Peter Richmond
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/09/the-exchange-peter-richmond.html
September 22, 2010
It's late afternoon on a football Sunday in the Northeast, circa
1976. Outside, the sun is setting. Soon your mother will call you up
for dinner. But, before then, you want more football. You flip over
to NBC and there, in West Coast sunshine, is a team wearing silver
and black, playing with a kind of controlled recklessness. Their logo
features a pair of crossed swords and a man with an eyepatch; their
coach is a shambling, wild-haired guy; their quarterback is nicknamed
Snake; and their owner looks like he carries a stiletto in his
jacket. You watch them play and before you know it, you've fallen in
love with this team. Before you know it, you've abandoned your
Redskins or Eagles or Jets. You're now an Oakland Raiders fan.
If any of the above resonates for you, then you will want to read
Peter Richmond's new book, "Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr.
Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders," which has just been
published by Harper. Richmond, who is the author of numerous books on
sports (as well as a Shouts & Murmurs piece about Ken Griffey, Jr.
published in The New Yorker), kindly agreed to answer a few questions
by e-mail.
--
What drew you to writing about this team now?
For thirty yearsstarting just about the time the Cowboys were
anointed as "America's Team"I've been watching with dismay as the
N.F.L. deteriorates from sport into High Entertainment, into a show
where, as tight end Raymond Chester puts it in the book, "the
"players are independent contractors. They are each mini sports
corporations." In my last book, "The Glory Game," with Frank Gifford,
we recreated the 1958 Colts and Giants: an era when the game still
had a foot in its lunchpail roots, when the players would hang in the
locker room after practice to be with their friends, then head off to
Toots Shor's to get blitzed, because Toots would always pick up the
check, and they were making less money than bus drivers.
So after I finished that one, I wondered: What was the last great
football team that played the sport for love and camaraderie, not
money or fame? It was a no-brainer: the Raiders of the seventies.
During that one decade, they won more games than any other team,
including a Super Bowl. But much more intriguingly, they played for
each other, they partied hard and long, and they loved their
downtrodden city as much as the city loved them. Each summer the vets
would show up in training camp early, so they could hang with their
friends. Would that ever happen now? No way.
Were you a Raiders fan when you were younger?
Insanely so. At Yale in the seventies, when my boring, gray-flannel
Giants were foundering, I was an angry, anarchic, substance-loving
rebel without a cause…except pro football. There was only one way to
reconcile those two disparate personalities: falling in love with a
football team that wore its hair to its shoulders, its eyeblack like
vampiric mascara, and its attitude on its (ragged) black
sleevesplaying in a grassy stadium where the sun was still shining
on television when, back East, it had already turned into dark,
depressing Sunday Night, which meant that indecipherable classes
about Immanuel Kant were looming at dawn. The weekly Raider games
were my soulful salvation.
The seventies produced a number of colorful teams, including the
Steel Curtain Steelers, the Bronx Zoo Yankees, and the We Are Family
Pirates. Was there something special about that decade?
Absolutely…and let's not forget the no-hitter Dock Ellis pitched on
acid in 1970! History judges the seventies as a light footprint in
our national history, and it may have been, culturally…but in pro
sports, the ideological vestiges of the sixties lived on into the
seventies. The athletes who emerged as stars in the seventies had
grown up as kids in the sixtieswhen their adolescent sports tracks
kept them from joining in the rebellion until they turned pro, at
which point many of them became free to channel their inner Abbie
Hoffman/Malcolm X.
Pro sports has always been, always will be, a conservative collective
corporation, business-management-wise, butweirdlyin pro sports, the
revolution now lived on. In the seventies, the pro athlete started to
truly become empowered, as television embraced sports as a viable
revenue stream. At that tipping point, a lot of the athletes found
the most counter-intuitive of stages on which to display their
rebellious souls: the playing field.
How different would the N.F.L. be today if Raiders owner Al
Davisand not Pete Rozellehad become commissioner, as seemed
possible when the A.F.L. and N.F.L. merged?
