Anyone who wants to be bad on purpose wants to be like the Raiders.
The Raiders are an anomaly in pro sports, comparable with no other professional sports organization in America. Regardless of their geographic location or the components of their roster, the franchise has sustained the same philosophical template for almost fifty years. This is especially rare when one considers how often sports franchises have no philosophical template at all.
There are certain principles the Raiders have always followed, even during periods when doing so worked against them. These principles are:
1) Draft for speed. This is why — in 2009 — the Raiders selected little-known Maryland receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey in the first round of the draft. He had the fastest forty-yard-dash time at the NFL combine. It is the franchise belief that speed can be acquired, but not taught. Bey was supposed to be the modern version of Cliff Branch, the Raiders’ deep threat throughout the 1970s. The Raiders incessantly aspire to replicate their own past.
2) Combine a power running game with a vertical, downfield passing attack. This is the logical extension of the first principle. The Raiders’ long-standing offensive approach has been to pound teams on the ground and then burn them deep. They’ve always overvalued strong-armed quarterbacks who take downfield risks, starting with Daryle Lamonica in 1967. A notable exception to this strategy was the brief coaching tenure of Jon Gruden from 1998 to 2001, when the Raiders ran a West Coast system that emphasized short, ball-controlled passing. This was also the last time the Raiders played in a Super Bowl.
3) Reward excessively physical play, even when it results in unnecessary penalties. Consider those penalties the price of doing business. In 2011, Oakland set the NFL record for the most penalties in a season. But that record is merely one spike in their overall history: The Raiders have always been among the most penalized teams in football (they’ve led the NFL in that category fourteen times), with particular dominance in the idiom of severe 15-yard unsportsmanlike penalties.
4) Sign players that other teams are unwilling to accept. This is essential.
5) Never police problematic off-the-field behavior. In fact, celebrate that behavior.
6) “Just win, baby.”
The first two principles apply to how the game is played on the field, so their meaning is mostly technical. The third principle toggles between how the game is played and how the game is perceived, so it has symbolic import. But it’s those final three principles that matter most. They are purely ideological. They represent the ethos of the Raider organization, and they’re the worldview of one man: Al Davis. When you think about the Raiders in the abstract, he is the only person who needs to be considered in the concrete. In 1962, he was named the Raiders’ head coach and general manager; by 1976, he was the team’s principal owner and the architect behind every move it made (a position he inflexibly retained until his death from heart failure in 2011). The only reason the Raiders managed to sustain one model for five decades is that they were completely controlled by one personality for that entire period. This will never happen again. He was the last dragon. When writing about football (or any sport), a phrase that’s often thrown around is “the modern era.” In pro football, it’s customary to claim that the modern era starts with the inception of the Super Bowl, or the 1970 merger of the NFL and the AFL, or the ’78 rule changes that accelerated the passing game. But this is only because we never think of history having a future. When NFL historians debate this question in a hundred years, the clever ones will suggest that the league’s modern era didn’t start until the day after Al Davis died. He was the end of the beginning. We’re only crawling out of the Precambrian now.
For the sake of transparency, I should probably mention that Al Davis is (pretty much) my favorite sports owner of all time. For the sake of balance, I should also note that he was an awful person who openly encouraged cheating. He’s my favorite, but not because I like him. In the wake of his death, some of his more reprehensible acts now seem charming (throughout the sixties, rival coaches believed he planted secret microphones in his opponents’ locker room). Yet so much of what he did was simply mean-spirited. He enjoyed being hated, or at least he didn’t mind. In 1992, future Hall of Fame running back Marcus Allen gave an interview on ABC in which he claimed that Davis was trying to end his career and wreck his livelihood, even though Allen had been the Raiders’ MVP in Super Bowl XVIII. Davis seemed self-destructive in counterintuitive ways; he often behaved as if his interior goal was to wreck the NFL (he sued the league three times and even sided with the upstart USFL in an ill-fated 1986 antitrust suit). His iconic phrase, “Just win, baby,” might sound like an innocuous rah-rah motto, but there was something perverse about his insertion of the word just. When combined with the persona Al Davis fostered (and particularly when the phrase oozed from Al’s own larynx), that extraneous just seemed like the amoral justification for everything he did. He wanted the world to view him as totally ruthless, a quality he associated with power. Davis was a civil rights activist and a rare pro-labor owner, but these qualities are not what people remember. What people remember is that Al Davis was a Jew who openly expressed a fascination with Adolf Hitler. Think about that: It wasn’t just that he was a Jew with a weird, unspoken attraction to Hitler’s role in world history; he was a Jew who wanted people to know that he thought Hitler was super interesting.
He loved the contradiction. He loved how it bothered people. It was an advantage.
“For a long time I thought I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew,” Danish director Lars von Trier said at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, promoting his 2011 film Melancholia. He was sitting next to Kirsten Dunst, who periodically gasped as his extemporaneous dialogue continued. “But it turned out that I was not a Jew, and even if I’d been a Jew, I would have been a second-rate Jew, because there’s a kind of hierarchy in the Jewish population. But, anyway, I really wanted to be a Jew, and then I found out I’m really a Nazi, because my family was German, which also gave me some kind of pleasure. What can I say? I understand Hitler. But I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end . . . I think I understand the man. He’s not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit, yes. But come on, I’m not for the Second World War.”
