by Jim Miller
On BART I looked over an Oakland Tribune article entitled, “Is Arnold Losing His Superhero Status? Planned Cuts Will Hit Hardest at Lower End of Economic Spectrum.” In the sports section, Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer talked about his experience with Raiders fans: “An older lady, a grandmotherly type was walking down with Raiders stuff on. I kind of waved at her and I got the bird back. I was trying to be nice, but I learned my lesson. Those guys around there—whether it’s men, women, or children—are in it to get after you.” What else was left? I wondered. As the East Bay Express put it, “With Oakland’s season long ago spoiled by lethargy, player vs. coach infighting, and a designer steroids scandal, the only things that Raider Nation have to look forward to the rest of the year besides five more chances to spackle on hypoallergenic silver and black death masks and trot out their spike-encrusted hard hats are a few prime opportunities to drag the other teams’ postseason dreams into the mud with them.” Enter the Broncos, my personal nemesis and bringer of more bitter Mondays than any other hated foe. I was just starting to work up a serious fit of loathing when it was ruined by turning the page and seeing the “Queer Eye for the East Bay” take on Al Davis. Apparently Al needs to lose the sweatsuits and the pinkie ring, “And get a new pair of sunglasses immediately. These look like they were given to you in 1962, when you first became coach of the Raiders. The mini-pompadour thing in front of your hair is also about four decades behind the times and harks back to the days of Vitalis.” This, I was sure, was yet another bad omen in a season of bad omens.13
At the Coliseum stop the driver announced, “Raider Nation stop. The Coliseum, where the Raiders are going to crush the Denver Broncos! The AFC Champion Oakland Raiders will crush the Denver Broncos! Raider Nation stop.” We headed into the stadium in our silver-and-black rain ponchos, and I spotted a guy wearing an old-fashioned striped prisoner’s outfit chatting with a very wet silver-and-black Uncle Sam. At the seats, our Black Hole neighbors checked on the status of Kelly’s pregnancy and said hello to Hector. The game started with baseball-like scores as the Raiders went up 2–0 with a safety and built the lead to 5–0 by way of a Janikowski field goal. After this, a costly penalty led to a Broncos touchdown, but the Raiders took the lead back briefly with another field goal. That was the last time they would score as the Broncos took a 14–8 lead into halftime after another Raiders penalty led to Denver’s second touchdown. They were giving it away. In the stands, there was some action as a handful of Broncos fans were roundly booed and heckled, with one losing his orange beanie to a hostile takeover and another Donkey fan requesting a police escort out of the stands. In the second half, the Raiders stayed with Denver through a scoreless third quarter before more penalties and turnovers finally cost them the game, 22–8. It was a dismally frustrating debacle that sent the Black Hole trudging home wet and cranky. After the game, Callahan exploded at a press conference saying, “We’ve got to be the dumbest team in America.” The Raiders were falling apart at the seams. It was like a bad dream that just would not end.14
Nevermore
After losing a pathetic, forgettable game to the Steelers in Pittsburgh, there were rumblings that the Raiders had given up. And as I headed into Oakland once again with fellow Raiders fan Danny Widener, I must admit I was looking forward to the Holiday Beer Tasting at the Pacific Coast Brewing Company more than watching the Raiders further unravel against the Ravens. Like the bird in the famous Edgar Allan Poe poem after which Baltimore’s gridiron heroes are named, many Raiders fans were saying, “Nevermore.” For the first time all season, I saw no cars lined up to get into the Coliseum as we passed by the front gate in our cab. Nonetheless, here we were, just in time for the tasting. After about ten or more samples of holiday cheer apiece, Danny and I ambled down to the produce market on 2nd Street to visit Oaklandish, a gallery and store run by the Nonchalance Collective that features pop culture nods to Oakland’s subterranean history with posters, t-shirts, and a variety of other kitsch devoted to the Black Panthers, the Hell’s Angels, the Symbionese Liberation Army, graffiti artists, Julia Morgan, Bruce Lee, and more. When I told a woman there about our project, she showed me an “Aztlan Raiders” t-shirt. After milling around amid the eclectic array of hip-pop cultural artifacts, we went downstairs and found another bar, where Danny and I talked about the Raiders.
