A Lament for the Raiders

There is a small town somewhere within the depths of Alabama by the name of Enterprise. It is not a good town. You likely do not want to live in Enterprise. But if you ask the people there what they think about that, they’ll say, “Well, at least we don’t live in Dalesville. That place really sucks.” Yes, there is always something worse.

I bring this up since after watching the Raiders blow another lead and in light of us recently releasing our findings on the investigation into the duplicitous collapse of the Denver Broncos by John Elway, I am reminded of those crappy towns in Alabama. The Broncos and Raiders both stink and for both fans all you have when you’re that low is to be able to point at your sunken rival and take solace at least you’re not them. There is a different sort of bitterness in such a relationship. A strange unearned glee. An indecent privilege to be a snob. ASU and UofA fans surely understand this.

“You’re a Broncos fan? That stinks.” “Better than being a Raiders fan.”

The Raiders do indeed stink. They have just lost to the Rams after leading 16-3 with less than four minutes in the fourth quarter and have now tied a dubious record of losing four games this season when leading by 17 points at one point in the game. They lost to the Rams at home too. Oh wait, they’re in Vegas now, but it might as well been a home game since there’s more Raiders fans than Rams fans in Los Angeles. Chargers? Yes, what about the Chargers. Go approach any random person on the sunny streets of LA and ask them, “Chargers fan?”, and you will get a confused look followed by perhaps a laugh if that person is feeling friendly. Point is, there’s a lot of Raiders fans and Raider Nation is in pain.

I didn’t catch much of the Raiders Rams Thursday Night Game as I am recently in the doghouse with my wife in lieu of my recent travels and not being able to afford enough Christmas gifts for my spoiled and beautiful children. I tried to build some goodwill by cooking, doing the dishes, and helping the munchkins with their stupid homework. I even sat and watched their shitty shows with them which usually I walk out on. Alas, when I tucked the gremlins to bed and went to my wife for some hanky she was still upset with me. It’s been bad vibes in the house for the last month but since our Broncos report came out it’s been worse than usual. My wife’s family are Broncos fans so you must understand it’s been difficult to reveal to them our investigation into the schemes of John Elway. “Don’t you dare tell my Father!” My queen raged at me when I sat her down and explained it all to her. Then it was denial. Deny, deny, deny. “It’s all lies, Jonah!” she’d remark if I asked if she was done being angry with me and accepted the truth. Sigh. I don’t bring it up anymore and find myself watching more Disney Channel and awful reality television and singing competitions. We need a goddamn Hunger Games I stew and think to myself as I sit besides my family. Well, maybe I’ll get some hanky at least later for sitting through this. Nope, no hanky for me. My wife lies in bed with her earphones in. “Sweetie, are you still listening to that new Taylor Swift album?” “No.” “What are you listening to?” “Harry Potter.” I wince. She’s listening to those damn audio books of Harry Potter again; can’t say how many times she’s listened to those same books. My wife loves Harry Potter more than me. I turned and sat at the edge of the bed and saw our cat, Wintergreen. Wintergreen glared. My cat won’t even let me pet her.

I went downstairs dejected and turned on the game and what did my eyes behold but Baker Mayfield tossing the rock for the Los Angeles Rams. I couldn’t believe it. Was I stoned? No, I was with my kids all night, wish I was stoned. Baker was really playing. Released by the dastardly Panthers on Monday, the man joined the Rams on Tuesday and was playing for them on Thursday night. Is the league trying to destroy Baker? They were down 16-3 and Baker looked in trouble but the Raiders pressured him so much the refs eventually seemed to tire of throwing flags on the Rams offensive line for obvious holding. Or perhaps they huddled with four minutes left and the Raiders up thirteen and said, “Fuck it, it’s Baker, he aint going to do anything, league been bitching about these Thursday clunkers too, just let him play on.” Play on he did, leading one of the most underscored comebacks and collapses I’ve ever seen.

Down 16-10 with under two minutes in the fourth, 98 yards to go, and no timeouts, Baker led the Rams down the field and beat the Raiders 17-16. The Raiders committed two bad defensive penalties, their safety whiffed on a deep shot that a good safety would have intercepted, and then they played press man against the Rams with 16 seconds left and the Rams still needing to go 30 yards. It was atrocious defense and incredibly sad for the Raiders. Another gut-punching loss in a disaster of a season. I imagined the Broncos fans rejoicing, taking solace that in their own miserable 3-9 season that the Raiders were torturing their fans with such losses.

