Better to Reign in Hell

by Jim Miller

  The bad side of Raiders fans existed in what I would describe as the “hard core diehards.” They have no life outside of the Silver and Black. They exist to glorify the punk/thug image of the team. I would classify them as wannabes who live out this fantasy through the team’s image. It is sad that some would rather attend a Raider game than find work to put food on the table. Take the Violator, for example, a PR coup for the Raiders when they flew him in because he could not afford the airfare. Did anyone think they maybe should encourage him to get a life?? Same for most of the denizens of the Black Hole—they live vicariously through the team’s “bad boy” image. It is unfortunate that many do not know when the game ends and reality begins.

  The good side of Raiders fans is in the unbridled enthusiasm they bring to the games. The experience at the House of Thrills is second to none. If you sit in the stands and cheer for your team respectfully and let the opposing team’s fans do the same there is great positive energy generated. The camaraderie and feeling of community is also positive. It is rare these days to find a common bond amongst large groups of people, which breaks down artificial barriers of race, education, and class. When channeled correctly all these things are very positive—when not, they cut like a two-edge sword.

  I thought about Jimbo’s disavowal of Raider Nation as I watched the Silver and Black, down 17–10, start what would have been a thrilling comeback drive at their own 6-yard line. As Tuiasosopo marched the team down the field, a guy in a white Raiders jersey and a Bill Clinton mask walked up the stairs holding a cigar, and I saw a whole band of guys dressed like KISS in silver and black strolling behind our seats. Three more “regular guys” got arrested while the Hell’s Angels just down the row watched the game peacefully while eating ice-cream cones. The game ended with Tim Brown catching a pass by the goal line and getting wrestled down inside the 1-yard line as the clock hit 0:00. As the Oakland Tribune headline put it the next day, “Time Runs Out on the Raiders.”8

  Skull Lady

  Eleven

  Real Women Wear Black

  Football in our period, as before and after, was an arena in which masculinity was at issue, not a settled matter.

  Michael Oriard, King Football

  What’s happening is that women are discovering how deeply satisfying the sanctioned conflict of football can be.

  Sally Jenkins, Men Will Be Boys

  [T]o be a football fan as a woman is empowering. I feel so empowered.

  Carrie Donnelly, Raiders fan

  Jim and I arrived at our seats, a bit out of breath from hurrying down the stairs to our section. “Gotta little Raider brewin’ in there?” asked the African American guy in a number 24 Charles Woodson jersey as he observed my growing belly and grabbed my hand.

  “Hey, he’s already got a Raiders binky waiting for him when he gets out!” I laughed as I was helped over the seat from the row behind me, marveling at the care with which my fellow Black Hole denizens handled my increasing bulk. It was another dismal game, and while the chivalrous souls around me could find it in them to aid a pregnant woman, ugliness was brewing elsewhere. Charles Woodson had spent the intervening week after the loss to the terrible Detroit Lions criticizing his coach, and Callahan was in turn probably wondering if he’d have a job with the Raiders the next season (he wouldn’t). The Raiders had also lost second-string quarterback Marques Tuiasosopo to a knee injury. Yet early in the game, the fans were not acting like this was the 2-and-6 Raiders who were falling apart. We heard the usual boisterous chants of “Ray-duz” on the way in, and things seemed to be looking up with Buchanon’s 79-yard run at 11:53 into the first quarter. But, as with everything this season, the Raiders had given it right back one minute later, and would go on to lose in overtime 24 to 27 after blowing the lead in the last few seconds of regulation time. It didn’t matter that Callahan had listened to the critics’ complaints and had gone with the running game, because the Raiders’ defense just couldn’t stop the big plays. The only positive things this week happened off the football field. Prosecutors announced that they wouldn’t pursue felony manslaughter charges against former Raiders great Marv Hubbard, thus taking him off the hook for a fatal car crash, and Oakland was rated the United States’ “eighth funnest city” according to the makers of the board game Cranium.1

  By the middle of the game, Oakland didn’t seem to be very fun, though.

  “Get that girl with the Jets shirt on! Shit! Get her!” screamed a tiny brown-haired woman in a Raiders jersey as she went after an equally diminutive blonde in a Jets jersey.

