Head Raider

Like some ghost battalion doomed to march across the same eerie battlefield for the rest of eternity, the members of the Oakland Raiders football team came drifting up the runway from the playing field. No one shouted. No one slammed the slick concrete walls. No one kicked or cursed. They simply moved in mute, lifeless agony, their ability to experience hurt or pain strangely dead. What had happened before had happened again.

When it really counted, when the whole nation was watching, when all that money was on the green-felt table, when everyone connected with the game of football was convinced that they were finally ready to dominate their sweaty universe, the Oakland Raiders had again snatched defeat (continued on page 172)Head Raider (continued from page 113) from the jaws of victory. Was this the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth straight time it had happened? It made no difference. All Oakland Raider defeats are cruel, the disgrace unbearable. No football organization aims so high, squawks so loud, fails so often. None wins so many games and so few championships.

When the clubhouse door finally opened, some of the players were still slumped in their cubicles, patches of mud and blood drying on their hands and faces. They had made no attempt to remove their uniforms. They wouldn't concede that what had happened was real. While they sat there yet in full battle dress, the war was not over, the professional football season hadn't ended. From time to time, one of them would rise with a great heaving, sighing burst of strength, pull off his jersey, remove his pads and head for the obscuring mists of the shower room.

On an equipment trunk, isolated from the rest of the mourners in the Oakland dressing room, sat Al Davis. He was resting his cheekbones in his hands. There are times when he forgets his Brooklyn Jewish origins and falls into a pseudo-Southern accent, which is, after all, an effortless way of speaking.

This time the hurt was so deep, the wound so ancient that Davis was using the hard, bitter tones of his native land. Do not get the impression that Al Davis came from a squalid section of Brooklyn, an impression he would like to give when he talks to athletes from the ghetto. He grew up in a wealthy neighborhood where all the Irish, Italian and Jewish families settled as soon as they got a few hundred thousand dollars ahead. He was never a street fighter except in his own mind. "I'm not the lovey-dovey type," he said. "They want to know if I plan to go over to congratulate Art Rooney. I don't see any reason to. It's nice he won ... you follow me? He's a nice fucking guy. He hung in there for years, when there wasn't any goddamn money to be made in professional football, and I admire hell out of him. If he doesn't know I'm happy for him without me saying it, he's not the goddamn man I think he is. That kinda shit doesn't bother men like Art Rooney ... whether I go over or not ... you know what I mean? Art knows my guts are cut up. If we had won, I wouldn't expect him to come over here when he's all cut up again himself. This was another damn game. Tomorrow, we start planning for next year."

A television cameraman stuck his weapon into the small room and turned on a light bright enough to illuminate hell.

"Hey, leave us the fuck alone," said Davis, disgusted at the man's lack of sympathy. "Don't you have any damn idea what's happened here? These guys have worked hard. They proved they were the best team in the league over the length of the season and they aren't going to the Super Bowl. Now leave them the hell alone. Geez!"

Davis slumped forward and gazed at some statistics somebody had handed him. "This is damn disgraceful," he muttered. "Christ! Our longest gain was four yards.... That's the negative aspect of what happened.... We should have run better.... We've been living by throwing the ball and, Jesus, they're going to the Super Bowl. The Pittsburgh Steelers ... Christ! The Oakland Raiders had the best year and they had to have a great year. Christ!"

The insane thing about the Oakland Raiders is that they have consistently been the best team through the sunniest years of the professional-football boom. The statistics prove it. In the dozen seasons since Allen Davis became head coach and general manager, the Raiders have scored a handsome over-all record of 115 wins, 42 losses and 11 ties. The Dallas Cowboys are second, with 107--58--3. Despite the sainted presence of Vincent T. Lombardi for much of the period covered, the Green Bay Packers are eighth, with a 95-64-9 figure.

The statistics are lovely; very ornate, in fact. But they lie about the most important subject and Davis knows it. The Raiders have been to only one Super Bowl. They were defeated handily by the Packers and His Holiness, the sainted but not necessarily saintly Lombardi. Last season, they were rousted out of the American Football Conference's play-offs by Pittsburgh, ultimately the Super Bowl champion, by a 24-13 score. For the Raiders, it was the fifth consecutive post-season defeat.

Coming close and failing is Davis' personal purgatory. He refuses to make it his hell, although he suffers worse in defeat than anyone else in the game. Some people suggest that he takes victory just as hard. He admits that he cannot bear to attend team parties. "I don't like silly social functions," he says. "They make me ill at ease."

