This Game Should Go Back in Sack

Armageddon, it wasn’t.

I have seen better football on street corners. It looked in the poor light of Anaheim Stadium like Purdue-Iowa, circa 1929. It made Fordham-Pitt’s scoreless ties look like an aerial circus. Stone wheel football.

They kept telling us it was “just a game.” Oh, sure, everybody smirked. And Man o’ War was just a horse and Marilyn Monroe was just a girl and the Queen Mary was just a boat.

It was supposed to be the matchup of the ages. Dempsey-Tunney. Germany-Russia. Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral.

Instead, it was what the fight crowd would call “an agony fight.” Sixty minutes of clinches and head butts.

It was fought at longer range than the Battle of Jutland. If you like 50-yard field goals, this was your cup of tea. If you’re wild about punts, there were 11 of them.

The Rams didn’t have the ball often enough to know what color it was. The Raiders didn’t do much with it when they had it.

The two quarterbacks managed to look like guys trying to paddle an aircraft carrier through the waters of the North Atlantic.

The game started off in a dense fog. Unfortunately, it lifted. This is a game which could have been played just as well in the dark. For this game, they not only didn’t need lights, they didn’t even need the football. At least they didn’t need to blow it up.

The Rams didn’t seem to write the football in their game plan. Which was a good thing.

The Rams needed a compass more than the football. They went backward most of the night faster than a guy who misses the top step in the dark.

The game made up in comedy what it lacked in drama. In the second quarter, the Raiders, with the ball on the Ram three-yard line, sent in a fake field goal. But security was so tight they forgot to tell the holder, Marc Wilson, who was to get up and throw a pass to Marcus Allen. Since he didn’t know this, he was busy trying to get the laces in the right position when he looked up and saw what looked like the whole Ram team closing in on him. He did the only thing he could do: He threw the football to one of them.

It was the kind of game the TV guys like to call “hard-hitting.” English translation: boring.

It was a victory for the new guys in town, the tough guys, the swaggerers. The terrorists in the pirate suits.

They came down here to Yuppieville and knocked the guys in the three-piece suits around like a guy cudgeling his mule.

The Rams still call themselves “Los Angeles,” but they have fled to the suburbs like every other upwardly mobile white collar.

The Raiders come, so to speak, on motorcycles. Carrying chains or wearing coal scuttle helmets.

The outcome was probably no surprise to longtime Ram fans. They have long since learned to fear the worst.

You know how Ram fans are. You could see them huddled in their charter buses going to games like a guy going to the electric chair.

Raider fans go to games snarling. Ram fans pass the fried chicken. Raider fans throw it at the other team.

Ram fans tend to tiptoe to wins. They don’t yell at their team, they implore it. Raider fans shriek: “Kill ‘im, Lyle!” Ram fans beg: “Please hold them, fellows!”

The Raiders like to think they took the town away from the Rams like the guy kicking sand in the face of the 98-pound weakling and making off with his girl. They played the game Monday night like Hell’s Angels taking over a mountain town. The Rams did everything but lock the doors and pull the curtains, but the Raiders kicked butts anyway.

The Raiders looked just too brutal for them. The Rams looked more like English schoolboys caught in a street riot. Ram Quarterback Dieter Brock got sacked more than Christmas mail. Howie Long spent more time in his backfield than Eric Dickerson. Brock got sacked six times, but he threw the ball on at least 14 other occasions in the direction of the horizon or with “To Whom It May Concern” address on it.

So, the big, bad Raiders from Central Los Angeles thumped the silk sheet set from the placid hills of Orange County. Los Angeles is their turf for the moment.

If they have a rematch in the Super Bowl, bring a good book, though. Or, pray for fog.