  “Take your bitch home!” yelled the silver-and-black clad hellion as her male companion held her back, her arms outstretched and clawing at the air. The woman in the Jets jersey backed up against her six-foot-four-inch boyfriend, who, ironically, was dressed head to toe in Raiders gear. After the angry Raiders woman had been carted up the stairs, we saw the Jets woman shake her head, marveling after nearly getting jumped by someone of her own sex. I couldn’t help but think about Jerry Porter’s comments earlier that season regarding one of his foes on the Titans: “He’s a girl. I don’t like playing football against girls.” After the game, our friend Jim told us that he had seen a group of women decked out in Raiders gear attack a couple of female Jets fans. “I was surprised to see how aggressive those girls were,” he said.2

  On the face of it, “chick fights” among women fans seem somewhat surprising given the history of women’s involvement in football. We are used to seeing women as cheerleaders, beautiful feminine baubles emphasizing the tough maleness of the football players on the gridiron. Football, among all the other contact sports, with the possible exception of prize fighting, enshrines masculinity and uses femininity as a foil. In fact, football’s history parallels fears in the United States that society was becoming “feminized.” In Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity, Michael Messner points out, “That the modern institution of sport was shaped during the time when women were challenging existing gender relations helps to explain the particular forms that sport eventually took.”3 It is interesting to note that football’s early history coincides with women’s suffrage, a moment in U.S. history when women really were contesting the established order. Michael Oriard also documents other events that challenged the taken-for-grantedness of masculinity:With industrialization, the closing of the frontier, and the migration to cities, the American male was cut off from the physical demands of everyday outdoor life, through which his manhood had once been routinely confirmed. Thrust into a new world where traditional masculine traits were no longer meaningful, he found in vigorous outdoor sports such as football a compensating validation of his manhood. The outcry against football brutality was great, but concern over the possibility of an emasculated American manhood greater.4

  Oriard goes on to discuss how middle-class men, in particular, were fearful of feminization, since their work generally involved no physical labor at all. For working-class men, such anxieties would come later. Football, which was initially played by elite college men and soon after by working-class professionals, was the perfect sport to allay such fears. Its brutality and aggressiveness—its sheer physicality—bespeaks a power through might. When one is successful on the football field, one is successful because of one’s physical prowess. Even the strategists on the field (the quarterback, for example) have to be in the peak of physical health to withstand the continual body blows. “Girls” can’t take the abuse. Football is thus a potent vehicle through which masculinity is made manifest.

  Raiderettes and company

  Obviously not all men are cut out to be football players. Nor do all men define masculinity through violence and physical dominance. For a wide swath of men in the United States, however, that is exactly how masculinity is defined. Hence, if you can’t be a football player—or even a player in your work life—you can watch the game as a fan and identify with the guys on the field. As Susan Faludi notes in her chapter on Cleveland Browns fans in Stiffed, one of t
he powerful venues which many working-class men in Cleveland have had for shoring up their masculinity and their sense of self in the face of deindustrialization, the resulting job losses, and marginalization has been football fandom. This identification can prove treacherous, however: “The sort of ‘team’ in which a man could lose himself while finding himself as a man no longer seemed to exist. Not in the workplace. Not on the battlefront. Not even on the playing fields.”5

  Nevertheless, in many ways a football game is indeed masculinity writ large: twenty-two beefy guys battling each other for possession of the ball and the field. The allure of the game for men is its lack of apparent ambiguity. This explains the rampant homophobia permeating the stands and the Internet as men attempt to police the boundaries of acceptable masculinity and keep the game as unambiguous as possible. When male fans call each other or players “fags” or “homos” or hurl any other number of homophobic insults, they are making sure that the identity they’ve defined as “male” remains pure. Which is why women are used in very specific ways to prop up male identities.

  Cheerleaders serve as feminine counterpoints to the sweating, grunting players. In the middle of one’s field of vision or TV screen the stars perform the central show; on the sidelines, serving as a kind of frame, are the hypersexualized and generally silent kootchy dancers. The huge squad of Raiderettes (note the diminutive), in their ultra-feminine low-cut pirate tops, black miniskirts, and white go-go boots with a rainbow of flowing locks serve as a kind of gender commentary on the players. Like Las Vegas showgirls, the Raiderettes, along with their sisters throughout the NFL, shake their booties and their boobies and all but strip for the slavering mass of male fandom. The Raiderette whom we spoke with on condition of anonymity at the Raiders rally before the home opener might not see herself this way, especially since she thinks that she and her colleagues “represent women fans and that we set a standard for women. I believe that this is how women fans should represent the Raiders—as the Raiderettes do.” Nevertheless, while the players tackle, hit, and grab each other, the scantily clad cheerleaders wave their pom-poms and smile for the camera. As Sally Jenkins puts it in Men Will Be Boys: “With its emphasis on the extreme possibilities of the male body and psyche, coupled with the emphasis on relatively naked, voluptuous women as cheerleaders, football has reinforced traditional notions of male–female relations like no other public ritual.” In this arena, the football player acts while the cheerleader is a passive bit of eye candy. It’s the old male gaze at work, an exercise of patriarchal power. Or is it? In the realm of the spectacle, both the men and women on the field are targets of the gaze. Which is where female fans of football come in.6