Danny is a tall, handsome, light-skinned African American man with long dreads and a compelling presence. Currently an assistant professor of history at University of California at San Diego, Danny grew up in Echo Park and Venice and went to school at UC Berkeley while living in East Oakland, making him a rarity in Raider Nation, an L.A. fan with East Bay credibility. Danny’s take on Raiders fans is both academic and personal:Football is intensely conformist. It’s the only major sport where all the players are always masked, essentially, so people are always anonymous, and even the management ethos of football makes players much more interchangeable. It’s like the combine, the way they measure things. There is nothing like that in baseball or basketball. So the Raiders offer people a way to be connected to institutions and also be anti-establishment. And I think that’s another kind of thread that defines what it means to be a Raiders fan. What could be more conformist than having sixty thousand people [in a stadium] and you’re all dressed the same and yet somehow you are expressing your individuality?
So these white guys from San Leandro and these black guys from East Oakland bonded with the Raiders, not the A’s. Oakland is an industrial city. It is a working-class city, and there is class mobility for some of the whites but even those whites don’t have mobility to the upper class. And so the Raiders fans, you see them come in from BART. They come from Walnut Creek, San Leandro, over the hills. They are insurance salesmen. They are contractors. They’re heavyset—they’re Schwarzenegger voters essentially, right? And the African American population, the black population that comes to those games is still relatively young or it is multigenerational, and it is a central-city, Oakland crowd. And it does allow this bond. It allows that kind of interracial bonding about Oakland, but I don’t think it’s so much about a progressive antiracism as it is about Oakland’s deep insecurity, which is transformed into this collective thing. But it’s interesting, the political thing about it. You have these working-class black people who are really lumpen [or underclass] and these petty bourgeois whites. I mean there is a substantial Latino population in Oakland but it’s relatively new. [Raiders fans] are a fractured and threatened group. It is the social basis for fascism. It’s the culmination of the ideology of action movies—the class anxiety and the masculinist culture—it’s an amalgamation of a lot of things. Something about this is really about insecurity and fear and projection.
In terms of masculinity and being a Raiders fan, it’s not as aggressively proletarian as the Steelers. People have accessed edginess in a way that they hadn’t before, you know? The other thing is that the Raiders have always been, I think, conceptualized as a black team. And part of the popularity of the Raiders with fans has to do with the fact that Americans are now willing to accept—for the same reason that gangster rap is popular with white teens—something that gives them access to “the other.” So the Raiders are an urban team, unlike the Rams or the Chargers or the Cowboys. They have always had bad asses. And I think the Raiders allow you to access that same thing you do when you see a gangster movie. It’s the gangster theory of life. So there is something about the Raiders that’s simultaneously urban, but also fast-paced and modern. They don’t just run the ball. So it’s interesting because when you think about why you like a team, the style of play along with simply the colors and all that stuff is part of it. There is an aesthetic dimension to it. There is a moment where all the kind of imagery, the style of play, the uniform, the aesthetic—the form and function is all there with the Raiders. And the Raiders used to win. We like that—we’re Americans, after all. But the Raiders really seized on that gangster mentality, that flashiness, all of those things in a way that’s
unique if you think about them in comparison to other teams.
My uncle would take me to games [in Los Angeles] and certainly the attendance in the stands was much more heavily people of color than you would be likely to see in any football stadium today. [Other teams’ audiences] at one point would have been predominantly working-class families, but now they are suburbanized, relatively affluent. The Raiders, I guess, managed to deal with the loss of this fan base by moving geographically and by picking up this kind of gangster community. The Raiders also probably would have been a different team if they hadn’t moved to L.A., because when they moved they acquired this Chicano and black fan base at the same time gangs became a part of those communities and entered the whole American imagination. I think you could separate football teams into different categories. There are the suburban teams like San Diego and Seattle. Then there are middle-American teams like Dallas and Denver. The Miami Dolphins are Miami Vice, kind of flashy. They’re legitimate Raiders rivals stylistically. Except for their goddamn flipper.
