Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  The first person we talked with at halftime was Andrew the Shieldhead. Andrew told me that he was making Shieldhead t-shirts and was working on “a multimedia project.” His vision was “to compete with Nike.” Andrew said that he had been at the Super Bowl in San Diego and that he “gets a lot of recognition from people.” While he hoped to make something off of his Shieldhead activities, he was not in it for the money: “I do this because I’m a fanatic.” While I was at the table with Shieldhead, Kelly went outside to interview Bob, the bar’s co-owner and Ricky’s brother.

  I left Ricky’s to chat with Bob out in front while Jim stayed inside. As we talked, Bob kept his eye on things, telling the two rambunctious little kids waiting for their parents not to climb or swing on the skinny trees across from the entrance. When people arrived, Bob would often greet them by name, shaking their hands or slapping them on the back. He gave new customers directions as they walked in. We sat in the two white plastic chairs designated as the smoking area. Bob’s manner was thoughtful as he told me about himself, his family, and how he views the Raiders. Since his father was the founder of the bar, Bob literally grew up there. Ricky Senior had died in February 2003, and Bob and his brother Ricky were fixing their father’s house up themselves in order to sell it—“we don’t hire people to do our work like affluent folks do,” he told me wryly. Bob stayed in the East Bay his whole life:I went to college at Cal State Hayward and played basketball. I got a bachelor’s degree in political science and did a teaching credential in K–6 writing. After that I got accepted to law school, but decided that education is a better thing to do. I don’t teach anymore, but I do coach basketball, which is how I am still able to be a teacher. Currently, I own Outbound Travel and am partners with Ricky. We own everything here.

  He gestured around the L-shaped setup of Ricky’s, its gift shop, a salon, and the travel agency, which fronts the street. A tall black man left the bar and Bob nodded at him as he got into his car. I asked Bob about San Leandro and the East Bay. He continued:In my lifetime, the East Bay developed into a bedroom community of San Francisco from the previous generation, who had had local affiliations and grassroots identification with the place. These had been the children of immigrants—working-class people. Before them were the children of the people who came to the Bay Area because of the World War II industry—people from the South, African Americans, children of sharecroppers. So things here have changed a lot.

  I remember one summer while I was in college I had a beef with my dad and ended up working in a brass and aluminum foundry near here. This was probably one of the worst jobs in the world. I worked with desperate people: parolees, immigrants, hungry college kids. There were four engines the size of 747s in the place that generated so much heat and noise it was awful. Overhead, sand was pouring into molds and toxic gasses were spewing as molten metal poured out. It was like working in hell. But that was the kind of industrial work there was around here.

  We ruminated a bit on the conditions of peoples’ lives in the East Bay, and in Oakland in particular, which prompted a few bitter remarks from Bob:The politicians will build new Republican-sponsored armaments and aircraft carriers, but they won’t support the schools or the people here. They used 9/11 to feather their own caps. It was a terrible thing, but they’ve used it for their own purposes. Because of my business, I travel a lot—in India on third-class trains, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey. I’ve even been shot at. Americans like to think that it’s like America all over the world, but it’s not. It’s not even like America here. The violence in Oakland, for example, is appalling. A black man shoots another black man and no one does anything about it. Nobody can find the time to make it right. Regular people have nothing—the rich have everything. If you give people a piece of the pie, they won’t revolt. But you can’t trust the rich to share anything. The answer to all the problems is to balance the wealth in the world. If you take even just 10 percent from the rich you can make things a lot better.

  Bob stopped to get up and take one of the boys out of a tree. I switched subjects when he returned by asking him how he became affiliated with Oakland and the Raiders. He told me that the connection for him began with a reaction to the West Bay press’s attitude toward the East Bay. As a kid he had liked the 49ers until the San Francisco Chronicle ripped East Bay fans. He characterized it like this:The East Bay is working class and all that. It is not the West Bay, which is chardonnay-drinking intellectuals who believe that they are better than you. It’s the upper crust versus you guys who work on our cars and build our homes. So, I liked the 49ers, but then I lost allegiance because I didn’t like getting pissed on all the time by Republicans and the affluent. I like working people—regular folks. These are the people who support their team.