  Why do women watch sports? What could possibly be interesting for the woman fan? Jenkins documents that “a full 40 percent of the [NFL’s] television audience is female,” and “[a]ccording to various surveys, including Nielsen research, anywhere from 28 to 40 million women watch the NFL on TV each week, and as many as 60 million watch the Super Bowl. League figures show that women make up 40 percent of game day attendance. Forty-six percent of all NFL Licensing purchases are made by women.” Jenkins’ conclusion is that “women are discovering how deeply satisfying the sanctioned conflict of football can be.” Judging by the lines to the women’s restrooms and the rows of female faces in the stands in the Oakland Coliseum, the Raiders attract their share of the fairer sex. When we spoke with Tish, Michelle, and Kristie, three women fans at the Raiders rally, and asked them why they liked the team and football in general, Tish answered, “I’ve always loved football. It’s an aggressive sport and fun to watch.” “I like to watch contact sports,” Michelle added, “they’re physical and action-packed where every play is different.” Impulses similar to the ones that lead men to watch football entice women as well. It’s also important to note women’s increasing participation in the world of work. If men watch sports to escape from their lives, if football, for example, offers a release from tension and a venue for displaced aggression, it should not be surprising that women might find some of the same kinds of satisfactions in viewing sports. In the wake of not only the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late sixties and early seventies, but also the passage of Title IX, which has enabled girls and women to participate in sports in school, women’s positive attitudes toward sports make sense. For even though there have always been women spectators at sporting events, the ways that women watch sports—and watch men play sports—are changing.7

  The women fans in the Black Hole are a case in point. From Raider-Gloria and Skull Lady to your average Jane in a Jerry Rice jersey, the end zone is filled with rabid women, as stat-savvy and vehement as their male companions. For some, like ESPN reporter Alyssa Minkoff, the Black Hole represents a place where she can “satisfy and even nurture [her] desperately underutilized reprobate streak.” In her article “Sweetheart of the Hole,” Minkoff describes her weekend in “The Black Hole in Raider Nation” and says that she went to the game in order to “get back in touch with [her] ‘Inner Bad Girl.’” While the article mostly details a novice’s journey through the parking lot and the stands, it is interesting that Minkoff characterizes her impulse to experience Raider Nation as being “bad.” What this depiction makes apparent are the ways in which gender crossing can be titillating—as long as it’s crossing from the world of women to that of men. Being in the male realm where physical might clearly rules can be a welcome respite from the female realm of sticky emotion. “Bad girls” not only choose to hang out with men instead of women, they also often act like men in the way they approach relationships and life. Football games in general and Raiders games in particular offer the female fan the opportunity not only to vacation in the land of men, but to dress up in the most outrageous ways possible.8

  Skull Lady, whom we met at the Raiders rally earlier in the season and whose antics in the Black Hole (including several cameos on the jumbo screen during games) we noted with amusement, would not agree with our anonymous Raiderette that the cheerleaders should set the tone for women fans. With her skull-encrusted construction helmet, silver-and-black face paint, black jersey, black lycra leggings, skeleton epaulets, shin guards, elbow-length gloves, and long blonde hair, Skull Lady cuts quite a figure. She told us she’d been dressing up for games for four years after her five-year-old niece picked out her outfit and told her that she “had to come to all the games dressed this way.” Just two rows from the field, Skull Lady sits right in front of one of the squads of Raiderettes. “Don’t get me wrong, I like the Raiderettes,” she explained without disavowing her own brand of costuming. While a large part of Skull Lady’s impetus is her occasional big screen appearance, this does not negate her genuine enthusiasm for the game and the team. The Raiderettes may be the official promulgators of female sports fandom, but the women in the stands who roll up their sleeves and throw themselves into the games right alongside the male fans are redefining the strict gender dichotomization of sports. Interestingly, no men we spoke with seemed to mind rooting with the girls. Sitting side by side with women fans, men ogled the cheerleaders, or made fun of them, and discussed the game with their female companions. In fact, the group of friends and family surrounding us in our seats in the Black Hole included equal numbers of women and men. And throughout our research, many a man told us that he became a Raiders fan through his mother or grandmother rather than through his male relatives.

  A parallel to men growing up in a Raiders matriarchy is the large number of women who were brought up in the Silver and Black by their fathers. Amanda and Carrie Donnelly are two such women. Both in their early twenties, the Donnelly sisters are warm and gregarious. Carrie, the older of the two, has long, curly brown hair and an infectious laugh. Amanda, who is quieter than her sister, smiles a lot and has shorter, blondish hair. While their mother is a huge Raiders fan, it was their father who raised them to gravitate toward all things silver and black. A former blue-collar worker in the aluminum industry who became a social worker afte
r a back injury, their father grew up in Alameda and went to Raiders games from an early age. Just about every member of Amanda and Carrie’s family has season tickets, including their mother, who grew up in the East Bay community of Castro Valley. As Amanda puts it, “[The Raiders] are not just a team, but something that we believe in—something holy—that we are very passionate about.” The Donnellys’ father, however, is the biggest “fanatic,” according to Carrie. “When we were kids, we were given no other choice. Any presents we were given had to be silver and black. For example, we had to have silver-and-black NFL jackets.”

  “We wanted pink jackets,” added Amanda, “but it had to be silver and black.”