Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  We went from mingling with the official boosters with money to spend on plane tickets, vacations in Napa, and wine tours to the center of unofficial Raiders fandom in the heart of East Oakland. Driving down East 14th Street/ International Boulevard, licensed and unlicensed Raiders symbols abound on shirts, jackets, cars, store windows, rugs, blankets, and banners draped on the sides of buildings or hanging in storefronts. These fans who bleed silver and black might be lucky to come up with the cash to make the trip a few blocks down the street to 66th Avenue, turn right and pay a minimum of $47 for a ticket once a year. Their passion is just as strong as that of the official boosters, but, in this case their identity has local roots, tied as it is to the funky poetry of the boulevard. Clusters of kids in Raiders gear who may never have heard of Daryl Lamonica or be able to recognize Al LoCasale, adopt the Raiders’ tough image and pirate swagger because it says, “I exist, I’m tough, I can take it.”

  As we drove along, Joe, our photographer, commented on the character of International Boulevard, “East 14th is a very interesting place. It’s a real interesting racial mix, a distinct area where things have changed a lot over the years. It seems to me like it’s very much of a melting pot—Vietnamese, Chinese, immigrants from Latin America, Chicanos, and blacks, all along the boulevard. It makes you think of the number 7 subway train in New York City.” In the beginning of our journey we passed by the Alameda County Jail near Lake Merritt. Joe glanced over at a building by the lake and told us how Huey Newton had gotten a penthouse there after returning from prison. “He went to Vacaville and came back a different person,” he said. “He bought a telescope and used it to look back over at the jail.” Joe, it turns out, had a long history in the Bay Area Left:After my best friend got shot to death in New York City, I dropped out of NYU and came out here. Before going to UC Berkeley I did penance by first going to Oakland City College, which was on Grove Street (it’s Martin Luther King now), not far from Eli’s Mile High Club. This was 1961. I got an apartment on Alcatraz Avenue and went to Oakland City College, which was a hotbed of activism and the birthplace of the Black Panther Party because both Huey and Bobby Seale were students there. So there was all kinds of activity going on. I also met some radical folks and became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Friday nights were spent picketing downtown Oakland restaurants in Jack London Square that refused to hire minority workers. Ex-senator William Knowland, who owned the Oakland Tribune, was a real right winger and he would come with his entourage and a police escort to whatever restaurant CORE [the Congress of Racial Equality] was picketing, push through our line, and go to dinner there.

  I eventually went to Berkeley, graduated in 1965 and got recruited to be on the editorial board of the Movement Newspaper, which had started out as the Northern California Friends of SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] newsletter, but grew into a national monthly newspaper in the late sixties. I had a strong relationship with Huey Newton in that I had known him peripherally at Oakland City College, where there had been a fierce struggle between the cultural nationalists and a group who were more revolutionary nationalists, led by Huey. When I became editor of the Movement newspaper (around the time when the famous picture of Huey sitting in the chair came out before he was shot), I got to go interview him when he was in Alameda County Jail. When I first came in there was a whole line of people in the public visiting area, but he saw me in the back and said, “Let me talk to that white boy for a minute.” So I spent a lot of hours with him, which of course he loved because he could be out of his cell. He could come down there and sit and smoke cigarettes and talk about politics. Over the course of several weeks we did an extended formal interview that was eventually published in the Movement newspaper entitled “Huey Newton Talks to the Movement about the Black Panther Party, Cultural Nationalism, SNCC, Liberals and White Revolutionaries.”

  East 14th turned into International Boulevard, and we passed by Cambodian and Vietnamese restaurants, Wonderful Boutique, New Saigon Supermarket #2, the Lineman’s Club, Tacos Sinaloa, Oakland Bait, and Bui-Phong Bakery. There was a black pickup in front of us with a Raiders shield taking up the entirety of the back window and a van passed by flying a pirate shield flag. In Fruitvale we went by Discolandia, The Gold Key Club/La Llave de Oro Club, and stopped when we came upon Paris Wig and Beauty Supply, where the owner had lovingly painted “Go Oakland Raiders” beneath the announcement for “Human Hair on Sale!” The owner, W.S. Song, has the sign painted every year at the beginning of the season. “It’s just my way of supporting the team,” he told us. Unfortunately, Mr. Song is always working, so he doesn’t get to go to games.