  I went to my first Raiders game at Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. You could walk down to the field to talk to the players because no one was there. I do think, though, that Al Davis gets too much credit for making the Raiders what they became. In high school, I hustled programs in Frank Youell Field. My friends and I would sneak down to the field to be unofficial ball boys. That was a different era.

  I asked Bob what he thinks of fans now. “I don’t like it very much and feel like there’s been some lost innocence. The combination of sports or professional football and liquor has created this ugly side where people drink too much and swear too much. Fans can take things too far nowadays—too much of a good thing goes too far and people don’t police themselves enough.” I thought this was interesting from a man who was one of the owners of the most famous Raiders bar. “I actually like watching basketball more now because drunks can’t watch it. Football is different—you can watch it when you’re drunk.” I laughed. He went on:Raiders fans changed after they came back from L.A. The original Raiders fans were workers with a hometown affiliation. Many even worked for the Raiders organization in some capacity. The new Raiders fans have gotten to the point where they want to be recognized. They have a sense of community, but it comes out of a sense of outward enmity and inward amity. It’s gotten to an absurd level in some respects. Many Raiders fans have this notion of constantly being under attack. So, for example, if people were being attacked by Martians, Jews and Christians, Catholics and Protestants would all pull together. That’s how Raiders fans can be and it can be great, but people can take it too far. So Raiders fans will throw things at other fans in the stadium. I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of good fans—there are—but the others are definitely there. I would think that the Raiders organization doesn’t want bum fans, but that’s what’s happening. And it just turns me off, peoples’ uncouthness, their ignorance. The drunker you get, the stupider you get. I know that football is an emotional game, but if they were placed in their grandmothers’ living rooms, they’d change. So I’m not your typical gung-ho Raiders fan. I’m really turned-off by peoples’ lack of respect and self-respect. A lot of what people see as scary Raiders fans are people under the influence. My attitude is, “Don’t lose respect for yourself, your team, and your community.”

  As far as the Raiders organization itself, they’ve lost their affiliation with the community. They’re no longer the Oakland Raiders. Al Davis holds a grudge toward Oakland. He’s aloof and doesn’t try to market the Oakland Raiders, and in some ways he seems to blame the fans. Davis has a totally pompous attitude toward everything, toward his own greatness. I think Jon Gruden left because he stole too much of Al’s thunder. Davis has caused a lot of problems with his own marketing. He could have gotten the fans back, but he didn’t. A good marketing team, like Green Bay, is oriented toward its community. Instead, the Raiders don’t develop community, the stadium is an atrocity, and they sell the seats to the ghetto at the same price as the upper-class neighborhood. The Raiders are truly like pirates who ride their pirate ship from town to town taking plunder as they go. So, Al Davis has really ruined it for me because of leaving Oakland. But, you know, you’re always in love with your first love—but th
ey’ve broken your heart.

  I asked Bob what it was like to work at the bar, and how he viewed the customers, a predominantly Raiders bunch. “You mean at Ricky’s where the customer is always wrong?” he joked.

  Seriously, I’ve always worked the door and I treat everyone the same across the board. I’m fair. If you have a preconceived notion about anyone, that’s bad. And race is just not an issue in this bar, either. People appreciate that and when they come here, they don’t always like it when others go too far. So the way we keep people from being over the top is through their own sense of community. They like hanging out here, so they don’t want to lose this place or embarrass themselves.

