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acolyte call down to the sideline on behalf of the boss:
“Mr. Davis wants a new quarterback now.”
Calling Davis a micromanager would be an act of
definitional courtesy. Never mind his insistence on being
the one to hire assistant coaches, a duty usually conferred
on the head coach. He also approved the wording on
brochures sent to season-ticket holders. He once told
defensive tackle Tom Keating that he controlled the
organization down to the wastebaskets.
Hue Jackson recalls that when he interviewed with
Davis for the top job, Davis spent most of their three
hours diagramming plays on a whiteboard. “I’d never
had that kind of interaction with an owner,” says Jackson,
“where you’re not talking about marketing or staffing,
but zone schemes and counter-schemes.” When Jackson
got the job, Davis, then 81, informed him, “You run the
team. And you run the offense. But I run the defense.”Bob Mansbach, a longtime NFL producer for CBS,
recalls once visiting Davis’s Marina del Rey apartment
and finding “Al sitting alone in this small place. He’s
watching game tape and scribbling down plays on a pad
that he’s going to give to Tom Flores.”
Davis had few close friends, at least outside of football.
“I’m not really part of society,” he once said. Despite his
wealth and his fascination for World War II, he traveled
to Europe for the first time only when the Raiders played
a London exhibition game in 1990. He was 61.
In so many ways Davis prefigured today’s workaholic
NFL exec. He lived alone through the Raiders’ L.A. years,
encouraging his wife, Carole, to remain in the East Bay.
When his assistants took dinner breaks, he would lift
weights and run, reading NFL newspaper clips on themously against the move, but Davis armed himself with
an injunction. Afterward, the football lifer wedded to
attacking offense filed an antitrust suit.
That Davis ultimately won in court only emboldened
him. When an upstart rival league, the USFL, filed its
own antitrust suit against the NFL in 1986, it was Davis,
alone among the owners, who sided with the USFL in
agreeing: The NFL did operate in anticompetitive ways.
Davis’s Raiders eventually moved back to Oakland,
threatened a move to Sacramento, then to Silicon Valley.
Altogether, there are too many motions and threats and
lawsuits to catalog here, but they distill to this: Like an
activist for states’ rights fighting a large, centralized
government, Davis believed individual teams should
hold more autonomy and power than the league itself.
This debate over whether the NFL is a single entity or a
collection of 32 teams would persist for decades, under-
girding everything from free agency to licensing deals.
One legacy of Davis’s litigiousness: In 1997 the NFL
passed a rule mandating that if a franchise sued the
league and lost, it had to pay the league’s legal fees. “That
was deliberately to make sure Al would feel the pain if
he sued again,” says Hawkins. Another move aimed
rather obviously at Davis: After his various innovations
(schemes?) to protect Raiders revenue from NFL money
pools, the league added a provision: If a team refuses to
pay assessments, the commissioner can in return with-
hold TV-revenue distributions. “He was a maverick,”
says Hawkins. “And yet he contributed in a backhanded
way—by being such a total pain in the ass—to a lot of
the centralization of the league’s power.”
And this is a critical point. Davis’s influence was often
for good. But sometimes it was for ill. Sometimes his
impact came, unintendedly, in the attempts of others to
stop him. Or to emulate his ways.
The impatience of owners—and, in turn, fans—who
think they know better than the coach? Before it became
voguish among owners, Davis was putting his coaches on
a perpetual hot seat. Glenn Dickey, a longtime Raiders
beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, remembers
watching Davis pace the concourse of the Miami airport
in 1970. Oakland, coming off a 12-1-1 season under Mad-
den, had just lost a Week 3 game to the Dolphins, and
here Davis wondered aloud whether he should fire the
coach, who was in his second season.
Likewise, when Jones takes a hands-on approach to
Cowboys football matters, he has a precedent. Davis, often
seated in the press box on the road, would scribble plays
and formations on small pieces of paper during games.
When sequences weren’t executed, he’d pound a first on
the table. More than once, reporters overheard a Davis100 OBJECTS
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