the latter out of business. At the AFL’s annual meeting
that spring, commissioner Joe Foss resigned, likely before
he was pushed out. Though Davis had no management
experience at a league level, he did have that force of
personality, and so he was summoned as the new com-
missioner. He was 36.
Pitted against his NFL counterpart, Davis versus com-
missioner Pete Rozelle made for great theater. A smiling
extro vert, Rozelle (class of ’85) came from a p.r. back-
ground, but he shared Davis’s fondness for power. In ’63
Rozelle had been named Sports Illustrated’s Sports-
man of the Year for “making vigorous decisions, not all of
them popular, and proving that he could act independently
of the owners who hired him.”
Davis, too, approached his
commissionership as some-
thing other than a figurehead.
The NFL was not a competitor
in a business dispute; it was an
enemy in battle. And Davis was
the general.
Valley, reading concern
about this approach among
AFL owners, tried to reframe
Davis in the most benign light
possible. “Al’s his own boss, his
own guy,” he tried to reassure.
“He doesn’t wear any man’s
saddle.” Davis himself was
considerably less diplomatic.
“Give us about three months
to get organized,” he said, “and
we’ll drop a bomb somewhere.”
Which he did. Under Davis’s
militaristic leadership the AFL took the fighting to a new
front. Beyond competing for rookies, the league would
now try to poach its competitor’s veterans. Oakland, for
instance, signed Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel to a
contract in 1966 that began immediately after his NFL
deal expired. AFL teams began similar negotiations with
NFL stars like Bears tight end Mike Ditka and 49ers QB
John Brodie. This was an escalation to war.
In the end, two of the leagues’ less hawkish execs,
Lamar Hunt of the AFL’s Chiefs and Tex Schramm of
the NFL’s Cowboys, met—often in secret, to avoid Davis’s
wrath—and discussed a path to peace. And in the sum-
mer of ’66 the two outfits merged under the NFL banner.
Rozelle would remain as commissioner; Davis would
return to the Raiders.
By any accounting, the merger marked one of the
pivotal hinge points in NFL history: The league was now
unified, fortified and, for the first time, held a monopoly on
the pro game. Davis’s hardline aggression was a brilliant
gambit that, purposefully or not, forced the compromise.
But the compromise also etched battle lines between
Davis and Rozelle and, by extension, put Davis on the
wrong side of NFL mythmakers. “Sometimes I will look
through the history and it’s like he’s been written out,”
says Millen. “I’ll be like, ‘Where’s Al?’ It makes me sick.
The merger? They [honor] Lamar Hunt. He brokered a
deal. But that deal doesn’t happen without Al Davis. Al
forced them to do something.”
Meanwhile, an idea that Davis (among others) champi-
oned, pitting the best AFL team against the best NFL team
once each season, was taking hold. The AFL-NFL world
championship game was first held on Jan. 15, 1967, with
Lombardi’s Packers beating the Chiefs in front of 61,946
fans at the L.A. Coliseum, far from a sellout. The follow-
ing season, the Raiders represented the AFL, falling to
Green Bay. By then the nickname for this game had stuck,
and everyone began referring to it as the Super Bowl.BACK IN Oakland, Davis found himself in the role
best suited to his skill set: minority owner (after
Valley carved out a 10% stake for him) and GM. For a
man who always fashioned himself as smarter and sav-
vier than his competitors—and his colleagues, for that
matter—here was his chance to prove it. The self-styled
maverick who actively reviled conventional wisdom could
build his roster and accumulate power.
In his prime Davis was endowed with a sixth sense
for assessing talent. Let everyone else scout USC, Okla-
homa, all the college powerhouses. Davis dispatched
his men—and often went himself—to backwaters like
minuscule Maryland State, where he found bedrock
tackle Art Shell (class of ’89). He took special pleasure
in finding unmined gems at historically black schools.
In ’68 he made Tennessee State’s Eldridge Dickey the
first black QB ever selected in the first round.
While this was all in keeping with Davis’s sensibilities—
his left-of-center political leaning, his esteem for the
outsider and the underdog—it was also guided by free-
market pragmatism. Why not draw your workforce from
the largest labor pool possible? (In this way the trail-
blazing nature of his drafting Dickey is undercut, in a
sense, by the QB’s immediate forced move to receiver.)
Bottom line: Davis approached his roster construction
as broadly and as creatively as possible. Again and again
he found discarded players and transformed them into
stars. Long before Kurt Warner was discovered stocking
grocery shelves, Davis was combing the equivalent of
clearance aisles. His Raiders teams, as Ribowsky put it,P R I D E A N D
P O I S E A N D
POLYESTER
Davis was a
man of the
people—both
with players
and coaches
(after SB XV,
alongside
Flores and
Shell, whom
the owner
empowered).