Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  Then, just when it seemed that all was lost with the Raiders down 31–17 and 5:59 remaining to play in the game, they came back. Gannon went six out of seven passing for 110 yards in the last five minutes, scoring first by hitting Alvis Whitted with a 36-yard touchdown pass. Finally, the Raiders’ defense held, and the Silver and Black roared down the field again with Tim Brown and Jerry Rice catching pass after pass and Charlie Garner tying it up with a 24-yard touchdown run. In overtime, the Chargers won the toss and it seemed our hopes would be cruelly dashed despite the heroic comeback, but the defense held and Sebastian Janikowski won the game with a 46-yard field goal, transforming the remaining crowd into a sea of jubilation. We hugged, high-fived our neighbors, and headed home, joyfully convinced that the Raiders had turned the corner. We were back.3

  In the heaven of the spectacle

  Ten

  Monday Night Lights

  Carnival in its widest, most general sense embraced ritual spectacles such

  as fairs, popular feasts and wakes, processions and competitions . . . open

  air amusement with costumes and masks.... [I]t included comic verbal

  compositions (oral and written) such as parodies, travesties and vulgar farce

  . . . [which for Bakhtin included] curses, oaths, slang, humor, popular tricks

  and jokes, scatological, in fact all the “low” and “dirty” sorts of folk humor.

  Carnival is presented by Bakhtin as a world of topsy-turvy, heteroglot exu-

  berance, of ceaseless overrunning and excess where all is mixed, hybrid, ritu-

  ally degraded and defiled.

  Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “From Carnival to Transgression”

  The party at the AM/PM mini-mart across the street from the Coliseum was in full swing at 3:00 p.m., well before the 6:00 p.m. kickoff for the Raiders Monday Night Football game against the AFC West–leading Kansas City Chiefs, an old-time blood foe. It had been a dismal three weeks in Raider Nation with two straight road losses to the Chicago Bears and the Cleveland Browns, the loss of linebacker Bill Romanowski for the season with a concussion, and the news that former Raiders great Marv Hubbard had killed a man in an auto accident—but you’d never know it from the buzz around the sold-out stadium. Darth Vader and friends rolled by on their Harleys in black leather jackets and hollered “Raiders!” to a group of fans in jerseys who were splitting a joint on the sidewalk. They blew out their smoke and yelled back “Raiders!” in response. A customized silver-and-black lowrider cruised by with “The Autumn Wind” blaring on the stereo, and the crowd that spilled out the door of the mini-mart was in a jolly, rowdy mood.

  The parking lot was rocking with energy as people danced to soul and hip-hop, head-banging rock and heavy metal, downed tequila, wrote up signs, pranced about in elaborate costumes, and greeted each other happily. The Raiders season was on the brink of total disaster, but the atmosphere had a playoff-like intensity. We saw a couple making out in front of their motor home and watched a man chug half a bottle of vodka. A larger number of people were in costumes tonight, and the outfits covered a wide range, from a squad of Raiders army men and the Grim Reaper to a Raiders Playboy bunny and a silver-and-black Rasta man. A throaty “Fuck K.C.!” chant broke out in a corner of the lot and would continue sporadically for the rest of the evening inside and outside of the stadium. I saw a Dia de los Muertos Raiders skeleton, a Raiders football head, and a Raiders shield tattoo that took up a man’s entire upper torso.

  Inside, the hallways were mobbed and echoing and the “Ray-duz! Ray-duz!” chant was deafening. The cops looked a little edgy, and we saw a few people being carted away in handcuffs before the game even started.

  “We got another K.C. idiot over there,” I overheard a cop say to his partner.

  “That’s what they’re paying you for,” his partner said.