It will come as little surprise that these words got von Trier banned from a festival that was actively celebrating his work. He initially apologized, but then retracted his apology in GQ, essentially arguing that to apologize for what he considered a joke would be akin to apologizing for who he was as a human. Considered rationally, it’s obvious von Trier should never have apologized at all. Von Trier did not say he liked Hitler; he said he understood Hitler (which, as a director, is what he’s supposed to do — he’s supposed to place himself inside the perspective of abnormal viewpoints). But the main reason he shouldn’t have apologized was because he was never sorry. He was joking, fully aware that what he said would not be taken as a joke. His goal was to make a certain kind of person hate him (and by “certain kind,” I do not mean Jewish people — I mean the type of people who actively enjoy the sensation of outrage, Jewish or otherwise). “He spoke with grotesque insensitivity; he acted like a jerk,” moaned The New Yorker, seemingly unaware that this was his objective. For his art to succeed, Lars von Trier needs to be despised by the reactionary segment of his liberal audience. His movies aim to confront people with ideas they will never truly accept: Melancholia is about how the end of the world might be positive. Dogville is about the inherent evil of the American experiment; its quasi-sequel, Manderlay, implies that racism is both inevitable and unconquerable. The Idiots suggests humans are irrevocably trapped by their own inhibitions. Dancer in the Dark is about how Björk was such an ineffective factory employee she had to be executed (or something along those lines — I didn’t totally get that one).
Like the ’88 version of Eazy
-E, von Trier is a performative nihilist. We never know how he really feels about anything, but his public posture is to the left of morality. His films are so deft and disturbing and antihuman that it’s easy to perceive them as satire, which is what some audiences prefer to do; because his films are a rare example of high-art explorations within a mostly middlebrow medium, middlebrow critics want to like them. They want to be intellectually associated with an auteur who makes great movies, so they’re tempted to reframe his work as something postmodern. They want him to be an ironist. But von Trier realizes that his movies are important only if taken at face value. They can’t have malleable interpretations. They need to be experienced from the standpoint that he really does believe the end of the world might be a great thing, because that’s what pushes a project like Melancholia outside the realm of conventional cinema. You need to view von Trier as a talented, terrible person. He has to wear the black hat, and no hat is blacker than the one resting upon the brain that relates to Hitler.
N.W.A wore Raiders gear because of what the Raiders represent (and because they were local), but also because the Raiders happen to wear black. Sometimes things are simple. But here is something less simple: In 1988, Mark G. Frank and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University published a study titled “The Dark Side of Self-and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sports.” It starts from the premise that black connotes evil and death in all cultures and hopes to figure out if “these associations influence people’s behavior in important ways. For example, does wearing black clothing lead both the wearer and others to perceive him or her as more evil and aggressive? More importantly, does it lead the wearer to actually act more aggressive?” It will probably not surprise you that their ultimate supposition is yes. (I can’t imagine anyone would know this study even exists if the answer had been no.) One of the metrics the researchers invent is something they call the “Malevolence Rating.” Twenty-five random people (none of whom followed sports) were each paid two dollars to look at various NFL and NHL uniforms and rank them on various continuums (good/bad, nice/mean, timid/aggressive). The study’s conclusion is that the Raiders have the most malevolent overall appearance (the Miami Dolphins are seen as the least malevolent, which suggests Axl Rose might have been one of the twenty-five people polled). I will grant that this is a questionable way to validate a theory that already seems intuitively true. But what’s harder to prove is the second part of the question, and that’s the question that matters: What makes the Raiders act the way they do? Is it conscious or unconscious?
There are two Raiders who best represent the ambiguity of this problem: Jack Tatum and John Matuszak. Both are now deceased. Tatum was among the best defensive backs of the 1970s and is widely viewed as the hardest-hitting free safety of his era. Nicknamed the Assassin, he is best remembered for inflicting a tragedy: In a 1978 preseason game against the New England Patriots, Tatum paralyzed Patriot wide receiver Darryl Stingley from the chest down. He did not intend to break the man’s spine, and there was no penalty on the play. It was a clean hit (although today he would have been severely fined by the league office). Tatum’s reputation and livelihood was based on violence, and the hit on Stingley was no different from what he tried to do to every opponent on every play. But what will always be weird about this event was Tatum’s reaction. He supposedly tried to visit Stingley in the hospital, but found himself unwelcome by the immediate family; as a result, the two men never spoke, ever. Tatum never apologized. “It’s about who can hit the hardest,” he said in 2007, the week of Stingley’s ultimate death. “That’s what the game is about.” There are those who insist Tatum was privately troubled by what happened, but there’s a lot of public evidence that suggests otherwise — most notably, Tatum’s three ridiculously titled autobiographies: They Call Me Assassin (1980), They Still Call Me Assassin (1989), and Final Confessions of NFL Assassin Jack Tatum (1996). Why would a player who put a man in a wheelchair (during an exhibition game!) have such an unquenchable desire to be identified as a killing machine? Only a player who sees that designation as central to who he is. Tatum is the argument for consciousness: He wanted to be vilified by others because that is how he viewed himself.