The week before the Raiders were dismissed from further competition by Pittsburgh, they were matched with the Miami Dolphins, champions of the American Conference three straight years, Super Bowl survivors twice and generally considered to be the dynastic successors to Lombardi's Packers. In box 20 on the mezzanine level of the Oak-land--Alameda County Coliseum, Davis struts and frets his team's hours on the field. He crouches, prowls, stands, sweats, swears. He almost never sits. There are no time-outs left and Miami leads 26-21 with 26 seconds left to play. Oakland, which sometimes does not think it necessary to play full-tilt football until the final minute of a game, has the ball on the Miami eight-yard line.

"You got the Dolphins just where you want them, ahead with seconds left to play," says a newsman, trying to ease the tension and fully aware that his words will hardly be heard. "They must know how dangerous the Raiders are when they are trapped."

"Yeah, yeah," says Davis, "sure, sure." His broken fingernails are slipping back and forth across the front of his teeth. His face has no complexion. His arteries have been drained of blood. Quarterback Kenny "The Snake" Stabler cannot find a receiver. They are all over the field but neatly covered. The clock is ticking. Miami defensive end Vern Den Herder has his hands on the Oakland quarterback and he is falling forward.

"Throw the damn thing away, Kenny," shouts Davis, his soul in torment. "Stop the damn clock. What's the matter with your head? Aw, damn it! Damn it! Damn it!"

As Stabler pitches forward, he floats one of his left-handed passes into a mob scene in the Miami end zone. Hands beat on helmets. Oakland's smallish running back (5'10") Clarence Davis is between two large, malevolent Dolphins; namely, Mike Kolen and Charlie Babb. "Oh, God, we've blown it. What a damn stupid damn thing to damn do," says Al Davis, his energy spent. Nobody knows what has happened to the pass. Then an official reacts. Up go referee Ben Dreith's hands. Touchdown! Davis reels. "What a dumb damn pass. My God! How did it happen? How in the hell did we score? He honest to God caught the ball? Oh, my God! It's not goddamn possible." The time ticks out and the other club officials in box 20 stand, waiting for Davis, the resident genius, to lead them to the Oakland dressing room. He does not stir. The quality of the victory has left him entirely sapped. He is muttering about the unclean touchdown pass.

Eventually, he decides that the Deity has come down to help him. The profanity, which is something of a macho thing with Davis, anyway, ends. He concludes that this was God's way of evening out the affairs of men and football coaches. It was two years earlier that the Almighty came down and took another play-off game away from Oakland. With 22 seconds left and the Raiders leading, 7--6, a Terry Bradshaw pass intended for Frenchy Fuqua either bounced or was batted back to Franco Harris, who ran 60 yards for a Steeler touchdown. Almost immediately, the Oakland players and coaches and executive personnel began to complain--with some justification--that they had been sorely wronged, if not to say downright screwed. They argued that the ball had bounced off Fuqua's shoulder, thereby making Harris an illegal receiver. (A pass may not touch two members of the same team in sequence.) The officials insisted that Raider defensive back Jack Tatum had a hand over Fuqua's wishbone and the ball ricocheted off his knuckles. Blowups of the television films showed nothing conclusive. Neither did the Steelers' game movies. The decision stood.

"God came down and let Franco Harris catch something--you know what I mean?" says Davis, with his nervous laugh and stagy stutter. "You follow me? Men plan and plan and God comes down ... just like today against the Miami Dolphins. We catch that pass. Shucks! You tell me. But Clarence conies up with it, get me? How does that work, if it isn't God? If you don't believe there's a God that does stuff like that, how about fate? It's the same thing, you got me?"

•

Al Davis, managing general partner of the Oakland Raiders, is one of the most powerful men in the National Football League. He is a former successful head coach whose ability to think on the side lines was once compared to that of Frank Leahy, Paul Brown and Lombardi. He is a former league commissioner. He gave the city of Oakland, one of the smallest communities this side of Green Bay, reason to build a major sports facility and get into the major leagues. He is a member of the N.F.L.'s executive committee, an elite group that determines policy for the nation's new national pastime. He is also on the competition committee, which means that he can help change the game if he wants to.

When you conjure up the Oakland Raiders, your mind fixes on Al Davis. He dominates his own team, whether he coaches or not, in a way no mortal has since George Halas was the Chicago Bears. His coach--some say his surrogate--John Madden is a warm, pleasant, red beet of a man, who has a carefully programed sense of humor. Davis' players are integral parts in a carefully devised plan. They wear no-nonsense black-and-silver uniforms--good solid institutional colors, men-living-together-in-a-military-unit colors. There are no dominant players. There are only "Raider types," carefully selected by The Organization. Even someone as gaudy as George Blanda seems oddly subdued in Oakland's black and silver.

