by Jim Miller
9 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 287.
10 As Dunning puts it: “In short, in modern societies, sport has come to be important in the identification of individuals with the collectivities to which they belong; that is, in the formation and expression of their “we-feelings” and “we-I” balances. Through their identification with a sports team, people can express their identification with the city that it represents or perhaps with a particular subgroup within it such as a class or ethnic group. There is even reason to believe that, in the context of complex, fluid, and relatively impersonal modern industrial society, membership of or identification with a sports team can provide people with an important identity-prop, a source of “we feelings” and a sense of belonging in what would otherwise be an isolated existence within what Riesman . . . called the ‘lonely crowd.’” (Eric Dunning, Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization, [London: Routledge, 1999], 6)
11 Ibid.
12 As Rowe observes, “A ‘values vacuum’ has been created whereby many people feel alienated, no longer believing deeply in anything, identifying with anyone, or feeling committed to any cause outside the immediate interests of themselves and their immediate relatives. An opening exists, therefore, for enterprising parties to engage in the ‘consciousness’ trade . . . to help supply the meaning and commitment that rapid social change under late modernity or postmodernity has evacuated from many lives. But what phenomenon has the emotional force to bind symbolically the fragmenting constituents of society, especially where there is abundant critical self-reflection, cynicism and a seeming ‘exhaustion’ of novelty? Not surprisingly, the answer is . . . media sport.” (David Rowe, Sport, Culture, and the Media: The Unruly Trinity, [Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999], 69)
13 Rowe, Sport, 70; Dunning, Sport Matters, 6.
14 Oakland Tribune, Jan. 19, 2003.
15 Oriard, King Football, 148, 219–20, 221, 345.
16 Dunning insightfully argues that “in the everyday life of the relatively ‘civilized’ advanced industrial societies of today, routines and controls . . . tend to be conducive to the regular generation, not only of simple boredom but, perhaps more importantly, of feelings of emotional ‘staleness’ as well.” Consequently, many people turn to sports as “a search for pleasurable and de-routinizing emotional arousal.” Sports delivers this kind of “de-routinizing emotional arousal,” as Dunning puts it, big time. Thus the rush of feeling may come from Raiders quarterback Rich Gannon scrambling for a game-winning touchdown or from watching him writhe in pain beneath fat Baltimore Ravens defender Tony Siragusa in the 2002 AFC Championship game, but the intensity of the true fan’s state of being at such moments is undeniable. Dunning outlines the contours of the sports fan’s emotional landscape as follows: “Sports can also be said to be a form of non-scripted, largely nonverbal theatre, and emotional arousal can be enhanced by spectacular presentation, the emotional ‘contagion’ which derives from being part of a large, expectant crowd, and from the ‘performances’ which spectators and not just athletes put on.” Of particular note here is Dunning’s comparison of sports and “theatre” in that it illustrates both how knowledge of the formal aspects of the performance enhances the spectators’ pleasure and how one must “suspend disbelief ” in order to fully engage the show. His reference to the emotional “contagion” of the crowd is central since it addresses the fundamentally collective nature of sports consumption and the central role of that collective emotional expression in fans’ connection to sports. Dunning’s point about the performances that spectators put on is crucial as well. (Dunning, Sport Matters, 3)
17 Dunning goes on to say, “In order, as it were, for the ‘gears’ of one’s passions fully to engage, one has to be committed, to want to win, either as a direct participant for one’s own sake because one’s identity is at stake, or as a spectator because one identifies with one of the individual performers or competing teams.” Questions of identity and identification are of critical importance both for the routine functioning of sports and for some of the problems recurrently generated in connection with them. (Dunning, Sport Matters, 3)
18 Ibid., 4–5.
19 Glen Dickey, Just Win, Baby: Al Davis and His Raiders (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1991), 167.
20 John Matusak with Steve Delson, Cruisin’ with the Tooz (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987), 209; Dickey, Just Win, 189; Jim Plunkett and Dave Newhouse, The Jim Plunkett Story: The Saga of a Man Who Came Back (New York: Arbor House, 1981), 221; Ira Simmons, Black Knight: Al Davis and His Raiders (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima Publishing, 1990), 202 and 198; John Lombardo, Raiders Forever: Stars of the NFL’s Most Colorful Team Recall Their Glory Days (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2001), 1.
