Davis Hits Bomb on 4th-and-Long Gone

You can’t go home again, the author has told us. Apparently, Al Davis believes it.

To the complete surprise of that segment of the population that has been listening to network news, cable news and late-night radio, the Los Angeles Raiders aren’t going anywhere this season and maybe not this century.

You don’t know what a relief this will be to this reporter. Not that we had any say in Al’s decision or wanted any. But you have no idea how discomforting it got to be to get late-night calls from radio stations and TV stations around the country, principally New York, demanding to know what I knew, if anything, about Rumor No. 333: that the Raiders were, as of that very moment, on a van back to Oakland. People who, so far as I know, never spoke with Al Davis in their lives, were publicly trumpeting that, according to “their” sources, Al had cut a deal with Oakland (or, even further back, Sacramento) and was shortly to tee it up in the new base. They could make you feel very uncomfortable, these long-distance know-it-alls, as if, somehow, like the husband in a triangle, you were the last to know. They pitied you.

Over the past hectic years, I have had occasion to ask Al Davis half-a-dozen or more times what he planned to do with his team--keep it here, move it there. What? And, always, Al told me, “I don’t know, yet. I’d like to stay here, but I don’t know if I can.”

But I got hesitant passing this information along because it usually occasioned an outburst of guffaws and derisive laughter and people looking at you as if they couldn’t believe anyone could be so gullible.

I have always known one thing: While Al Davis has as much respect for money as the next man, money was never the issue. The team was.

The team is Al Davis. It’s what he’s about. Al Davis is not your basic dilettante owner who picks up a football the way he might pick up a stable of Arabian horses or a new yacht. The Raiders are Al Davis’ yacht. They’re his hobby, his family. They’re his life.

Al Davis did not want to go back to Oakland. There is an element of defeat, humiliation in that. A retreat. Al Davis does not like to retreat. Al Davis does not punt. Al Davis goes for the bomb.

But he would have gone back to Oakland for one reason: If it was good for the team. Al relates the whole universe to how good it will be for the Raiders.

Al Davis is a complex man. But you have to understand the Raiders are his creation, his pride, his art. They define him. Rembrandt had his oils, Hemingway his books, Milton his poems, Patton his army--and Al Davis has his Raiders.

Al Davis doesn’t need Hollywood. Al Davis doesn’t do discos. The only movies he sees have no women in them, only guys in helmets and face masks and the action runs backward 50% of the time. Siskel and Ebert will never grade the performances--but Al will.

Davis did not care for the prodigal-son role in Oakland, but he would gladly have swallowed his pride, packed his team and gone home again-- if he was persuaded it would return the team to glory. You get the feeling Al Davis would leap into an alligator pit if it would put the Raiders in the Super Bowl.

Al Davis has a reputation for being an unreasonable man. It’s for sure he’s difficult. He’s an alley fighter. He gets the first punch in. He is an implacable foe. He would be insulted to be thought lovable. He sees life as a war.

I do not know who is ultimately at fault for the colossal impasse which developed over his tenancy in the Coliseum, but I am glad my house is not owned and run by a committee. The very words, Coliseum Committee , make a chill run down my spine. There was a time when we were growing up when we thought government ownership was the best answer. No one is so sure now. Just ask the Soviets.

No matter who was at fault, the ultimate fact is, the Coliseum Commission practically ran the Raiders out of town.

The Coliseum itself is a disgrace. I get my view of it mostly from press box windows, but they are stained and cracked and stick in their tracks, and you have to assume the rest of it is in similar decay. Parts of the edifice smell worse than any set of stairs underneath a River Seine bridge. It is not overly sanitary. It has never had adequate transportation, parking, policing. It is just more comfortable to sit in than the original Colosseum. Our Coliseum is hardly a landmark. It was built in Coolidge’s time, not Caesar’s.

But it has Los Angeles attached to it. And that is a magnet. I don’t think there is any doubt L.A. helped make pro football the big-time sport it became. I think it helped save baseball. I know it made pro basketball.

The usual procedure in impasses of this kind is for the community to lose a historic franchise with a shrug--and then turn around and pony up hundreds of millions for a stadium to house an expansion team. New York lost the Dodgers and the Giants due to municipal indifference, then dipped into the public coffers to erect Shea Stadium to host a team that lost 120, 112 and 111 games its first three years.

L.A. doesn’t need the Raiders. But do the Raiders need L.A.?

You can bet me Al Davis thinks so. Because everything he does is with the Raiders in mind. So, for the moment, Raiders R Us.