The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 7

  The consensus among the 1600 or so sportswriters in town favored Miami by almost two to one. . . but there are only a handful of sportswriters in this country with enough sense to pour piss out of their own boots, and by Saturday night there was an obvious drift among the few "smart" ones to Minnesota, with a seven-point cushion. Paul Zimmerman of the New York Post, author of A Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football and the sportswriting fraternity's scaled-down answer to the Washington Post's political guru David Broder, had organized his traditional pressroom betting pool -- where any sportswriter who felt up to it could put a dollar in the pot and predict the final score (in writing, on the pressroom bulletin board, for all the world to see). . . and whoever came closest would pick up a thousand or so dollars.

  Or at least that was the theory. But in reality there were only about 400 writers willing to risk a public prediction on the outcome of a game that -- even to an amateur like me -- was so obvious that I took every bet I could get against the Vikings, regardless of the spread. As late as 10:30 on Sunday morning I was calling bookies on both coasts, doubling and tripling my bets with every point I could get from five to seven. . . and by 2:35 on Sunday afternoon, five minutes after the kickoff, I knew I was home free.

  Moments later, when the Dolphins drove the length of the field for another touchdown, I began collecting money. The final outcome was painfully clear less than halfway through the first quarter-- and shortly after that, Sport Magazine editor Dick Schapp reached over my shoulder in the press section and dropped two bills -- a five and a twenty -- in my lap.

  I smiled back at him. "Jesus," I said. "Are you giving up already? This game is far from over, my man. Your people are only 21 points down, and we still have a whole half to go."

  He shook his head sadly.

  "You're not counting on a second-half rally?" I asked, pocketing his money.

  He stared at me, saying nothing. . . then he rolled his eyes up toward the soupy mist above the stadium where the Goodyear Blimp was hovering, almost invisible in the fog.

  When I began this doom-struck story many months ago, the idea was to follow one team all the way to the Super Bowl and, in the process, try to document the alleged -- or at least Nixonian -- similarities between pro football and politics. The problem, at that time, was to decide which team to follow. It had to be one with a good chance of going all the way, and also a team I could get along with over an extended period of time.

  That was in early November, and the list of possibilities included about half the League, but, I narrowed it down to the four teams where I already knew some of the players: Los Angeles, Miami, Washington and Oakland. . . and after many days of brooding I chose Oakland.

  There were two main factors involved: 1) I had already made a large bet, at 8-1 odds, on Oakland to go all the way -- as opposed to a 4-1 bet on the Redskins and 2-1 against Minnesota. . . and 2) When I checked with Dave Burgin, a former San Francisco Examiner and Washington Star-News sports editor, he said there were only two teams in the whole League flakey enough for me to identify with in any kind of personal or human way: One was Pittsburgh and the other was Oakland.

  Well. . . it is three months later now, and the question that still haunts me, is, which jail, morgue or asylum would I be in today if I'd happened to pick one of the other teams.

  Even now -- almost 2000 miles and two months removed from the Raider headquarters in Oakland -- I still want to reach for an icepick every time I see a football. . . and my only consolation, looking back on that nightmare, is that I might have decided to "cover" the Dallas Cowboys. Just before talking to Burgin, in fact, I read a savage novel called North Dallas Forty, by ex-Cowboy flanker Pete Gent, and it had cranked up my interest in both Dallas and the Cowboys enough so that I was right on the brink of dumping Oakland and heading for Texas. . .

  Fortunately, I was shrewd enough to choose Oakland -- a decision that resulted, less than three weeks after I made it, in a series of personal and professional disasters ranging from massive slander and a beating by stadium-cops outside the Raider dressing room, to total banishment from the field, locker room, press box, and for all practical purposes -- because of the dark assumptions that would inevitably be made about any player seen with me in public -- from any bar, restaurant, zoo or shotgun store in the Bay Area frequented by any Raider players.

  The reasons for all this are still not entirely clear -- or maybe they are, and I still can't grasp the real meaning of what happened. Perhaps it was merely a case of the chickens coming home to roost, accompanied by three giant condors.