  After talking to Mr. Song, we kept driving down International Boulevard, now behind an old Plymouth with a Virgin of Guadalupe on the right side of its back window and a Raiders shield on the left. There were Mexican flags flying in front of some of the shops, and trucks occasionally stopped to unload produce, bottlenecking traffic on the street. We passed by open-air fruit stands and pulled off on a side street to take a picture of a big Raiders shield painted next to the front door of United Auto Body, where a “Raiders Drive” sign was also posted beneath the hours. Back on International, we headed past the Eritrean Orthodox Church and continued on, at one point glancing over at the now-repaired McDonald’s that had been vandalized the night of the Super Bowl and noting the Kwik Way and the “Men of Valor Academy” across the street. A homeless man was wandering aimlessly in the middle of the road, ignoring the honks and shouts of motorists. A Mexican woman on the sidewalk was strolling with her two little girls in white dresses, a daughter holding each hand. A block or so later a black lowrider with customized silver flames painted across his car’s hood was parked by a storefront displaying a Raiders shield. Cruising past Chen’s Restaurant, Holiday Fish and Soul Food, and Mandy Ruth’s Shelter, I couldn’t help but see the street as an ever-unfolding Whitmanesque catalog. The lack of chain stores had kept it from becoming yet another endless, bland, standardized strip mall zone. International Boulevard bristled with life and danger. It was, I thought, one of the last great American streets. I thought of The Luniz song, “East 14th . . . Cuz I’m a Raider, Oakland Raider.” and remembered passing a church that proclaimed, “Jesus es el Señor de Oakland.”

  The distance between the odorless chi-chi halls of the Napa Marriott and the teeming streets where young kids joyfully run and weave back and forth through traffic on bicycles in the summer heat was palpable. Still, something tells me that despite the protestations of more “respectable” fans, and perhaps some of the players themselves, that this is the spiritual heart of Raider Nation, the place where a new generation of fans has transformed the Raiders’ aura born of the sixties and seventies into a far more edgy moniker of street polyglot.

  Those who say that the tough kids on the corner are “not real fans” hold to the illusion that cultural signs, like football logos, are dead, stable, fixed sites of meaning and cannot be multiply rewritten by whoever chooses to claim them. The world has changed beneath the radar screen of the older generation of fans, and commentators who fail to see how the dramatic disparities between the largely white middle-class suburbs of America and the miraculously diverse new immigrant and old native working- and underclass inner-city neighborhoods has widened to a chasm. Membership in an imagined community, however, is not determined by exclusionary socio-economic barriers, but rather is forged in the mind’s eye of the fan. Thus, on this bright day in July, it was clear that Raider Nation lived in the imagination of East Oakland.

  We passed by the Bethlehem Christian Center (J.E. Bobo Senior, Pastor) and the Zodiak Motorcycle Club with a crowd of the Wicked Wheels outside by their bikes. I glanced over at a burned-out Victorian, and Joe talked about what used to be here in East Oakland and what happened to the solid working-class jobs that originally supplied the Raiders with their “blue-collar” image:There was a fleet of auto plants that are all gone. In addition to places like the Chevrolet assembly plant, Oakland had
a strong manufacturing base with plants making electrical machinery, metal fabrication, food production, canneries and, of course, the shipyards. Since the early 1960s, the whole Bay Area has suffered from deindustrialization. I joined the Boilermakers, Local 6, in 1971 when it was still pretty large and vibrant. It has shrunk by 90 percent. There were large shipyards both here and in San Francisco, where I worked. During World War II, when the union was still having a battle about being a Jim Crow union, there were shipyards that employed 250,000 to 300,000 workers in the Bay Area. As late as 1971, passing on the job as a boilermaker to your son was still something you could do. You could still earn a decent living. By the time I retired, my local had to merge with Local 10 in Oakland to retain the name of Local 6. I believe the two locals together had at least 5,000 members when I joined. Now they have less than 500 because so much of the work has gone to lower wage areas, many of them outside the United States.

