Raiders' one-of-a-kind Oakland experience coming to an end

OAKLAND

Last Sunday was a run-of-the-mill game day in the vast parking lot of the Oakland Coliseum, which is to say it was a never-ending cavalcade of brisket and brats, weed smoke and beer bongs, profane T-shirts and silver-and-black serapes, Super Bowl XV flags and giant inflated Darth Vaders, mariachi and Mac Dre.

Something about Raiders games has always been different. Every sports team has its loyal supporters and favored regional cuisine. But only in Oakland will you find such a concentration of game-day ghouls, demons, zombies, malevolent priests and priestesses, pirates and Elvis impersonators - a football game disguised as the midnight screening of a horror movie.

This spooky congregation will converge on its holy ground one more time Sunday, when the Raiders face the Jacksonville Jaguars in what will almost certainly be the last home game the team ever plays in Oakland.

“One game left,” Andy Coronado said. “It’s kind of melancholy.”

Coronado, a 57-year-old from Stockton, was sitting inside his minibus, a staple of the pregame scene here. He bought the vehicle for $800 six or seven years ago and turned it into a mobile shrine to the Raiders. Every stroke of the paint job, every interior decoration is dedicated to the team. Affixed to the front of Coronado’s ride is a leg that looks as if it were pulled off a piñata; before each game, Coronado wraps the leg in colored tape to represent that day’s opponent.

On the right side of the bus is the oversize autograph of Lester Hayes, who played cornerback for the Raiders from 1977 to 1986, the first five of those years in Oakland. Hayes, who now lives in Modesto, likes to renew his vows to Raider Nation by roaming this parking lot from time to time.

“I’ve met people that are sons and daughters, nieces and nephews of fans who watched us play,” he said. “This is family love. Brother, you’ll see people I’ve seen for four decades. And their family members. It’s family love, and family love travels.”

We will find out soon, because this scene is about to fade away. Team owner Mark Davis, son of the late franchise patriarch Al Davis, announced in April of 2016 that he planned to move the brand to Las Vegas. The past year, especially, has been a slow-motion crawl toward that eventuality, with the Raiders releasing periodic video updates of the construction of their new stadium near the Vegas strip.

Familiar territory for fans

For older fans, it’s a familiar feeling. The Raiders, one of the AFL’s original 1960 franchises, uprooted from Oakland abruptly in 1982 and moved to Los Angeles. They returned in 1995 and, for the most part, were welcomed with open arms by the people they had once abandoned. It was as if Oakland had forgiven the Raiders for a temporary lack of judgment.

“They never should have left,” former Raiders linebacker Matt Millen said in June of 1995, as quoted in a Press Democrat article. “They’re going back where they belong. Coach (John Madden) and I talked about it and we agreed: The Raiders should never be anywhere but Oakland.”

“This is the last move of the Los Angeles Raiders,” East Bay politician Don Perata declared in the same story.

Alas, the confidence was misplaced. The Oakland Coliseum has grown increasingly decrepit. Mark Davis, like his father before him, craved ownership of a state-of-the-art facility. He has spent the past several years bickering with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, the Oakland City Council and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors on how to achieve that. The unhappy breakup is about to be finalized.

Most Raiders partisans seem to be giving Davis the benefit of the doubt. He grew up watching games in Oakland and has built up tremendous goodwill since succeeding his father in 2011. Few other NFL owners are as willing to rub elbows with fans. And this is the family business, after all. Who wouldn’t want control of his or her own stadium?

Kirk Morrison, an Oakland native and a Raiders linebacker from 2005-09, contrasts the Raiders’ move with that of the Chargers, who relocated from San Diego to Los Angeles in 2017.

“San Diego’s my second home,” Morrison said. “I know those people down there are hurting. They’re hurting bad. The team that they had and they’ve known literally walked away and went up the road and said forget about you guys. With Mark Davis, it has not been that way. As crazy as it’s been, they’ve made this transition work.”

Choosing Vegas’ deal

The Vegas enticements were powerful. Nevada taxpayers are subsidizing $750 million of the stadium project. Of course, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in July that the overall cost of the facility has risen to $1.9 billion.

“They didn’t really get a great deal in Las Vegas,” Oakland City Councilman Dan Kalb said. “They thought they were gonna get a great deal. Things changed. It’s a deal, not a great deal. They could have stayed here if we gave them a good deal. We didn’t let ourselves be screwed.”

