Maybe He Would Settle for a Raider Personal Seat License

The Raiders never seem to run out of opponents, even in the off-season.

With all quiet on the football front, and no new threats to abandon Oakland for Los Angeles surfacing in the last week, the club has renewed its ongoing battle with Denver Bronco Coach Mike Shanahan, who maintains the Raiders still owe him a quarter of a million dollars in back pay from the season and a half he coached them beginning in 1988.

Amy Trask, the Raiders’ chief executive, sent out a copy of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s ruling that the team owes Shanahan only $32,625.

And why haven’t the Raiders paid that $32,625?

Because Shanahan committed perjury, Trask claims, in an arbitration hearing.

Asked his response to all this, Shanahan, through a Bronco spokesman, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Tell [new Raider coach] Jon Gruden to get all his money up front.”

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Add Trask: She was never hesitant to defend her team to the media when the club was located in L.A.

On one occasion, she found two reporters discussing a Raider slump while getting coffee in a team office at Raider headquarters in El Segundo.

“You come in my house,” Trask sternly told the reporters, “you drink my coffee and you bag on my team?”

Uh, yeah.

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Trivia time: Raider owner Al Davis coached the team from 1963 through ’65. Who preceded him?

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Trivial time: What is the distance most commonly run by American athletes?

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Reshoot with new ending: When the Washington Wizards’ Tracy Murray scored 50 points against the Golden State Warriors last week in Oakland, he was overjoyed.

Because he had a career high for himself and a season-high for the NBA?

Of course, but, most of all, because his team won, 99-87.

Murray still remembers another big night in Oakland with a not-so-big finish. That was back in his prep days when his team, Glendora High, played in the state championship.

“I scored 64 points and lost the game,” Murray said. “I ask myself all the time, ‘How do you score 64 and lose?’ Haunts me to this day. That’s what makes this so sweet. We won.”

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But can he kick? A 9-year-old Brazilian farm boy has been catapulted to fame for his extraordinary likeness to his hero, world and European footballer of the year Ronaldo.

Bruno Lima Alves beat 57 other look-alikes for the starring role in a new soft drink commercial in which he represents the young Ronaldinho, as Ronaldo is affectionately known in Brazil.

The boy, who lives on a farm 140 miles south of Sao Paulo, rides into town by truck or ox-cart to train for local soccer team Pariquera-Acu.

If Lima Alves has any success in his new show business career, look for the ox-cart to go.

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Trivia answer: Red Conkright, who took over a Raider team that was 0-5 early in the 1962 season and wound up losing eight of nine on his brief watch.

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Trivial answer: 90 feet, the distance between the bases on a diamond.

And finally: New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica, taking his shot at the television coverage of the Winter Olympics: “I didn’t know CBS was going to treat things like Picabo Street’s gold medal as an exclusive.”