Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  On the way toward their last humiliating preseason loss, a 52–13 drubbing in Dallas, the Raiders began to turn on each other as Bill Romanowski savagely attacked black fellow-Raider Marcus Williams, hitting him so hard he broke his eye socket, knocked out a tooth, and effectively took him out of contention for a spot on the team. Romanowski, who I had always hated as a Bronco, had a checkered history with black players (in the past he had spat in the face of 49ers receiver J.J. Stokes). For this new low, the Raiders gave him a slap-on-the-wrist fine and a one-day suspension after Romo issued a formal apology. The whole season appeared to be imploding from the word go, and the Oakland Tribune headlines told the story, “AFC’s Emperor Looks for Clothes,” “Raiders Suffer Texas-size Meltdown,” “Paranoia of Raiders Keeps the Fans Away.” Even glory-years Raiders great Jack “They Call Me Assassin” Tatum was in trouble, struggling with medical bills after having his left leg amputated because of a diabetic condition. It was looking as though we might end up documenting a colossal Raiders meltdown from our bird’s-eye seats in the Black Hole. The prospect of slogging through a nightmare season was hugely depressing, but as the old Lowell Fulson song put it, “Crying Won’t Help.”5

  Ghost of Raiders past—Coulter Steel, Emeryville, California (note the edge of the door on the right)

  Seven

  At Ricky’s

  Since good food and drink are often the accompaniments of good schmoozing,

  trends in the numbers of various sorts of eating and drinking establishments in

  America are both startling and suggestive. Between 1970 and 1998 the number

  of full service restaurants per one hundred thousand population fell by one-

  quarter, and the numbers of bars and luncheonettes were cut in half . . . These

  cold numbers confirm the gradual disappearance of what social commentator

  Ray Oldenburg calls “The Great Good Place,” those hangouts that “get you

  through the day.” In effect, Americans have chosen to grab a bite and run rather

  than sit a while and chat.... Whether we live alone or not Americans are stay-

  ing home in the evening and Cheers has become a period piece.

  Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone

  We were always the second-class citizens of the Bay Area—you know, East Bay grease. The Raiders gave us credibility and toughness we’re proud of.

  Ricky Ricardo, Ricky’s co-owner

  The Raiders opened on a Sunday night in Tennessee, so Kelly and I figured that Ricky’s, the Raiders bar, was the perfect place to watch the season opener. We flew into Oakland late and got a room at the Airport Hilton so we could also check out the other spot where many Raiders fans watch games, the Airport Hilton bar. The next morning we went for breakfast at the Sports Edition Bar and Grill. Although there were Raiders banners up and some pieces of Oakland sports memorabilia here and there, the place was more antiseptic beige than silver and black. It reminded me a bit of the airport itself, clean and inoffensive enough for the traveling business class. The walls were covered with generic pictures of sports figures that represented no particular team and a crew shell was inexplicably hanging from the ceiling. We walked by a table of very large men sporting Cowboys, Packers, Buccaneers, and Indiana Pacers shirts and caps. The guy in the Buccaneers gear was harassing a Raiders fan at the next table, “Hey, where’s Barret Robbins? Is he still wandering around San Diego somewhere? How much money did they pay him to lose the Super Bowl like that?” The little old man in a well-worn Raiders cap shuffled away quietly. I noticed a bicycle hanging from the ceiling next to a model hang glider.

  As we sat and ordered, we scanned the room and noticed more Raiders fans coming in as the morning games rolled on. There were TVs strategically placed around the bar, and I noticed how odd and dissonant the cheering was when people were rooting for perhaps ten different teams in five different cities at the same time in the same room. It was a collapse of the time–space continuum. There was simultaneity without unisonance, a kind of schizophrenic sporadic and spasmodic cheering. After a while the boisterous chatter gave way to tube-induced stupor. This place epitomized the sports bar as an affectless, identity-less site of image consumption where the viewers/consumers could move from team to team as the impulse struck them. The overall effect was numbing. Despite the fact that all the waitresses were wearing Raiders shirts, nothing about the place spoke Oakland or East Bay.

