AL DAVIS & THE RAIDERS MYSTIQUE
He is the Bay Area's own Darth Vader; a powerful villain, both feared and respected. But his contributions to football and to the identity
of Oakland are undeniable. Here is a look beneath the shield, into the heart of a warrior.
Good Morning, Mr. Davis. ‘Hello.’ How are you Feeling? ‘We’ll See!’ Behold Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders and their quick-strike, “vertical” passing game were so successful that, over four decades, the team put together the best winning percentage in the N.F.L. And Al Davis was both the source and the beneficiary of that success, for no owner inhabits a sports franchise as thoroughly as he does. Davis has been with the Raiders for 43 of the team’s 47 seasons. He has been to five Super Bowls and won three times. He has been the team’s head coach, its general manager and its managing general partner. (Davis acquired a small ownership stake in 1966, then leveraged it into control of the team.) He minted the team’s muscular catchphrases — “just win, baby,” “pride and poise,” “commitment to excellence” — and he chose its silver-and-black uniforms. (Davis, as it happens, is colorblind.) Davis spends most of his time in his Oakland aerie; “I’m not really part of society,” he once said. Steve Ortmayer, who worked for Davis for 14 years as an assistant coach and director of football operations, says: “His life is the Raiders. That’s not a statement to be taken lightly, like a lot of people’s life is what they do. It’s to an extent that he has never taken a day off from the Raiders. Never.”
This makes Davis the last practitioner of a classical style of sports management you might call personality-driven football. As perfected by Paul Brown of the Cincinnati Bengals and George Halas of the Chicago Bears, personality-driven football is the psychological joining of owner and team. Davis flouted league decorum in the front office; the Raiders flouted it on the field. But in the new N.F.L. — which, in his charmingly out-of-time way, Davis has likened to I.B.M. — teams tend to be owned by captains of industry and are no more an extension of their owners’ personalities than their fast-food franchises or theme parks or used-car empires. Davis, on the other hand, has no other business. “We’re not a club where the owner was in the widget business,” says Amy Trask, the Raiders’ C.E.O. Davis pours everything he has into the Raiders.
Davis’s football intelligence was never so much a matter of x’s and o’s as a cultural consciousness that Davis has called his “gestalt.” The Raiders were a peculiar mixture of Davis’s desires. Well into the 1960s and ’70s, pro football retained a militaristic snap. George Plimpton, the journalist and erstwhile quarterback, wrote that the ’60s were “so violent that it is impossible to accept the metaphor of football, and its popularity, without wondering whether it reflects some of the country’s excesses.” As a student of foreign affairs going back to the Third Reich, Davis plundered the association with gusto. For years, the game-day schedule he distributed to the team listed 1 o’clock — game time — as “We go to war!” Military metaphors abounded: the N.F.L.-A.F.L. merger of 1970, which Davis initially opposed, reminded him of the agreement at Yalta; he issued statements like “The guerrilla wins if he doesn’t lose.” Howie Long, a defensive end who studied history at Villanova, found that after his indoctrination with Davis he began imagining the team’s practice center in Alameda as a fortress city in the hills of Cortona, something to be defended at all costs.
But the hard line Davis took in metaphor disguised a more liberal heart, an almost tender inclusiveness. What we tend to remember as the bad-boy Oakland Raiders — the “mélange of odds and ends, oddities and irregulars, factory seconds and seeming chain-gang escapees,” as the writer Mark Ribowsky put it — was in fact an early template for modern professional football. It is well known that Davis provided feed and care to troubled souls like Alzado and Matuszak. It is less well known that Davis was among the first wave of owners to scout the historically black colleges, from which he pulled, for example Art Shell, the rumbler on the left side of his offensive line. Davis could look at a castoff and see a future star, like Jim Plunkett, who had been cut by the San Francisco Forty-Niners, or Todd Christensen, a washed-up fullback whom Davis converted into a rangy tight end. If Davis was more paranoid and combative than other owners — he has sued the N.F.L. numerous times — his players looked upon him as unconcerned with reputation or conventional wisdom. “The truth of it is I’d been cut twice and had tryouts for four teams,” Todd Christensen told me, “so he could have been Khameini or Osama bin Laden for all I cared.”
The mix the Raiders achieved was revolutionary, and Davis managed a number of historic firsts. He became the first owner to draft an African-American quarterback in the first round, Eldridge Dickey, way back in 1968. He made Art Shell the first African-American head coach in the modern era; he made Tom Flores the first Hispanic coach. Amy Trask is the first woman to serve as chief executive of an N.F.L. team. In the 1960s, Davis moved two games out of segregated cities in the deep South when he learned the stands and local hotels would be segregated. “I just think he is absolutely unencumbered by prejudice of any type,” Trask says.
