Al Davis locked in the past

With increasing frequency people ask, “Has Al Davis lost it?”

Ordinary people ask. Raiders fans ask. Sports fans from all over ask. They see Davis looking old and frail and they observe his erratic behavior — sometimes it is erratic — and they wonder if his mental processes are slowing down or if he’s going senile or suffering from early stages of Alzheimer’s. People wonder and ask.

If Davis looks frail, he’s entitled. When you’re his age, you’ll look frail, too. Just because he looks frail — he denies he has any serious health problems — does not mean he’s mentally slow or he’s losing his mind. Whenever he talks to the media he thinks logically, answers quickly, is decisive and has a good memory. He also is humorous, sarcastic and mean. In other words, he’s Al Davis.

So, you can stop wondering if Al has lost it. He hasn’t. But he makes weird decisions, as he did with his first pick in the draft.

Sure, Darrius Heyward-Bey, the wide receiver Davis took No.7, could turn out to be the reincarnation of Tim Brown or even Jerry Rice. That is to be determined. It says here he won’t.

He’ll be a fast runner who drops a ton of balls and after a while people will call him a disappointment. Except, he won’t be the disappointment. Davis will.

And let’s get something straight. Coach Tom Cable pretended he had input in the Heyward-Bey selection and the ones that came after. Dream on, Tom. Davis makes the choices and Raiders coaches, happy to be employed, pretend they’re on board.

Davis did not choose Heyward-Bey because he has become mentally impaired. Davis chose him because he is a prisoner of his own genius. There is nothing ironic in that remark. He has genius but he’s also a prisoner of it.

As a young man, Davis fell in love with speed receivers. At a certain time of his life and at a certain time in the National Football League, this love affair made sense. You got a quarterback who could throw the hell out of the ball and you got a receiver who could sprint past the defense, and that QB and that receiver would hook up 50 yards down the field. When it worked, it looked so easy and terrific and it was an in-your-face statement, a pugnacious Al-Davis statement.

Except they don’t play football like that anymore. The game has changed, become more sophisticated. A few years back the Raiders got Randy Moss, the prototypical speed receiver, a great receiver. On the Raiders he amounted to zilch.

No one could get him the ball and after a very short while Moss, a guy with the maturity of a pouting 2-year-old, lost interest and dogged it. The Raiders are saying Heyward-Bey is a Moss-like receiver.

It’s a weird thing to brag about when they already had Moss and loused that up. Anyway, Heyward-Bey is not as good as Randy Moss.

Davis is a prisoner of his genius because he once had a brilliant formula that worked in a specific time and place — speed at wideout — and he can’t get beyond it. He stubbornly reinvents the past. He reinvents the past every day of his life.

He lives in the Raiders’ glory days even though the Raiders no longer have glory days. He wears that Raiders outfit, really wears it, goes through life decked out in a costume most people consider dated and silly.

His project in life, every day of his life, is recapturing a past moment of glory when he was on top of the world, when he was great and everyone acknowledged that, when his team was great — the team of the decades or something like that. His tragic flaw, and it is a tragic flaw, is that he always looks back, never looks forward. He is a living, breathing anachronism.

On Sunday, Cable quoted Bill Walsh to justify some of Davis’ “speed” picks in the 2009 draft. You don’t need to know what Cable said because it’s nonsense, and what Cable knows about Walsh is minimal. But Cable inadvertently invoked a comparison between Davis and Walsh.

So here goes. There is a difference between Davis and Walsh and this is why Walsh ultimately was a better football man. Walsh had a flexible intellect and he always questioned his own assumptions. Just because something works today doesn’t mean it will work tomorrow.

There is the well-known scene, Walsh watching a Steve Mariucci practice, Walsh noticing Mariucci did things pretty much as Walsh did, Walsh realizing the Niner offense had not evolved with Mariucci. It hadn’t. Walsh was appalled. Davis would have been delighted if his coach did things as they always had been done and never deviated.

Davis is the kind of genius who figured things out once and thinks he found the answer forever. He is the kind of genius who thinks life is a lock and key. He doesn’t realize the locks and keys are infinite and keep changing. Because of that limitation he is sad or funny, depending on your point of view.

Because of that, he drafted Heyward-Bey.

For more on the world of sports in general and the Bay Area in particular go to the Cohn Zohn at blog.pressdemocrat.com/cohn. You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at 521-5486 or lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.