  Kelly came back inside and we focused on the game. The third quarter featured only a sputtering Raiders offense and a Titans field goal. In the fourth, with the Titans clinging to a 15–13 lead, the Raiders were the victims of a horrible call that gave Tennessee a touchdown on a play where the receiver never got his feet down in the end zone. This injustice was followed by Gannon going down with what appeared to be a knee injury with 7:11 left to go in the game. I ran to the restroom and the guy behind me was saying to himself, “Rich Gannon cannot be hurt. Repeat: Rich Gannon cannot be hurt.” I nodded in agreement and returned to my seat to see Gannon jog back out on the field and run a miraculously efficient 65-yard drive to score a touchdown to make it 22–20 Titans with 3:30 left in the game. But the big comeback was not to be as Tennessee hit another field goal, stopped the Raiders, and left the crowd at Ricky’s to cuss and mumble about stupid penalties and bad calls. As usual, we were robbed. Despite the loss, the mood in the bar was subdued but amiable. We got up to leave and thanked Ricky for his hospitality on the way out. An elderly man in a Raiders chef’s hat was rolling two big pots of cooking oil outside. Shieldhead walked up to us and the security guard by the door said, “He’s crazy, but I like him.” Ricky smiled and said, “He’s a really nice guy.” Shieldhead grinned and replied, “We’re family.”

  Eight

  Working-Class Heroes

  The promise of the industrial garden . . . was realized, if unevenly, in

  places like San Leandro and Fremont. Working-class Oakland neighbor-

  hoods in Oakland’s flatlands, in contrast, faced a steady hollowing out,

  as the city’s small-scale manufacturing economy contracted. Gone were

  the hundreds of railroad jobs that had sustained an earlier generation of

  black Oaklanders. Gone, too, after the advent of containerization in the

  mid-1960s, were many of the longshore and warehouse jobs.... The

  city’s massive canning industry had declined by the middle of the decade.

  Oakland’s automobile industry had simply disappeared. Between 1961

  and 1966, Oakland lost ten thousand manufacturing jobs.

  Robert O. Self, “California’s Industrial Garden”

  As Kelly, Joe, and I wandered through the crowd at the Raiders rally on the Friday before the home opener, I noticed a good number of people in union hats and t-shirts along with their Raiders gear. The Communications Workers of America, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, the Firefighters, and the Ironworkers were all represented here and there in the crowd. I thought about the Raiders’ blue-collar image and pondered the irony of the fact that just as the Raiders were beginning to foster their working-class rebel image in the sixties, the real working class in Oakland was being pummeled by deindustrialization and union busting.

  We asked Chris Rhomberg, a sociologist and student of Oakland, to comment on the relationship between blue-collar Oakland and the Raiders’ rebel image:This isn’t real rebellion, of course, but a highly stylized and aestheticized fantasy of rebellion. Or, rather, I think the Raiders really symbolized not rebellion so much as a certain image of working-class mobility. That is the idea that work is hard and punishing, that you have to make your breaks and take them, even breaking the rules if necessary (and the Raiders were always famous for collecting penalties), and that success comes abruptly and from out of the sky, as it were. “Commitment to Excellence” is a fine motto, but wasn’t the bottom line always “Just Win, Baby,” and doesn’t that express the dominant value system in a capitalist culture?

  The high point of working-class rebellion in Oakland was not when the Raiders brought together fans in the Coliseum parking lot in the sixties, but when, in 1946, twenty thousand workers shut down downtown Oakland to support a retail clerks’ strike in one of the most noteworthy general strikes in American history. Defying big business, the city’s political elite, and even some of their own conservative union leaders, Oakland’s workers took ownership of the city. Singing, dancing, picketing on rollerskates, fighting with police, and marching by City Hall chanting, “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” working-class Oakland residents staged a strike that was part political theater and part revolution. Described as a “carnival-like atmosphere” by many, the strike was called a “holiday” by the local unions.