The situation with Matuszak is less clear-cut. The first overall pick of the 1973 draft, he was a powerful but generally underachieving defensive end. He was far more dangerous off the field. Matuszak was a six-foot-eight, 280-pound cocaine addict who owned a lot of guns and once ended up in a straitjacket (reportedly due to an overdose of booze and barbiturates). He claimed to consume Valium and vodka for breakfast and was charged with four DUIs. In 1986, he was unsuccessfully sued by a male stripper who claimed Matuszak threw him across a bar. Yet there was something peculiar about the way Matuszak viewed his own character: He always talked like a smart person pretending to be dumb, except when he acted like a dumb person pretending to be smart.
“When you say I epitomize the Raiders,” Matuszak once told a broadcaster, “and then you say the Raiders aren’t very well liked, I guess what you’re trying to say is that the Raiders — as well as John Matuszak — have always been . . . controversial.” In Matuszak’s defense, he seemed a little high when he said that. But this is the kind of attitude that made him confusing; he seemed unhappy that he was self-aware. What Matuszak really wanted to say in that interview was that anyone who suggested he epitomized the Raiders was fundamentally suggesting that he was a legalized criminal (and that this was undeniably true). He knew it, but he saw it as something partially outside of himself. He wrote about this in his entertaining autobiography, Cruisin’ with the Tooz: “When people expect you to be wild, talk about you being wild, encourage you to be wild, you begin to be wild. It’s almost as if you become your image.” Certainly he was not the first celebrity to claim that other people’s perception of him eventually usurped his actual self. But Matuszak is an exaggerated example of this phenomenon. Before signing with Oakland, he’d struggled with Houston, Kansas City, and Washington. His limited ability as a player was not enough to mitigate his behavior as a citizen; for all those other teams, he wasn’t worth the trouble. But Al Davis saw this differently. When Davis met Matuszak for the first time, the Tooz was wearing a black suit with a silver shirt; Davis immediately understood what he had. Matuszak would be a loyal monster, and his problematic personality was added value. His mere presence proved that the Raiders did not operate like other organizations (whatever he contributed on the field was pretty much gravy). Because of rogues like Matuszak, unhappy free agents gravitated to Oakland (a phenomenon that continues to this day). It became the destination franchise for every disenfranchised football player because Davis did not require consciousness. Playing for Al Davis meant you didn’t have to accept any preexisting conditions of morality or appearance. You did not have to think about what your actions meant to the outside world. If you wanted to be a histrionic crazy-eyed killer, that was fine — but it was just as acceptable to be the complete opposite (one example was Raider tight end Dave Casper, a well-educated eccentric who preferred fishing to partying). Nothing was inflexible. The Raiders were not villains because everyone on the team was a reprobate; the Raiders were villains because everyone on the team was intellectually free. That’s villainy’s upside. The downside is that Matuszak died from heart failure at the age of thirty-eight and no one was remotely surprised.
Nobody believes N.W.A anymore. I’m not sure anyone completely believed them ever. When Rodney King’s 1991 beating led to the 1992 L.A. riots, there was a moment when “Fuck tha Police” seemed super prescient — but that moment passed. It became a footnote. Instead, everyone returned to a more distanced interpretation of their work, a position dependent on the notion that Straight Outta Compton was a well-made cartoon: “It’s not about a salary / It’s all about reality they chant as they talk shit about how bad they are,” Robert Christgau wrote at the time of its release. “Right, it’s not about salary — it’s about royalties, about br
andishing scare-words like street and crazy and fuck and reality until suckers black and white cough up the cash.” Still, he graded the record a B. When Spin published an alternative album guide in 1995, Straight Outta Compton scored 10 out of 10 — but writer Greg Sandow still retroactively attacked their aesthetic authenticity: “We now know the group was hollow at its core — Eazy-E, who bankrolled it and promoted himself as its major star, couldn’t even write his own raps.”
This has become the only sophisticated way to think about N.W.A: It’s essential to appreciate the concept while discounting the realism. You have to take it seriously and unseriously at the same time. For the guys in the group, it could not have worked out better. In 1989, the FBI foolishly wrote a letter condemning N.W.A. [The missive noted that seventy-eight law-enforcement officers were “feloniously slain in the line of duty during 1988 . . . and recordings such as the one from N.W.A are both discouraging and degrading to these brave, dedicated officers.”] Immediately, every intellectual sided with the Compton musicians. How could the FBI believe that this album was anything except a brilliant spoof? Persecution made the group seem smarter. N.W.A’s true fan base agreed with that assessment, although with fewer complications — they saw Straight Outta Compton as straightforward entertainment. Who even cared if it was real or fake? Wasn’t the larger message of the album to not care about anything? “I don’t give a fuck,” Cube rapped relentlessly. “That’s the problem.” To people who valued ideas, N.W.A knew the most; to people who valued an uncompromising assault, N.W.A cared the least.