  As Lawrence A. Wenner has observed, this one-size-fits-all version of social space is all by design: “the postmodern sports bar is ‘nobody’s place.’ Beyond the Bleachers and Sports Garden, names of these postmodern places are Champions, Challenges, The Ballpark, The Bottom of the Ninth, Sports City Café, The Sporting Club, and All Stars American Sports Bar.” Hence, places like the Sports Edition Bar aim to create a “heterotopia” that “transcends both place and ‘authentic’ identity with regards to sports.” The result of this is that postmodern sports bars are “democratized” in the process of being totally “commodified.” In other words, when the social space of the bar is no longer a site of gender, ethnic, class, neighborhood, or even team identity, the only thing that defines the space is that it is a place to consume images, and anyone can do that. The sports memorabilia in such places is there as a kind of nostalgic touchstone that casts a wide net in order to give an “identity hook” to a vast range of customers. The connection the customer has to the memorabilia is a distant one, however, that resembles the relationship a patron in a museum might have to an ancient cultural artifact. As opposed to the old-school local sports bar, these safe, clean, well-lighted sports theme parks cater to no one in particular in an effort to usher in a new era of highly profitable pervasive standardization.1

  I finished my eggs and watched a waitress wander around aimlessly with a bundle of silver-and-black balloons. We paid the bill and called a cab to take us over to Ricky’s. Our driver was Eritrean and was wearing an A’s cap. “Go Raiders,” he said as he dropped us off. On our way in we strolled past the parking spot reserved for “Stabler 12” and I glanced up at the big Ricky’s sign complete with an old-fashioned cocktail glass. A huge satellite dish loomed above it. At the other end of the building there was Ricky’s Team Shop, which sells Raiders gear. We nodded to the small group of Raiders fans mingling by the front door and headed inside, where we were greeted by a rush of Raiders imagery. One of the first things that caught my attention was a big Skull Patrol sign with a menacing skull in the middle and the motto “the first line of defense” at the bottom. I looked over at a poster for the Ricky’s Raiders Rally featuring Raiderhed next Saturday. It was vaguely reminiscent of an old Haight-Ashbury psychedelic rock poster, except that it was in all silver and black and featured a good number of tough-looking skulls and the tag line “Bash the Bengals.” The room space itself was dark and womblike. While there were TVs everywhere, they didn’t overwhelm the setting like they did in the Sports Edition Bar. I strolled around and checked out the plethora of Raiders memorabilia—signed jerseys from Jim Otto, Fred Biletnikoff, and Kenny Stabler as well as entries from Atkinson, Vella, Plunkett, and Bradshaw. As opposed to other generic bars, most of the stuff here was addressed specifically to Ricky. There were photos of former and current Raiders hanging out in the bar. I looked up at a Jersey Shore Raiders Booster Club t-shirt signed by Phil Villapiano that was inscribed “To Ricky’s Raider Bar, You kept the spirit alive, ‘Stay Wild.’” There may have been a few pennants of other teams here and there, but it was clear that Ricky’s was Silver and Black holy ground, a Raiders shrine.

  We walked into the other room and were greeted by another row of jerseys signed by Raiders greats: Lamonica, Sistrunk, Dalby, Martin, Tatum, and Hubbard. And in the corner on a table at the intersection of Hubbard and Tatum was a little sign that read, “Reserved for Al Davis.” I noted a poster of Ben Davidson and a collage of seventies Raiders under the moniker “The Soul Patrol.” As we were surveying the place, I noticed that a lot of people knew ea
ch other. As patrons came in they were frequently greeted by name. A guy in a Tim Brown jersey was sitting next to his girlfriend, who was wearing 49ers gear and taking a friendly ribbing from just about everyone who passed by. When former Raider Sam Adams grabbed a fumble for his new team and ran in to score, a woman stood up in front of one of the big screens and yelled, “You go, Sam—you’re still our boy!” We noticed an old stained-glass Ricky’s sign on the wall that informed us that the bar had been established in 1946. That, I thought, was the central difference between this place and the sterile Hilton bar, its East Bayness. In San Leandro, fairly close to the Oakland city limits, Ricky’s drew people from both the suburbs and the city.

