Oakland In Search Of Its Past

Al Davis will be 66 years old next month. He wants to win one more Super Bowl in one more decade, the ‘90s.

If he takes the Raiders back to Oakland, as it appears he will, the move from Los Angeles will have more to do with winning than with money, although the two still rank first and second with him.

Place-kicker Jeff Jaeger, a former University of Washington Husky, understands. He joined the Raiders in 1989, the last time they played in Oakland.

“It was an exhibition game against Houston,” Jaeger said. “God, it was crazy; everything you would want in a home field.

“In L.A., there is never much of a crowd behind you. Heck, you’re looking up in the stands to see if your wife is OK.”

Given assurances a stadium could be built near Hollywood Park by 1997, Davis might keep the Raiders in Los Angeles, but there are no assurances, and time is running out.

Davis contends he lost money playing in the Los Angeles Coliseum last season, even though he got free rent, which he won’t get this year. And even if a stadium could be built, where would the team play this season and next?

Anaheim? Dodger Stadium? The Rose Bowl?

He will give up the long-range money of Los Angeles in the next century for winning in Oakland in this one.

“You want the feeling the Denver Broncos have when they play at home,” Jaeger said. “You want people to really care about you.”

They do in Oakland.

Indeed, the city’s love for the Raiders, which far surpassed any feelings for the World Champion Oakland Athletics, will allow it to take Davis back, on his terms: a 65,000-seat expanded stadium in 1996 that would include luxury boxes at a cost of $90 million.

The money would be borrowed by the City of Oakland and paid from luxury-suite revenues, similar to the financing for Seattle’s rebuilding of the Seattle Center Coliseum for the Sonics.

People were quiet in Oakland yesterday, afraid to hope their team would be back. So many times Davis has been set to return, only to stay in L.A. for a better deal.

Oakland’s been used. She knows that. But this is her chance to get the Raiders and keep the A’s. To return to her heyday of the 1970s.

Oakland has no chance of getting an NFL expansion team; the nearby 49ers will lobby against that.

And Oakland deserves not just a pro football team. She deserves the Raiders.

They never fit in Los Angeles. They’ve never been happy there.

The Raiders team that I covered in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, in Oakland, has the same trainer, the same equipment man, and the same owner. Players from the ‘70s have become coaches and scouts of the ‘90s, and to a man, they’re sorry they ever left Oakland, where they reflected a community instead of being a parody of it.

The Raiders always have been relative rogues, but in Oakland they were the idols of the working class, not of motorcycle gangs. The fans cheered in Oakland. In Los Angeles, they brawl.

It was a shameless thing Davis did in going to Los Angeles for the riches he saw there in luxury boxes that never were built and cableTV revenues that never materialized.

The Raiders won a Super Bowl for Los Angeles, but the city never really took them in. Their play since 1983 has been downhill, partly because it never changed.

Davis has the same friends, the same clothes, the same offense he had in Oakland. His wife never moved.

“Every year I hear about the mystique of Oakland, about the way it was,” Jaeger said. “I know a lot of people will be happy to go back. I just want to be settled.”

What made it possible for Davis to return to Oakland was the change in ownership of the A’s baseball club. Ken Hofmann and Steve Schott are buying it from the Haas family, which opposed changing the baseball park to fit football again.

Hofmann, an original partner with Ken Behring when the two bought the Seattle Seahawks, believes the football upgrades will improve the situation for baseball.

No doubt Hofmann’s involvement will fuel a conspiracy theory that his buddy Behring and the Seahawks might move to L.A.

But the Seahawks have a lease in Seattle. Besides, there are far better candidates to move: Tampa Bay, Cincinnati and Cleveland.

Oakland will attempt to remodel a stadium to fit both the needs of football and baseball, something that failed in the ‘60s.

But the ‘60s and ‘70s were good to Oakland. And the city will try anything to get those good times back.