  II

  The Raiders kicked you out? For what? Drug rumors? [Laughter] Well, it's nice to know they're starting to give writers the same kind of underhanded chickenshit they've been laying on players for ten years. . . Yeah, it varies from team to team: Like, for me, getting traded to Pittsburgh after all that time in Oakland was like finally coming up for air. As a matter of general philosophy, though, the National Football League is the last bastion of fascism in America.

  -- Tom Keating, Defensive tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers

  To reach the Oakland Raiders' practice field you drive from San Francisco across the Bay Bridge and then south on U.S. 17 to Exit 98 at Hegenberger Road at the south end of Alameda Bay. . . turn right at the off-ramp that leads to the Oakland International Airport; glance back at the Edgewater Inn and the squat-white concrete-block building right next to the Edgewater that says "Oakland Raiders" and then swing north again.

  About six miles past the Airport entrance, the Oakland Hilton and a speedboat raceway -- the road gets narrow and seems to be heading downhill, through a wet desert of stunted jack-pines (or scrub-oaks, or whatever they call those useless little trees that grow on the edge of swamplands all over the country, near places like Pensacola and Portland). . . but this is Oakland, or at least San Leandro, and when you drive 20 miles out of San Francisco to a lonesome place like this, you want a pretty good reason.

  . . . Or at least a decent excuse.

  The only people who make this run regularly, in the autumn months between late August and December, are Bay Area sportswriters and people on the payroll of the Oakland Raiders -- players, trainers, coaches, owners, etc. -- and the only reason they make this grim trip day after day is the nervous fact that the Raiders' practice field and daily headquarters is located, for good or ill, out here on this stinking estuary across the bay from San Francisco.

  It is a hard place to find unless you know exactly where to look. The only sure giveaway sign, from the highway, is a sudden rise of thin steel scaffolding looming out of the jack-pines about 200 yards west of the road -- and two men in cheap plastic ski jackets on a platform at the top of the tower, aiming big grey movie cameras down at whatever's happening on the other side of that tree-fence.

  Turn left just beyond the film-tower, park in a muddy lot full of new Cadillacs and flashy sports cars, and walk up a grassy bank to a one-story concrete-block building that looks like a dog-kennel or a Pepsi-Cola warehouse in St. Louis. . . push through a big metal fire-door & along a naked corridor decorated on both sides with black and grey helmets, sharp-edged footballs, red-white-and-blue NFL stickers. . . and finally around a corner into the weight-room, a maze of fantastically-complicated machinery with signs all around warning "unauthorized persons" to keep their goddamn hands off of everything. One of the weight-machines costs $6500 and is designed to do nothing but stretch knots out of trapezius muscles; another, costing $8800, is a maze of steel cables, weights and ankle-hooks that will -- if used properly -- cure kinks, rips and contusions out of every muscle from the hip to the achilles tendon. There are other machines for problems of the feet, neck and elbows.

  I was tempted to get physically involved with every machine in the building -- just to know how it felt to get jerked around by all that fantastic machinery. I was also tempted to speak with the trainers and sample whatever medications they had to offer -- but pro football locker rooms are no longer
the wholesale drug dispensaries that they were in the past. National Football League Commissioner "Pete" Rozelle -- along with "President" Nixon and the network TV moguls -- have determined that drugs and pro football won't mix; at least not in public.

  On my first visit to the locker room -- and on all other visits, for that matter -- I avoided both the weight machines and the trainers. There was no point, I felt, in compromising the story early on; although if I'd known what kind of shitrain I was heading into I would have sprung every machine in the building and gobbled every pill I could get my hands on.

  But I felt a certain obligation, back then, to act in a "professional" manner. . . and, besides, for my first look at the Raider practice field I was accompanied by a friendly little fellow named Al LoCasale, who had told me when I called on the phone that he was "executive assistant" to the Raiders' general manager and would-be owner, Al Davis.

