by Jim Miller
In addition to the gorgeous brutality, Oriard argues that we watch our teams because of “personal connectedness or regional rootedness” or other narratives that we read in the “cultural text” of football.2 In the case of Raiders fans, ties to Oakland and/or Los Angeles, racial tolerance, urban grit, working-class pride, cutthroat competition, rugged individualism, and rebel flair have all been central factors in drawing and testing the intense loyalty of their fans, who frequently embody the traits—real or imagined—that they associate with the team’s image. Sometimes as “the Beast of Bourbon” puts it, Raiders fans ironically “revel in . . . notoriety,” whether or not their “real self ” fits their fan identity.
Oriard also discusses the perspective from which we watch football:And imagine the fans watching these players and teams not as a “mass” audience but as actual people: European, African, Hispanic, and Asian-American; Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and nonbeliever; WASP and redneck; college graduate and high-school drop-out; conservative and liberal; racist and humanitarian; male and female, rich and poor, urban and rural, sick and well; ones just fired from jobs and ones just promoted; ones just fallen in love and ones just separated from a spouse; some pissed off at the world and some blissfully content. The possibilities are limitless.3
Raider-Gloria
In the course of our journey into Raider Nation we discovered an equally diverse range of fans. While the Raiders’ blue-collar image does have a solid base in reality (we interviewed longshoremen, warehousemen, firefighters, cops, members of the armed services, long-distance truckers, mechanics, concrete pourers, refinery workers, union pipefitters, waitresses, maids, and steelworkers), there were also white-collar workers (lawyers, doctors, teachers, businessmen, and bond traders) as well as those on the margins of economic life (unemployed and homeless fans). This socio-economic diversity went hand in hand with racial diversity and a multiplicity of political perspectives ranging from right-wing hawks with a Social Darwinist worldview to antiwar populists. As Raiders fan Randy Leppard puts it, “Silver and black fans are your neighbors, co-workers, friends, and acquaintances. We are black, white, brown, red, and yellow. Our Raider Nation consists of lawyers, students, doctors, garbologists, teachers, truckers, and the unemployed. We are everyone and everywhere. We did not emerge from the bowels of Hell, but the true fan would rather burn in Hades than cheer for the likes of the Jackasses [Denver Broncos] or Chefs [Kansas City Chiefs] or the Whiners [San Francisco 49ers].”
Randy’s positive portrayal of Raiders fans is a direct response to what he calls “the haters” who defame them. His eloquent description of Raider Nation is an interesting mix of democratic populism a little reminiscent of Tom Joad’s “I’ll be everywhere” speech to his mother at the end of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and an intensely competitive tribalism. This response was a common one among the Raiders fans we interviewed, and it shows that in addition to the predictable embrace of rivalry and competition that might be argued to echo the logic of the market which dominates American culture, it also displays the genuine longing for community that is its antidote.4
An Imagined Community
Every game was a terrifying adventure, win or lose, and the Raiders of the’70s usually won—except in Pittsburgh, where cruel things happened and many dreams died horribly. You could see the early beginnings of what would evolve into the massive Raider Nation, which is beyond doubt the sleaziest and rudest and most sinister mob of thugs and whackos ever assembled in such numbers under a single “roof,” so to speak, anywhere in the English-speaking world. No doubt there are other profoundly disagreeable cults that meet from time to time in most of the 50 states.