  “Yeah, I’ll go watch him get his ass kicked and then take a report,” he replied smugly as he slowly made his way through the crowd. In the Black Hole, the mood was festive as people mugged for the cameras and gave the Chiefs a creatively menacing welcome. The twelfth man was present and accounted for, yelling, screaming, and insulting the Chiefs with gusto, one fan consciously upping the next in volume, wit, and vulgarity. There were a couple of Hells Angels in our section, but they were pussy cats compared to the “regular” fans, who were in fine form booing and heckling the Chiefs persistently and the Raiders when their offense sputtered on the way to a 10–0 Chiefs lead at halftime. As I watched a very drunk guy in striped silver-and-black face paint get taken away in handcuffs for some unknown offense, I pondered the meaning of extreme fandom. How did the public space of a football stadium, where spectators are supposed to passively consume the commodity spectacle that is a football game (a sport chockfull of the Taylorist ideology of managerial control and worker efficiency, not to mention martial spirit and jingoism) become a contested space where a good number of fans constantly test the limits of acceptable behavior?

  Along with my friend Scott, I have always been a social libertarian and a fan of the carnivalesque. For Mikhail Bakhtin, “Carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order” and suspends “all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.” Thus, there is something subversive about events that mock “high culture” and official prohibitions and celebrate the vulgar, Dionysian excess, and deriding iconoclastic laughter. Some adherents of Bakhtinian theory emphasize its utopian populism and go so far as to argue that the excesses of carnival represent an embryonic form of political resistance. Others dismiss this and argue that carnival is a “licensed release” that lets people blow off steam and consequently functions as a mechanism of social control. Critics also point out that during carnival, the weaker members of society (women or gays, for instance) are as likely as the powerful to be abused and demonized, and thus carnival may not be a liberating occasion for all.1

  Clearly there was a bit of all of this going on in the Black Hole: the scatological humor; the populist leveling of the fussy and pretentious by a “creative disrespect” that exalts the weird and makes a prince of the pirate; extreme drunkenness and drug use; ecstatic collectivity (sometimes channeled into super patriotism); persistent homophobia; and occasionally, violent sexism like that exhibited by the drunken lout who came up to my pregnant wife when I was in the restroom and proclaimed, “If I don’t watch myself, I’ll rape you.” While I should confess that I have frequently given myself license to drink, swear, and act like a nut at games, this transgression seemed to me to be far from utopian. That, of course is the problem with any event where people get a sense that the usual prohibitions may be ignored—one person’s happy anarchy is another person’s fascist free-for-all. That said, the goodly number of arrests and fights we saw at games does not negate the fact that it is only a tiny minority of people who get crazy and abusive or violent. For most people, it’s a good crazy, a healthy disavowal of the prison of everyday life. Risk is the price of admission.

  Not everyone thinks the price is worth it. Oakland Tribune sports reporter Dave Newhouse has become a sharp critic of Raiders fans. The title of a 2002 article proclaimed, “Black Hole Hits Bottom,” and he went on to explain, “I’ve visited numerous stadiums and arenas in my 40-plus years of sportswriting, and I haven’t yet seen anything that matches the crazed atmosphere at the Net. I’ve observed plenty of lewd behavior, but what goes on in Oakland, believe me, is worse.” While being careful to exclude up to 80 percent of fans, Newhouse does decry the “monsters in makeup” who make up “Oakland’s second zoo.” When we emailed Newhouse in 2003 he cited a number of violent assaults and noted that “fans have been urinated on and slugged in restrooms.” As for our section, “In the Black Hole, fans scream gutter language, give the finger, and grab their crotch to opposing players.” Interestingly, his Oakland Tribune piece argues that the “out of control atmosphere” at the Net has no impact on the games: “If Raiders fans believe their
zealousness is helping their team, then they’ve really lost their minds.... Read my lips: It doesn’t make any difference.”2

  In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi argues that the impotence that Newhouse is intent on shoving in Raiders fans’ faces is itself the source of the extreme fan’s transgressions. As Faludi observes in her chapter on Cleveland Browns fans, corporate sports has led to the “ultimate marginalization” of working-class sports fans since the focus on TV revenue as the main source of income has “revealed just how passive and insignificant a force he [is] to his team’s fortunes.” Thus, while many media pundits have blamed fan violence on alcohol and a loss in civility in the culture, they have ignored the fact that “the reduction of fans to props could induce rage, that the show of violence might itself be the flip side of a compulsory display of glamour.... In the show business realm the fans now lived in, rage, even if kept off camera, served to draw attention, to gain recognition, and to express horror that fame would never be forthcoming.” Hence, Faludi sharply notes, “Rabid fans increasingly became focused not on helping the players perform, but on cultivating their own performances. The show in the stands began to conflict with, even undermine, the drama on the gridiron.” What everybody wants, by this logic, is to ascend to the heaven of the spectacle, to become part of the show.3

