Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  While I ruminated about the old days, I thought of the famous line from Dr. Samuel Johnson, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

  As game day approached there were the requisite local news stories about the Raiders invasion, and one station interviewed a sports psychologist whose sage wisdom was that “fans of losing teams are more likely to vent their anger.” By this logic, I thought, Bengals fans must occupy half of an Ohio state penitentiary. Truly violent Raiders fans were a tiny minority, and most people with any sense could easily avoid conflict with them. In my sleepless delirium, I thought it might be useful to compose a list of guidelines for Chargers fans or others who feared for their safety. Something like “ten ways to avoid be pummeled by an angry Raiders fan.” With my lifetime of experience in Raider Nation I had observed a few things that I thought might help:1. Understand that aggressive Raiders fans, like the thanes in Beowulf, operate by the principle “wergild” or “man price,” which means that any insult or challenge to their pride must be answered in kind, otherwise they must forfeit their life or one of their relatives.

  2. Know that as good patriotic Americans, aggressive Raiders fans have also adopted the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes. Consequently, an angry fan may deem it necessary to take aggressive action as a way of stopping you from insulting them before you even have the chance to do so. They are generally unrepentant about faulty intelligence.

  3. Don’t call guys with tattooed tears on their faces “Fucking losers.” In fact, avoid using the f-word with them at all costs and consider not engaging them in conversation at all. Generally avoid eye contact.

  4. The tailgate is the mead hall. Respect the aggressive fan’s mead hall. Hosting the opponent’s flag next to a mead hall or carelessly strolling by in the enemy’s colors may be perceived as a direct challenge to Raider National Security. For God’s sake, stand down!

  5. Remember that even though only a very small percentage of Raiders fans are violent felons, even mild-mannered construction workers from Pacoima don’t take kindly to being flipped off and may have to kick your ass.

  6. Avoid slurs of all kinds, particularly those related to race and class. Remember that you are a mild-mannered suburbanite who works in an office park. You are not tough and 99 percent of Raiders fans can kick your ass. Even the women who you think are safe to flip off can beat you up.

  7. Your status as a security guard in a yellow windbreaker does not strike fear into the heart of Raider Nation. Don’t be an idiot or a bully or they will kick your ass.

  8. If the Raiders win, take the harassment from aggressive Raiders fans good-naturedly and you will win over your hated enemies. Otherwise, well, you know . . .

  9. Remember that, as the Center for Aggression Management explains, “It is . . . important to understand that aggression begins when any individual becomes unable to cope with their anxiety. At this juncture, the mind perceives this anxiety as a threat and the body responds by producing the fuel to aggression: adrenaline. Thus begins a spiral of aggression that can, all too often, result in violence. As spectators observe their favorite players conducting themselves in an aggressive way, they too become aggressive in the stands, especially when these elements are exacerbated with the introduction of alcohol. Contemporary research in the field of ‘mirror neurons’ has demonstrated that individuals watching an action movie experience to some degree the same fear and aggression as if they were actually experiencing that action. Whether athletes, spectators, vendors, participants in gaming establishments or worker-on-worker aggression, the Sport, Leisure & Entertainment Industries provide a prime setting for potential aggression.” Translation: If the Raiders lose, be afraid. Be very afraid.3

  10. It is not safe to cut off Raiders fans or flip them off from the alleged safety of your expensive land tank. The aggressive Raiders fan will happily jump over the median and kick off your side view mirror as punishment for this kind of infraction.

