Column: If the Raiders depart, it won’t be the first time fans in Oakland have been left behind

Sometimes it can be depressing being “Dr. Death.”

With all the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Oakland Raiders, a superfan can’t even fully enjoy his favorite team.

“In the parking lot before the game, or when I get to my seat, people are like, ‘We’re not going to Las Vegas, right?’ ” said Ray “Dr. Death” Perez, the diehard Raiders fan who wears silver and black face paint, a hard hat adorned with a Mohawk of fake knives, a jersey and shoulder pads, and striped prison pants.

“Last year, people were really kind of scared, like, ‘I think we’re really going to Carson.’ Now, it’s, ‘What is this, a joke?’ ”

Talk about lousy timing. The Raiders wallowed along for the last 13 seasons without a winning record before finally getting good. And now, when they’ve emerged as one of the hottest teams in the NFL — at 10-2 heading into Thursday night’s game at Kansas City — they’ve turned their attention to relocating to Las Vegas.

“We’re thinking, ‘Because we’re winning more, there’s no way they’re going to take our team away from us,’ ” Perez said. “But then again, they were winning back in the early ’80s and they still left.”

That’s the disconcerting parallel for longtime Raiders fans. Their team abandoned Oakland for Los Angeles in 1982, a mere two seasons after beating Philadelphia in the Super Bowl.

Al Davis, late owner of the Raiders, was suing the league for the right to move at the time. The acrimony was so intense between the sides that NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was advised by staff to hold the Super Bowl trophy with both hands when presenting it, in case Davis were to reject his handshake on national television. The two men wound up shaking hands anyway.

Despite all that external noise, those Raiders were able to keep their eyes on the prize.

“You don’t make a big thing of it, you don’t bring it up,” recalled Tom Flores, who coached the Raiders in Oakland and Los Angeles, winning rings in both places. “You don’t respond to it until the question is asked. We just went on, business as usual. We had an obligation and a job to do.”

For the most part, the current Raiders have taken the same approach. Coach Jack Del Rio has steered far clear of the topic of relocation, instead keeping his team laser-focused on the task at hand. It’s Raiders owner Mark Davis, Al’s son, who is working on the Las Vegas options, along with his executives, and they will be responsible for convincing at least three-quarters of the other 31 owners to vote in favor of his plan.

The Chargers have until mid-January to decide whether they are going to leave San Diego and join the Rams in Inglewood. That one-year option rolls over to the Raiders if the Chargers choose not to exercise it.

Meanwhile, Hall of Fame safety Ronnie Lott, who played for the Raiders but more famously for the San Francisco 49ers, has helped galvanize efforts for an East Bay stadium aimed at keeping the Raiders where they are. It all makes for a confusing scramble.

“The fans in Oakland are pretty irate,” said retired quarterback Jim Plunkett, who led the Raiders to Super Bowl victories in the 1980 and ’83 seasons. “They’re trying their best to try to keep the team there. We’ve sold out for the first time in many a year here. But it’s difficult, because the [O.co Coliseum] is run down, it’s obsolete. The Raiders put up all their signage and everything, and after the season they have to tear it down because the A’s are the main tenant.”

The Raiders of old were used to getting by with the bare necessities.

Joked former Raiders linebacker Matt Millen: “We didn’t lift weights, we lifted stones.”

“We didn’t have the shiny new facilities,” Millen continued. “We had rusted barbells and dumbbells, and we had them outside. We didn’t even have a gym inside.”

That long-gone headquarters on Doolittle Drive, just north of the Oakland Airport, was a windowless building that was gradually sinking, prompting its denizens to nickname it, “The Submarine.”

“It was embarrassing to take anyone out there to show them my office,” Flores said. “It was right next to a dump, too, and every once in a while, it would really smell.”

In 1982, when the Raiders’ headquarters remained in Oakland even as they played their home games in Los Angeles, they gathered for the traditional team picture against the backdrop of a giant trash bin.

“We had to white-out the dumpster in the background,” the coach recalled with a chuckle. “The picture was so unprofessional; it was a joke. We all laughed about it. We were kind of a team without a home, so why not take it in front of a dumpster?”

To this day, that shot stands out from every other Raiders team picture, a crude precursor to Photoshop with players and coaches looking like paper dolls pasted on a blue background.

Maybe the most memorable part of those old headquarters was their neighbor being a company that tested jet engines. Every Friday morning, the whine from those turbines was so loud that the football team didn’t need to simulate crowd noise.

“We couldn’t hear squat,” Flores said. “One day, Al sent somebody over with $50 to see if they would turn the engine off while we practiced. They’re going to turn off a million-dollar engine for $50? I don’t think so.”

Millen remembers the plywood wall that surrounded the team’s facility, a barrier tall enough so no one could see in or out.

“My rookie year, I was wondering what was on the other side of that fence,” he said. “[Linebacker] Ted Hendricks said, ‘You want to know what’s on the other side?’ And honest to God as I’m sitting here, he turned around and punched the fence, and the whole section fell over.”

“See for yourself,” Hendricks said. “There it is.”

The rudimentary conditions made for a special camaraderie among the players.

“We’d be taking showers after practice, somebody would flush a toilet, and in unison we’d all take one step back and wait,” Millen said. “Because you knew if you were standing in the shower and somebody flushed the toilet, you were going to get scalded.”

Times have changed in a big way. One of the demands of Del Rio’s taking the job was that the Raiders get up to speed with the rest of the NFL in terms of facilities and equipment.

“Jack did some things as far as bringing back the pride and the swagger,” Flores said. “It was, ‘This is what champions are. This is what the Raiders used to be. Don’t just listen to it, let’s do it.’ We’ve got to join this century. We were just so antiquated.”

Before a home game last month, a plane flew a banner over the Coliseum reading, “Vegas, If you build it, we won’t come.” The effort was organized by fan groups “Stay in Oakland,” “Save Oakland Sports,” and the “Oakland Raiders Booster Club.”

“If the Raiders left it would be heartbreaking to the fans, the community,” Flores said. “They love the Raiders so much. I don’t think there’s anybody other than maybe the people in Vegas that believe the Raiders don’t belong in Oakland. Even when we moved to L.A. — and L.A. opened their arms — we still felt like the Oakland Raiders.”

Still, Flores acknowledged, moving is in the Raiders’ blood.

“You might say historically that the Raiders are used to being kind of a gypsy team,” he said. “Move around here, move around there, find a home and win.”

sam.farmer@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATimesfarmer