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Just Win, Baby: The Al Davis Story
Just Win, Baby: The Al Davis Story
Just Win, Baby: The Al Davis Story
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Just Win, Baby: The Al Davis Story

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Revealing how an obscure young assistant coach, in less than a decade, progressed to become a head coach, general manager, league commissioner, and controlling partner of the Oakland Raiders franchise, this biography pays tribute to the late Al Davis. Contrary to Davis’s notoriously quirky and reclusive reputation, this account is based on the inside scoop he personally gave the author, lending his full cooperation to relate the account of his life and career. With a treasure trove of previously untold anecdotes, personal reminiscences, and highlights of Davis’s leadership of the Raiders as professional football became America’s premier spectator sport, this chronicle details the major impact this maverick owner hadnot only on professional football but also on America’s sports scene as a whole. The subject’s influence on the merger of the American and National Football Leagues into the greater NFL is also reviewed as is his election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherTriumph Books
Release dateSep 1, 2012
ISBN9781617499890
Just Win, Baby: The Al Davis Story
Author

Murray Olderman

As a Holocaust survivor, Earl Greif was able to come to the ?land of dreams,? America ? what a frightening, exciting and wonderful experience that turned out to be, transformed from a peasant boy in Poland who escaped the Nazi slaughter to successful real estate developer in southern California. He put aside the nightmare of the past and the world of evil to discover so many beautiful people for whom he has eternal gratitude.

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    Just Win, Baby - Murray Olderman

    Davis

    Introduction

    In late June 2009, I received a phone call from Al Davis—a surprise,

    because I hadn’t spoken to him since attending his 75th birthday party five years earlier on July 4, 2004, at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. He wanted me to work with him on a memoir.

    A million people would buy the book, he said, to find out how we changed the course of pro football, and how the NFL is practicing revisionist history. He was mainly interested in chronicling his role in the 1960s, when the American Football League came into being and his own career skyrocketed: from unknown assistant coach to head coach/general manager to league commissioner to team owner. He wanted to set the record straight about what he perceived as a distorted version of pro football history.

    Davis commissioned me to write a manuscript. I drew up a letter of agreement, but he said we didn’t need it. We had worked together before. I had produced two hardcover books previously about the Oakland Raiders following their Super Bowl victories in the 1980s. They were joint ventures with the team, self-published handsome volumes, but they were never promoted by the Raiders.

    For two full days a week throughout July 2009, I met with Davis at his office in Oakland, rare access to a notoriously reclusive sports figure who shied away from revealing his thoughts. I taped our conversations, in which there were no restrictions on subject material, and went through a half dozen large bins of research material, numerous clips and background articles that he provided from his files at home and in the office. They were laid out on his long office conference table; he didn’t use a desk. I also talked extensively with several sources, including his former general manager, Scotty Stirling, whom Davis enlisted to help in the project. No topics were off-limits. We agreed on an outline for a projected book.

    Davis was 80 years old at the time and his health was a subject of concern, though he made it a point to say his cholesterol and triglyceride levels were low and that he had been given a clean bill of health by his physician. He could not walk unaided, since he suffered from a progressive disease called myositis that attacks the muscle endings and particularly affected his legs and hands. He used a walker, laboriously, and had two male caretakers in constant attendance to his needs. Because he couldn’t negotiate the steps at his home in Piedmont, California, in the hills of east San Francisco Bay, he moved into a specially laid out 1,800-square-foot suite at the Airport Hilton Hotel in Oakland, a short distance from the Raiders headquarters building in an industrial complex in neighboring Alameda. He always came up to his second-floor office through a rear elevator. His inner sanctum embraced three rooms. The entry contained the side-by-side desks of his two secretaries, Karen (Fudgie) Otten, who had been with him 21 years, and Kristi Griffin Bailey, who had served 13 years. All contact with Davis filtered through them. An anteroom in the middle was filled with mementos of the Raiders: helmets, plaques, jerseys, and the like. It led to Davis’ private office that had a silver-leathered couch and a couple of flatscreen TVs, as well as equipment for the football tapes and digital recordings that he watched. He sat at the end of a long, black-lacquered conference table with a phone connection to his secretaries, though he frequently barked out directions or questions to them through the two adjoining rooms.

    Davis was still in complete control of the Raiders’ football operation, a daunting load for an executive; he had no general manager or other person who could be a football sounding board since Bruce Allen, now the general manager of the Washington Redskins, departed in 2004—though he had been advised to get an aide and claimed he had been looking for one.

    I had been told that because of his debilitating condition his energy level was low and that he sometimes nodded off. I did not find that to be true. He was alert and articulate, though the faux Southern accent he once affected had long since given way to the harsh diction of his native Brooklyn. And he sat continuously for hours delving verbally into his past.

    I wrote the manuscript that fall and subsequently made a couple of flights to Oakland from my home in Rancho Mirage, California, to go through a trove of photographs and update him on the book’s progress. In February 2010, I presented him with a completed text. We met at his office in Oakland on two more occasions and went over the manuscript page by page, making minor deletions and insertions from notes he had written. I emailed the final version to him in March 2010. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get it published.

    More than a year later, he had not made a move to get the memoir in print. I saw him at the Raiders’ training camp in August 2010 and he said he’d let me know what was happening. He never did. I queried him twice more about it and received no reply, which was not unusual for this complex man.

    I knew Davis for more than 50 years, since he was an assistant coach at Adelphi in the early 1950s. I’ve written about him over the years for the Scripps-Howard syndicate, where I served as sports editor and executive editor, and done several magazine pieces on him. In addition to co-publishing the two Raiders Super Bowl books, Davis also had me on a retainer for two years to research a Raiders Hall of Fame, which never materialized.

    For whatever reason, Davis showed no inclination to go ahead with the autobiographical manuscript. I finally adapted much of the material and added background research as well as personal observations into a third-person account of this unusual man who, more than anyone else, can provide an inner view of the machinations that produced the modern professional football game. Nothing in our meetings was said in confidence. There is material here that is revelatory and noteworthy and directly from him, which he never shared before. Davis had never authorized or cooperated in a biography. Two unauthorized biographies of him—Just Win, Baby by Glenn Dickey and Slick by Mark Ribowsky—were essentially slams, critical of him.

    I have incorporated considerable extra material to present a more balanced portrait of him as a person and to uncover what it was about him that led to his achievements in football and made him such a controversial figure in the sport.

    Prologue

    More than four decades have elapsed since 26 owners of professional football teams met in a tense conclave at the St. Regis Hotel in New York in May 1969 to decide the final alignment of the merged American and National Football Leagues. Since then, pro football in this country, operating as the combined NFL, has had an unparalleled rise in American sport, superseding baseball and all the other team games in our cultural firmament as the national pastime.

    While Al Davis reveled in that success, and could immodestly claim to be an integral part of it, he was also aware of an undercurrent within the old NFL ranks. This undercurrent, he claimed, has never abated. It is their attempt to mask how that merger came about, and it continues to cloud the true facts of this historic joining of rival professional leagues.

    Davis was an American Football League original, there at its beginning in 1960, when Lamar Hunt, the young Texas scion of the oil-rich H.L. Hunt family, thwarted in his efforts to purchase an existing NFL franchise, banded with Bud Adams, another young oil heir, and decided to form a new professional football league. They solicited six other entrepreneurs, men such as Ralph Wilson, a Midwest insurance and trucking magnate, who read a squib about the venture in the New York Times while attending the races at Saratoga Springs, New York, and Barron Hilton of the renowned hotel chain, who insisted that an Oakland franchise be in the mix to provide a regional rival for his Los Angeles Chargers. And, presto, the American Football League came into being.

    Davis joined Hilton’s team, the Los Angeles Chargers, that first year of existence in 1960 as an assistant coach under Sid Gillman. Since then, he has been a head coach and general manager, the commissioner of the AFL, and for the last 45 years of his life the managing general partner and chief owner of the Oakland Raiders.

    They were tumultuous and exciting years, generally exhilarating, with some down times, including suffering through seven straight losing seasons in the first decade of the 21st century. For Davis, they were also marked by personal achievement. He was voted AFL Coach of the Year and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The years have also been marked by myriad team achievements. The Raiders won three Super Bowls, played in two others, and until a couple of years ago, were the winningest team in pro football and still rank third in won-lost percentages since he joined them in 1963. Finally, there have been his notable contributions to the game. He was the presenter for a record nine inductees into the Hall of Fame shrine at Canton, Ohio; he hired the first black administrative person at league level, the first black field official, the first woman executive; he made Art Shell the first African American head coach in the modern NFL and, before him, Tom Flores, an Hispanic-American, the first head coach from a minority group.

    A highlight of his career was serving on the first NFL Competition Committee with three of the most revered men in the history of the game—Paul Brown, Vince Lombardi, and Tex Schramm. In the eight years he was on the committee, it helped shape professional football into the colossus that stands atop the sports world today.

    In Oakland, he formulated aphorisms to shape his philosophy for winning football. He said the most important element was that a will to win permeate the organization, top to bottom, and he labeled it a Commitment to Excellence.