  On game day, I met my Raiders buddies Chuck, Hector, and Brad, as well as a few of their friends, in the parking lot before the sold-out Raiders–Chargers game. Here I was, back at the scene of the crime, where the hideous nightmare that was 2003 for the Raiders began. There was a kind of evil symmetry to it, but I was disengaged, still basking in the afterglow of my son’s birth. After some beer and doughnuts, I left my friends to do one last tour of the tailgates and found my Silver and Black brethren to be in remarkably good spirits, despite the Raiders’ dire circumstances. It was four hours before the game and the lot was full with Raiders fans clearly outnumbering Chargers adherents. I ran into a nice Filipino family, two parents with two cute little girls, all decked out in Raiders gear. Their dad, a navy man who was riding a tiny bike, had a big Raiders tattoo on his upper arm and told me that he was trying to start a Raiders fan club in Okinawa. After the family, I ran into some people I’d met in the Black Hole who’d driven their motor home down from Oakland and a bunch of guys who’d come down from East L.A. It was a beautiful day and the mood was festive. There wasn’t a hassle in sight. When I came upon the San Bernardino Raiders Fan Club group, one of the members told me, “It’s not about winning and losing. It’s about family. We’re about family.” Not a very scary crew, I thought.

  At one point, a police car rolled up and when I asked for a comment on Raiders fans from the cops, they told me to turn the tape recorder off, but then one of them said:I don’t think this game lives up to the hype. There is a spike in fights, but I just think it’s the proximity between the two cities. Back in Philly, where I’m from, the rivalries are similar. Here in San Diego, they almost never win, so people blow this game up. It’s a big thing for Chargers fans every year, but I’d say Raiders fans are no worse than Vikings fans or any other fans. Maybe a little bit more fired up, but not that bad. I don’t know what it is exactly, but people make a big deal out of this game, more than they should.

  I thought it was interesting to hear this from a cop who, unlike the local media, actually had to deal with the rough stuff. It confirmed my theory that when one factors in the good, the bad, and the ugly, Raiders fans are indeed not nearly as nasty as their reputation. Everybody has their crazy story, but, for the most part, Raiders fans are pretty good people. The real dirty secret of Raider Nation may be that the majority of Silver and Black fans are average working-and middle-class people who enjoy basking in the Raiders mystique and having a little tongue-in-cheek fun on the weekend. And Raiders fans like to party hard and let it all hang out. But while many of them might enjoy their status as urban folk devils, they are nothing compared to the Chicago Cubs fans of 1900 who celebrated a 4th of July double header with fire crackers and gunfire, yelling “Load! Load at will! Fire!” when the Cubbies won. As has been noted previously, the occasional violence at Raiders games is not historically unique in America, nor does it come close to the wreckage left by their European or South American sports fan counterparts. What the existing violence does threaten to do, however, is kill the party for everyone, since the fear of the unruly crowd fuels the puritans and the enemies of free public space who want to turn every corner of America into a lame, boring G-rated movie with a heavy police presence.4

  Back at our tailgate, my friends were hitting the tequila and chatting it up with the group next to us who had driven up from L.A. By the time we were ready to get to our seats, the line to get in was wrapped halfway around the stadium. As our bladders filled to painful levels and the line moved at a snail’s pace, I noticed security personnel with cameras standing on top of the entrance above the crowd. I thought back to the Super Bowl nightmare as the minutes ticked away relentlessly. Chuck and I had gotten separated from the rest of the group and, after an hour and a half, we had missed most of the first quarter. It was clear that the Orange Alert combined with the Raiders invasion had inspired the authorities to make everyone’s life miserable in order to keep us safe from one another. For a moment, I had the temerity to be outraged that I had paid good money for t
his privilege. I wondered if herding cranky football fans like cattle on the way to slaughter was an effective aggression management strategy. After the first quarter ended and we were just about to call it a day and go listen to the game on the radio, the gate appeared before us. Chuck, who was a little buzzed but far from a menace, gave me an “I love you man” hug in celebration as we approached the elusive gate. Then he almost tripped on a cord that was taped to the ground and had to steady himself on the rail by the entrance. That was it. The SDPD swooped in and cuffed him, no questions asked. When I asked what was going on, the cop said, “You want to go with him?”

  After the game, Chuck reported that the cops had kept him in handcuffs in the holding cell in the bowels of the stadium for four hours without allowing him to pee or telling him why he was there. Some of our Raiders brethren were less polite, kicking the walls, and cursing the cops for the whole time. I spent the second quarter looking for a pay phone so I could call Chuck’s wife and let her know what had happened. It certainly didn’t seem like a good idea to risk talking to the cops. After I got a hold of Sharon, I went to my seat to watch the Raiders lose the game 21–14 to the Chargers. It was a fitting end to a nightmare of a season. On the way out, I heard a woman in a Chargers jersey say, “Now I can tell that Raiders bitch at work, ‘Fuck you!’” For the first time in several years, I didn’t see a single fight. The Prison Entertainment Complex, it seemed, was a rousing success.

