in the modern era. Again, Raiders employees encouraged
the owner to embrace a moment of favorable publicity. He
declined. “I got the best guy,” he muttered. “End of story.”
This open-mindedness—and humility—applied not
only to coaches. In 1983, Davis hired Amy Trask as a
legal intern tasked chiefly with helping the Raiders win
their battle with the NFL over their move to L.A. Over the
next three decades Trask rose within the organization,
including a stint as CEO. “He was ahead of his time in
many, many, many regards,” says Trask, now an analyst
for CBS. “He hired people—and, yeah, fired and cussed at
people—without regard to race, gender, religion, ethnicity
or any of these individualities.”
As Davis obsessed through the years over the ther-
modynamics of winning, he reached a conclusion. Part
of victory entailed superior players executing superior
plays; the “army of men,” as Davis called his teams, had
to operate with discipline and precision. But winning
also came from differentiating your team. Much as Davis
loved the NFL, his motivation also came from ensuring
his Raiders stood apart from the rest of the league.
To that end, he devoted great time and energy to what
we would now call “building brand loyalty.” Though
color blind himself—not only figuratively, but literally—he
recognized the symbolic power of image and design, so
much so that in 1963 he unilaterally changed the Raiders’
colors from black and gold to silver and black, dressing
himself in that scheme seven days a week.
So, too, did Davis grasp the power of the slogan. There
are entire Madison Avenue creative agencies that have
yet to concoct a single catch phrase as potent as any
of Davis’s three gems. Pride and Poise. Commitment to
Excellence. And, of course, Just Win, Baby.
As Davis was coming up, sports owners were largely
faceless. (Name the owner of, say, the 1984 Detroit Tigers.
What does Joe Robbie look like?) But Davis knew that
he, personally, could play a role in the Raiders’ singularmystique, and he cultivated a celebrity force field to
rival that of his players. He’d stand on the 50-yard line
during warmups, glowering at the opposition. While he
seldom gave interviews, he made sure TV producers knew
where he’d be sitting during games—a leaf of playbook
that Jones and Robert Kraft, among others, have lifted.
Another of Davis’s organizing principles entailed seek-
ing every conceivable competitive advantage, on the field
and off. Sometimes this meant smudging the line be-
tween gamesmanship and cheating; sometimes it meant
swerving over the median. Teams reliant on the running
game complained that when they played in Oakland, the
grass was soggy from overwatering. They reported see-
ing strange men in the bleachers when they practiced.
Some of the accusations were real. Lester Hayes did
put Stickum on his hands to aid in intercepting. Davis
himself did use the occasion of Valley’s attending the
1972 Summer Olympics, in Munich, to get a leg up: He
drafted a revised partnership agreement, making himself
the franchise’s managing partner and de facto general
manager, with virtually unchecked powers.
Some of the charges were imagined. Harland Svare,
the Chargers’ coach in the early ’70s, was so convinced
the Raiders were spying on him that he would yell into
the lights of Oakland Coliseum’s visiting locker room, “Al
Davis, I know you’re up there!” Davis later responded,
“The thing wasn’t in the light fixture, I’ll tell you that.”
But it didn’t matter. For Davis, every moment an op-
posing team spent worrying about hidden surveillance
cameras—or bugs in the locker room or underinflated
footballs—was a moment diverted from preparation.
Belichick, an unapologetic admirer of Davis’s, elevated
this art, such as it is.
Davis sought competitive advantages outside the scope
of the game, too. In 1980, figuring his team was better off
in Southern California than the East Bay, he attempted
AL GO to move the Raiders to L.A. NFL owners voted unani-