21 Lombardo, Raiders Forever, 7; Simmons, Black Knight, 197; Mark Ribowsky, Slick: The Silver and Black Life of Al Davis (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 277.
22 Simmons, Black Knight, 316-17; Ribowsky, Slick, 341.
23 Lombardo, Raiders Forever, 7.
24 Oakland Tribune, July 2, 2003, July 1, 2003, May 23, 2003; Simmons Black Knight, 298.
25 Oakland Tribune, May 23, 2003, Aug. 15, 2003.
26 By this time the trial had been moved to Sacramento, California.
27 Oakland Tribune, Aug. 5–7, 2003, Aug. 15, 2003, Aug. 17, 2003, Aug. 27–30, 2003; San Jose Mercury News, Aug. 11, 2003; San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 27, 2003, Aug. 30, 2003; www.raiders.com, accessed Aug. 26, 2003.
28 San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 27, 2003; Oakland Tribune, Aug. 29–31, 2003, Sept. 1, 2003, Nov. 12, 2003, Dec. 30, 2003, Feb. 5, 2004, March 16, 2004. As of this writing, there has still been no final resolution in this case.
29 Oakland Tribune, Oct. 10, 2003, Oct. 29, 2003, Nov. 14, 2003, April 3, 2004; San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 27, 2003, Oct. 16, 2003.
30 Ribowsky, Slick, 294.
31 Dickey, Just Win, 249.
32 As cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall once pointed out about the way people consume the ideology that comes with televised media, some people swallow the “dominant-hegemonic” message (or party line) whole, others take an “oppositional” position and resist the message, and many more in the middle negotiate a position that accepts some of the ideology while rejecting other aspects of it. Transferring this model from the realm of television consumption to the realm of football fandom helps illustrate how the “meanings” of football are not totally constructed by the game’s owners and then unproblematically accepted by the fans. We will not argue, as some cultural studies scholars have, that the consumption of popular culture (in this case sports) constitutes an act of serious political agency, but on the other hand, it is not simply indoctrination either. (Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, [New York: Routledge, 1993], 90–103)
33 Los Angeles Times, Dec. 2, 1995.
34 San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 22, 2003.
35 Ribowsky, Slick, 316; Dickey, Just Win, 245.
36 Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (London: Verso, 2000), 43–4.
37 Chris Pink, “End Zone 67,” Raider Mystique, Jan. 10, 2003, available from www.nflfans.com/raiders/article, accessed July 17, 2003.
38 Dick Hebdige, “Subculture,” in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (London: Routledge, 1997), 130.
39 Ibid.
40 Hebdige, “Subculture,” 131; Dickey, Just Win, 239, 246; Simmons, Black Knight, 270; Jo Sparkes, “Horsehair Jerseys,” Arizona Sports Fans Network, Nov. 27, 2002, available from www.arizonasportsfans.com/storypage, accessed May 25, 2003; Oakland Tribune, Nov. 17, 2003; for his discussion of class consciousness and “Otherness,” see also Hebdige, “Subculture,” 133.
41 Hebdige, “Subculture,” 139.
42 Rowe, Sport, 162.
43 Ibid., 68.
44 Ibid., 70.
Chapter 1: Bin Laden Is a
Raider Fan
1 Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992), 26.
2 Hunter S. Thompson, “Back in the Day,” www.espn.com, April 21, 2003, available from http://espn.go.com/page2/s/Thompson, accessed July 7, 2003; Thompson, “The Last Super Bowl.”
3 San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan. 22, 2003 and Jan. 25, 2003; “INS Kicks Off ‘Operation Game Day’: Agents Arrest Dozens in Security Sweep Tied to Super Bowl,” World Net Daily, January 24, 2003, available from http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news, accessed July 31, 2003.
4 Plant, Radical Gesture, 26.
5 Oakland Tribune, Jan. 30, 2003.
6 San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan. 28, 2003; Oakland Tribune, Jan. 27, 2003; Jan. 28, 2003; Feb. 2, 2003; June 12, 2003.