  On the waterfront the Longshoremen still have a great union, but the work is containerized, so the number of people you need, which is the other part of the waterfront story, is considerably less. So the cities have actually changed in their class character. We have all sorts of people not doing well and homeless on the streets and in the projects and the ghettoes, but the rest of the city [both in San Francisco and Oakland] is much more upscale.

  As we cruised by the nineties, the street got a tougher, edgier feel. There were more young men on the corners and the feel of the area was meaner. I looked down a side street and saw what looked like a drug deal. A lot of the guys were sporting Raiders gear. I looked at a little boy, about eleven, proudly wearing a Woodson jersey while waiting at a bus stop with his dad wearing a Raiders cap.

  The fact that these fans, many of whom are very young, may be less knowledgeable about the team’s storied history and less able to shell out big money for personal seat licenses does not make their expropriation of the Raiders’ image as a source of personal, street, and neighborhood identity less meaningful. Football has played a role in the “Americanization” of immigrants in the United States throughout the last century and has always been a site of class struggle with regard to who owns the game. This was true when immigrant coal miners and other white ethnic working-class players like my grandfather and his brothers in Pennsylvania took up the game of the Ivy leaguers, and it is true today. What a drive down International Boulevard shows is that economic exclusion from the luxury suite set has not negated the community’s love of the Raiders as a symbol of the “thereness” of Oakland, independent of whatever happens in the courtroom or on the field. Until the “corporate base” completely replaces the “fan base” in American professional sports, these “undesirables”—in the eyes of the elite who think they own the game, and the world—will continue to crash the party in their unlicensed, bootleg gear. As for the real “gangsters” amid the wannabes and plain old fans, one might ask whether in a culture where violence is as American as apple pie if it is not totally understandable that kids shunted to the margins would prefer to be feared rather than ignored. Make your fellow citizens tremble in your wake rather than pity you.

  We headed out of Oakland and into San Leandro past an old auto plant that now houses bingo and sofas. Joe recalled that in the sixties the line between the cities “was a real demarcation.” East Oakland was largely black and then you had “the very white suburbs.” The Panthers, Joe told us, used to talk “about the occupation of the ghetto by an occupying army of white policemen, a lot of whom were apparently recruited in the South, and I don’t mean South San Leandro.” Today though, we noted, San Leandro is far more diverse. It’s still a blue-collar suburb, but not a lily white one. I noticed more trees and a park as we rolled on past Sam’s Super Burger and City Hall. We stopped to take a picture of the “Trailer Haven” sign, a bit of pure Americana, and continued on by Ernie’s Sea Food and Pring’s Coffee Shop before finding the turn that took us to Ricky’s, the Raider fan Mecca. It was closed, but we got out and snapped some shots of the bar and the parking spaces playfully reserved for Al Davis, Ken Stabler, and a long list of other Raider greats. Afterward we sat on the hood of the car, and Joe voiced some us his reservations about the meaning of fandom:This kind of fan phenomenon, even if it’s not a sellout, where you get 50,000 hard-core people to show up, some of them staying overnight beforehand, troubles me. Well, these people would never show up at a union meeting. It reminds me, too, of the sixties when I was a member of the Hayward worker’s collective and I went to work for Kellogg’s while the Vietnam War was raging. These workers were obviously being squeezed economically, and they were definitely contributing to the cannon fodder being sent to Vietnam. I had been a bit of a sports fanatic before politics took over, but what struck me was that there would be these really incredible things going on in Vietnam, and we were getting close to having a strike at our plant, and people would come in and the entire conversation would be taken up with which person ran for how many yards for the Raiders or whatever. That’s how the hegemony works in this country, keeping workers from talking about what really matters. I was really struck that people could work themselves into such a frenzy and show an intellectual capacity for analysis of football, but not for their own economic or political condition.

