Airborne Pilgrims of the Silver and Black

They came here by the hundreds from Southern California on Sunday as they do for every Raiders home game, climbing onto airplanes early in the morning, playing out a bittersweet love affair that ended years ago for most other local pro football fans.

They were people like Christopher Townsend, a 40-year-old public affairs executive from Dana Point who grabbed a 10 a.m. Southwest Airlines flight, and Pat Lawlor, a 48-year-old building contractor from the Palos Verdes Peninsula who caught a 7:20 United Airlines flight. They and between 1,000 and 2,000 other obsessed commuters have been flying to Raiders home games ever since the franchise abandoned Los Angeles in 1995 and returned to its original home.

Some, like Lawlor, have flown a couple dozen times to Oakland. Others, like Townsend, have come to every one: eight trips a year, plus playoff games like Sunday’s American Football Conference championship loss to the Baltimore Ravens.

“If they lose I can’t sleep,” said Rob Vogl, a 37-year-old Toluca Lake apartment manager, after stepping off a Southwest flight in an Oakland Airport filled with so much silver and black that it looked like a Raider sideline. Vogl had dressed the part: Raiders jacket, pirate cap, black and white combat fatigues and skull-and-crossbones T-shirt.

It is not unusual for Raider fans to make up a third of the passengers on Sunday morning Oakland-bound flights from Burbank, Los Angeles International Airport and John Wayne Airport in Orange County. Pilots play to the audience: One captain humorously asked Sunday if there was a game going on that day. On another flight, Capt. Dale Dietz intoned: “Go Raiders!”--drawing a raucous cheer--and promised to “go fast to get all you Raiders fans up to the football game.”

Contractor Lawlor, bearded and dressed in his Raiders cape and black Raiders jersey, said the outing costs him about $250, thanks to an advance-purchase airline ticket. He comes in part, he said, because he relishes Oakland’s devotion to the Raiders--something he never felt as strongly during the 13 years the team spent in Los Angeles.

“The [Oakland] fans are better; you don’t have the fights in the stands and it’s a great stadium. Half the fun is being on the plane when the whole thing is full of Raiders fans.”

The optimistic commuters waited for shuttle buses and cabs to take them to the nearby Network Associates Coliseum.

“Raider love,” Chris Jimenez, 32, cooed into his cell phone, signing off with his wife, Jessica, who was back home in Westlake Village.

Jimenez, wearing a Raiders hard hat (“we’re going to work today”) and the number-12 jersey of quarterback Rich Gannon, was traveling with his brother-in-law, Rain Pennington, 30, of Granada Hills. They calculated that the trip cost them at least $500 apiece.

“Both our wives are saying, ‘You’re spending this much to go where? What if they lose?’ ” Jimenez said, but he refused to entertain such thoughts, laughing, “I wouldn’t want to be a Raven right now, I’ll tell you that.”

Kathy Schloessman, president of the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission, a private organization founded to attract major events to the city, flew up Sunday. “I don’t think there’s any other city--any other relocated team--that has fans flying to every home game,” she said.

Recalling the Gladiators

Part of it is a love of pro football in a city without a team, a love that cannot be satisfied by television.

“Back to the days of the gladiators, people liked to see an aggressive sport,” said Ray Cruz, 37, of Glendale, who had just arrived on an 8:05 a.m. flight from Burbank. “There’s nothing like it in America today.”

Because there are relatively few pro football games during a season, each is “a lot more of a life-and-death struggle,” suggested Lloyd Franklin, who arrived with his fiancee, Susan Hale from Hermosa Beach.

“But it’s also strategy,” added Hale, bedecked in a team jacket, T-shirt and pendant.

Franklin grinned and removed from his pocket a photocopy of two wagering slips from Las Vegas. Back in February he’d plunked down $67 on the Raiders to win Sunday’s conference championship game. It would pay $1,000. He had also bet $134 on a Super Bowl win, worth $4,000.

“That would pay for our honeymoon,” Hale said.

Some of the commuters, like Townsend, had fallen for the Raiders’ audacious outlaw image since the team was founded in Oakland in the 1960s. Others, like Maureen Johnson, president of the Greater Los Angeles Raiders Boosters, got hooked when the Raiders first relocated.

The booster group numbered well over 300 when the Raiders played in Los Angeles, but now consists of 30 or so hard-core fans who travel to home games.

Johnson’s daughter, Debra, and late husband, William, were the first two in the family to get hooked on the Raiders. “I thought, ‘I’m either going to be a part of this or I’m an outsider,’ ” Maureen said. “Now I’m the biggest screamer.”

William died in 1987, but mother and daughter both still follow the team avidly. Sunday’s game was the second Oakland home game that Maureen had attended during the playoffs. Debra would have come, too, except for a seven-pound excuse--the baby boy, Isaiah, she delivered the day after Christmas.

Debra and her husband, Adrian, met six years ago talking Raiders football. “It’s been Raiders love ever since,” she said.

The problem with giving yourself to a team this much, of course, is that losses hurt more than they would on television, especially Sunday’s 16-3 loss to the Ravens, which cost the Raiders their first Super Bowl appearance in nearly two decades.

Before he headed back to the airport, Chris Townsend talked about that long Baltimore touchdown pass in the first half and that penalty that cost the Raiders a score late in the game, and how at least he had been able to watch the game with some of his friends in a club-level box. But he could not rationalize the score. “A nightmare,” he said. “All the bad scenarios coming true.”

And then he said the only thing you would expect from a guy who has not missed a home game in six seasons:

“I’ll be back next year.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Super Bowl

On to Tampa

The New York Giants and the Baltimore Ravens won their respective conference championships Sunday and will meet in Super Bowl XXXV on Jan. 28.

TV: Channel 2, 3:15 p.m.

NFC championship

New York Giants: 41

Minnesota Vikings: 0

AFC championship

Baltimore Ravens: 16

Oakland Raiders: 3

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