The Latest Defeat Is a Crying Shane

Coliseum Cowboys, doing the six-gun chop. Texans. Ex-Texans. Wanna-be Texans. Everywhere you looked, California cowpokes. Bumper-to-bumper in their cars, rump-to-rump in their seats. They came from Thousand Oaks, where the Dallas team once trained, and from a thousand other towns. Came to form a crowd that--at 91,505--was exactly 300 greater than attended the Raiders’ first two home games.

“Had to be half our crowd,” said Nate Newton, a 303-pound Cowboy buckaroo.

Half, Nate?

“OK, so 40,000 or so were for us. Man, you should have seen our hotel. It was swamped. There was one group of guys who were in the elevator from 3:45 a.m. till 9 this morning. They’d just go up and down, up and down, waiting to get autographs. We usually try to duck guys like that by using the service elevator, but they were on that, too.”

Some of them were authentic Texicans. Others, well, they wouldn’t know a rodeo from Rodeo Drive. But they came to the game. And so did a Raider regiment--eager to see the “new” hi-ho silver-and-blacks. There were Goal Post Heads wearing freebie caps from a restaurant chain with little uprights attached made of sponge. There were “Shell’s Angels,” wearing shirts that proclaimed themselves ready to join up with Coach Art’s gang.

A crowd.

An actual crowd.

Remember crowds? Remember sellouts? Remember SRO? The Raiders do, fondly. Once upon a time, it didn’t necessarily take a Dallas to draw one. But that was before the Raiders started out 0-4, before the economy went bad and the team went worse. It took a three-game recovery by the Raiders and a visit from the Cowboys to fill the house Sunday, to get people excited about the gunfight at the L.A. corral.

“I’d just like to see a little fewer Dallas Cowboy fans,” said Todd Marinovich, the Raider quarterback.

Maybe next time.

This time, Dallas took the crowd noise and the football and ran with it, 28-13, with Emmitt Smith doing most of the running. There were six Smiths on the field for this game--Anthony and Steve for the Raiders; Emmitt, Jimmy, Kevin and Vinson for the Cowboys--making the souvenir game program look more like a motel registry. But it was those 91,505 paid customers to whom the Cowboys really tipped their hats.

“Right now, there ain’t a stadium in America where we go that isn’t at least one-third Cowboy fans,” Newton said.

“I’ll tell you, here we are, in the Coliseum, in Raiderland, and a couple of times, I thought our offense was going to have to ask for quiet from our fans.”

On the congested freeway and along the ramp of Martin Luther King Boulevard, there were pickup trucks with Texas plates and America’s Team bumper stickers, some with passengers yippying and ya-hooing all the way to the gate. Some of them came to see the Cowboys give Los Angeles a lesson in down-home football. Others in the next lane wore black shirts and warned the Dallas folks to be prepared for a whippin’.

The Raiders came out motoring and motivated, with Southern Methodist’s own Eric Dickerson reminding those Texas tourists of the back he used to be. Unfortunately, after 34 yards in the first quarter, Dickerson gained exactly eight over the remainder of the game. The entire Raider backfield, in fact, rushed for fewer than half as many yards as Dallas’ Smith did all by his lonesome.

What punctured whatever momentum the Raiders had early was a point-after-touchdown that went wrong on a snap by center Dan Turk, who will get no further blame here, he being such a good friend to the media and all.

But, as Al Davis put it afterward: “That one damn play just hung there, all the rest of the day.”

While Marinovich went 31 yards to Willie Gault with a touchdown pass--after twice trying bombs that fell beyond Gault’s fingertips--Dallas answered with a hand grenade from Troy Aikman to Alvin Harper that turned the game as upside-down as a Canadian flag. After that, though, nobody’s arm strength affected this game anywhere as much as Emmitt Smith’s churning legs did.

Ronnie Lott, the Raider safety who is 10 years Smith’s senior, got a good look at young Emmitt slip-sliding into the secondary all day long. Lott came away saying: “I haven’t played against Barry Sanders, but I’ll say this--he’s stronger than Thurman Thomas.”

Compliments like these actually came pretty easily to the Raiders, who recognize a strong team when they see one. Dickerson, who volunteered the opinion that any team that ran the football as well as Dallas did deserves to win a game, gave the Cowboys their propers afterward and said maybe they would meet again in the playoffs--”You know, a 9-7 record for us, 11-5 for them,” Dickerson said.

Could this be a set-up, the Raiders being so nice to these varmints from out of town? “Oh, no,” Newton said. “Don’t say that. If you get set up, you get upset.” And he smiled when he said that, pardner.