The Raiders have a leader, a Godfather. The guy who is ultimately in charge. The only person who comes close to Al Davis is Steinbrenner [who is] equally loathed and equally meddlesome. But unlike Steinbrenner, Davis has actually made a lot of innovations in the game. [He is a] hated figure, but somebody who really has revolutionized the game. What is Raider football? It’s Al Davis, the Godfather. Anytime you have a glorification of the gangster worldview and that community, you automatically have to have a discussion of authenticity, you have to have a discussion about history. So there are all these narratives about class, so that’s one thing. But a core element, the essence of being a Raiders fan is being the real thing. The gangster image just replaced the lunch bucket image [in that regard]. I mean, the spectacle of Raiders fans, the way the commentators talk about it is one thing, but there is actually very little real social violence in American professional sports among American fans, nothing compared with other countries. We are extremely well behaved. Some of that is because they don’t let them get as drunk as they used to, and of course we make everybody sit in their seat and follow all these fucking rules in the United States. And we’re free: “Love your freedom and sit down.” So other teams besides the Raiders just don’t allow you to maintain your sense that you’re not conforming, not taking any shit off of anybody.
Trying to place people ideologically in America [gets you] into this populist stew. You could construct a scenario that says Raiders fans have always been a working-class team. They are a working-class team in Oakland. When they got to L.A., this was still the working class. It was South L.A. But I think politically it’s probably much more to the right because it’s essentially about the glorification of violence. It’s also about nostalgia. Since they have moved back to Oakland it has much more of this cast of nostalgia. Nostalgia is key.
On game day, the Black Hole was abuzz with the news that Saddam Hussein had been captured in Iraq and, for today at least, the hope was that the end of the fighting was near. Some of the patriots in the crowd had duly adorned the usual black-and-silver signs and outfits with little American flags. Sadly, they couldn’t have been more wrong. Danny and I had noted how surreal it had been to see the TV footage of the Iraqi Communist Party celebrating by waving red flags as Wolf Blitzer and company steadfastly ignored the irony. Several rows in front of us, I noticed a guy in black-striped silver facepaint holding up a UFCW picket sign for the TV cameras. Holding the line in the Black Hole, I thought: beautiful. He posed for a picture and afterward, Jack, one of my Black Hole neighbors, said, “It’s hard being out there all day and all night. People need something to pick up their spirits. You should get out that picture so people can see it. That would be great. It’s not like those CEOs are not making enough money. Shit.” I nodded in agreement and we talked a bit about strike tactics, the old sitdown strategy, and how hard it was for unions to get their message out in the media. How long would they be out? Until January? March? It was a hard bargain, we agreed.
Only 45,398 fans showed up that day, but the Raiders rewarded the smallest crowd since 1998 for their loyalty by stunning the AFC North–leading Ravens 20–12 in a gritty, well-played game. There weren’t any Ravens fans in the stands and there weren’t any hassles with the cops, although I did hear a rumor that a narcotics officer was cruising the restrooms dressed in Raiders gear and a dog mask. I thought of Danny’s musing about the incipient fascism in a football crowd. While I had to admit that there is always an element of Raider totalitarianism when it comes to greeting fans brave enough to come and root for the other team in the Black Hole, I just couldn’t write off the whole phenomenon as right-wing groupthink. It’s love and war at the same time, I thought, not one or the other exclusively. As for the nostalgia, yes, it was there. But nostalgia for what? Maybe it was just my hangover, but the whole Raiders fan story was shaping up as a bittersweet tale of loss and unnamed yearning. Danny was having a good time hamming it up in his silver Mexican wrestler’s mask. The Raiders played tough defense and sent the crowd home happy. It was the last good day of the season. As we crossed over the bridge to BART, Danny saw a guy selling five-dollar gear and quipped, “Nothing says Christmas like a ‘Fuck All Raider Haters’ t-shirt!”
Busted
Thirteen
Just Lose, Baby
This team needs help. Serious help. They could be in this dark hole forever. They need some damage control.... I know how to get rid of the psychic virus.