  Oaktown pirates

  No Other Life Seems Real

  For every Raiders game for the last several years, I have worn the “stadium pal.” The stadium pal is a urine disposal system, which consists of an external catheter, tubing, and a bag which attaches to your ankle. It allows me to drink as much as I want without worrying about missing a play to urinate.

  Mikie Valium, Raiders fan

  In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argues, “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” Thus, as critic Greil Marcus explains:A never ending accumulation of spectacles—advertisements, entertainments, traffic, skyscrapers, political campaigns, department stores, sports events, newscasts, art tours, foreign wars, space launchings—made a modern world, a world in which all communication flowed in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. One could not respond, or talk back, or intervene, but one did not want to. In spectacle, passivity was simultaneously the means and end for a great hidden project, a project of social control.4

  In a world where the spectacle comprised not just one event but “a social relationship among people mediated by images,” there was “no real life, yet no other life seemed real.” The consequence of this, according to Marcus, is that “nothing seemed real until it had appeared in the spectacle, even if in the moment of its appearance it would lose whatever reality it had.” It was, as Debord put it, “the material reconstruction of the religious illusion” as people sought authenticity, identity, and a whole other range of subjective emotions by consuming a product. To ascend to the heaven of the spectacle was to enter the image yourself, surrender yourself to the “something bigger than oneself” that was the commodified image writ large across the social landscape. I thought about the celebrity fans all vying for their three-second TV shot, the stadium jumbo screen, the newspaper photo, the website, collector’s card, or business card. What mattered here was not a football game, but elevating oneself to the godlike realm of the televised image, penetrating the aura, and attaining the illusory sense that you were part of the show. The spectacle seduced people by selling them the idea that their passivity was an enactment of their freedom and individuality rather than a surrender to a democracy of “false desires.”5

  Another, less dystopian way to think about the Black Hole experience comes from John Fiske, who has argued that “one reason for the popularity of sport as a spectator activity is its ability to slip the disciplinary mechanism of the workday world into reverse gear.” According to Fiske, fans who are “monitored” at work become monitors at the game, and the players become objects upon which “fans can punch away their frustration.” The whole experience can be incredibly intense and, for Fiske, “This intensity is often experienced by fans as a sense of release, of loss of control. Fans often use metaphors of madness to describe it . . . and madness is what lies just outside the boundary of civilization and control.” Thus, I thought, as the fans booed Gannon’s weak performance and cheered when backup quarterback Marques Tuiasosopo ran on the field to replace him after his injury in the second half, the Black Hole turns workers into managers for a few hours, and they exercise their imaginative control with an angry passion driven by the revenge of the average Joe or Jill over their shitty boss. “Serve me!” say the angry curses at players, “Recognize my power!”6

  Yet another view of the meaning of fandom comes from Michael Oriard, the preeminent scholar of the culture of football, who agrees with Susan Faludi about the NFL’s “abandonment of its working-class fans.” As he points out, “Without television, professional football paid poorly and had no national audience; the coming of television transformed it into the number-one American spectator sport but at the same time began the inevitable estrangement of the fans from the players.” The result of this transformation, according to Oriard, is that expensive tickets, public subsidies, merchandizing, and TV contracts have “created opportunities for merely rich owners to become filthy rich from football” and rendered fans “less necessary.” While “ordinary fans remain important for TV ratings and the revenue they determine” a single “corporate luxury box is worth hundreds of ordinary tickets.” Thus, while he argues that Faludi “romanticizes” a golden era when fans really did have a kinship with the players, Oriard does see the average fan as more marginalized today than in the past.7

  In an e-mail interview Oriard further explained his view of fans:I resist both the reductive “subversion” and “containment” extremes in cultural analysis.... I thus view football fans’ experience in the same “messy” way that I view other aspects of sport. Despite the terribly negative impact of corporatization on football fans, I assume that fans continue to find in football and their own teams something meaningful for themselves. At the same time, I assume that the meanings they find contain elements of delusion and self-delusion. My own predilection would be to not force the messiness of the ethnographic data into a too-tidy resolution of any kind. That would be truer to the world as I see it.