  Strike participant Stan Weir remembers, “Never before or since had Oakland been so alive and happy for the majority of the population.” As Rhomberg puts it, “The emergent celebration of working-class identity in the city center defied the cultural definition of downtown as a place of commercial consumption and the regime’s political control of urban space.” In effect, shoppers became strikers. After the strike, the consciousness of local workers was transformed, and they even brought it into the ballpark. As one contemporary observer noted, “Four months after the General Strike, at the opening of the baseball season in Oakland they had the Oakland motorcycle drill team lead the dignitaries into the ball park. They were not all trade unionists in that ball park, but I never heard anybody get booed so loudly and hard as those cops did that day.”1

  John Spinola of Ironworkers Local 378

  What the Raiders represented today, I thought, as I surveyed the crowd in Frank Ogawa Plaza, was a symbolic site where the partial construction of identity occurred. Many of those workers who in the past might have been strikers have now been transformed into shoppers: they consume, in the case of the Raiders, a commodity that speaks blue-collar grit or street authenticity or whatever else depending on the imagination of the consumer. In tailgating, or coming to a crowd of 10,000 people for a Raiders rally, or cheering as one with 50,000 at the game, or with many more virtually through the far-flung media nexus, people can perhaps recuperate a fragment of the collective identity that events like the Oakland general strike offered years ago. As community in America declines and fragments, in a metropolitan area like Oakland an event like this free rally brings together people from the inner city and the atomized suburbs to share in something that, however loosely, binds them together in some ill-defined way. Even thought of as a transitory, imagined community, Raider Nation itself has seemed at times in danger of disintegrating.

  It was a sweltering day and Kelly, Joe, and I were sweating as we weaved through the crowd, taking pictures and doing quick interviews with fans. We got out of the way for a guy on a tall unicycle, strolled by a gaggle of Raiderettes, and watched people lining up to get autographs from Raiders legends. With its mishmash of corporate booths, media cameras, and fans dressed in homemade costumes, the whole gathering struck me as a cross between a mall event and a high school pep rally. We saw Señor Raider Man, Phil and Angel, Gorilla Rilla, the Oaktown Pirates, and a whole range of other fans in elaborate getups. A sexy Latina walked by in a “Yo Amo Raiders” tank top. There was a booth for organ donations and a totally empty “No Alcohol” zone. I got a beer and Kelly went over to interview an Oakland cop who was guarding the players’ tent. He told her (anonymously) that he been born and raised in Oakland, had worked on the force for thirty years, and had season tickets. “It’s a little more wild now than in the sixties,” he told Kelly. As for the
Raiders organization, “It’s all about the money. They’ll probably move again. Money-wise it will hurt the city. We’ll lose jobs.” Despite his pessimism about the Raiders’ future, he seemed glad to be at the rally. It reminded me of a story one of our interviewees had related to us of seeing a cop stop his car in the middle of the road after the Raiders won the AFC championship, get out, and start dancing with fellow fans on the street, yelling, “We did it! We did it!”

  Joe snapped a picture of an older African American woman dressed from head to toe in silver and black holding a beautiful handmade figure of “The Oakland Lady.” It was, as usual for Raiders events, a multi-age, multiclass, multiracial crowd that, for the moment, was in a friendly mood. Everyone was happy to chat with us. The Raiders organization had someone running around filming the fans. Somebody tried to get Joe to move off the steps by the VIP tent, claiming that he didn’t have an “access pass.” We met Gus Cardenas from San Bernardino, who let us get a shot of his “Destiny Angel” Raiders tattoo. Then we ran into George from Inglewood, who had also driven up the several hundred miles for the rally. He was pulling his son Anthony behind him in a little red wagon, both of them wearing Raiders jerseys. After George and Anthony, we met Edwin Brown, a proud retired teamster from Oakland who’d been a fan since the beginning. Standing near Edwin we met “Skull Lady,” whose photo would make the first page of the Sunday sports section in the Oakland Tribune, as well as “the Radiator,” whose costume was a chaotic mix of Raiders symbols that was hard to decipher.