How different would the United States be if Ralph Nader had been
elected president? We'd have an entirely different league, in a
hundred different ways. Rozelle was a slick team playerand an ace
marketer. His job in 1966 was to turn the merging leagues into one
revenue-producing entertainment product. (He could have done the same
thing with competing grocery-store chains, and probably been as
professionally satisfied.) Rozelle was a tanned, handsome,
central-casting spokesman who was great at unruffling
inter-owner-feud feathers and smilingly molding the sport into an
attractive television commodity: the architect of the game we have
today. If Davis the historian/ego had prevailed, Al's dictatorial
Roman-emperor streak (think the good emperors: Augustus, not
Caligula) would have turned the league into a league of warring
nation-tribes, with mano-a-mano competition between franchises: no
holds barred, no restrictions on stealing other players, winner take
all. The losers would have Darwinianly disappeared.
At heart, Davis is a male Ayn Rand. But more significantly, under
Davis the old players would have been taken care of; for all of his
empire-building instincts, Davis' real managerial talent lay in his
love for each and every one of his players. He never forgot that he
himself wasn't good enough to play, and he always held his athletes
in reverence for their skills. He treated them like kings. If Davis
had run the whole shop back then, we wouldn't have infirm
ex-N.F.L.ers having to beg for help today.
On the other hand, he probably wouldn't have allowed for the
revenue-sharing that Giants owner Wellington Mara spearheaded, which
is the underlying economic factor that contributes to the parity in
the modern league, and allows every fan in every city to have honest
hopes of reaching the playoffs each year. But this is all a fantasy:
Al as Commissioner would have lasted a season or two before being
expelled, in a coup of boorish, foppish industrialists who would have
toppled him, as Rome did with most of its emperors (although they
probably wouldn't have used the Praetorian Guard to murder him, so
he'd have retired to an island fortress, like Catalina, and started
another league).
Do you think fans have forgotten what a great coach John Madden was?
These days he's best known as a commentator and video-game pitchman.
If Madden had wanted to erase his name from the pantheon of great
coaches (which I know he didn't; today he holds enormous pride in his
coaching achievements), he couldn't have chosen a better
post-coaching career: becoming the Greek Chorus of the sport for four
decades, and thereby obscuring his brief coaching brilliance. He
walked away at the top, like Jim Brown: with a better
winning-percentage than Vince Lombardi's. I'd put him on the Rushmore
of coaching with George Halas, Paul Brown and Lombardi. But his
talent as a coach lay in a philosophy entirely antithetical to the
other three: he was anti-authoritarian. He turned his players loose
six days a week as long as they showed up full-bore on Sunday, and
treated them like men doing a job, professionals who could be trusted
about doing the work they were being paid for.
As Ken Stabler put it in the book, one of his credos was "On the
field, go play. Off the field, go play." Or, as tight end Ted Kwalick
said, "I was glad to play for a coach who treated you like a man, not
like a kid." That saying about giving someone enough rope to hang
themselves? Madden gave them enough rope to be themselves. And the
result of that looseness was that they loved him, and showed up on
Sunday determined to make him proud. Like Davis, Madden revered his
players, and liked them as people. The bottom line is that John never
bought into the idea of coaches being drill-sergeants, or
mind-masters arranging pawns (or slabs of meat). He saw himself as a
shepherd of a bunch of grown-up, athletes who were proud of their
individuality, and let them roam where they wanted to.
Are there any teams in the league now that carry on the tradition of
the Madden/Davis Raiders? Perhaps the Baltimore Ravens?
Definitely the Ravens, although Rex Ryan, the coach of the Jets, has
a lot of Madden in him: big, funny, loose, with total faith in his
players. But the Ravens fit the Badass bill. They wear black, they're
from a downtrodden town, and they hit harder than any team in
history. Ray Lewis would have been a great Badassalthough he
overstepped the Badass bounds…after all, he was indicted for murder
(the charges were later dropped), and none of the Raiders was ever
even busted.