  LoCasale led me through the locker room, past the weights and the trainers, and out through another small door that opened onto a long green pasture enclosing two football fields, four goal posts, many blocking sleds and tackling dummies, and about 60 men moving around very actively, gathered in four separate groups on both fields.

  I recognized John Madden, the head coach, running the offensive unit through short-pass drills on the field to my right. . . and on the other field, about 50 yards to my left, another coach was running the defensive unit through some kind of drill I couldn't recognize.

  Far down at the other end of the field where the defensive unit was working, I could see George Blanda, the Raiders' 46-year-old reserve quarterback and premier place-kicker, working with his own set of handlers and banging one kick after another "through the uprights" -- from the 30 or 35 yard line. Blanda and his small crew were paying no attention to what was happening on the offensive and defensive fields. Their job was to keep George sharp on field goals, and during the two hours I was there, that afternoon, he kicked at least 40 or 50, and I never saw him miss one.

  There were two other solitary figures moving around on the field(s) beyond the small enclosure near the locker-room door where LoCasale and several assistants made sure the half-dozen local sportswriters stayed. One was Ray Guy, the rookie punter and number one draft choice from Mississippi, who spent all afternoon kicking one ball after another in tall spiraling arcs above the offensive unit to a brace of ballboys just in front of the sportswriters' huddle. . . and the other was a small wiry man in a tan golf jacket with a greasy duck-tail haircut who paced along the sidelines of both fields with a speedy kind of intensity that I never really noticed until he suddenly appeared very close to me and I heard him ask a sportswriter from the San Francisco Chronicle who I was and what I was doing there. . .

  The conversation took place within 10 yards of me, and I heard most of it.

  "Who's the big guy over there with the ball in his hand?" asked the man with the DA.

  "His name's Thompson," replied Chronical sportswriter Jack Smith. "He's a writer for Rolling Stone."

  "The Rolling Stones? Jesus Christ! What's he doing here? Did you bring him?"

  "No, he's writing a big article. Rolling Stone is a magazine, Al. It's different from the Rolling Stones; they're a rock music group. . . Thompson's a buddy of George Plimpton's, I think. . . and he's also a friend of Dave Burgin's -- you remember Burgin?"

  "Holy shit! Burgin! We ran him out of here with a cattle prod!"

  I saw Smith laugh at that point, then he was talking again: "Don't worry, Al. Thompson's okay. He wrote a good book about Las Vegas."

  Good god! I thought. That's it. . . If they read that book I'm finished. By this time I'd realized that this strange-looking bugger named "Al," who looked like a pimp or a track-tout, was in fact the infamous Al Davis-- general manager and de facto owner (pending settlement of a nasty lawsuit scheduled for court-action early this year) of the whole Oakland Raider operation.

  Davis glanced over his shoulder at me, then spoke back to Smith: "Get the bastard out of here. I don't trust him."

  I heard that very clearly -- and if I'd had any sense I'd have abandoned the whole story right then, for reasons of extreme and unnatural prejudice; call the office and say I couldn't handle the bad vibes, then jump the next plane to Colorado. . . I was watching Davis very closely now, and it occurred to me that the fiendish intensity of his speech and mannerisms reminded me very strongly of another Oakland badass I'd spent some time with, several years earlier -- ex-Hell's Angels president Ralph "Sonny" Barger, who had just beaten a multiple-murder rap and then copped out, they said, to some kind of minor charge like "Aggravated Assault with Intent to Commit Murder," or "Possession of Automatic Weapons" (submachine-guns), "Possession of Heroin (four pounds) with Intent to Sell, and Sexual Assault on Two Minors with Intent to Commit Forcible Sodomy". . .

  I had read these things in the Chronicle. . . but. . . What the hell? Why compound these libels? Any society that will put Barger in jail and make Al Davis a respectable millionaire at the same time is not a society to be trifled with.

  In any case, the story of my strange and officially ugly relationship with Al Davis is too complicated for any long explanations at this point. I spent several days pacing the sidelines of the Raider practice field with him -- prior to the Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Kansas City games -- and the only thing I remember him talking about is "Environmental Determinism." He spoke at considerable length on that subject, as I recall, but there is nothing in my notes to indicate precisely what he said about it.