Hunter S. Thompson, “The Last Super Bowl”
A useful way of addressing the meaning of fan communities comes in Dean Chadwin’s Those Damn Yankees: The Secret Life of America’s Greatest Franchise. While his book is mostly devoted to exploding the Yankee myth and exploring its sordid corporate underbelly, Chadwin does spend some time discussing the meaning of fandom. Specifically, he notes that “the identification with a team, its uniform, and history involves baseball’s most direct appeal to the gut. The tribalism displayed by a community of fans has an almost immeasurable force. It creates instant civic rivalries where none previously existed.” In the course of his skewering of the Yankees, Chadwin describes their fans as a “hegemonic nation interested only in the claims of monarchy, a tribe set on domination . . . They are the worst New York has to offer: loud, aggressive, unruly, unthinking, cocky, self-absorbed, dictatorial, ungenerous celebrants of triumphalism.”5 Of more interest than the condemnation here is Chadwin’s use of the metaphor of nation. “Yankee nation,” as Chadwin calls the fans of the Bronx Bombers, is more than just a disparate collection of individuals watching a baseball game; it is a group identity, a site of shared meaning:Although the crowd in the bleachers will return home to their separate lives as soon as the game ends, for a few hours they inhabit a place where only one identity is acceptable: Yankee fan. Here Benedict Anderson’s imagined community is very real indeed. Any statement that violates the group’s one idea can prove dangerous. Fans wearing hats in support of the rival Mets or Red Sox are hounded by hundreds of fans pointing and chanting “Mets Suck” or “Boston Sucks.”6
Chadwin invokes the notion of an imagined community here as a way of understanding fan identity, but his discussion of fans is limited to their competitive tribalism. While many Raiders haters’ image of Silver and Black fanatics might match up nicely with Chadwin’s disdainful portrait of “Yankee Nation” as a bunch of vulgar homophobes who refrain from racial slurs only out of pragmatism, the concept of an imagined community is more nuanced than “a single idea” of exclusionary team worship and deserves a bit more attention.7
The term “imagined community” comes not from a cultural analysis of sports, but, as Chadwin notes, from Benedict Anderson’s book on nationalism, Imagined Communities. Anderson sets out to analyze why people love, die, and kill for nations. Central to his project is exploration of the roots of people’s sense of belonging to an “empty” philosophical concept. In an ironic statement given the subject of our book, Anderson claims of nationalism, “Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that there is ‘no there there.’” According to Anderson, a nation is “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” Nationalism, then, is not “an awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.” This phenomenon is not limited to political communities. In fact, Anderson tells us, “all communities larger than the primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” The fictional nature of the nation is what allows it to supercede fundamental differences and conflicts of interest among its members. As Anderson puts it, “It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship.”8
Phil and Angel
While Raider Nation is not “political” in any overt sense, it is an imagined community nonetheless whose members’ chosen identity, whether consciously or not, does hold some significant ideological content. Indeed, the parallel between the characteristics that Anderson claims for the political “nation” people imagine and the fan “nation” that Raiders fans dream of are striking. Just as people in a dying farm town in North Dakota, the Tenderloin in San Francisco, a Buddhist monastery on Maui, and a tenement in the south Bronx might all sport some form of patriotism (whether it be a flag on the front porch, taped to the side of a shopping cart holding everything one owns, on the bumper of an SUV, or on a t-shirt), Raiders fans from East Oakland and Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and Liberia, Costa Rica, identify with and display the Silver and Black. The Silver and Black Attack website’s map of Raid
ers fans shows them in every state in the union and more countries in the world than any other professional franchise; the map’s heading proclaims, “We are everywhere.”
What links these scattered legions of fans is not personal connection but a shared imagining. Most important, the fans we interviewed universally self-identified as part of “Raider Nation.” How do they signify this identity outside of the stadium? Raiders fans fly team flags at their houses, trim their bushes into the shape of the pirate shield, put decals across the entire rear windows of their cars, stencil “Commitment to Excellence” on their vans, paint their living rooms silver and black, put helmets on their cats during games, walk their dogs with Raiders collars and leashes, barbeque on team-themed grills, make their little girls ride silver-and-black tricycles, and hang Raiders Christmas lights. They wear customized jerseys, t-shirts, boxer shorts, thong underwear (the hottest seller during Super Bowl week), watches, socks, baseball caps, earrings, necklaces, pajamas, pants, robes, aprons, jackets, and rain ponchos. They get Raiders haircuts and adorn themselves with Al Davis, “Fuck the Rest,” and “Raider Nation” tattoos. Even their babies are outfitted in Raiders onesies, bibs, and booties while sucking on pirate shield pacifiers.