  Wenner argues that the local sports bar is a throwback to the neighborhood tavern, the archetype of the great good place:Its main attraction is a friendly, homogenous, cohesive social culture, often forming along the lines of ascribed characteristics of race, ethnicity, sexual preference, country of origin, language or occupation. However, achieved subcultures, such as those formed around interests in sports, politics, gambling, or literature, can also bring a cohesiveness to the character of the tavern.... The sports bar is a “retrofit,” a remodel, a new coat of paint on the turn of the century tavern that functioned as a man’s “third place,” a place where man visited in part as a response to industrialization.2

  Wenner goes on to argue that “the cultural logic of sports bars functions at the nexus of a high holy trinity of alcohol, sports, and hegemonic masculinity . . . the sports bar is partly modern and partly postmodern, partly the ‘great good place’ and partly a commoditized construction of bricolage on the highway strip or mall.”3

  Although there is plenty of beer flowing at Ricky’s, it defies several aspects of Wenner’s analysis of the sports bar. While home to plenty of macho Raiders fans, the bar is not an exclusive realm of patriarchy, since plenty of women (including Ricky’s wife, Tina) both work at and patronize Ricky’s in a nonsubservient capacity. It is also not exclusive in terms of ethnicity, since its proximity to Oakland combined with the outlying suburbs makes it an open space where a very multiracial crowd happily commingles without sacrificing a sense of local identity. Indeed, Ricky’s reunifies communities that have, in many cases, been separated as a result of deindustrialization and suburbanization. It is a site of multi-ethnic, mixed-sex blue-collar schmoozing. As Robert Putnam argues, while organized community activities (what he calls “maching”) have steeply declined, “schmoozing” (or informal social communion) has persisted and is a sign that a hunger for community still exists. While “watching is not the same as playing,” Putnam observes, fans’ “sense of shared enthusiasm for common passion can generate a certain sense of community.”4

  Thus, Ricky’s is a Raiders fan utopia where the real social divisions that separate fans in other areas of their lives are left at the door and for the few hours that the game is on, the imagined community of Raider Nation is realized. Importantly, an expensive ticket ($47 at a minimum) is not necessary to watch the game at Ricky’s, the beers are only $2.50 rather than $7.50, and parking is free rather than $15, so the economic barriers that might exclude many fans at the Coliseum do not exist at Ricky’s. Working-class “East Bay grease,” as Ricky put it, is welcome. Hence rather than being an exclusionary bastion of drunken “hegemonic masculinity,” Ricky’s feels more like a welcoming family.

  After we got a table and ordered a “Ken ‘the Snake’ Stabler” steak sandwich and a “Jim Otto” smoked turkey sandwich, Kelly and I went over to the bar to talk to Ricky Ricardo, the proprietor of Ricky’s. Ricky, a very warm man with dark hair and beard, seemed glad to meet us and welcomed our questions. He poured a draft beer for a guy in a Black Hole t-shirt, then explained to us, “The bar moved to this location in 1962.” When I asked him what it was like during the glory years, he told me about the days when his father ran the bar:My father had buses full of fifty to a hundred people going to the games in the seasons before television. The Raiders players were always around in the early sixties. They came here a lot and many of them still do. We’ve always had a lot of Raiders fans coming here—in the sixties to seventies, even after they moved. The darkest day was when Al took them to L.A. We kept torches burning because we believed they would come back. Ricky’s was like a shrine—like they never left. We had satellite, though, so we didn’t miss a Raiders game (we had to take that down eventually). People lined up to see the games. They would also get together to go down to L.A. to see them play. I even went to London on August 5, 1990, to see them play. I brought a giant banner that said “Welcome Home Oakland Raiders,” because I thought they’d be back soon. Of course, it took another five years before they did return.

  We worked really hard on bringing them back to Oakland. The politicians listened to the fans. Ignacio de la Fuente called me before their return was announced and said, “Ricky, it’s a done deal.” I had a printer make up the Oakland Raiders schedule. When the Raiders did come back, it was bedlam around here. Our lots were full of TV trucks because of the schedules. Even L.A. news vans came down here to this place to get the story. It was like a fairy tale. A lot of the fans did fall off, though. Some went to the Niners, but a lot of them stayed true to the Raiders.