Chapter 2: Oakland’s Burning
1 John Krich, Bump City: Winners and Losers in Oakland (Berkeley, Calif.: City Miner, 1979), 71; Gary Rivlin, Drive By (London: Quartet Books, 1996), 11.
2 Beth Bagwell, Oakland: The Story of a City (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1982), 205–6; Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 83, 84.
3 Abbie Wasserman, ed., The Spirit of Oakland (Carlsbad, N.M.: Heritage Media Corporation, 2000), 89.
4 Rivlin, Drive By, 35–6; Wasserman, Spirit, 89, 87, and 79; Ishmael Reed, Blues City (New York: Crown, 2003), 87; Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 199.
5 Oakland Tribune, July 18, 2003; Rhomberg, There, 184, 199; Rivlin, Drive By, 19.
6 Oakland Tribune, June 3, 2003; July 25, 2003.
7 Oakland Tribune, June 16, 2003.
8 Oakland Tribune, June 28, 2003, May 14, 2003, July 27, 2003; Rhomberg, There, 186.
9 James Diego Vigil, A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 20, 22, 26.
10 San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 21, 2003.
11 San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 27, 2003; Oakland Tribune, Jan. 27, 2003; ER, “OPD Uses Tear Gas in Post–Super Bowl Maneuvers,” www.sf.indymedia.org, Jan. 27, 2003, available from http://sf.indymedia.org/news, accessed July 3, 2003; San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 20, 2003; Oakland Tribune, Jan. 28, 2003.
12 San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 27, 2003; San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 26, 2003; San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 27, 2003; www.sf.indymedia.org, Jan. 27, 2003.
13 Oakland Tribune, Jan. 28, 2003, Feb. 1, 2003.
14 Krich, Bump City, 75; Johnson, Gold Rush, 168; Ishmael Reed, “Living at Ground Zero,” Image, March 13, 1988, 11; Ishmael Reed, Airing Dirty Laundry (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 102; Oakland Tribune, July 17, 2003; July 2, 2003, June 26, 2003, July 29, 2003, Sept. 9, 2003, Oct. 1, 2003, Oct. 2, 2003, Nov. 1, 2003.
15 Oakland Tribune, Jan. 31, 2003.
16 Ibid.
17 Oakland Tribune, Feb. 6, 2003.
18 www.sf.indymedia.org, Jan. 27, 2003 and Jan. 28, 2003.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Rhomberg, There, 54, 56–57, 99.
22 Johnson, Gold Rush, 169; Bagwell, Oakland, 240–41.
23 Johnson, Gold Rush, 165.
24 Amory Bradford, Oakland’s Not for Burning (New York: David McKay, 1968), 2, 6.
25 Ibid., 191.
26 Ibid., 200–1.
27 Ibid., 212.
28 Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron B. Wildavsky, Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 4, 5, xi, 154,149–51; Rhomberg, There, 169.
29 Rhomberg, There, 184.
30 Reed, Airing Dirty Laundry, 213.
31 Vigil, Rainbow, 168–9; East Bay Express, July 23, 2003.
32 Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, and So Much More (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 72.
33 Dunning, Sport Matters, 170-73.
34 Dunning, Sport Matters, 172; Bill Buford, Among the Thugs (New York: Vintage, 1993), 205, 249.
35 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (New York: Penguin, 1960), 16, 32, 30.
36 Jean Baudrillard, “The Mirror of Terrorism,” in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London: Verso, 1993), 76, 75; Oakland Tribune, Jan. 28, 2003; Baudrillard, “Mirror,” 75.
37 Baudrillard, “Mirror,” 76, 76–77; Oakland Tribune, Feb. 1, 2003.
38 Oakland Tribune, Jan. 27, 2003; Baudrillard, “Mirror,” 77.
39 Baudrillard, “Mirror,” 79, 80; www.sf.indymedia.org, Jan. 27, 2003 and Jan. 28, 2003.
Chapter 3: We Are Everywhere
1 Oakland Tribune, March 10, 2003.
2 Rowe, Sport, 168.
3 www.silverandblackattack.com.
