Raider Owner Davis to Be Inducted Today

Jim Thorpe slept here. He played a lot of football here too. For this is the home of the Canton Bulldogs, legendary early-century professionals.

Canton, fittingly, is also the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which this year has attracted perhaps its most distinguished cast of inductees and presenters.

On the steps of the shrine at noon today:

--Raider owner Al Davis will be presented as a Hall of Famer by the coach of one of his three Super Bowl champions, John Madden.

--John Mackey of Baltimore, voted top tight end of the NFL’s first 50 years, will be presented by former All-AFL quarterback Jack Kemp, President Bush’s secretary of housing and urban development.

--In a reunion of once underrated cornerbacks ranked by some coaches as half of the NFL’s all-time defensive backfield, Lem Barney of Detroit will be presented as a Hall of Famer by Jim David.

--John Riggins of Washington, famous for Super Bowl power running and notorious for off-field partying, will be presented by NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

It is Tagliabue’s first appearance in this ceremony. It is Davis’ ninth. Davis had been chosen as a presenter by all seven of the Raiders who are in the hall and by Lance Alworth of San Diego.

A fifth 1992 honoree, Dave Boss of Los Angeles, organizer and former head of the NFL’s Creative Services department, was to receive the NFL’s prestigious Pioneer Award on Friday night at the annual Hall of Fame banquet.

Boss had spent the morning in a Canton hospital, where he was taken for observation after a brief illness. Doctors said it was stress reaction and released him when he responded positively to tests.

During a career that brought Boss national attention as the designer of, among other things, the first 25 Super Bowl programs and posters, he also designed the Pioneer trophy, which is awarded periodically for innovative off-field contributions to the game.

There have been only three previous winners--Arch Ward, the Chicago sports editor who put on the first all-star games; Fred Gehrke, the former Ram who designed football’s first multicolored helmets, and John Facenda, the NFL’s first film voice.

The lengthy Hall of Fame weekend began at a breakfast for thousands Friday, when Davis was the second of the four enshrinees to get his gold Hall of Fame jacket, which he slipped over his silver tux.