Nothing pleases The Organization more than finding an athlete on another team who is not doing well either because he is being misused or because he is playing out of position. It was either a game or a conceit with Davis in the early days of his reign to make a mockery of another club's system. He picked up fullback Billy Cannon from the Houston Oilers and made an all-league tight end out of him. He accepted Hewritt Dixon, a tight end from the Denver Broncos, and made a great fullback out of him. He took defensive back Clem Daniels from the Kansas City Chiefs and converted him into a 1000-yards-a-season running back. They said that linebacker Arch Matsos was an overrated nobody, but Davis redesigned the entire Oakland defense so that Matsos' mobility would make Davis look like a genius.

Unlike other teams, the Raiders do not encourage the construction of superstars. They ignore the clichéed concept of drafting the best athlete regardless of position. They go strictly for the best men at the positions where they are weakest. They are so bold at times that they almost shatter the confidence that other clubs have built by sticking to the rules. They badly needed a punter three years ago, so they used their first round picking up a punting specialist, Ray Guy of Southern Mississippi. They did so in the knowledge that Guy was also a fine pitcher greatly sought after by several major-league teams. He signed with Oakland, mostly because he was flattered to be the only punter ever drafted on the first round. It was calculated flattery. Guy understood it and appreciated it. He lives in trivia contests everywhere.

The Organization does not enjoy making mistakes. One year it had two first-round choices and it used them to select two other curiosities, a left-handed quarterback, Kenny Stabler of Alabama, and a black quarterback. Eldridge Dickey from Tennessee State. The former is a smash success. The latter did not take well to being converted into a wide receiver. Dickey was able to commit incredible atrocities, mostly because Davis did not want to admit that he had blundered in that case. Dickey went to practice only when he felt the urge, which wasn't often. At every capricious turn, he was forgiven.

When he was finally traded to Baltimore, it was only with the deepest reluctance. Raider types are not supposed to fail. Dickey's name is no longer mentioned.

Warren Wells was an immensely talented but deeply disturbed young man who had been cut in order by the Detroit Lions, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Raiders and the Houston Oilers. The Lions were turned off when he brought a pistol into their training camp at Cranbrook Academy out in the safe, white suburbs of Detroit. Wells was alternately a scoundrel and an evangelist, depending on which day you talked to him. Despite his brilliance as a wide receiver for the Raiders, his behavior was so erratic that the law was constantly after him. One evening, he set what must be a Northern California record when he was caught for drunken driving on both sides of the Bay Bridge. He was nailed in San Francisco and held just long enough to sober up, a concession to his status as a football player. When he was let go, he pulled out a jug, got blasted again and was flagged down in Oakland. That time he was held overnight.

His transgressions could not offend The Organization. Each time, he was taken back willingly. The authorities finally decided that they had had enough on February 17, 1971, when Wells was sent to county jail. Davis managed to get him placed on probation, but on September third of the same year, he was knifed by a girl he allegedly had beaten up. Since Wells had caught 36 touchdown passes in three years, Davis wanted him out of prison. His fellow managing general partner, Wayne Valley, was a friend of Judge Leonard Dieden but refused to use his influence with him. Davis suggested that Valley was a racist. This was based on two counts: Valley is a rough talker and often uses racist remarks; and Wells is black and the judge is white. Wells wasn't out of jail until the following spring. His usefulness was at an end and The Organization released him.

"It wasn't racism," said Valley. "The Genius [Davis] was willing to use a guy who belonged behind bars simply because he was a good football player. He didn't care that Warren was a potential danger to society and to himself. He just didn't give a damn. To Davis, Warren wasn't an emotionally disturbed guy, he was a Raider type and the Raiders needed him."

•

Writers have been picking at Davis for better than a decade, with a notable lack of success. Lombardi was easily stereotyped as a drill instructor who bought the beer for the entire regiment on the day when he ceased to make their lives nearly unbearable. Tom Landry is a methodical man of God, an unyielding fundamentalist. Paul Brown is an autocrat with the warmth and understanding of a Romanov. Frank Leahy was a Victorian adventurer on the surface and an Irish rover underneath. But Al Davis, their peer, works at making himself an enigma.

A few years ago, the late Leonard Shector, then the fastest man with a typewriter or a hand ax this side of Rex Reed, spent a half hour with Davis at the Raiders' summer concentration camp at Santa Rosa up in the Sonoma Hills. He came away with a story so slanted that even Davis' old adversary Sidney Gillman felt sorry for him. "What a slash job that was," said Sid. "Unfair."