    He was influenced from his earliest days in athletics by the power inherent in success. To augment it, he selected the slogan Pride and Poise. It’s a belief in what you’re doing, and doing it with total control and confidence. He bought space to put those labels on bus benches throughout the city of Tampa, Florida, when the Raiders played there in Super Bowl XVIII.

    He was determined to create an environment that would inspire the players to feel the same way, concurrently giving them a credo and football strategy that would make them adhere to his purpose. The key to that environment, he said, is treating people the way they want to be treated and yet having rules and regulations that they have to observe. To be honest, that also means installing a benevolent dictatorship, a para-military situation, but not taking away their individual rights as much as possible.

    His football philosophy advocated attack and pressure. I’d rather be feared than respected, he asserted. Even on defense, the stress is on attack. His very first year as head coach, the Raiders accomplished the greatest won-lost turnaround in the history of pro football—from 1–13 in 1962, the previous season, to 10–4.

    On a personal level, over more than five decades, he still felt a chill of excitement running through him when he heard the roar of the spectators as the Raiders came sprinting out on the field. Even in a hostile setting, when they played in an away stadium, the intensity of the crowd, manifested by the booing, was elevating because it was based on fear as well as respect. He believed in a tough team. That was his raison d’être.

    From a sentimental viewpoint, he found allegiance to a professional football team more meaningful than identifying with a university and its famous and hallowed traditions. He wanted all his players to feel that way about the Raiders. We strove to have the finest leaders, he said, the best coaches, the greatest players, playing the most epochal games; and then they could all be enshrined in a personal Hall of Fame after their five years of retirement. In short, I wanted us to dominate pro football, and there were periods in which we did.

    Davis took a 1–13 team, an organization that was reportedly being moved every week, that was laughed at and ridiculed, and came up with dynamic football at the advent of the sport as a phenomenon on national television, which embraced his team because it played exciting football, scored points in profusion, and was not afraid to be daring and innovative.

    The players were infused with spirit and pride. Davis recalled Marv Hubbard, a fiery fullback of a generation ago, sitting in the locker room after games and saying to himself, over and over, I’ll never take this uniform off.

    His spirit, according to Davis, continues to this day among the many fine men who have passed through the team portals and contributed to the lore of the Raiders. Davis said he was guided in his operation of the team by a will to provide the best forum possible for the display of their skills, knowing that their feats are emblazoned in the record books. And that there are young people out there motivated to emulate them and perpetuate the history of this unique organization.

    The Silver-and-Black of the Raiders was recognizable worldwide from the shops of Singapore to the stalls of Mumbai to the kiosks of Paris. People who wouldn’t know a zone blitz from a scrum responded to those colors because they connoted flair and adventure.

    The 1960s, when it all began, and into the early 1970s, were a time of tremendous social tumult in this country. John F. Kennedy was assassinated during Davis’ inaugural 1963 season in Oakland. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were both killed within two months of each other in the spring of 1968, after the Raiders started the year going to Super Bowl II. The Cold War with Russia was on. The specter of the Vietnam War hung over the entire decade. The San Francisco Bay Area, anchored by Oakland in the east, was a hotbed of protest and love-ins.

    Most of this narrative focused on that period as a crucial, formative time in the modern annals of pro football, both for Davis personally and for the competing leagues.

    Although publishers beseeched him for his memoirs over the years, this is the first time his thoughts and experiences have been committed to a single volume. As an octogenarian, he felt that time was moving on. He said, Others have gone so far in destroying the truth that I want to tell what really happened in this critical period of the game. I don’t want history to be revised, and I resent it. I also want to emphasize that over the last four decades I have been an active and productive member of the greater NFL.

    In the following pages there are such revelations as how:

    Legendary baseball owner Bill Veeck clued Davis in on the keys to acquiring a sports franchise.

    He almost bought the Oakland A’s baseball team from Charlie Finley.

    Pete Rozelle and Davis shared a casita at a tennis ranch in Arizona.

    Vince Lombardi and Davis did not have a physical altercation, as asserted in a book by Dan Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

    Hall of Famers John Elway and Terry Bradshaw almost started their pro careers as Oakland Raiders quarterbacks.

    Ralph Wilson once owned 25 percent of the Oakland Raiders while running his Buffalo Bills.

    Signing a Hungarian kicker actually triggered the AFL-NFL merger.

    The San Francisco 49ers’ Lou Spadia offered Davis several million dollars to move the Raiders to Seattle.

    Wayne Valley, once the majority Oakland owner, was prevented from purchasing the San Francisco 49ers.

    Davis discovered John Madden and got him his first valuable commercial.

    Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina defended his right to move the Oakland franchise to Los Angeles.

    A buck private became head coach of a service team laden with college and pro football stars.

