By Bob Markus


The Oakland Raiders may have forgotten how to win, but they haven't forgotten how to handle the media--with disdain bordering on contempt. The Raiders are the most p.r. disfunctional organization in all of sports and have been so almost since their inception in 1960. Ever since Al Davis, then a 33-year-old assistant coach with the Los Angeles Chargers, became head coach and general manager of the Raiders in 1963, there has been an attitude of suspicion surrounding the team that makes Georgetown basketball's Hoya paranoia look like glasnost. The latest manifestation was on display last week, when Davis tried to keep Rich Gannon, a CBS analyst, out of his headquarters building, where the network was holding production meetings. Apparently, Gannon, who was the Raiders' quarterback the last time the team went to the Super Bowl, has been too critical of his old team. Of course, there is much to be critical about. The once potent Raiders have suffered six consecutive losing seasons since that 48-21 Super Bowl loss to Tampa Bay, a team coached by Jon Gruden, who had been Oakland's coach the three previous years. They may have reached rock bottom Sunday when they were blown away by the New York Giants, 44-7, in a game in which many of the Giant stars were given the second half off. Davis, once a superb judge of talent--there are 11 former Raider players in the Pro
Football Hall of Fame--squandered the first pick in the draft three years ago when he chose LSU quarterback JaMarcus Russell, who has been beyond terrible. While other young quarterbacks like Joe Flacco, Matt Ryan, Mark Sanchez and Chad Henne are leading their teams to victory, Russell is leading the Raiders on the road to ruin.


There are other indications that Davis is out of touch with NFL reality. He hired Lane Kiffin, a 31-year-old assistant coach at Southern Cal, to be the Raiders' head coach in 2007. Four games into the next season, he fired Kiffin, saying he had made a huge mistake. He compounded that mistake by replacing Kiffin with Tom Cable, whose head coaching experience consists of four years at Idaho, his alma mater, where he delivered an 11-35 record. Cable will finish the season, but he could finish it in jail or a courthouse after one of his assistants accused him of breaking his jaw in a blind side attack a few months ago. "He was screaming, 'I'll f---ing kill you! I'll f. . .ing kill you,'" according to the assistant, Randy Hanson. Hanson said he thought the attack was inspired by something he had said the previous day. While Cable was in a meeting with the Raiders' underachieving defensive backs, Hanson reportedly was telling the other assistants: "You know what's going to happen. Tom's gonna come out of that meeting and say I'm the problem. I'm the one confusing them and blame it all on me." The NFL and the Napa, Cal., police department are conducting separate investigations into the incident. Good luck to them. Prying information out of the Oakland Raiders has always been as difficult as prying the first pickle out of the jar.





My first dealing with the Raiders was pretty typical. I was on the West Coast covering the Rose bowl for the Chicago Tribune and the Raiders were getting ready to play the Houston Oilers for the AFL championship and the right to go to Super bowl II. I flew up to Oakland to cover the game and get a pregame column. After checking into my hotel I called the Raiders' publicity director, Lee Grosscup, a former quarterbacik from Utah who was famous for his white shoes. I told Grosscup I was there to do a pregame column and wanted to go to practice and interview one of his players. "Who do you want to talk to?" Grosscup asked. "Billy Cannon," I replied, referring to the former Heisman trophy winning halfback from LSU, who had made the transition to all-pro tight end. "My God," Grosscup exploded, "you can't talk to Billy Cannon. Nobody can talk to Billy Cannon." I then requested George Blanda, a former Bear and winner of the first two AFL championships as quarterback and kicker for the Oilers.
"No, you can't talk to Blanda," said Grosscup. "Then who can I talk to?" "Jim Otto," replied Grosscup, who added that practice started at 1:30 and gave me directions. When I arrived at 1:30 the practice field was empty and so was the locker room--except for one lone figure staring into his locker. Of course, it was Jim Otto, the Raiders' Hall of Fame center, who obviously had been told to wait for me.



That was the way the Raiders were, controlling, secretive, mistrustful. Recalls Ted Hendricks, the Hall of Fame linebacker who spent the last nine of his 15 pro seasons as a Raider: "The joke around here always used to be that if anyone was in the stands during a practice, he had to be a spy. Of course, everybody assumed Al (Davis) was using a spy, too. " Even though the Raiders usually made life difficult for me, I came to have a grudging admiration for them. In the early years of the AFL, many papers more or less ignored the upstart league, none more so than The Tribune, which was more or less in bed with the Bears' George Halas. But when I went out to cover my first Rose bowl after the 1965 season, the Buffalo Bills were playing the Chargers, who by then had moved to San Diego, in the league championship game. Except for Paul Zimmerman of the New York Post I might have been the only national writer covering that game. Zimmerman, of course, became the famous Dr. Z for Sports Illustrated, but back then he was more known for the elaborate charts he kept of each play, a system I never could understand, and for running the writers' pool at the Super Bowl. I once won it two years in a row and after the second time, Paul informed me that his pocket had been picked in the rush to the dressing room. Nevertheless he ponied up the money without much resistance. For those of you wondering where Dr. Z's predictions have gone, I'm sorry to report that Paul has suffered a series of strokes beginning last October and as far as I know he is still unable to speak. I spent many a night in his company--he was a wine connoisseur and the first one to point out to me the merits of Ridge Zinfandel. I certainly wish him well.



If you covered the AFL in those days you were bound to run into the Oakland Raiders frequently. I covered their loss to the Jets in Shea Stadium, the game in which Joe Namath threw through a biting wind to Don Maynard to send the Jets to the Super bowl. I was one of the few writers who did not expect the Baltimore Colts to blow away the Jets in the Super bowl, although I admit I wasn't brave enough to pick the Jets to win it. I covered the "Immaculate Reception" game in Pittsburgh and remember attending a late press conference the night before in which John Madden, the Raiders' coach, revealed that the team had watched the movie "Jaws" on the flight to Pittsburgh and, "Boy, I wish I could have that guy as a linebacker."



I think my favorite Raiders game was the famous "Ghost to the Post" playoff in Baltimore when Raiders tight end Dave Casper (the ghost), not only set up the tying touchdown with a 42-yard reception, but caught the game-winner in overtime. If that wasn't enough, when I got back to the football press box after doing the locker room interviews there was a small craft airplane lodged in the nearby baseball press box, the dare devil pilot having attempted to fly through the goal posts.



The Raiders in all their arrogance were fun to cover in those days. But those days are gone. Al Davis seems to have lost his way. His famous utterance: "Just win, baby," seems more like a prayerful plea than the unconditional demand it used to be.