It openly suggested that Davis lied about his disturbingly modest athletic career and that he was so sensitive about his physique that he wore baggy pants to hide his slender legs and never shook hands because his fingers were so short. It was a cunning piece of work. It implied far more than it revealed and it left Davis with a title that cannot be erased. The headline, in Look magazine, said: "The Most Hated Winner in Football." That is one that sits on Davis' mind like a cancer. He is largely unwilling to give magazine interviews, even though a more kindly story in Sports Illustrated, written in 1963, when he joined the Raiders, left him with a designation he rather fancies: The Genius. "Well, shoot, man, if that's what they want to call me, what can I do to stop it? You follow me? I mean, shoot, I'm no smarter than anyone else. I just try to work harder. Know what I mean? That's all. Genius? Well, that's funny, man. Genius? Me? Al Davis? Shoot!"

As a matter of record, Davis never forgot what Shector did to him. He waited and waited. He put out the word. It turned out that Davis wasn't anywhere nearly as hated as he was respected, football people being accustomed to sharp practice. One day a couple of summers later, he received a telephone call from Paul Brown, maximum leader of the Cincinnati Bengals. It had been whispered that Shector was bearing down on Brown with the idea of doing the same sort of job on him that he had done on Davis. What did Al advise?

If Brown made the regular newsmen feel a part of the inner circle and Shector like an outsider, then the yellow journalist would be instantly discredited. Brown did just that. "You have one minute to leave this room," he said. "You are not welcome here. I know what you did to Al Davis and I also read a piece you wrote on Vince Lombardi that was not very complimentary, either." With no court of appeal, Shector had no choice but to depart, Justice had been served, at least in Davis' eyes.

That is exactly how the Oakland Raiders' managing general partner prefers to operate. He likes to think three, four, five steps ahead and cut you off at the pass. After all, one of his hobbies is the study of foreign affairs.

"Henry Kissinger has gone too far in his arrogance," he says. "The secret is to control conditions without growing arrogant. That's good diplomacy, if you follow what I say. You can control, but when you start thinking you're God ... well, you're in a whole lot of trouble. You've lost perspective. Know what I mean?"

Davis sees himself as a latter-day Metternich cleverly outflanking the crowned heads of Europe by dint of sheer intellect. Although he affects jock mannerisms--working out daily and swearing like the boys, when he himself is alleged to be somewhat puritanical about sex--he is actually above all that. He is the head of The Organization--an unreal entity that operates out of a two-story, black-and-silver stockade just off the Nimitz Freeway. Across the highway is the Coliseum, a plain-pipe-rack stadium that holds 54,000 ticket holders, nowhere near what the Raiders could do if unrestrained. There is talk that 15,000 seats will be added. Then the Oakland club, which shows about a $3,000,000-a-year profit, will be one of the most lucrative in the league.

All of the walls are black and silver. The carpeting is silver ... well, silver gray. The wood is ebony stained. The seat cushions are silver gray. The couch is black. There is only one window in the building--in Davis' office. There are no clocks, because members of The Organization are not supposed to think about things like being home with their wives and families. Once a newsman called John Madden at his home and his wife replied: "It's 11 P.M. What would he be doing here this time of night? Why not try the office?"

Some days Davis arrives in his silver Cadillac with the black-vinyl roof, wearing gray slacks in a rich corduroy. His pullover sweater may be black with silver and white stripes at the cuffs, collar and waist. The loafers are black, worth a minimum of $110. On other days, Davis has a black sports coat, silver slacks and a white shirt with a white tie. Any time one of his executive assistants sees something in the team colors that suits him, he can charge it to the company and Davis will approve the expense.

There are shutters on Davis' office window. He can look out. Nobody can look in.

Discipline is so severe that secretaries are instructed not to come to work smiling on a Monday morning after a Raider defeat. Round-the-clock loyalty is demanded. Once there was a playful publicity man named Bob Halford, who got on the horn one midnight with his old friend Don Klosterman, both of them somewhat in their cups. They had worked together with the Kansas City Chiefs. But now Halford was employed by Davis and was, therefore, a member of The Organization. Klosterman had gone on to become general manager of the Houston Oilers. They laughed and talked and amused each other for the better part of an hour. Nothing was said about the expense of the call. Keeping the enemy amused and, thus, unweary is good strategy. When Davis went to talk trade with Klosterman a few days later, he discovered that the Oilers knew something about one of his players that could only have been learned from the Oakland public-relations man.

"Have you talked to Don Klosterman lately?" asked Davis.

"Just the other night," said Halford, innocently.