After the game I went back up to bed, my body excited from the game. Who knows, maybe my wife will be in the mood. Nope, she was still listening to those Harry Potter books. “Raiders lost,” I said. “Good,” she replied sharply. “You know, I used to be a Raiders fan,” I mumbled as she turned away ignoring me. She either didn’t hear me or she ignored me, either way she turned off the lights and went to sleep leaving me there laying on my back thinking.

I used to be a Raiders fan. It’s true. I had never told my wife that. Never anyone actually. Only my parents and brother would know. I was once a Raiders fan and in that moment with the room dark and Wintergreen sitting at the end of the bed staring at me with her glowing mean eyes I closed my own and found myself astro-projecting, my body soaring over a ghostly world of blue and black across the desolate cities of memory. In the end I reached my childhood.

Fall 2001. My Pop was never much a fan of the NFL. My football fanatic Uncles are fans, but not Cardinals fans, having grown up in Arizona before the Cardinals arrived from St. Louis in 1988. One Uncle for the Vikings and another for the Cowboys, some of the top teams in the seventies. We must not forget how truly awful the history of the Cardinals football franchise is here. The banner to this website is “If you’re reading this you have felt pain”. It is that for good reason. The Cardinals have been bad for a long time. If you think they’re bad now, look where they were twenty years ago. That was when I first saw the Cardinals.

Young me, innocent and happy, not yet panged by the fangs of love. The world a wonder and not just some rainbow in the gutter. My Pop was taking me and my brother to see the Cardinals at Sun Devil Stadium. The Cards were 2-4 and led by Jake Plummer. They were hosting Donovan McNabb and the Eagles. The Eagles scored on the opening kickoff and completely controlled the game. It was hot as hell, the game per NFL rules kicking off at 1 pm. Half the stadium was empty. My Pop didn’t even buy the tickets, some guy at his job gave them to him since he didn’t want to go. At halftime the Cards were down 21-7. It was an exodus, everyone choosing to leave the heat and the crappy local home team. It was miserable to go see the Cardinals on most afternoons then. Why are the Cardinals not that popular? Well, when you change cities three times, play in an oven for a stadium, and suck for twenty years, that’s why. Blame the Bidwells. It’s pretty simple why the Cards are lousy.

After we left the game at halftime and got home we tried to watch the rest of the Cards game on television but of course the game was blacked out locally since not enough fans attended the game. 33,000 fans attended that NFL game on a November afternoon in Tempe. Sun Devil Stadium had over 70,000 seats then. The stadium was literally less than half-empty. Children laid under the bleachers for shade while the adults wallowed in pain suffering the heat, their bodies spread out as if they were within the third level of hell, the bright silver steel of the open bleachers reflecting the sun’s rays and searing their skin with cancer. The NFL basically said fuck you to the good people of Arizona. You get 70,000 of your peasants here in this death vortex or we wont show the game on tv. Democracy prevailed. We said fuck you back, we aint going, and by the way, most of us don’t even like the Cardinals. And so it went like that for the Cardinal's first twenty years in the desert. But back to me, at home from the game. The Cardinals weren’t on, but there was a team that was on television playing good football. It was the Raiders.

The Raiders were once a great football team believe it or not. In 2001 they had pro-bowl quarterback Rich Gannon and future Hall of Famers Tim Brown, Jerry Rice, and Charles Woodson. The Raiders were fun to watch. You have to understand, I just saw what was on tv here and the Raiders were awesome on tv. That pirate logo with the swords was badass. The Silver and Black. The passing attack of Gannon, Rice, and Brown. Their entertaining and crazy coach Jon Gruden. And that guy, John Madden, the jolly guy from the video game and calling the games, he was a Raider! Madden was a Raider. And the black hole! Raider Nation, dressed up like the army of death itself. Every Sunday was Halloween with the Raiders. I loved Halloween. This was my team. Every Sunday I watched them if I could, taking the paper and checking the listings if the Raiders were on television, and if not, snatching the Monday paper to see how they did. I watched their games alone on my small tv in my bedroom. I watched them as they beat teams with names like the Giants, Chiefs, and Chargers. All these teams I had never heard of before as I was discovering what football was in my newfound passion with the Raiders. And no team was as cool as the Raiders. None as badass as the sword and the shield. The Autumn Wind is a Pirate. The Autumn Wind is a Raider. Yes, I was a Raiders fan.