Davis wasn’t simply attempting a demographic shift but wholesale behavioral modification. In the 1970s, some N.F.L. teams were still enforcing a ludicrous, top-down propriety — the rival Kansas City Chiefs, for example, required players to wear red blazers when they traveled together. The Raiders would have none of it. “These are the greatest athletes in the world,” John Madden once said. “They’re like artists. And if you take their creativity away from them by making them robotic, then they’re going to play like robots.”
The Raiders’ ethic was organic and bottom-up. Sometime in the 1970s, Jim Plunkett and Fred Biletnikoff began sitting on their helmets during practice. There was nothing particularly special about sitting on your helmet other than most other teams in the league wouldn’t let you do it, and for the player it conveyed a certain psychic benefit.
The Raiders’ idea of a mandatory team function was “Camaraderie,” a Thursday-night drinking session masterminded by some of the more intimidating members of the offensive and defensive lines. (At Super Bowl XV in New Orleans, in 1981, the Raiders moved Camaraderie to the French Quarter, and they encircled and shared liter-size Hurricanes as if they were standing in a huddle.) The Raiders were not unfamiliar with Northern California’s counterculture scene. Linebacker Chip Oliver left the team to live in a commune. Linebacker Phil Villapiano was beaten senseless by a group of Hell’s Angels in a bar fight. Gene Upshaw kibitzed with Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and other members of the Black Panthers at one of Upshaw’s Oakland bars. Seale and Newton, Upshaw says, were Raiders fans, because they admired the team’s fierce sense of loyalty.
Indeed, it is tempting to regard the team Davis cobbled together as the N.F.L.’s first radical political organization, with a militant ethos and an open-minded approach toward membership. “Al always felt the enormity of the Raiders, the mystique of the Raiders, could control players, because players wanted to fit into that mystique,” Steve Ortmayer says. A more conventional owner might have insisted on a few nods to decorum: coats and ties on the team plane, no fraternizing with the Panthers. But Davis’s refusal to commit to a moral code other than “just win, baby” helped him juggle all the heterogeneity. Excluding anyone on the basis of race or attitude might cost him a player and give another owner an edge. Davis had an expansive vision of what could make a football team. What other teams craved, the Raiders had in spades: camaraderie.
What changed was not so much Davis losing his touch as the rest of the league catching up. Two events leveled the playing field. One was the N.F.L.’s belated adoption of more expansive free agency and a salary cap in 1993. As Ortmayer puts it, this was a problem “because it broke down the ability of Al to run the operation totally as a family.” Suddenly the Raiders’ camaraderie had less appeal than the big contract. The other change was that the N.F.L. became more like the Raiders. The N.F.L. now has African-American coaches like Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith and African-American quarterbacks like Steve McNair and Vince Young. The remnants of faux-military culture have given way to a relaxed atmosphere that can accommodate even those players with “attitude” problems. Randy Moss, whom the Raiders acquired from Minnesota in 2005, quit on the team last season; he suggested in a radio interview, unwisely but perhaps not incorrectly, that “there’s a lot of funny things going on around here in this organization.” When the Raiders traded Moss to New England this spring, it was a measure of how the N.F.L. has evolved that the wonkish and corporate Patriots, rather than the Raiders, were thought to provide a nurturing environment in which a provocateur like Moss could flourish.
Davis’s cultural innovations had been integrated into the N.F.L.’s mother brain. And thanks to further measures like harsh punishments for on- and off-the-field transgressions, the league has entered a period where there’s very little cultural difference between the franchises. “The gap between the smartest owner and the dumbest owner is much narrower than it was a generation ago,” says Michael MacCambridge, the author of “America’s Game,” a history of professional football. This change has proved beneficial for historically benighted franchises like the Arizona Cardinals and disastrous for once-smart franchises like the Raiders. As the new century approached, and the Raiders hadn’t won a Super Bowl since 1984, they had the desperate look of every other mediocre N.F.L. franchise. All that remained of personality-driven football were Davis’s quirks.
This is the post-Davis Raiders. A team with its own quirks, coaches and vision, but without the considerable imprint of its owner. Through the ministrations of Dr. Romanowski, Davis may be able to emerge every now and then to declare that reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. Lane Kiffin may succeed in reversing the embarrassments of the last four seasons. But Davis’s personality-driven football is dead. Jerry Porter delivered the eulogy, without malice: “The Raider mystique does not exist anymore.”
(Excerts from a recent NY TIMES article)