For that single indiscretion, the publicity man was summarily dismissed. A man who would leak a small item would eventually spill something important that might hurt the franchise. Davis will not let that happen. His present public-relations man is an extraordinarily efficient individual named Tommy Grimes, whose lips have grown almost bloodless over the past few seasons from straining to hold back a rather inventive sense of humor. Funny flacks are not what The Organization prefers. Another Oakland press agent, Bob Bestor, was such an incredible impressionist that his voice sounded more like Davis' than Davis' own. One afternoon, at the insistence of some newsmen, Bestor called the same Klosterman and had a ridiculously unfair trade half made before Klosterman realized that he was being put on. Bestor departed soon afterward.

"They used to say that I was tough on my public-relations men," says Davis, lapsing into the Southern accent he acquired, rather quickly and mysteriously, during a single year as an assistant coach at The Citadel. "Shoot ... that's not so. Look at Tommy Grimes there. Ah've had him on the staff for seven years. No problems there. Ah had trouble with some of mah other PR men because ah tried to do them some favors. One of them had a drinking problem and ah tried to help him out. He said some things in that Shector story. Now he's dried out and he admits he said a lot of those things when he was ... ah ... drunk, you follow me?"

"All I am is an organization guy," Davis says. "When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, I admired George Weiss of the New York Yankees. Maybe the other kids in my neighborhood admired the players, guys like Dixie Walker and Pee Wee Reese and all the rest. But Weiss was my hero. He developed a great organization, one that created a dynasty the like of which professional sports will never see again. He kept a low profile. I try to keep one. It isn't easy. That's why I tell writers they should be talking to John Madden. You follow me? Shoot, man, he's the head coach. Write about the team itself. I tell my secretary to try to convince writers who call for an interview with me that they ought to write about somebody else, instead."

But the people who work in the Raiders' front office, the subgeniuses and semigeniuses and assistant geniuses who make up The Organization, all lack flash and instant identification. Who knew Madden before Davis made him, at 33, the youngest coach in professional football? Who knows him now, even though Davis insists that people should be doing stories on the head coach and not on him?

Of his assistants, Davis says, "Every last one of them is in demand. I handpicked every one of them. I selected them on the basis of efficiency, intelligence and loyalty. They stay with me, too. They've all had chances to go someplace else, but they like it here. The Raiders pay better than the majority of teams. For instance, Al LoCasale, my administrative assistant, was one of the three finalists for the New York Jets job [general manager]. He could have had it. I think he was probably their first choice. But he preferred to stay here."

Davis' adjutants reflect his thrill of intrigue. LoCasale is a pompous man, filled with inner furies. He is given to smiling a lot and speaking in enigmatic phrases. Your friend one day, he is liable to insult you the next. He is an accurate reflection of The Organization's party line. If Davis is disturbed with you, LoCasale is blazing mad. Equally impressive and equally mysterious is former personnel director Ron Wolf, alleged to be both a former Army Intelligence operator and the possessor of a photographic memory. Considering that the Raiders do not use computerized scouting and that they usually draft in the 19th or 20th spot on every round, and considering that they usually come away with an excellent selection of college seniors, everything they say about Wolf must be true. Like most Davis subalterns, he speaks highly of the leader.

"They say that he's a dictator, because that's the way any military organization has to be set up," said Wolf. "But he isn't that way at all. He is a dynamic man, a real intellect. He has an amazing mind. Still, he lets you think on your own. When you make a decision, you better have ten good reasons for making it. He keeps you mentally sharp, that's why it is such a pleasure working for him. He should be utilized on a league level, not on a club level. That's why he didn't go back to coaching. He was ready to do something else. Now he's ready to move up again and the pity is there is no real place for him to go. I feel a loyalty to him because he's treated me so well. Once when Al LoCasale was out of a job, he called him and said to use his [Davis'] credit card to make calls looking for work."

Former employees are less generous, possibly because they are former employees.

"One time I went to Davis and asked him what he wanted to do about the flight to San Diego," said Bestor. "I told him a charter would cost us $2000 more than taking the regular commuter flight. He told me to do what I thought was best. So we took the regularly scheduled flight and there was a stop in Los Angeles. Naturally, there was a lot of bitching among the players. So Davis stood up and yelled, 'For Christ's sake, Bobby, are you responsible for this? Why didn't you consult with me before you did this?' He insisted that I had never talked to him about it. I suppose, with everything he had to think about, that it could have slipped his mind. But he's not above shifting the blame to somebody else."

•

Life has not been very difficult for Davis, who was to the purple born, if that phrase fits the merchant princes of New York Jewish society. His father, Louis Davis, manufactured clothing and shoes and left his sons, Allen and Jerry, millionaires when he died in 1961. (Even now, Davis cannot speak of his father without becoming emotional.)