Indeed, as people’s lives become more and more atomized and civic participation, like voting, universal military service, and other forms of community involvement, continues to decline, many people probably feel more connected to their team than to most other political and social institutions. As Robert Putnam puts it, “By virtually every conceivable measure, social capital has eroded steadily and sometimes dramatically over the past two generations.” Putnam’s study systematically outlines how “the quantitative evidence is overwhelming” that civic, workplace, religious, philanthropic, and political participation are significantly waning. Sadly, this trend has continued even after the wave of patriotism following 9/11. Citizenship is rapidly becoming a spectator sport that mimics the qualities of sports spectatorship—rooting and bemoaning without actually participating. Hence a unified Raider Nation is no more of a myth than “United We Stand.”9
Sports sociologist Eric Dunning has explored the central role that sports has come to play in helping people construct (or “imagine”) a sense of identity and belonging in contemporary society, whether it be through an association with a team’s city or a particular class, race, or gender association.10 Following Dunning, an imagined community like Raider Nation is a source of identification with Oakland or Los Angeles or California (depending on the fan) or a given subgroup (blue-collar, street tough, rebel, renegade businessman, black, Latino, etc.). It is also a source of identity and belonging in an increasingly fragmented society where traditional forms of community have long been under siege. As Dunning points out, the “deployment of the so-called ‘new technology,’” “rapid social change,” and global conflicts have led to the “disappearance across the globe of many older patterns of work and social integration and the emergence of newer ones.” What sports does in the midst of these “anxiety-provoking imponderables” is “to give people a sense of continuity and purpose in contexts which are highly impersonal and beset by what many experience as a bewildering pace of change.” Put simply, a fan might think, my city may be blown up by terrorists, my job may be eliminated because of a technological innovation or a budget cut, my kids’ future may be in jeopardy, but at least there’s the Raiders.11
Particularly for blue-collar fans in a city like Oakland, where deindustrialization has taken a severe toll on the job base and, consequently, on neighborhoods and families, sports can serve as an emotional life preserver. As cultural studies scholar David Rowe notes, when social institutions fail, a values vacuum emerges and sports can help fill the void.12 Rowe sees sports as a way people compensate for the loss of meaning and community elsewhere in society. Interestingly, he notes that the power of sports is strong enough to get us to suspend our disbelief and cynicism in an era when they are, as he puts it, “abundant.” Going even further, Rowe claims that we have seen sports “appropriate many of the functions of established religion, supplying the rituals and deeply held beliefs that have faded in increasingly secular societies dedicated to the worship of the god of conspicuous commodity consumption.” Dunning makes a similar point when he argues that, “for the most committed fans, and perhaps for others besides, sport can be said to function as a ‘surrogate religion.’” Clearly, the point here is not that religion has totally vanished from the world of all sports fans, but that sports (along with other consumer activities) have come to fulfill some of the same meaning-giving and identity-granting functions that once were the sole province of religion. After all, the games are played on Sunday.13
For some fans, religion and the Raiders actually go hand in hand. Despite George Carlin’s assertion about the godlessness of the Silver and Black, a good number of fans overtly mix religion and the Raiders. As Mark Shelton, a corrections officer and pro wrestler explains:Another thing is that I’m a Christian. My understanding is that a great many Raider players are also. Both Napoleon Kaufman and Steve Wisnewski served and are serving God in a great capacity during and after they left the Raiders. People don’t seem to make the connection with being a Christian and being a Raiders fan. Seems to be contrary to them. But taking castoffs and bringing them to glory is very harmonic to the scriptures and the teachings of Christ. I kind of dig the paradox.
Other Christian Raiders like Jim Freeman, who started a Christian Raiders club, agree: “You can’t be weak or timid or wimpy to live your faith, and you can’t be any of those things to be a Raider.” A Southern Baptist minister, Brad Richardson, claims that “God is responsible for my being a Raiders fan” and that growing up near Arrowhead Stadium where the Kansas City Chiefs play was like “living in hell.”14 Unconcerned that some of their fellow believers might see devotion to the Raiders as well as the Lamb of God as contradictory, these fans simply marry their faiths.