    It makes for an interesting stroll through the archives of football history. And it bolsters Davis’ certitude that the Oakland Raiders, during his tenure of almost half a century, have been a positive force in making pro football the game of our times.

    1. The Commissioner

    On an early spring afternoon in 1966, Oakland Raiders owner Wayne Valley sauntered casually onto the team’s practice field at Hayward High School in northern California and radically changed the life of Al Davis. This was Davis’ terrain. The young Oakland head coach stood there in baggy, gray-white warm-up pants, a gray-white sweatshirt—he had trouble distinguishing colors and preferred neutral shades of white or black—with a Raiders’ logo cap on his head and a whistle dangling around his neck. Normally not even the main owner of the team, which Wayne Valley was, invaded his turf.

    Hey, Genius, the brusque, burly owner—he was a former college lineman—addressed his coach. Davis was never sure if Valley was paying him a compliment or meant it to be mocking sarcasm. We need a guy to take on the NFL. It sure ain’t Joe Foss.

    Foss, a genuine American hero, a man who shot down 26 Japanese planes as a U.S. Marine pilot in the South Pacific during World War II, had been the commissioner of the American Football League since it opened for business in 1960. He was a likable and personable man out of South Dakota, but not prone to be confrontational.

    We want a guy, Valley explained, speaking for his fellow AFL owners, who’s not afraid of fighting them, who knows their people, who knows players, who can go out and get them, grab ’em by the balls. Valley could be blunt.

    Davis was approaching his fourth season of coaching the Oakland Raiders and coming off an 8–5–1 second-place record as he concentrated on this off-season mini-camp, more interested than anything else in catching up to the San Diego Chargers, who had won three straight Western Division titles.

    You’re the guy, blurted Valley.

    Me? said Davis, feigning surprise. Oh, no, I don’t want to move back to New York. That was where the AFL headquarters would be located.

    Hey, argued Valley, you don’t do it, we won’t have a league.

    Valley had already checked with other influential AFL owners such as Ralph Wilson of the Buffalo Bills, Billy Sullivan of the Boston Patriots (they wouldn’t become the New England Patriots until 1971), and Lamar Hunt of the Kansas City Chiefs, to see if they approved of his proposal to have Davis succeed Foss as commissioner. The Raiders had a big rivalry going with Kansas City, but Hunt, the conservative founder of the AFL, surprisingly said it was fine with him to supplant Foss with Davis.

    Among other possibilities broached to head the fledgling league was Jim Corbett, the athletic director at Louisiana State University, but he had no pro-football background. Valley campaigned for his young coach and general manager on the premise that Davis knows the NFL; he’s not afraid of them. He can handle the New York press and the networks and guys like Howard Cosell.

    Valley reiterated firmly, You’re the guy.

    And Davis began to mull it over in his mind: Maybe I am the guy.

    In early April, he flew to New York and met with Sonny Werblin, whose ownership group of the revived New York Jets included Don Lillis, Phil Iselin, and Leon Hess—all big money men. Sonny was a super theatrical talent agent and top executive at MCA, the entertainment colossus. He had negotiated a big television contract for the league with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Running the Jets, he had also boosted the AFL image by signing Joe Willie Namath to a $400,000-plus contract as the centerpiece quarterback of the rebuilding franchise.

    Davis also met with Billy Sullivan, the owner of the Patriots and an AFL original. He knew that Barron Hilton, who owned the San Diego Chargers, was for him—Al had started his pro coaching career as an assistant with the original Chargers—though Hilton was getting ready to bail out of pro football and sell the team to Gene Klein. The key man was Kansas City’s Lamar Hunt, who had created the AFL. It was whispered in league circles that he covertly wanted a merger with the NFL, and there were rumors that he was in contact with representatives of the older league. It was later revealed that Hunt had been meeting secretly with general manager Tex Schramm of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys to forge a merger. Davis felt that Lamar was persuaded by the thought that a bold and aggressive new man heading the AFL would spur a union of the two leagues.

    Because Wayne Valley had recently undergone bypass surgery in Houston, performed by one of the area’s renowned heart surgeons, and was convalescing there, the AFL owners decided to convene in that city to decide on a new commissioner. Davis flew from Oakland to Houston on April 7, 1966, and was picked up at the airport by Kenneth (Bud) Adams, the owner of the Oilers. Adams, the first man to join Hunt in the AFL venture, was gung ho about going after the NFL. Kick ’em in the teeth, he encouraged Davis on the ride to the Shamrock Hotel, site of the owners’ meeting.

    Davis signed a contract that morning for five years at $60,000 a year, plus an investment bonus of $15,000 annually. As the new commissioner left the meeting room and headed to the hotel elevators, accompanied by

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