  The next day I read that Charles Woodson and Charlie Garner had missed a team meeting and that Coach Callahan had benched them just before the game, nearly provoking an unprecedented team walkout. This might have been a better way to go down as the Raiders’ only scores came from kick runbacks in a game where third-string quarterback Rick Mirer was forced out due to an injury, leaving the team in near-total chaos. It was a marvel that they lost by only 7 points. “They quit playing for him,” a Raiders official said of the team’s reaction to Callahan’s move, “You saw that today.” As the Oakland Tribune put it, “Call it a mercy killing.” With the games out the way, the soap opera continued as speculation raged about which players would leave and when Callahan would be fired and who would replace him. Raider Nation had fallen apart. It was the worst collapse of any Super Bowl team in NFL history, and they didn’t even earn the first draft pick. Nonetheless, we knew that, as the last group of fans I spoke with in the parking lot said, “We’ll be back.”5

  The Decline and Fall of Raider Nation?

  Sadly for the small, rain-drenched contingent of 31,000 Raider Nation diehards who endured the Silver and Black’s ugly 13–6 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars in their final game of the 2004 season, the pride-and-poise boys did not come back. Instead, they let Hall of Fame shoe-ins Tim Brown and Jerry Rice go and the team went nowhere. Having lost starting quarterback Rich Gannon in the third game of the season, the Kerry Collins–led Raiders faltered badly, finishing 5–11 to complete the worst back-to-back pair of seasons in team history. After the Raiders finally exorcised the 2003 Super Bowl demons by defeating Jon Gruden’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers in front of a delirious sellout crowd in Oakland to start out 2–1, Collins threw interception after interception in the games that followed, and the defense bled points all year long in loss after loss. Midway through the season, in the second quarter of yet another brutal home field pummeling at the hands of the hated Denver Broncos, the soggy sellout crowd of Raider Nation loyalists let the team have it and kept booing all game long as the Raiders were humiliated by the Broncos 31–3 in a hellish mud bath. Never have I heard a hometown quarterback being booed as loudly and relentlessly as Collins was that day. “Our fans sucked,” whined Raider Barry Sims after the game. It was, as the Oakland Tribune’s Monte Poole put it, “Raiders vs. Raider Nation.”6

  While Sims and other Raiders would later make nice and Collins would begin to play better, the boos continued all year long along with chants of “Tui! Tui!” (for backup quarterback Marques Tuiasosopo) every time the offense faltered. Besides the Broncos game in Oakland, other 2004 lowlights included losing to the hapless New Orleans Saints at home, getting absolutely crushed by the San Diego Chargers on the road, and blowing late leads to the archrival Kansas City Chiefs in a pair of home-and-away choke jobs, the latter one on Christmas day in front of a national television audience. Only a stunning upset of the Broncos in a blizzard in Denver stood out as a beacon of hope in the dark night of the soul that the last two seasons had become for the Raider faithful. Well, that and the emergence of bootleg “Revolutionary Raider” t-shirts featuring the iconic image of Che Guevera in a black beret sporting a pirate shield.

  Off the field, Raider Nation suffered further. Late in that ill-fated season, excessive revelers were targeted during a police dragnet dubbed “Just Drive Sober, Baby” that yielded thirty-one drunk drivers, twenty-one unlicensed drivers, fifty-two impounded cars, a kidnapper, and one loaded .357 caliber handgun. In the courtroom, Al Davis was handed another defeat when a judge ruled that the McGah descendants had rightfully inherited a partnership in the Raider franchise, virtually guaranteeing future legal squabbles over revenue. The players, however, both present and former, were engaged in the most dramatic fiascos. Raiders defensive standouts Charles Woodson and Marques Anderson were busted for public intoxication near Oakland’s Jack London Square in December, raising the spectre of a second NFL drug policy offense for the superstar Woodson. The Raider soap opera continued as troubled ex-Raider All Pro center Barret Robbins was arrested in San Francisco for punching a guard at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel after the man brought Robbins the glass of water he requested; the guard had found him wandering near the Starlight Room Bar on the 21st floor of the hotel at 7:00 a.m. It appeared that Robbins’s emergence from the depths of his bipolar disorder and alcoholism had been short-lived, as only weeks later he was shot and seriously wounded in a tragic confrontation with Miami police.7

