Oakland--Name Suits the Raiders : Pro football: City and team regain that familiar ring when Al Davis returns club to its roots and a legion of loyal fans.

The day before the Los Angeles (nee Oakland) Raiders were to play a crucial game against Denver two years ago, a group of about 100 black-and-silver clad fans were at Oakland Airport for the hour flight south.

“We are,” said one of them, “the real Raider fans.”

For the eight years the Raiders have played at the Los Angeles Coliseum, much of the country has shared that sentiment. It still slips off the tongue: “the Oakland . . . er, Los Angeles . . . Raiders.

When Al Davis announced Monday that he was moving his team back north, he insisted he had nothing against the Los Angeles fans, only against the folks who run the Los Angeles Coliseum, who he claims reneged on promises to improve the facility.

But Los Angeles has always been blase unless you’re the Dodgers or the Lakers, perennial winners who have made it a habit to accumulate superstars.

Stars are big in Tinseltown:

Hey, let’s go see Jerry-Elgin-Wilt-Kareem-Magic or Sandy-Don-Maury-Fernando-Orel-Kirk. And watch Pat coach and Tommy manage. We can even get to see Jack Nicholson at courtside.

Hockey? What’s that? The Kings just got Wayne Gretzky? Let’s go to a hockey game.

“You know what I like about this place,” says a transplanted New Yorker with a Los Angeles attitude. “When you go to a game, you get to see celebrities. In New York, the celebrities are inconspicuous.”

That was the Los Angeles Raiders--inconspicuous, a team on the decline playing in a declining area near what passes for downtown in an area where 12 million people are spread out 60 miles north and south and 50 miles east. The Oakland Raiders, that bunch of misfits and outcasts who appeal to the lunchpail guys like those who took the plane south eight times a year.

Yeah, they’d fit in Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Boston, but not LA--not enough stars, except for Bo and he only shows up for half a season.

“As a sports town, Los Angeles has always been a hard sell,” NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said Monday after the Raiders announced their move. “That’s what a lot of owners tried to tell Al when he decided to move.”

Davis acknowledges some of that.

But his oft-stated theory is that the Raiders’ attendance problem--they barely sold out half the 90,000-seat Coliseum for most of their games last season--is due to the team’s decline on the field. They were 8-1 in the strike-shortened first season in Los Angeles; won the Super Bowl their second year and were 11-5 and 12-4 their third and fourth.

Since then they’ve been 28-33.

“We just didn’t get the caliber of players we had been getting,” says Tom Flores, who played for the Raiders in Oakland, coached them to Super Bowl titles in Oakland and Los Angeles and is now the president of the Seattle Seahawks.

There’s more.

The USFL, for example, put a team in Los Angeles and did so poorly that a couple of times reporters actually counted the house in the Coliseum. The Express played their final game at a junior college.

League officials finally came up with a theory--the weather is too good, there are race tracks, beaches, other things to do.

“It just wasn’t the same,” says Matt Millen, who played for the Raiders in both cities and is now with San Francisco. “In the Coliseum, you could be tied 17-17 in the third quarter with one team driving for the go-ahead score. Then someone would yell ‘Surf’s up!’ and everyone would head for the beach.”

Millen’s not the only one who thinks the Raider mystique literally went south with the Raiders.

Art Shell, the current coach, is the quintessential Raider -- an offensive tackle who played for the team in Oakland for 15 years, then became an assistant coach before taking over when Mike Shanahan was fired four games into last season. Shanahan was a Los Angeles aberration, the only Raider coach who hadn’t been a Raider, a guy who grew up in the organization.

Shell’s reaction to the move was a Raider reaction.

“I’m going home,” he said, “I’m going home.”