  So the saga rolls on. Al is a maverick. He’s the ultimate chessman in the way he plays other people. You’ll never know if they’ll leave. For example, they don’t print anything with the name “Oakland” on it. So, it’s out of our hands as fans.

  Ricky had to get back to work, so I thanked him and jotted down a few notes. Sitting a couple of seats over from us was a large African American man in an Oakland Raiders t-shirt leaning forward with both his arms resting on the bar. He had been sipping a Budweiser and listening intently as I talked to Ricky. Malcolm, as he introduced himself, had gentle eyes and a big grin. He volunteered his own story and views:I grew up in Oakland and I still live there. I went to my first Raiders game in 1963 when I was four years old with my dad at Frank Youell Field. So I loved the Raiders and have always followed them. In my view, Al Davis built the team. He built the stadium. And after that, when he got the Coliseum, he had great successes. To complain about Al is to bite the hand that feeds you. None of this would have happened without him. Al just wants to evolve. But everyone wants to get him—politicians shot him down, the NFL wanted him. He led the effort to build the Coliseum. But the same city doesn’t want to respect him. The media harps on the last ten or so years and never wants to give Al credit for what he’s done. You can’t hate Al, all you can be is an interested observer.

  We went back to our table to eat and watched people wearing silver-and-black beads and Raiders medallions arriving. A pretty Asian woman with long black hair strolled by our table in a “Raider Angel” baby-doll t-shirt. I went to the men’s room and noticed they had a TV conveniently located inside so that one need not miss a second of the game. Back at our table, we met Lee “The Flea” Phillips, who informed us that he takes photographs at Raiders home games and had worked for Raider insider Al LoCasale. Lee told us that his family had had a chance to buy into the Raiders in 1959, but couldn’t come up with the cash. I went out to his van and he showed me several binders full of amazing shots of Raiders games. (Lee, it turned out, was quite a photographer.)

  Back inside, we chatted with Señor Raider Man, a celebrity fan who has his own collector’s card. Raised in Upland, California, this maniac moved to Hayward five years ago, works for Airborne Express, and has been a fan “since 1996.” A tall, stocky man dressed in a customized number 69 jersey with his moniker on the back, he also sports football pants, pads, a Raiders fanny pack, official “ass-kickin’” rally towel, Mardi Gras beads, silver-and-black face paint around his goatee, dark sunglasses, and a giant silver-and-black sombrero to top it all off. He told us how, when in San Diego for the Super Bowl, he beat up three non-Raiders fans during a brief sojourn down to Tijuana. He seemed to relish telling us about “kicking peoples’ asses,” detailing every kick and pun
ch. He told us that in Tijuana he went after the Chargers fan first. At another game, he informed us, he drank a bunch of tequila (which, he assured us, he doesn’t normally do) and “knocked out a guy in a Cowboys jersey.” Disavowing any memory of this event, Señor Raider Man told us that his friends relayed the story to him later. All of this mayhem was done, according to this self-appointed antihero, “to support the team.” He seemed immensely pleased by this.

  A large group of women sat down next to us all decked out in Raiders gear. It was game time, and the whole bar erupted into a deafening roar for the first kick of the Raiders game, a rematch of the AFC Championship game against the Titans. With each first down the whole bar would chant, “One, Two, Three—First Down!” During the big plays a guy in a Raiders jersey, pants, and pads with a football helmet, an eye patch, and a foam shield just like the one on the Raiders logo would jump up on his table and break into a frenzied cheer. The whole place was cheering like we were at the game itself. When Charlie Garner caught a pass and went 46 yards for a touchdown the place went nuts and the “Ray-duz” chant broke out. There were high-fives and hugs all around. People also had fun chanting “defense,” telling the TV announcer to shut up when he said something stupid, cursing the referees, and heckling the players. Although no one could hear them in Tennessee, it turned into an ongoing conversation that the crowd had with itself, full of irony and good humor. After the big Raiders score, though, the Titans went back up 12–10 before halftime.