  If all of this was not enough, the bizarre arrest of ex-Raider kicker Cole Ford for a drive-by shootup of famous Las Vegas illusionists Siegfried and Roy’s compound rounded out the 2004 Raider rap sheet. Ford, who left football soon after losing his job with the Raiders, quickly went on a downward spiral into homelessness and schizophrenia. Living on and off in cheap Vegas strip motels and occasionally camping in the desert, Ford’s strange behavior first resulted in his being banned from the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino for scribbling notes on paper while apparently plotting a lawsuit against the establishment that demanded he be paid for every bet the sports book had accepted on every college and professional game in which he had played. After losing the suit, Ford went on to pump four shotgun blasts into the magicians’ mansion from the safety of a white minivan while yelling, “We need to get these [expletive deleted] out of our country!” No one was injured, however, and the police have ruled out a hate crime against magicians or Germans as a motive. Upon his capture, the once clean-cut USC grad’s mug shot evoked comparisons to Charles Manson and the Unabomber. As of this writing, Ford’s attorneys are contemplating an insanity defense. The placekicker’s NFL decline began when, in 1996, he missed a chip-shot field goal against Tampa Bay that lost the game and knocked the Raiders out of the playoffs. Perhaps the unfriendly sign posted by Raider Nation in the Coliseum at a subsequent game signaled his impending run of bad luck. It read: “FORD=Found On Road Dead.”8

  All of this seems to add up to some seriously bad mojo for Raider Nation as the team emerges from yet another horrendous season just in time to try to convince their beleaguered personal seat license holders to renew them for 75 percent of the original cost. Will Raiders season ticket holders sign up for another ten years of this torture? The jury remains out. With many fans realizing how much cheaper it is to purchase tickets to one or two big games a year and watch the rest on TV (or listen on the radio if it’s not sold out), it might take a miracle to resell them all. Even if this happens, the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum complex would still be almost $100 million in debt. Hence, it seems harder and harder to imag
ine a new golden era for Oakland Raiders football. Still, the faith persists. Many of our Black Hole neighbors insist they’ll be back even if the team isn’t. As we marveled at the generosity of our Raiders fan cohorts who gave up their dry seats to stand in a cold pouring rain so we could sit under the overhang with our year-old baby at the Jacksonville game, I surrendered to hope. Maybe the Norv Turner era would bring back the glory years after all. Sure, Kerry Collins’s multiple gut-wrenching interceptions and drive-killing fumbles were not encouraging, but the young receivers were promising. If we could only pick up a durable running back and entirely retool the league’s worst defense. It seemed impossible, but as veteran safety Ray Buchanon put it, “In this organization, the weirdest thing that can happen usually happens. So you never know what’s going to happen.”9

  Afterword

  Rebels of Oakland

  So what, after all, is the meaning of Raider Nation? What would fuel fans to come back after such a miserable season? To put it in academic terms, Raider Nation is a polysemic signifier, a symbol that means different things to different people. When fans put on the pirate shield, they imagine that it stands for hyper-masculinity, bad girl flair, street toughness, working-class pride, gangster menace, Oakland pride, Los Angeles pride, ethnic identity, rebellion, persistence, a strong work ethic, cut-throat competitiveness, family tradition, freedom, individuality, community, hegemonic domination, seventies nostalgia, ironic affiliation with the bad guys, old school football, a social Darwinist corporate ethos, a countercultural party scene, a sign of the little guy, the outsider getting one over on the favorite sons, and any number of other things.