Voted the most popular boy in his class, Davis went to tiny Wittenberg, a Lutheran school in Ohio, hoping that he would have a better chance to play varsity sports. It was a mistake. The campus was small and largely unexciting, permeated by evangelical Protestantism, something he had never faced in his insular Jewish-Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn. He left after one semester and, for a while, attended a junior college, before entering mighty Syracuse, where the athletic program suited his grandiose tastes. Davis did not play enough to win a major letter, a fact that still bothers him, although not as much as has been reported. For appearing in half of Syracuse's games in his senior year, he was awarded a minor letter. His partner--and current adversary in a lawsuit to break Davis' contract as managing general partner of the Raiders--is a former Oregon State fullback named Wayne Valley, a football star who never took off his jock even when he went on to make millions on the post-- World War Two construction boom. "Here are my college clippings, Al," he once said, producing a dusty scrapbook. "Now, where the hell are yours?"

When he graduated with a degree in English, Davis had no intention of teaching or of going into the family business. For a while, his mother toyed with the notion of buying her son the unusual gift of a Class D minor-league baseball team in West Virginia that he had seen advertised for sale in The Sporting News. She was looking into the matter when an application Davis had made for a job as football line coach and head baseball coach at Adelphi College on Long Island was accepted. A former Raider employee insists that he got the job only because Adelphi somehow got the impression that it was signing another Al Davis who had been a star at Syracuse a few years earlier. There are no records with the school's letter-man club that show that another Al Davis existed, proving that any sinister story about Davis will be believed. He was writing scholarly tracts about athletics when the Army drafted him. "I was only 22 and I was getting these pieces published in coaches' magazines ... you know what I mean? ... You see what I'm trying to say?"

Not only did military life agree with Davis but he managed to make military life most agreeable. His articles on coaching technique were brought to the attention of General Stanley Scott, commander of Fort Belvoir, Virginia. In those days, Service teams played on a level just below that of the National Football League. Only a private, Davis became head coach under General Scott. He was given his own staff car and a driver, a separate barracks for his team and the right to grab players where he could find them.

"I looked all over and found that a lot of football players in the Service were just dying to be Army engineers," he said. "After all, Fort Belvoir was an engineering center. We operated just like a pro team. A lot of bases wanted me to coach. But I liked the setup General Scott showed me and I took the job. I wanted to stay a private. They offered me stripes, but I thought it best to stay in the background. We lost only two games in two years."

Davis was discharged just before a Congressional investigation into athletic abuses in the military was begun. He was hired as an assistant to the personnel director of the nearby Baltimore Colts, who had admired his Army career. Davis took notes on how a professional team operated and kept them in a loose-leaf binder. A year later, he went to The Citadel, where he acquired his semi-Southern accent.

"I always thought I was handicapped by the fact that people were turned off because I was from New York," he said. "I guess that's how some Southern inflections crept into my speech. I was self-conscious, you follow me? I got two real outstanding players for The Citadel, Angie Coia, who later played with the Bears, and Paul Maguire, who was with the Chargers."

One year later, when he left to join Don Clark's coaching staff at Southern California, he took with him a deep respect for The Citadel's president, General Mark Clark, after whom he named his only child. He took with him, too, a reputation as a master recruiter. And he took several Citadel football players--notably, Angie Coia. ("When ah was at The Citadel, we had to get players. We had to win. It was tough. We had to take players away from some mah-tee big universities. You can't win without players. You have to move things to get players. Players just don't magically appear on your doorstep.") When the N.C.A.A.'s investigators got through poking around, USC was on probation. Still, the Trojans prospered for a while, with John McKay coaching the backfield and Davis coaching the ends. Given such important territory as Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia to recruit from, Davis brought in enough raw talent to keep the Trojans rated number one in the nation through the first eight weeks of the 1959 season.

Then guard Mike McKeever drove out of bounds and broke the cheekbone of a University of California ball carrier after the play had been whistled dead. The turmoil lasted for several days and USC ended up with a conference condemnation. Nobody in the school's administration backed up coach Clark. When the season was over, the Trojans were 8--2 and no longer first in the nation. Clark and Davis resigned. For a few months, Davis was out of work and desperately pondering which direction his future might take when he received a telephone call from Frank Leahy, the former Notre Dame master, who had been named general manager of the American Football League's Los Angeles Chargers.