  Father of the Nation

  There are a large number of imposters out there that do misrepresent the

  Nation. Ashamed of some of the acts that they may commit, I am thankful

  for the support that they give. I think everyone has done something in their

  time that others felt was not quite civilized. There isn’t a game gone by that

  I have not seen a fight at the NET. There isn’t a game gone by that I have

  not drank to get drunk, talked as much shit as possible and ate till I couldn’t

  eat any more. Tailgates are the reason for the season. I go to socialize with

  other die-hard fans, harass other fans and have the best time possible. An

  occasional photo op or autograph is likely.

  Paul, Raiders fan

  As I looked out over the silver-and-black sea before me I wondered about Oriard’s observation about delusion, self-delusion, and the messy nature of determining what it “means” to be a fan. As the Raiders tried to storm back in the second half, people’s responses were earnest, angry, ironic, humorous, and just plain crazy. Clearly not all fans (myself included) are dupes, but there is definitely a suspension of disbelief necessary to gear oneself up enough to care passionately about an essentially meaningless game. And sometimes the magic spell loses its power.

  The spell of the spectacle did lose its power this year for Jimbo, the father and onetime owner of the term “Raider Nation.” In late August 2003, before the regular season even began, Jimbo shut down his Raider Empire Listserv wi
th the following explanation:I have made a tough decision to shut down the list as I no longer have a passion for the Raiders. Don’t get me wrong, I will still go to the games and pull for the team but my involvement will stop there. I will enjoy the games for what they are—a sporting event, not a way of life.

  I have found it increasingly difficult to agree with the Raiders outside the game antics. In fact, I disagree with everything the Raiders have come to represent outside the Coliseum. That means I no longer wish to push the Raiders’ propaganda regarding fan misbehavior, the lawsuits, etc. My experience with Raiders fans has been, on the whole, very good but there were those who fit the description of “ugly, ignorant, dumb fuck Raiders fans.” Unfortunately, there are enough of the dumb fuck variety to make being lumped into the category of “Raider fan” a less than desirable attribute. I established and pushed Raider Nation . . . [and it] became bigger than anything they could ever hope to achieve. I sold it to the NFL and now am bowing out with nothing more to prove. The joke’s on the rest of the fuckers who are, at best, the bottom dwellers—I toast your ineptitude.

  When we interviewed Jimbo via e-mail after he renounced his Raider Nation citizenship we were surprised to learn that even the storied fan nickname was a trademarked commodity: “I conceived of Raider Nation in 1995 after the return of the Raiders to Oakland. If you look at the fan wall at the Coliseum you will see Raider Nation listed—that is how my PSL was registered.” As for the legal history of the term, he explained that, “Raider Nation was a servicemark and trademark which I owned. For two years there were negotiations with NFL properties which culminated in a settlement to transfer ownership of the name and logos to the NFL.” He started his Listserv “to offer an alternative to Raiders fans from the other mediocre and ‘Nazi’-driven mailing lists that existed at the time. You were a Raider fan as defined by some small group of pinheads.” But Jimbo became disenchanted because:The Raiders outside of football suck, period, end. They have no concept of how to build community support and, in fact, have done a good job of eroding the fan base in the Bay Area. Their incessant lawsuits, which fostered the “us versus them” image, now come across as nothing more than someone (Big Al) with enough money to make people miserable and/or get what he wants by twisting the law. The positive spin the organization tries to weave around these lawsuits would only deceive the diehard Raiders fans and/or someone who is brain dead.... Big Al exists to sue people who get in his way, including Raider fans.