Time to end 49ers-Raiders exhibition games

They need to cancel the exhibition game between the Raiders and 49ers. The people who own our local football teams need to do that starting next season and for every season after that.

It makes me sad to write this, sad because local sports rivalries are worth preserving, sad because people can be so disappointing. Oh, let's tell the truth. People can be awful.

The motivation behind the Battle of the Bay exhibition game was exemplary. Amy Trask of the Raiders and the 49ers' Yorks reinstated the game for all the right reasons, as a gesture of solidarity and goodwill and just plain good fun between the teams and fans. Under normal conditions the game would have worked out splendidly, like the Big Game for Cal and Stanford fans, a game which, year after year, brings both sides together in celebrating a wonderful tradition.

But the Raiders-49ers rivalry is not like that. How terribly sad. What a rip-off for all of us. I am not blaming Raiders fans and I am not blaming Niners fans. I am saying this rivalry, for whatever reason, brings out the worst in people.

It sure brought out the worst on Saturday night with those postgame shootings in the parking lot at Candlestick Park, and in an unrelated incident, one poor man got beaten unconscious in the bathroom.

I sometimes think both 49er and Raiders fans have a gang mentality when it comes to each other, when it comes to this game. They're like Bloods and Crips in Los Angeles and they hate each other for no good reason, and that's a tragedy that led to more tragedy on Saturday night.

A week ago, I attended the 49ers Fan Fest on a breezy sunny day at Candlestick Park. As I walked into the old stadium with a crowd of Niner fans, all of us noticed a Raiders fan in a Raiders jersey walking with us. I wondered if the guy was brave or simply nuts.

But an interesting thing happened. The Niners fans razzed him, but the banter was good-natured. A cop walked by and the 49er fans pointed at the Raiders fan and said he must be drunk, and the cop laughed. We all laughed and that broke the tension.

During the 49ers' practice the Raiders fan walked around the stands. Naturally, people booed him and he seemed to like it. But no one went any further. And I thought, "This is how civilized people should act, booing but not hitting, not hurting."

And then everything changed on Saturday night when civilized boos turned to gunshots, when good fun turned to terror.

They must end this game. The fans do not deserve this game.

That still leaves one problem. Every few years the Raiders and 49ers play each other in the regular season. What should they do?

They should have armies of cops patrolling the stadium and the parking lots before, during and after the games. They must stop every car and make sure no thug is sneaking a gun into the lot in his car. This will take time, will make things excruciating but it has come to that. Going to a 49ers-Raiders game will be like going through airport security, only worse.

We in the Bay Area pride ourselves on being special, on being more refined than people elsewhere. And we are, we really are. When poor Bryan Stow got beaten in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium we shook our heads and told ourselves the horror happened over "there," not here in the Bay Area.

And now we have our own tragedy for similar stupid reasons in our own parking lot. And we must admit - have to - that grotesque violence does not merely happen in sports stadiums out "there." It's here. It's us.

For more on the world of sports in general and the Bay Area in particular, go to the Cohn Zohn at cohn.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.