Leahy said something to Davis that was both flattering and gracious. Then he asked him how he would like to join the new venture as the Chargers' receiver coach. Davis was working with the Chargers in San Diego--where they had fled in 1961 after a disastrous first season--when the Oakland Raiders began looking around for a messiah. Here was a pitiful, homeless operation that moved nomadically from stadium to stadium and always seemed ready to move someplace--Portland, New Orleans, Seattle, Cincinnati, San Antonio. It was an ugly football team, the love-starved loser of a struggling new league. It was situated in a hard-hat-and-beer city that seemed to be embarrassed by being in a major league of any kind, even an inferior one.

"They kept telling me that I didn't want Davis because he was a son of a bitch who would stop at nothing to win," said Wayne Valley, who was doing the hiring in those days. "That description sounded pretty good. After all, that's how a lot of people used to describe me. They kept saying that he got USC into trouble and that there was something kinky about his Army record and that nobody could figure out how he got such a deal when he was only a 22-year-old private. Nobody could explain what he'd done wrong. They all said he was devious. That led me to think that they hated him because he was too sharp for them and he made them feel inferior. I said to myself, 'This so-called Genius has to be the guy ... he'll work 16 hours a day making sure nobody beats him out.' So I made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

Oakland Raider coaches--and there had been a number of them--had run up a composite 3--25 record in the two seasons prior to Davis' arrival. His first words upon taking command were: "You are the Raiders of Oakland. We are building a great tradition here today. Our motto will be 'Pride and poise.' You will never forget those two words--pride and poise. You will never lose either of them. Follow me to victory!" It could not have been funnier if he had told that rabble that they were now officers in the service of the czar and that they were about to attack Moscow and throw the Bolsheviks out. Never did he let Valley or Ed McGah, the other partner, forget that he had refused their first offer.

As soon as he had the job, Davis went looking for all the quality athletes other clubs said they couldn't handle. For a while, the Oakland dressing room was little more than a den of thieves and there were stories about knives and guns in the locker room. Davis gathered them all to his bosom. "Sure Art Powell is a bad guy," he said of a man he liberated from the New York Titans. "He's such a bad guy that all he can do is lead the A.F.L. in pass receiving and behave like a thorough gentleman while he's doing it." Under the Genius, this group of malcontents began to do different things. Davis invented the bump-and-run pass defense because, until two years ago, there was no rule that said you couldn't do it.

The six-year war between the insurgent A.F.L. and the entrenched N.F.L. had reached an impasse when Valley decided that what his group needed was a gunslinger to replace commissioner Joe Foss, the courtly war hero and ex-governor of South Dakota.

It happened at a midnight meeting at the Shamrock-Hilton Hotel in Houston, where Bud Adams, the slightly pixilated owner of the Oilers, spoke a few words of truth: "What we need is some ruthless bastard who won't have any compunction about taking the war right to them."

For less than a second, Valley pondered the situation: "Take my Genius!" he shouted. The vote was one short of unanimous.

On the evening of Davis' election, he instructed his publicity director, Jack Horrigan, to insert the phrase "dynamic young genius" before his name in the press release and then insisted that Horrigan level all possible questions at him. When the reporters were summoned, Davis was ready. It was a short battle. Inside of eight weeks, the N.F.L. was suing for peace. The strategy had been simple: "Get their fucking quarterbacks," said Davis. "Let's see them play without quarterbacks." He had Roman Gabriel of the Los Angeles Rams under contract to the Raiders and John Brodie of the San Francisco 49ers ready to jump to the Oilers. Three others were ready to go when peace broke out. The negotiations went on behind the commissioner's back. Davis was disgusted.

"They made the A.F.L. clubs pay indemnities to the 49ers and the Giants," he said. "Ah mail mah check from the Raiders every year. But, shoot, ah don't mind. They let me keep mah sword and mah horse for the spring plowing. What do ah care ... it's not important ... know what ah mean?"

Somehow Davis thought that because he had won the war, the A.F.L. owners should have shown their appreciation by pressing for a settlement that would have made him commissioner of the combined league. They did not. Davis had served his purpose and it was up to Valley to tell him so. "Look, Al," he said, "they got 16 teams and we got ten. I'm not sure you could get all ten of our votes, let alone any of theirs, if it came down to a decision between you and Pete Rozelle. He's got the job, so forget it. Come back to Oakland." Davis returned, but he decided that to be head coach again would be an affront to his pride. He would accept as his meager share of the spoils a chance to become the largest stockholder and to run the franchise. Davis holds 16 percent of the stock. In 1972, he signed a new contract with McGah, giving him $100,000 a year and total control of the club. This was well in advance of the January 1, 1976, expiration of the original agreement among McGah, Valley and Davis, signed after the leagues merged in 1966. It is the new contract that Valley is disputing in court.