The Raiders went 10-6 in 2001 and won their division. They blasted the Jets at home 38-24 in the Wild Card Playoffs and I began to hear of a thing such as a Super Bowl. Super Bowl? Holy smokes, what is that? They weren’t there yet though. They had to play the New England Patriots the following week. New England? Where the hell is that? I looked at a map and it wasn’t even there. Where is this place? I soon discovered on my small television that it was a land of winter and pain. The game was a snow bowl. It was beautiful, magnificent. On my small tv it was like watching a game unfold in a snow globe. The Raiders were looking good too. They couldn’t score much but they looked better than this team called the Patriots. But then it happened, the infamous tuck-rule play. Charles Woodson strip-sacked a young Tom Brady but the NFL called it an incomplete pass. I was confused more than anything. I didn’t know much of the rules then so was just utterly perplexed by any explanation the television gave. The Patriots then went on to win the game and I sat there alone in shock and silence. They kept showing that fumble too, the play that cost the Raiders the game, the play that launched Tom Brady’s career. I hated Brady and the Patriots for a long time after that and have always rooted against them. A child’s pain lasts a long time.

But next year was the year for the Raiders. In 2002 they went 11-5, Rich Gannon won the MVP, and they made it to the Super Bowl after thrashing the Jets and Titans in the playoffs. They looked awesome and the Super Bowl was in sunny San Diego. No stupid snow or New England. They were going to win. Since it was the Super Bowl I watched the game downstairs on the big tv in the living room, a whole spread of chips, dip, and soda. It was gorgeous. The Raiders were going to be world champs. And then the game started and the Raiders as a franchise have never recovered from that Super Bowl kickoff in 2003. The Raiders got skull-dragged by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 48-24 who were led none other than their former coach Jon Gruden. I cried in the second half at one point. But I stayed till the end, possessing that pure faith that only a child can possess, faith that the Raiders could come back and win. They never did. I watched the other pirate team take the trophy. Fucking pirates man. Fucking Jon Gruden.

The Raiders fell of a cliff after that Super Bowl. In 2003 they went 4-12. They weren’t shown much on tv anymore. I was the only one that cared for them in my house. No one shared the pain with me as I sat and read about another loss in the paper. I held on though, I still followed them here and there, but it was getting tough. Gannon, Rice, and Brown were all gone. In 2004 they went 5-11. My fandom was slipping. There was nothing to water it with. No other fan to share the joy and pain with. No wins to keep me nourished. The next year they had a preseason game against the Cardinals in Tempe. My Pop took me and my brother. It was to be my final moment as a Raiders fan.

The game was in the evening as it was a preseason game and because it was the Cardinals and preseason good seats weren’t hard to get we sat on the thirty yard line in the lower bowl. The game was ugly, all these no-name backups playing each other in a dull brawl. But it was the Raider fans that crushed my spirit. The black hole. The fans who I loved seeing on television. The army of Halloween. I saw them up and close. I saw them swear and hoot at the cheerleaders in sexual gestures. I heard their nasty grunting and caught glimpses of their genitals as I stood at the packed troughs in old Sun Devil Stadium. These people were gross. How? How? It was depressing. And then there were the fights. Grown me shouting and yelling at each other and then proceeding to throw haymakers at another. And it was Raider on Raider fan. The security guards wore bright yellow jackets and anywhere you looked across the stadium you saw those yellow jackets walking down the aisles to go break up a fight. My Pop laughed, it was so bad, so incredible how badly these other grown men handled themselves and how prevalent it was across the whole stadium. I sighed and watched the game go on. The Raiders won barely but the game had crushed my love for the Raiders. It was as if I was a young lad in Imperial Germany 1905, proud of my country and it’s military might, and I had been sent to fight in the Great War. Disillusioned I was. We are not gallant pirates. We are assholes and we stink. The Raiders slogged their way through another four win season after that. I never cared for the Raiders since.

Since that 2002 Super Bowl the Raiders have qualified for the playoffs only twice. They haven’t won a single playoff game. They have been one of the worst teams in the past twenty years. The Cardinals in 2006 moved into their nice new indoor stadium out in Glendale and in 2008 went to the Super Bowl with Larry Fitzgerald. I have been a Cardinals fan since. But with nights like these, as I watch the Raiders collapse and lose, I still feel the smallest of pangs deep within my chest. I hold a lament for the Raiders and I wonder what might have been had the Raiders won that Super Bowl and were merely competent going forward. I wonder if there are others like me. A lost generation of Raiders fans. I wonder how my life would have been had I stayed a Raiders fan. Had I continued to don the silver and black. I wonder if I would have been laying beside my wife who is a Broncos fan. I wonder if I would have had my children. Who knows? It’s probably best I hopped off the bandwagon when I did. But still, there’s still a hidden desire, a gnawing unhealthy twitch that every now and then bursts forth from somewhere deep within me, something that the Raiders brand does to some of us that’s indescribable. A fervent whisper that only I can hear and would never share. A whisper the blows where it wishes but you don't know where it comes from or where it goes. The Autumn Wind is a Pirate. The Autumn Wind is a Raider.