4 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 173, 175, 176, 178.
5 Tom Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan, 2004), 113.
6 www.knumbskullrecords.com.
7 www.roxie77.com/blackout/lyrics.
8 www.cdbaby.com/cd/deadriver.
9 www.smokealotrecords.com.
10 Luniz, “Oakland Raiders,” Silver and Black, compact disk, Rap-A-Lot Records, 2002.
11 San Francisco Chronicle, June 16, 2003.
Chapter 4: Training Camp
1 Rob Huizenga, “You’re Okay, It’s Just a Bruise”: A Doctor’s Sideline Secrets about Pro Football’s Most Outrageous Team (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 92, 105; Lombardo, Raiders Forever, 116.
2 Ken Stabler and Berry Stainback, Snake: The Candid Autobiography of Football’s Most Outrageous Renegade (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986), 76; Lombardo, Raiders Forever, 64, 184, 108; Ribowsky, Slick, 193, 225–6; Jack Tatum with Bill Kushner, They Call Me Assassin (New York: Everest House, 1979), 39.
3 Joe Queenan, True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 54.
Chapter 5: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
1 Oakland Tribune, August 8, 2003.
2 www.singhshady.net.
3 Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” 75–6.
4 Krich, Bump City, 77.
Chapter 6: Crying Won’t Help
1 Reed, Blues City, 28, 183; Lee Hildebrand and Michelle Vignes, Bay Area Blues (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1993), 8; Albert Vetere Lannon, Fight or Be Slaves: The History of the Oakland-East Bay Labor Movement (New York: University Press of America, 2000), 96.
2 Rivlin, Drive By, 4; Reed, Blues City, 20–22; Oakland Tribune, Aug. 20, 2003, Sept. 1, 2003, Sept. 3, 2003.
3 Sadly, the 2000 return of the blues to Oakland would last only a few more months: Eli’s has changed hands twice as of this writing and is no longer a blues club.
4 East Bay Express, Aug. 20, 2003.
5 Oakland Tribune, Aug. 21, 2003, Aug. 24, 2003, Aug. 26, 2003, Aug. 27, 2003, Aug. 29, 2003. Aug. 31, 2003; San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 26, 2003.
Chapter 7: At Ricky’s
1 Lawrence Wenner, “In Search of the Sports Bar,” in Sport and Postmodern Times, ed. Genevieve Rail (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 324–8.
2 Ibid., 318–22.
3 Ibid., 302.
4 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 113.
Chapter 8 Working-Class Heroes
The chapter epigraphs are from Robert O. Self, “California’s Industrial Garden: Oakland and the East Bay in the Age of Deindustrialization,” 178, in Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, ed. Jefferson Cowrie and Joseph Heathcott (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003); Joe Blum, “Degradation without Deskilling: Twenty-five Years in the San Francisco Shipyards,” in Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, ed. Michael Burawoy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 129–30; and Renay Jackson, Oaktown Devil (Oakland: La Day Publish
ing, 1998), 10–11.
1 Rhomberg, There, 74, 106, 107, 111; Lannon, Fight or Be Slaves, 108–11; George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 150.
2 Self, “California’s Industrial Garden,” 165, 177.
3 Oakland Tribune, Sept. 14, 2003.
4 Oakland Tribune, Sept. 15, 2003 and Sept. 16, 2003.
Chapter 9: Raiders Rage
1 David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates (New York: Random House, 1995), 241.
2 New York Times, Sept. 26, 2003 and Sept. 28, 2003; Oakland Tribune, Sept. 28, 2003 and Oct. 2, 2002.
3 Oakland Tribune, Sept. 29, 2003.
Chapter 10: Monday Night Lights
1 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “From Carnival to Transgression,” in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (London: Routledge, 1997), 294–5, 296, 297.
2 Oakland Tribune, Nov. 17, 2003.
3 Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999), 158, 205.
4 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 99.
5 Ibid., 98–9, 99, 104–5
6 Dunning, Sport Matters, 1–2.
7 Michael Oriard, review of Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Mother Jones Magazine (September 1999).
8 Oakland Tribune, Oct. 21, 2003.
