Peter Richmond - Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Maddens Oakland Raiders

C ould a very good football team be more than just a very good football team? Could it be something more? Could it be legendarynot just Hall of Fame legendary but legendary as in the tales of ancient warriors, half-real and half-mythical, who mattered because they inspired people who needed to believe in figures mightier than their mundane selves?

Could a football team seize the modern imagination because the days of true legend have long passed? Because we no longer have myths in sport or in life? Because long gone are the days when, as Ken Stabler put it to me, you played for the name on the front of the jersey, not the name on the back?

Or how about this: Could innocent outlawslovable rogues, as Stabler calls the Oakland Raiders of the 70swho played in a world grown increasingly conventional and downright boring be regarded as something more than just one of the great football teams of all time? Could history judge a collection of weirdly intelligent, proudly individualistic, seamlessly bonded men as something more than just another great sports team? Could they be heroes?

That was the thought that hit me one day. So I ran it by a random Raider from the erathe first Raider I talked to, actually. I asked him whether we could think of the 70s Raiders as heroic, in the youll-be-hearing-about-them-a-thousand-years-from-now sense. The answer wasnt exactly what I expected.

You have to go to the Greeks to get the appropriate conception, said defensive lineman Pat Toomay. The Greeksunderstood heroes as being capable of anything, from patricide to incest, because of the energy they had to embody to do the admirable things that they did. What the Greeks would see as quintessentially human behavior. Their heroes nature was exceptional and ambivalent, even aberrant. Their heroes prove to be at once good and bad and accumulate contradictory attributes.

Then Toomay, graduate of Vanderbilt, son of an Air Force general who specialized in Defense Department nuclear strategies, told me that if I wanted to pursue my idea, I should check out Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliades The History of Religious Ideas .

I never did. I was too busy revisiting the golden age of my beloved Raiders, none of whom committed patricide or incest but most of whom lived somewhere outside of the conventional grid. The well-read Toomay, like his black-and-silver brethren, was obviously not your everyday professional football player. He earned a degree in Applied Mathematics. Nor was the Raider linebacker turned state senator who enlivened training camp with trivia games featuring his mastery of animal genetics, nor the linebacker who found hed been traded during a macroeconomics exam. Nor the defensive tackle who holds a navigational-guidance patent and used to fly his own tiny airplane cross-country to camp. Nor the linebacker who would prefer to discuss the Druids rather than footballand once arrived at practice astride a horse. Nor the center who did a striptease atop the bar of his favorite tavern, nor the fullback who rode his motorcycle through a bar, nor the linebacker who befriended a Hells Angels leader, nor the cornerback who regularly checked into the hospital room along with his motorcycle. Nor the men who arrived fresh from footballs faceless, drudging minor leagues and blossomed into black-and-silver stars. Nor the players who would arrive at training camp early , so that they could once again plunge back into their unique haven of camaraderie.

But I think I know what Toomay was getting at: that greatness is one thing; legend is another; and myth is still a third. In a low-profile, second-sister town, all three were embodied by a hirsute, off-the-wall football team dressed in black and silver who played football for what Stabler calls all the right reasons.

How good were John Maddens Badass Oakland Raiders of the 70s? In a modern culture that seems to live by the philosophy Second place is for losersand in this case, first place judged by the number of rings on your fingersthey were not the best. Pittsburgh, Dallas, and Miami all took home more Lombardi trophies in that decade. But in the 70s, no team was so routinely dominant as the Raiders. Or so unusual. Or so damned fun and entertaining to watch playing Americas true pastime.

Lets consider some other numbers. After losing the Super Bowl in January of 1968, the Oakland Raiders won seven division titles in the next eight seasons. Between 1970 and 1977, they played in six AFC Championship games. And when quarterback Stablerthe de facto leader, the Badass emblem, the Snaketook over for good, in 1973, he led them to five consecutive AFC Championship games, and the Super Bowl XI title to end the 76 season: the Sisyphean myth denied. Their 66 regular-season victories from 1972 to 1977 led the National Football League. By those numbers, numbers that speak of perennial dominance, its obvious that the Badasses knew how to consistently play the game of football better than anyone out there, year in, year out. They were the ongoing emblem of in-your-face excellence.

The Steelers and Dolphins and Cowboys represented excellence of a very specific kind: simple football excellence. These were football machines, presided over by jut-jawed coaches whose stars seldom made an appearance in the celluloid reel of our imagination.

Pittsburgh and Miami and Dallas never hypnotized me , anyway. I was an East Coast college student laboring at the bottom of his class on an Ivyd campus, chafing against an unseen enemy, against all things privileged and conventional and summer-home-on-Nantucket-ishsmoking my weed in the mornings, barely skimming the textbooks, affecting the archetypal rebel pose. But beneath it all I was truly addicted to nothing but professional football, the game that evokes a primal instinct, a pull to our species need for team warfare, where a clan must work as one. The sport where strategy is sublimated by sheer physical will. And I was magnetically drawn to the guys whose hair flapped out of their helmets, whose mustaches and beards and eyeblack loomed like warrior makeup behind the face guards, whose delightfully pink-faced coach, unencumbered by coat and tie, waved his arms on the sideline at the officials like a blow-up doll gone amok. (Holy shit, John Madden told me, of the surprise hed feel when hed see himself on film after games. I know I got pissed, but I didnt think I got that pissed.)

Mostly, I was drawn to athletes who retained their individuality, strutted it, while playing a team sport, and to me, this furnished a magical high all its own. I hadnt a clue what Id do with my life, that Id end up actually writing about the world they inhabited, but I did know, like Madden did when he gave up thoughts of law school to follow his true bliss, that it would not be part of a vocation involving a coat and tie, and that whatever path I pursued would have to include professional footballplayed by outlaws.

In the 70s, I reveled not just in those countless Raider victories but in the certainty that if this particular band of brothers could excel, that as long as professional football could include a primetime team whose image, style, and attitude ran entirely counter to the mainstream product, then Big Football didnt have to be like Big Business or conventional society. The game could be played with obvious joy. Badass football, with its implicit message that rebellion was good , could indeed rule the professional landscape, no matter the number of rings it would earn. Better yet, played by iconoclasts and madmen, it could inspire.

Of course, the Raiders of the 70s themselves have their own ranking system for their historic excellence: Number oneof all time, the savage safety George Atkinson told me, his tones as sharp and confident as the way he played his gnarly game. Come on, man, Im ranking us number one. Without a doubt.