Football’s Bad Guy With the Eyepatch Has Been Unmasked

Once upon a time, the Raiders were football’s evil empire. If the Dallas Cowboys were America’s team, the Raiders were San Quen-tin’s.

To be a Raider was to be considered one of the great outcasts of history. It was the football version of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang. It wasn’t a franchise, it was a hideout.

To hear the rest of the league tell it, the Raiders emptied every pool room in the South, every jail in Texas, to get its starting lineup. Its front four it found hiding in the bushes in Central Park at midnight. It had more hard cases on its practice field than Devil’s Island.

Other teams scouted guys by checking their speed in the 40 or clocking the time they took to get rid of the ball. The Raiders just checked the police blotter. They didn’t want to know how many pass plays you had broken up, just how many barrooms.

These were guys who got rounded up every time there was a body found floating in the river. When they took the field, fans in other cities thought their uniform numbers were missing several digits, that they should have read “1P381007723 LAPD.”

They had a tackle one year they just hoped wouldn’t eat somebody. Other teams wore face masks for their own protection; the Raiders wore them for society’s.

You never went directly to the Raiders. You had to have loused up somewhere else first--been kicked off one or more franchises for assaulting a coach or a cop, biting the team mascot, pulling the doors off the team bus or trashing a hotel lobby.

The Raiders would hire anyone short of Heinrich Himmler. They crept into your heart the way the German Wehrmacht did. When they came to town, you hid the women and children and pulled the shades.

Other teams kept scouts on the payroll. The Raiders had a network of bail bondsmen. The Raiders wanted guys you had to hide in the cellar till the sirens faded. It was said you had to have blood on your clothes, a price on your head and a knife in your shoe to qualify for the Raiders. They had the same warm public image as serial killers. Sociopaths in cleats.

They didn’t so much beat teams as scare ‘em to death. Going into the Raider secondary with the football was like going through the Marseille waterfront at 2 o’clock in the morning with a gold watch on.

They played brass-knuckle, broken-nose football. Even their quarterbacks were hard cases. They called Daryle Lamonica the Mad Bomber.

Kenny Stabler played with this kind of permanent sneer and he didn’t much care whether he hit the tight end with the football or you, if you came too close. Jim Plunkett looked like a guy who’d killed Custer.

The Raiders don’t scare anybody any more. They dress like Raiders, they sound like Raiders and they might look like Raiders, but it’s just a bunch of guys in an ape costume. They got a pushing-around from the Washington Redskins the other night that would have embarrassed Harvard. The Redskins, of course, are the champions of the league--but so were they in January of 1984, when the Raiders beat them in the Super Bowl, 38-9. And it wasn’t that close.

What has happened? Where is “Pride And Poise”? What’s happened to “Just win, baby!”

Well, everybody has an opinion. But I see, in the current edition of the Sporting News where that eminent historian of the man-to-man defense, the Right Honorable Lester B. Hayes, has weighed in with his.

It’s not one to be taken lightly. The Judge, as his teammates called him--”So be it,” was his solemn pronouncement on most of the burning issues of our day--is a man who has been there.

The trouble, the Right Honorable L.B. Hayes figures, is that the Raiders have gone Hollywood.

This is a dreaded malady which begins with wearing earings, and loafers without socks, and moves on to gold necklaces, condos at the beach, phones in the car, hot tubs in the yard--and doesn’t include nosebleed football.

It has all tended to negate what Lester posits as the Raiders’ greatest asset, what he calls the fear factor. Intones Lester: “The fear factor is now in Chicago. Teams hate to play the Bears because of their kick- gluteus maximus mentality. The fear factor was so strong when we played, teams hated to play us in Oakland. The fear factor was our forte. The fear factor was worth points to us every game.”

Lester should know. The fear factor was so much a part of his arsenal he should have dropped leaflets. Lester saw to it a receiver came into his area of the secondary in the frame of mind of a guy who hears something rattling under his bed.

“I try to break his concentration,” Lester has said.

Sometimes, he did that by breaking his arm, too, other times by keeping up a running chatter about the terrible things that happened to people who brought the ball into the Raider secondary. Throwing a football in there was like throwing a lamb chop amid a school of sharks.

Oakland is not exactly Port Said. But it’s not exactly laid-back L.A., either. It is the considered view of His Honor Hayes that the Raiders, Tony Bennett notwithstanding, did not leave their heart in San Francisco. But they might have left it in Oakland.