It’s unlikely any degree of public money was going to be available here. But Amy Trask, the Raiders’ former chief executive and now a CBS football analyst and board chairman of the Big3 basketball league, insists there were “creative alternatives being discussed as to how to bridge that financial gap” in Oakland.

Trask said she pushed hard for those alternatives before leaving the organization in 2013. She suggested, for example, building a new stadium immediately to the north or south of the existing Coliseum, playing in the old place during construction, then hopping next door when the new facility was completed. That would leave room for the A’s, should the baseball team decide to remain at the Coliseum complex.

“What struck me was that every time I would offer an alternate proposal, there was always a reason that the answer was no,” Trask said. “Can we do two stadiums? No, it’ll use too much parking. OK, can we move the stadium a quarter of a mile? No. OK, what if we put the parking across the 880? No.”

Trask added: “I thought it telling that after the team lost its bid to move to Los Angeles (in 2016, when the NFL selected the Chargers over the Raiders), it didn’t resume talks with Oakland. It immediately pivoted to Vegas.”

Specifically, Mark Davis pivoted. “I believe if Al Davis was still around, we would’ve had a deal,” Kalb said. “And that Mark Davis is not in same ballpark as his father in terms of intellect and ability to get something done.”

Attempts to reach Mark Davis for this story were unsuccessful.

A lot of Raiders fans are resentful of their local politicians, but can you blame the budget writers for not wanting to throw public money at the team? The city is still repaying its share of the debt for construction of Mount Davis, the towering bank of stands and suites, completed in 1996, that now blots out the eastern horizon at the stadium. The county paid off the remaining $100 million of its project debt in 2015.

Finding fans all over

A reconciliation was never really in the cards. There is talk of the Raiders training in Napa again next summer. But when the 2020 NFL preseason begins in August, barring a huge surprise, the team’s first home game will be under a translucent roof serving as a shield from the Mojave Desert sun.

As Morrison said, “I know this time it’s for real for real.”

The Raiders could well thrive after the move. They had no trouble developing a rabid following in Los Angeles. Many of those fans have flown up regularly for games in Oakland since 1994, and many will drive or fly to Vegas. New traditions await.

“That’s honestly what has helped me kind of cope with the Raiders leaving,” Morrison said. “Because they’re gonna get fans from all over the world. Not just Vegas. Not just Oakland, Los Angeles. You’re gonna get fans from all over the world. … I think now I have to embrace that other people can share in the joy that I’ve had throughout my 37 years on this earth.”

Magic of Coliseum gone

But there’s no denying the team is about to lose something irreplaceable - beginning with that unique game-day experience. Despite Davis’ repeated insistence that any new Oakland stadium would have to include significant room for tailgating, the Las Vegas site apparently will have very little. The Raiders will offer shuttles and encourage fans to explore public transportation. Good for the environment. Bad for families bearing underinflated footballs and seven-layer dip.

Anyway, you can’t simply relocate an organic atmosphere like the Coliseum’s.

“When I played my first game versus my hometown team, the Houston Oilers (a preseason contest on Aug. 8, 1977), 60,000 fans sounded like 120,000 fans,” Hayes said. “Oh, man. The psychological stimuli! It made your spine tingle.”

It still does, according to Raiders coach Jon Gruden, who makes a pilgrimage to the Coliseum’s most notorious section of seats, behind the south end zone, after every home win. “I don’t have a lot of friends except the guys in the Black Hole,” Gruden said a couple weeks ago, laughing. “I only get to see them six or seven times (a year). I get emotional talking about it.”

Vegas will never be Oakland

Ask the 49ers about creating a mood. Only now, with the team riding a dramatic 11-2 start, have they begun to build a feeling of excitement at Levi’s Stadium, their home in Santa Clara since 2014. And it could be an even bigger challenge in Las Vegas, America’s favorite weekend party destination.

“Right now, you go to a game in Oakland, and the overwhelming, overwhelming percentage of fans are Raider fans,” Trask said. “If you are the fan of a team that’s playing the Raiders on the road, and you can afford to go to only one road trip to see your team, a lot of people are gonna pick Las Vegas.”

Even if the Las Vegas vibe is a success, it will not be Oakland. Nothing could be.

Morrison remembers making a spur-of the-moment decision, when he was playing at San Diego State, to fly home with a buddy for a Raiders game during their playoff run in 2002. They had a flight canceled, rerouted through Sacramento, and wound up counting their precious dollar bills and looking into renting a car to get to Oakland. Fortunately, they were surrounded by Raiders fans. One of them noticed Morrison’s silver-and-black gear and said, “Nope, you’re coming with us.”