Dr. Richard Crowley, sports psychologist, on the 2003 Raiders
For the Raiders, it was Super Bowl or nothing. As a result, their fan base will take the deeper hit. There will always be hard-core Raiders fans—those guys in spiked shoulder pads you see in the Visa commercials—but for those who only recently started affiliating with the team, this year probably destroyed their interest.
Christian End, Sports Fan Research Group, on the toll the 2003 season was taking on Raider Nation
It sure does hurt. It’s definitely difficult and frustrating, but we’re hanging in there.
Leroy Zine, President of the Oakland Raiders Internet Boosters
The Raiders’ last home game was another Monday Night Football affair, and despite the Baltimore win, the rumors were flying about dissension in the locker room and there was speculation about whether this would be Charles Woodson’s last game in Oakland. A far better result, most Raiders fans thought, would be to fire Coach Bill Callahan and do whatever it took to keep Woodson. Such was the tenor of the conversation Chuck and I were having as we walked through the airport in Oakland before spotting a bomb-sniffing dog outfitted with a Raiders shield. The country was on Orange Alert, and Reno the Raider dog, which we learned was the dog’s name, was keeping us safe from terrorists. “Isn’t that animal cruelty?” said one smart aleck passing by with a rolling suitcase. “Only if it was the 49ers,” the cop with Reno shot back. The cab driver saw our Raiders gear and said as he dropped us off at the hotel downtown, “I’m right behind you. I’ve got the world’s biggest rib eye waiting for me. After this stop, it’s tailgate heaven. Forget the game.”
Chuck and I went out to get a few beers and a burger before the game and talked about how he came into the Silver and Black family. Chuck, whose house has been San Diego Raiders central for our whole gang of Raiders fans, runs his own business and has followed the team religiously for years, despite the fact that he has never lived in Oakland or Los Angeles. A tall, lanky, brown-haired Anglo in his mid forties, Chuck has a relaxed, easy manner. We started by discussing how he came to be a fan as a kid:I started watching the Raiders in 1971. My dad was a General Motors executive, so I was living overseas in Singapore. Having never lived in the US, always living overseas with my folks, I was going to the Singapore American School, and, once a week during football season, they would get a game. There was no football on local TV in Singapore, so the only way I knew about football was that once a week NFL Films would send down film on reels, and we would watch the hi
ghlights in the auditorium. I have a memory of not even knowing who the Raiders were—I just liked the uniforms, the logo on the side of the helmet, their style of play. They weren’t clean-cut. They had long hair. They seemed to have more of an image of being outlaws. So I was a renegade just by the fact that I liked the Raiders. Any time you’re a Raiders fan, whether it be in Singapore or San Diego, you’re a renegade. There is something wrong with you. You seemed to be a nice guy, but what’s happened?
All I could do for years was follow them by the newspaper until I moved to the States in 1976 and was exposed to the Raiders on a daily basis. So it really has almost nothing to do with place at this point. You don’t think of Oakland as a place. I couldn’t have told you where Oakland was on a map, to be honest with you. I knew it was near San Francisco, and I had been to San Francisco a few times for visits while traveling in the States [because my brother lived there]. [By the 1980s] we were living overseas again in New Zealand, and my dad and I [traveled back to the United States] looking at some schools for me in the L.A. area. We [went to] a preseason game against the Rams at the Coliseum. This was my first ever exposure to pro football, and I already knew I liked the Raiders.
[Once I was living in San Diego as an adult] there was no Direct TV at that time, so if you wanted to see a game you had to go to a bar unless you were lucky enough to have [the Raiders game] as one of the games on the network that day. This was almost, to me, as good as going to a game because you were with fellow fans and you had that feeling that goes along with being with fellow fans—united in your love for the Raiders. Being in the bar in San Diego was strange because [the one I went to] was a Philadelphia Eagles bar in the morning and a Raiders bar in the afternoon. But every week, you were with your friends for three hours on a Sunday afternoon. There were people—you may not even have known their names—but you were high-fiving them and hugging them during big touchdowns and you looked forward to seeing them on a Sunday afternoon. Everyone there was a personality.