  Shortly after I heard him tell Smith to get rid of me on that first afternoon, I walked over to him and somehow got wound up in a conversation about how he was having trouble buying property in Aspen because "some people out there," thought his money was "dirty" because of his known connections in Las Vegas. "Hell, that's no problem," I told him. "I once ran for sheriff in Aspen; I know the place pretty well, and I can tell you for sure that at least half the money out there is dirtier than any you're likely to come up with."

  He stopped and eyed me curiously. "You ran for sheriff?" he said. "In Aspen, Colorado?"

  I nodded. "Yeah, but I'd rather not talk about it. We didn't lose by much, but losing in politics is like losing in football, right? One vote, one point --"

  He smiled crookedly, then began pacing again. "I don't give a damn about politics," he said as I hurried along the white-lime sideline to keep up with him. "The only things that interest me are economics and foreign affairs."

  Jesus christ! I thought. Economics, foreign affairs, environmental determinism -- this bastard is sand-bagging me.

  We paced back and forth a while longer, then he suddenly turned on me: "What are you after?" he snapped. "Why are you out here?"

  "Well. . ." I said. "It would take me a while to explain it. Why don't we have a beer after practice tomorrow and I'll --"

  "Not tomorrow," he said quickly. "I only come out here on Wednesdays and Thursdays. They get nervous when I'm around, so I try to stay away most of the time."

  I nodded -- but I didn't really understand what he meant until an hour or so later, when Coach Madden signaled the end of that day's practice and Davis suddenly rushed onto the field and grabbed the quarterback, Ken Stabler, along with a receiver and a defensive back I didn't recognize, and made them run the same pass pattern -- a quick shot from about 15 yards out with the receiver getting the ball precisely at the corner of the goal line and the out-of-bounds line-- at least twelve consecutive times until they had it down exactly the way he wanted it.

  That is my last real memory of Al Davis: It was getting dark in Oakland, the rest of the team had already gone into the showers, the coach was inside speaking sagely with a gaggle of local sportswriters, somewhere beyond the field-fence a big jet was cranking up its afterburners on the airport runway. . . and here was the owner of the flakiest team in pro football, running around on a half-dark practice field like a king-hell speed freak with his quarterback and two other key players, insist
ing that they run the same goddamn play over and over again until they had it right.

  That was the only time I ever felt that I really understood Davis. . . We talked on other days, sort of loosely and usually about football, whenever I would show up at the practice field and pace around the sidelines with him. . . and it was somewhere around the third week of my random appearances, as I recall, that he began to act very nervous whenever he saw me.

  I never asked why, but it was clear that something had changed, if only back to normal. . . After one of the midweek practices I was sitting with one of the Raider players in the tavern down the road from the fieldhouse and he said: "Jesus, you know I was walking back to the huddle and I looked over and, god damn, I almost flipped when I saw you and Davis standing together on the sideline. I thought, man, the world really is changing when you see a thing like that -- Hunter Thompson and Al Davis -- Christ, you know that's the first time I ever saw anybody with Davis during practice; the bastard's always alone out there, just pacing back and forth like a goddamn beast. . ."

  In the meantime, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen, I was trying to learn as much as possible about the real underbelly of pro football by watching a film of the Denver-Dallas game with several Raider players who provided a running commentary on the action -- trying to explain, in language as close as they could cut it for the layman's slow eye, what was happening on the screen and how it might or might not relate to the Denver-Oakland game coming up next Sunday.

  The purpose of the film-session was to show me some of the things -- in slow motion and repeated instant replay -- that nobody in the stands or the press box will ever understand. It was done as a personal favor, at a time when neither I nor any of the Oakland players realized that I was about to be banished. If I'd been writing a story on Evel Knievel at the time, I would have asked him to do the same thing -- sit down for an evening with some films of his jumps, and explain each one step-by-step, along with whatever was going through his head at any given moment.