Klein-Davis Football Feud Handed to Jury for the Call

The final whistle sounded Monday in an eight-week trial that brought the bitter feud between former San Diego Chargers owner Eugene Klein and Los Angeles Raiders managing general partner Al Davis into a San Diego courtroom.

By the time lawyers for the longtime rival sports magnates had finished 7 1/2 hours of closing arguments, facts and allegations were piled high before Superior Court Judge Gilbert Harelson, like so many bruised and beaten linemen after a goal-line stand.

Now it is up to a jury to don--figuratively, of course--the referees’ black and white stripes and determine if Davis maliciously singled out Klein as a defendant in the Raiders’ $180-million antitrust suit against the National Football League, resulting in Klein’s heart attack as he testified at the trial of the case in May, 1981.

Klein is seeking $48,600--reimbursement for his medical care after the dramatic infarction in a Los Angeles courthouse. If the jurors return a verdict in his favor, the trial will go into a second phase in which Klein’s lawyer may demand as much as $11 million in punitive damages.

“I’ve got no use for the man. I’ve never had any use for the man,” Klein said of Davis during a break in the proceedings. “He’s an excellent football man. But as a person, he’s pretty close to the bottom of the barrel.”

Davis, in Seattle for the Raiders’ game Monday night against the Seahawks, missed the trial’s final day.

Klein’s attorneys, Joseph Cotchett and Frank Pitre, sought to persuade the jury that they had proven that Davis had no grounds for alleging that Klein had personally set out to conspire in 1979 and 1980 against the Raiders’ efforts to move from Oakland to Los Angeles.

Deposition testimony from Davis himself--one of a pantheon of football personalities to parade into Harelson’s courtroom during the trial--established, they argued, that the Raider kingpin harbored enmity against Klein.

“Do you believe the management of the San Diego Chargers has any animosity towards you?” Davis was asked at a deposition in Palm Springs in March, 1980, a few days before he filed the antitrust suit.

“Yes, I do,” he answered.

Asked what Klein did to engender animosity, Davis said: “Everything he does and says--but it is mutual and I probably started it.”

Pitre argued that Davis’ ire was raised to the boiling point shortly before he filed the suit, when Klein told an Oakland newspaper that the Raiders were refusing to participate in the NFL’s charitable endeavors.

Davis’ attorneys sought to minimize the depths of the antipathy between Davis and Klein. Davis, they said, filed suit in a desperation effort to save his football “family”--his “little business,” as attorney Robert Baxley described the Raiders--from the well-orchestrated attacks of the powerful businessmen, like Klein, who controlled the NFL.

Klein, said Baxley, was a “ringleader” of the group of NFL team owners who interfered in Davis’ negotiations with Oakland stadium officials and sought to block the Raiders’ transfer to Los Angeles.

“He wanted to bottle Davis up,” Baxley said. “He wanted to hang him in limbo. He didn’t give a dang about the Raider organization or the people who worked for him. He hated Mr. Davis and he wanted to get him.”

The nature of Klein’s complaint--that he was a victim of malicious prosecution by Davis in the antitrust suit--meant, as Baxley said, that Davis’ defense team was obliged to retry many of the issues decided in the landmark antitrust trial.

By persuading a jury that the NFL had violated the Sherman Act, Davis won the right to move the Raiders to Los Angeles for the 1982 season. But a federal judge ruled that Davis could not single out Klein, Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere and NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle as individual defendants in the case.

Witnesses in the San Diego trial included illustrious Chargers of the past and present--among them former coaches Sid Gillman and Don Coryell, retired receiver Lance Alworth and Assistant General Manager Paul (Tank) Younger. Former San Diego City Manager Ray Blair was called to the stand, as was former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto, who did double duty as one of Davis’ defense attorneys.

In the end, the opposing attorneys turned to metaphor in an effort to put the trial in perspective.

Gary Bailey, one of Davis’ lawyers, likened the presentation of Klein’s case to the behavior of an octopus when under attack.

Unlike a bird, he said, the octopus cannot fly away. Unlike a lion, it can’t claw and bite. Unlike a deer, it can’t run off.

“An octopus, when threatened,” Bailey said, “releases a large cloud of an inky substance to disguise where he is.”

Pitre borrowed from the lexicon of the playing field.

Describing how Davis built a legal team “to execute his game plan,” Pitre said: “He used the federal court like a football field. And he used those team members to cripple a player, Eugene Klein.”