"They wanted me to start coaching again," Davis said. "You just don't go from commissioner to coach. At least I couldn't do that. I had to get into the managerial end of it. I wanted to be an owner, you follow me? They write such shit about me. They say I'm the real coach of the Oakland Raiders and Madden is just a stooge. If we win, I get the credit; if we lose, I give him all the blame. Why doesn't somebody ask John?"

Hulking along the hallway toward his office, Madden, still short of 40, resembles a large red bear. He chuckles way back in his throat but rarely laughs. There were stories that he could have replaced Hank Stram at Kansas City when the latter's long romance with owner Lamar Hunt finally ended, but then somebody pointed out to Hunt that it wouldn't do to hire somebody from an outfit so clearly defined in the fans' minds as the enemy as the Oakland Raiders. So the offer was never made.

"Al and I have a unique relationship," Madden said. "There's no other way to describe it. He makes suggestions and then he tries to sell them to me. He never gives me a direct order where coaching is concerned. People are always looking to see if we aren't at each other's throats. We aren't and that disappoints them, because Al is supposed to be some kind of villain, which he isn't. Sometimes he makes a suggestion and I ignore it completely. He never chews me out afterward. He's an organizational type and he's the head of The Organization. He admires the way the Los Angeles Dodgers do business. They sign Dodger types who fit their specifications for what they want at each position. They try to have a surplus so they can trade for Dodger types in other organizations. That's what we did. There are Raider types, you know.

"Al thinks of me as being the Walter Alston of professional football. A lot of guys might be put off by that, but I consider it one hell of a compliment, because Alston has been a great success at his profession and he's lasted 20 years working on one-year contracts. Incidentally, how do you like our offices? Just like Las Vegas, isn't it? No outside windows and no clocks. Al doesn't want you wondering if the sun has gone down."

There is a basketball game across the street at the Oakland-Alameda County Sports Arena, which is located on the same plot of land as the Coliseum. It was Davis who convinced Franklin Mieuli, owner of the wandering San Francisco Warriors, to stop drifting between the Cow Palace, the San Francisco Civic Auditorium and the San Jose Civic Auditorium and settle down in Oakland as the Golden State Warriors. Like a glowering godfather, he drifts through the stands, not wanting to be recognized but upset when he isn't.

"You know what Davis is?" asked Dick Vertlieb, general manager of the Warriors. "He's a catfish. You know the parable about the two Italian fishermen who come back to Fisherman's Wharf year after year and one always gets a better price for his fish than the other, even though their catches are about equal? Well, one of them says to the other, 'How come?' And the other tells him that when he throws his catch into a live tank, he always has a couple of catfish in the bottom. Now, there's no tougher, better organized, more aggressive fish than a catfish. Those catfish simply kept the rest of those fish stirred up until they reached port. They looked fresher and more alert. That's what Al Davis does to professional football. He's its catfish."

On the morning they were getting ready to bury Frank Leahy on a hillside above the Willamette River near his final home in Portland, it struck Davis that he would be remiss not to attend the funeral. So he called a newspaperman from San Francisco whom he knew was working on Leahy's biography at the time of the great Notre Dame coach's death. Would the writer meet Davis at the airport if he sent a limousine for him? Davis did not want to go to the funeral alone. When he arrived, it was raining and Davis was in a thoughtful mood.

"Here's a letter he sent me when mah father died," he said. "He'd only met mah father once, but he sent me this wonderful letter and apologized for not being able to attend the funeral. He was in the hospital at the time. I believe he would have gone if he had been well. Imagine that! Isn't that touching? Go ahead and read the letter."

At the service on the University of Portland campus, there were so few ex-players present that Frank Leahy, Jr., asked Davis to be an honorary pallbearer. He walked behind the casket wearing a red carnation in his lapel and gnawing on his lower lip.

"Where the hell were his former players and all the people who idolized him?" he asked in the limousine on the way back to the airport. "Those men were heroes to me when I was a kid ... Leahy and Red Blaik and all the rest. He was kind to me when I wanted to get into pro football. You know why I picked black and silver for the Raiders? When I was a kid, I went to see Army's Black Knights of the Hudson play the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. The Army team looked like a football team ought to look. But Leahy down on the side lines was mah idea of a coach. Ah am glad ah'm out of coaching. I could have ended up like Leahy did, all eaten away for nothing. Ah don't care how far it was to come or how short a notice they had, a great man shouldn't go out that way. And Frank Leahy was a great man ... the poor bastard! Ah don't spend enough time with mah wife and mah kid. Ah don't read the books ah want to read. There has to be more to life than football."

A mountain storm was gathering strength and the rented limousine was making waves on the expressway. In the back seat, professional football's resident genius was chewing on his finger tips and acting like a haunted man.