The Raiders' rebellions never resulted in anything more than having
to walk home because they were too drunk to change a flat tire. But
going by another definition of Badasswhich is that other teams are
literally afraid to play you, for fear of their careers, and/or their
livesthen the Ravens are our last holdover.
Do you think the image created by the Badass Raiders is also
responsible for the franchise being adopted as an icon by gangsta
rappers after the team moved to Los Angeles (as Ice Cube documented
in his film "Straight Outta L.A.")?
From the very beginning, as the also-ran team in the Bay Area,
representing an industrial multi-racial town lying a couple of
bridges away from a gentrified cultural capital, the Raiders appealed
to underclasses. In the seventies, when the team was half
African-American, the stands in the Coliseum were equally black and
white, and the tailgating parties the players joined in on after
every game in the parking lots were always multiracialwhite, black,
Asian. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were huge Raider fans (as were the
local, Sonny Barger-led chapter of the Hell's Angels). Even if the
Raiders had been a bad team in those years, instead of great, they
would still have sown the seeds of revolution.
Ice Cube's documentary was an inevitable anthem to an American
philosophy that gangsta rap represents: authority at the cost of
individual expression is dangerous authority, and must be defied. The
cool thing is that hard-core rappers (discluding the ones who
actually engage in gunplay) recognized, as Raider fans always have,
that football isn't just a sport; it's now embedded, as it should be,
as a manifestation/expression of our modern national and cultural
bloodstream, as powerful as music. The idea that baseball is
America's "pastime" is painfully accurate; that game represents the
centuries-old-school belief that our land was at its best when we
could move the old farmland-game into vacant lots in the newly
humming industrialized cities, and that White America would happily
click on, while the factory workers migrating from the South would
just truck on, happily oppressed.
Professional football, as commercial as it's now become, is
nonetheless as joyous an expression of our actual national collective
vibe as hip-hop and rap. We've always been good at music, ever since
Midwestern Lutheran/European church music met urban jazz in the
Twenties. And we've always been good at sports. It's natural that the
two should have merged in Oakland. (The only thing that disappointed
me, music/football-wise, is that the true pioneers of punk, Black
Flag, never adopted the Raiders. But it's never too late. They must
be touring somewhere.)
Why have the Raiders been so mediocre lately and is there hope that
the Raider franchise might one day soon become a Super Bowl champion again?
Soon? No. Sooner or later? Well, yeseventually; revenue-sharing and
free-agency guarantee surprises every few years; the days of
dynasties are over. But the Raiders carry a handicap: Davis'
continuing insistence at being the black-sheep iconoclast in the
league, relying on his old gut instinct to find players whom everyone
has overlooked. But this is no longer a viable strategy; thanks to
the scouting combines and the Internet, every team's personnel staff
now knows every player out there, from Notre Dame to Bloomsburg University.
When I asked the Badass defensive coördinator Bob Zeman about the
machinations of Draft Day back in the seventies, he told me, "Of
course, Al would make the final pick. It might be ten to one against
him, but he'd make the pick." I suspect that this is still the case,
and Davis' judgment has slipped. Their last few drafts have been
questionable. And he has no Madden in the trip-wired, high-tempered
Tom Cable. Sadly (with apologies to Robert A. Heinlein and Leon
Russell) Davis has become a Stranger in a Strange Land.
Until he relinquishes the lifelong belief that one iron-willed genius
can rule his world, the Raiders will struggle. Maybe he ought to
start over in another frontier sportsay, female roller derby. But I
know that he won't, and that he can't. The Raiders keep him alive,
and who can begrudge him that? Sports has never seen, and never will
see, another Al Davis. His brain is still totally
football-obsessedand still sharp. Let's just hope he gets lucky in
the next few years. If not, he can always revel in the memory of
1976, when Badasses roamed the landscapedominant defiant, and
laughing at how they were the luckiest, and happiest, men in the world.
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