PRO FOOTBALL DAILY REPORT : RAIDERS : Traveling Circus Is Coming Home

It’s time to fold the tents at Camp Shell.

After 5 1/2 weeks of work and three exhibition games, the Raiders are abandoning their summer training base in Oxnard tonight and returning to their year-around headquarters in El Segundo.

It has been a travel-filled summer, featuring one intercontinental trip to Barcelona, one cross-continent journey to Pittsburgh and one additional trek to Dallas.

But it has hardly been one long vacation.

Just the opposite.

Coach Art Shell has kept his squad in full gear for most of the two-a-day workouts.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said quarterback Jeff Hostetler. “He’s come back and he’s all work. He’s not going to put up with any screwing around and I think that’s important.”

Fullback Tom Rathman, who played eight years for the San Francisco 49ers, says this is the hardest he has worked in a camp but that he loves it.

Does Hostetler think Shell is cracking the whip harder than ever because he feels this team, performing at a peak level, can get farther than any of its recent predecessors?

“Oh yeah, I think so,” the quarterback said. “I think he realizes we’ve got a lot of pieces to the puzzle. . . . I notice a difference.”

No argument from the taskmaster.

“We’ve got a chance to be pretty good,” Shell said. “But we’ve got to work at it. If they just listen to (reporters) they could become fat and lazy. . . . I tell them, ‘I love you all. It’s nothing personal, but we’ve got a job to do.’ . . . Players are like kids. They adapt.”

Shell says he has also adapted.

“As you grow older and get in your job more, you find things to do to make the team better,” he said. “I’ve grown in that sense as a coach. I better understand how to get the team better.”