Voodoo Doesn’t Do, but Raiders Sure Do, 23-13

The Black Magic Woman met the Black-and-Silver Sunday in a game that had just enough juice to attract 48,152 people to the Coliseum.

This was one of the few breaks Marc Wilson got. Who needs to get booed by 92,000?

Wilson persevered through the pain of a shoulder separation while his friends and neighbors sat in the sunshine and booed every move he made. In the fourth quarter, he hit Dokie Williams with a 15-yard touchdown pass to break the game open as the Raiders beat the New Orleans Saints, 23-13.

Moments after Williams’ catch, Lyle Alzado, who scored his first touchdown two weeks ago, sacked New Orleans’ Dave Wilson in the end zone for a safety, putting the game out of reach.

Said Alzado: “I’m a scoring machine.”

The Raiders have won three games in a row and are 4-2, even if they’ve been a little light on the striking-fear-in-opponents-hearts index.

For the Saints, bolstered by the incantations of a New Orleans voodoo priestess named Macumba, it was the end of a dream, the first four-game winning streak in their 19-year history. Welcome to the NFL, lady.

For Marc Wilson, it was the end of a long day. He went 14 for 31, with the crowd booing every time he threw an incompletion, or trotted onto the field.

He had been sacked three times in the first three Raider possessions. On No. 2, Saint defensive end Bruce Clark grabbed him as an official blew the whistle ending the play, then body-slammed him into the turf and was given a 15-yard roughing penalty.

“Two quarterbacks, just picked up and thrown down like that,” said the Raider orthopedist, Bob Rosenfeld. “That’s how Jim (Plunkett) hurt his shoulder. Fifteen yards--what’s that compared to a guy’s shoulder?”

Wilson, asked if he thought it had been deliberate, opted for the polite answer--”I don’t know, he’s trying to perform”--but then tired of it.

“Yeah!” Wilson said. “Dammit, it was deliberate!”

Wilson played one more series, then was ferried to the dressing room for X-rays and a pain killer.

Meanwhile, the fans got their choice, rookie Rusty Hilger. The Raider defense had just gotten the ball at the New Orleans 40, where Rod Martin recovered Earl Campbell’s fumble.

On his first play, Hilger play-faked and hit Jessie Hester for 29 yards to the 11.

On the second, he ran Marcus Allen on a draw for 11 and the touchdown.

Possibly on the assumption that Hilger was going to chew up the Saints at 20 yards a clip for the rest of the afternoon, the fans booed when Wilson came back for the next Raider possession.

This one started at the Saint 26, Fulton Walker having just torn off a 26-yard return. Wilson took them in, hitting Todd Christensen for 16 yards on a third-and-eight, running another sprint draw for Allen, who went eight yards for the touchdown.

That gave the Raiders a 14-0 lead and won Wilson a respite, albeit a short one. Two possessions later, he threw an incompletion and the booing was on again. The crowd chanted “Rusty! Rusty!”

“Obviously there’s not much margin for error in this town,” said Hilger, a quick learner.

The game got longer, the Saints got closer, to within 14-13, and the fans got louder. The Raider coaching staff is calling Wilson’s plays for him, a first for the franchise, but they seem to have gotten them out of John Robinson’s vanilla playbook. For most of the second and third quarters, they ran Marcus Allen on first down, threw to him on second, threw to a wide receiver on third and punted on fourth.

But there were reasons. They had the lead. The Saints were laying back. Wilson was hurt.

And Wilson was getting discouraged.

“I started feeling it,” he said. “I told myself, ‘Just take it one play at a time.’

“You can get depressed when you throw three or four incompletions at a time, like ‘Bag it, the whole day’s shot.’ But I was telling myself, ‘Just make one play at a time, one pass at a time.’ ”

The Saints had gotten on the board in the first half, when Guido Merkens beat Mike Haynes for a 39-yard touchdown pass, cutting the Raider lead to 14-7.

They actually started to control the ball in the second half, after Wayne Wilson replaced the bigger and slower Earl Campbell and Hokie Gajan, whom the Raiders had been knocking down easily enough.

The Saints drove 63 yards for a Morten Anderson field goal early in the third period. They recovered an Allen fumble at the Raider 24 and settled for another field goal on the second play of the fourth, making it 14-13.

The next time, they got the ball on their 15 and promptly marched it out to their 46. There on third-and-four, Dave Wilson fumbled the snap from center and Reggie McKenzie recovered.

From there, Marc Wilson took the Raiders in again. He hit Christensen for 14 yards, Williams for 23, and, finally, with third-and-eight at the 15, he beat a blitz coming up the middle with a lob to Williams, who’d beaten Dave Waymer across the field. Wilson was backpedalling and he had about 450 pounds of inside linebackers in his lap, but he got the ball away.

Williams: “You can kind of tell what’s happening, just by listening. The crowd tells you a lot of times, if the quarterback has gotten flushed out of the pocket, if he’s looking, if he’s scrambling.

“That time, there was just an anxiety, like something was going to happen quick. When that happens, you take a peek. The coaches don’t like that. You’re supposed to finish your route.

“What did I see when I peeked? The ball, floating my way.

Wilson: “I can’t wait to see that play on film. I was on my back.”

Wilson answered questions with his left shoulder taped over his clothes, looking as if he were still hurting.

Did he feel he’d be ready next week?

“Right now, no,” he said, managing a smile. “In a day or two, it’s likely to change.”

Rosenfeld: “He has a shoulder separation. But this one, the kind he has, you don’t have to do anything to it. The joint sticks up but it doesn’t affect anything. Function-wise, he’s all right, once the pain goes away.

“It may not look sexy, but . . . “

When might Wilson be back, someone asked, Monday, Tuesday?

“You sound like (Al) Davis,” Rosenfeld said, grinning.

Raider Notes

Marcus Allen gained 107 yards, giving him 331 in his last three games. He also caught three passes for 51 yards. . . . Sacks: the Raiders, No. 2 in the NFL, had four. Howie Long had two, giving him seven. . . . Only seven teams have been sacked more than the Raiders, and the Saints got them four times. Bruce Clark had two. . . . With guard Mickey Marvin out, the Raider offensive line was shuffled once more. Bruce Davis, who’d taken Shelby Jordan’s left tackle spot, was moved to Marvin’s right guard position. Jordan went back in at left tackle. Left guard Charley Hannah, center Don Mosebar and right tackle Henry Lawrence stayed where they were. Dave Dalby stayed on the bench. The new combination wasn’t awesome, but with the quarterback hurting and the game plan gone arch-conservative, it wasn’t a fair test. . . . Next week at Cleveland, Curt Marsh, a left guard comes off injured reserve, so there may be another shuffle. . . . Ray Guy had 10 punts for a 44.9 average, and only one returned, for no yards. Fulton Walker, who came in as the league-leading punt returner, returned four for 58 yards.