’re cool. It doesn’t matter what your thing is—your color, your sex, any of that kind of stuff goes out the window, man. If you’re a Raiders fan, the main thing is about being in the Black Hole.

  In terms of community spirit, this place came alive last year [during the Super Bowl run]. You walked around and if you had any kind of Raiders thing on, people would honk and wave, no matter where you were. People would honk and yell, “Go Raiders!” It was all over town. It was a good thing. I will tell you the truth, it’s like you marry your first love. You realize you can’t live without each other, but you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to live with each other, and there’s a certain amount of that here. I think this community wants to have a Raiders team. Of course [Al Davis] is going to burn you if you set yourself up, so you have to go in with that kind of understanding.

  The morning of the Raiders game against the San Diego Chargers, Kelly and I woke up in the hotel room and watched “Rush’s Challenge” on ESPN’s Monday Morning Countdown with horror and loathing. After Limbaugh had finished arguing that Donovan McNabb was the beneficiary of liberal media largess because “they have been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well,” I glanced at the paper and saw that things were going badly in Iraq and that the number of people living in poverty in the United States had increased for the second straight year. Oakland itself was thinking of privatizing sixty acres of public land, a move that harkens back to the days of Horace Carpentier, the city’s first brazen entrepreneurial pirate, who granted himself ownership of Oakland’s waterfront in the mid nineteenth century and made himself enormously rich. It was only 9:30 in the morning, and I needed a drink.2

  After breakfast and a Bloody Mary or two at the Fat Lady, we hit the BART and laughed as
the driver announced “Raider Nation Station” when our train pulled into the Coliseum stop. The “Join Arnold” crew was passing out campaign flyers on the pedestrian bridge on the way into the Coliseum, and I tore mine up and dropped it in front of an angry Arnoldista. Inside, our Black Hole neighbors greeted us and inquired about Kelly’s pregnancy, which, we told them, was going well. On a football note, we learned that Barret Robbins was back after his long journey through shame and injury. Good, I thought, he deserved a chance. The game was preceded by the usual profanity and heavy metal hoopla. Once it started, the Chargers’ LaDainian Tomlinson sliced through the Raiders’ defense like a hot knife through butter. Racking up 143 yards in the first half alone, he was off to a record-breaking pace. The Raiders “D” was Swiss cheese. It was 21–14 at halftime and the crowd booed the team off the field. The Raiderettes’ sad “Funky World” routine did little to change our grim mood. “Frisbee dogs!” called out one desperate fan, “Bring out the Frisbee dogs!” Mercifully, the halftime ended, but the game brought little solace. With the season on the verge of total implosion, the feeling in the Black Hole was somber. No matter how many people flipped off the Chargers, the Bolts just kept scoring. Losing to the hated Broncos in Denver was pretty bad, but getting whipped by the pathetic Chargers at home was enough to drive a steady trickle of my fellow fans out to the parking lot.