“Literally rode from the Sacramento airport to the Coliseum,” Morrison recalled. “When people say ‘Raider Nation,’ like, that’s Raider Nation. That’s Raider family. That’s when I knew that the fan base was special. And I’m not even a player yet (at that point), I’m not even drafted yet.”

Trask can identify with that sort of hospitality, the counter-?argument to the trope of the drunken, foul-mouthed Raiders dirtbag.

“When the fans learned that I was a vegetarian very early in our relocation, I would walk the parking lots and they’re yelling out to me, ‘Amy, we made you asparagus!’?” Trask said. “I never shared this information. I never asked anybody to make me asparagus. That to me was a sign of how welcoming the fans were.”

Losing valued teams

It isn’t just the warm embrace of Raider Nation, though. The connection between this team and this community goes much deeper than that.

In Morrison’s mind, it’s NFL affiliation that defines a city. If he meets a guy in a bar and learns that he is from Pittsburgh, “I’m not asking him if he’s a Penguins fan. I’m not asking if he’s a Pirates fan. To me, it’s, ‘Are you a Steelers fan?’ Same thing, if I say I’m from Oakland: ‘Oh, you must be one of those Raider fans.’ That’s what people identify with. And I think it won’t initially hit people from Oakland and the East Bay. But in time, it will start to go away.”

It’s an especially salient point in Oakland, a city still mourning the loss of the Golden State Warriors, who built a new arena in San Francisco and moved there this season. The A’s have pledged to remain “Rooted in Oakland,” but they, too, are fed up with the Coliseum, their home since 1968. And so far, securing land for a new baseball park has proved treacherous.

During an interview with local Fox station KTVU in October, Schaaf said Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred had warned the mayor and other officials that he would encourage the A’s to move to Las Vegas if the city didn’t drop a lawsuit over the ownership structure of the Coliseum site.

“Obviously he chose his city wisely as far as exposing a pain point that all Oaklanders feel about losing our sports teams,” Schaaf told the TV station.

It’s a pain that hasn’t truly subsided since 1982.

Morrison saw that hurt before he even understood it. He grew up in Oakland in the 1980s. His earliest football memories were of the Los Angeles Raiders. So why did everyone in his family address them by a different name?

“When I was first learning, people would still call them the Oakland Raiders,” Morrison said. “And it was weird. I’m like, ‘How are they Oakland, but yet they’re in LA?’ I kept trying to figure it out.”

‘Chip on your shoulder’

The Raiders’ absence helped the 49ers gain dominance over the Bay Area in the ’80s. It was a one-team area, and that team, the 49ers of Bill Walsh, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, was winning Super Bowls. All of Morrison’s friends were Niners fans. But that wasn’t gonna fly in the Morrison household, and definitely not with young Kirk. It contradicted his sense of self.

“As a young kid, to me San Francisco was like, privileged,” Morrison said. “Because I grew up in West Oakland. I grew up where the Cypress Freeway collapsed (in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989). You only went to San Francisco for field trips. Now as I got older, it was a little different. But San Francisco always had this perception of being uppity, or better. The people of the East Bay, which is like the majority of my family, we took on the mentality of what being a Raider fan was. Just having a chip on your shoulder.”

When the Raiders returned to Oakland in 1995, Morrison’s father bought season tickets he couldn’t really afford. Morrison remembers the jersey he wore to games, a knockoff Jeff George No. 3. “We were kind of raised in the church. My dad was a minister,” Morrison said. “And when the Raiders came back, our sanctuary became the Oakland Coliseum on Sunday.”

‘I’m heartbroken for them’

The underdog mentality that Morrison described previously followed the team to Los Angeles, where hip-hop groups like NWA made Raiders gear must-wear attire in neighborhoods that felt overlooked. But can it follow them to Las Vegas? Vegas has its share of working-class people. But the city tries to sell a flashy, decadent idea of itself. How will that image mesh with old-school Raiders fans?

Even Raider Nation has yet to sort it out.

“For those fans that are looking forward to the move, I’m delighted for them,” Trask said. “For those fans that, whether they live in the Bay Area or elsewhere, they’re going to travel to Las Vegas for the games, and they’re delighted with having a brand-new stadium, I’m delighted for them.

“But for those fans who are heartbroken by the move, and who will not follow the team to Las Vegas? I’m heartbroken for them.”