  I think this is part of a larger conversation about the role that sports play, which you are exploring, and we probably have some differences about the hegemonic aspects of keeping males fanatical, sometimes to the point of violence, about something that doesn’t have any real connection to their lives. I had my flirtations with the rebel nature of the Raiders, but the idea that young men, and not such young men, whether they’re on drugs or alcohol, would actually shed each other’s blood over whether they were Raiders fans or 49ers fans when they should be united because they have shared class interests has always been something I find extraordinary. What is it that really divides Raiders and Packers fans? They’re all really working people. You take the big rivalries in the olden days, the Packers or the Steelers. You couldn’t find two more working-class cities than Oakland and Pittsburgh. And people would be ready to kill each other over some allegiance to highly paid professional athletes. It staggers the mind sometimes to think what a big mountain we have to climb to get people to see what their real interests are.

  It feeds a lot of jingoism. And in the Raiders’ case you have this illusion that you are being rebellious when, in fact, you are just fitting in. I mean I’m not pushing this to the point of saying that people are totally duped, but there is something powerful about being involved in allegiance to a team. It’s a yearning for community, I know. Part of the reason I’m pushing the other thing is to have a discussion about what it all means. I also realize that as soon as the game is over the bills are the same, whether you have a job or not is the same. Nothing in your life of any consequence has changed.

  After awhile, we noticed somebody walking toward us. It was Bob Ricardo, the co-owner of Ricky’s, who greeted us warmly and told us to come back later once the season started to check out the whole scene. Bob was a handsome fellow in his mid-fifties who looked like he’d just gotten back from fishing. He gave us a brief history of his family’s business and agreed to do an interview later. We headed back into Oakland, this time weaving through Elmhurst, Eastmont, and Seminary Park before returning to downtown as the afternoon bled into twilight.

  Death don’t have no mercy

  Five

  What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

  Raiders fans ate, drank and laughed together, cheered their team together, and won or lost together. The bonds of camaraderie that tailgate fans create for each other go far beyond what is experienced in the workweek world. Because of Raider love, every Sunday is a family reunion.

  Craig Parker, Football’s Blackest Hole

  Raiders fans are the most passionate fans alive. Now honestly, that doesn’t mean they are the most intelligent, straight-laced, sober, nonconvicted of felonies or misdemeanors fans, but loyal and energize
d they are!

  Mark Wilson, Raiders fan

  Sometimes the light’s all shining on me

  Other times I can barely see.

  The Grateful Dead, “Truckin’”

  On the day of the first preseason game, Kelly and I got off the freeway on 7th Street near Mandela Shipyards and made our way past the public housing alongside the train tracks under the freeway to downtown Oakland. At Broadway we turned left and cruised past bars, tattoo parlors, Chinese restaurants, and the newly gentrified ornate storefronts of Old Oakland. It was early in the morning so we kept going past 10th Street and rolled by the ornate Oakland Tribune tower, DeLauer’s Newstand, Frank Ogawa Plaza, and the Paramount Theatre, an art deco masterpiece complete with an elaborate mural of dancers. At Grand we noticed that the old Hofbrau Restaurant was closed down before we drove on through auto row toward the hills. We passed the Sawmill, passed under the freeway, and turned left on MacArthur and left again on Telegraph where we cruised by Nordic House, Holistic Acupuncture, a Portuguese church, and an athletic club in an old mortuary building. We noticed a quaint red wooden church and saw the old Sears building with closed businesses inside. Past 24th Street the city got grittier and I noticed a pool hall, a Giant Burgers stand, and a gothic-looking Baptist church. In Koreatown we saw the Bear’s Cave bar and rolled by the beautiful old Fox Theatre at 19th. Coming full circle we made our way back to Broadway, turned right on 10th, and parked in the Convention Center lot before tossing our bags in our room in the Washington Inn, built in 1913, which at the moment was packed to the gills with a boisterous Chinese wedding party.