So where then does the power of sports spectatorship come from? What could draw people in and seduce them into paying good money for games, gear, and the various other prerequisites for membership in Raider Nation? Michael Oriard claims that “a major part of football’s appeal, expressed in a variety of ways” is “the intensity of experience—physical, emotional, psychological—” that the game offers “players and fans alike.” Oriard notes that, as early as the turn of the twentieth century, writers like Jack London’s friend James Hopper were penning tales about football as an expression of a “romantic primitivism.” In the 1920s, Lewis Mumford attributed the rise of spectator sports to the reaction of a population “drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.” By the 1950s, magazines like Dissent were arguing that football’s popularity was a response to “the drudgery of everyday life,” and an Esquire writer observed that the sport was an answer to the “decline of exuberance in daily life.”15 Dunning agrees, noting that the emotional arousal that comes from watching sports helps people fight boredom and pull themselves out of their deadening routines by surrendering to the “emotional contagion” that comes with being part of a large, expectant crowd.16 It is not just the role of passive spectator that the fan plays but also, depending on the fan, the role of actor in their own show. In this way, fans connect not just to the players in the contest but to each other as well. The stronger this bond becomes, the more intense the loyalty to one’s imagined community. Nowhere in sports is this bond closer than in Raider Nation.
The fans we interviewed frequently referred to fellow Raiders fans as “60,000 of your closest friends,” “my tribe,” “brothers,” and, perhaps most commonly, as “family.” Hostile observers inclined to see only machismo and violence in a gathering of Raiders faithful would be surprised to discover a loving community. “You will never get the full picture of Raiders fans until you visit the parking lot before a home game.
My group has one of the best tailgate parties, which includes a DJ, full bar, and pigs roasting on spits. Race, age, gender, or socio-economic status means nothing. All people are bound together by their love of the Raiders,” said Raiders fan Andrew Miller as he invited the authors to “come to our party and feel the love.” Miller, who says he is “downright evangelical” about the “spectacle in the parking lot,” views his attendance at the games as “one-third tribal gathering, one-third sociology experiment, and one-third football.” As we spent the season wandering from tailgate to tailgate, we were fed, offered beers, given presents, and generally welcomed with open arms. In one of many instances of Raiders fan generosity, Kelly was given a “Raiders Girl” cap straight off the head of a fellow fan after she admired it on the wearer. “I’ll get another,” the woman told us after we tried to give it back. This gift was followed by a full course of carne asada and a Corona from her husband. Far from an isolated incident, this sort of Raiders potlatch is the norm in the parking lot. Come who may, no questions asked. What this clearly illustrates is that, for many fans, the social event of commingling with fellow members of their imagined community is equally or perhaps even more important than the game itself.
Dunning also points out that such emotional involvement stems from the fact that “one has to care” in one or more of three ways: about the sport itself; if one is a participant, about one’s own performance; and if one is a spectator, about the performance of one’s chosen contender. Fans have to identify deeply, or their emotional gears will not be fully engaged.17 Nowhere is this identification with team and identity stronger than with Raider Nation. Even as the team’s moves and political and legal battles drive marginal fans away, hard-core Raiders fans maintain a quasi-religious bond with their team. The fear that Raiders fans generate in opposing fans is as much a product of their intensity as it is any actual threat of violence. When Raiders fans speak about the nature of their connection to their team, their language is fraught with passion: their “gears” are clearly engaged. When asked to describe their fandom, Raiders fans almost universally referred to “passion” and “loyalty.” Other descriptions included “intensity,” “commitment,” “heart,” “rabid,” “boisterous,” “take no prisoners,” and “totally nuts.” As Raiders fan Michel Hines puts it, “I think Raiders fans are just a little over the edge most of the time.”