We Believe?

So what does this have to do with pro sports? Nothing, really, and that’s the point: Oakland’s most recent turn in the spotlight can be attributed to its activists and its creatives and not, in any way, to its teams. In fact, one notable protest in the area was decidedly anti-sports. Up in Berkeley, when Cal wanted to build a new athletic training center, construction was hindered because activists took up residence in soon-to-be-cut-down trees.

Yet whatever the relationship between Oakland’s renaissance and its teams, Quan insists the franchises matter. “Oakland is so used to being dissed,” she says. “We’re treated like San Francisco’s ugly stepsister. When the media talks about Oakland, they malign it. But we’re a tough city, a blue-collar city that has this chip on our shoulder, and that’s represented by these teams — teams we stuck with even when they were losing.”

Between Quan and Cauwels, talk turns to a potential conflict if and when the A’s clinch the division. The team wants to host a downtown rally on October 1, the same day the Chinese community will be celebrating a national holiday.

“We’ll work it out to do both,” says Quan.

“Imagine that,” says Cauwels, thinking through the mascots used in each community’s celebrations. “We could have a lion, a dragon, and an elephant all in the same place at the same time.”

“That,” Quan says, “is Oakland for you.”

On September 15, the Oakland Raiders played the Jacksonville Jaguars at O.co Coliseum.

That, when describing the scene at a Raiders home game, is all that needs to be said, right? The Raiders played a football game. As for the rest of the scene — you can fill in the blanks. You know, for example, that because the Raiders played a football game, there was a caravan rolling into the Coliseum parking lot around 6:45 a.m., dozens of cars, half of which seemed to be blasting 2Pac and Dr. Dre’s “California Love.” And you know that, because the Raiders played a football game, the parking lot smelled like sweat and weed and brisket, that some fans had the team logo tattooed on their arms and others had “Raiders” scrawled in Sharpie across their bald heads. You know that a few wore jerseys with prison inmate numbers and that one or two had T-shirts that read “Occupy the NFL.”

At this point, if you follow sports at all, the setting is implied. The Raiders played. An octogenarian in a wheelchair smoked a cigarette while pointing at the picture of Al Davis on her shirt. One implies the other. No more needs to be said.

Amid all this — all these passionate fans, here despite the general mediocrity of their team — I met 25-year-old Ray Perez. Perez is a college student from West Sacramento, and he moonlights as a server at Joe’s Crab Shack, and he was dressed, as you have no doubt already inferred, in prison pants and a Raiders jersey and fake dreadlocks and a helmet covered in protruding knives. His face was painted black, except for the parts of his face that were painted silver. On the back of his jersey was written the name by which he is most often called: Dr. Death.

oakland 3Though he became Dr. Death, one of dozens of self-made Raiders fan characters, only three years ago, Perez has been attending Raiders games since he was 7. He can barely remember the days when the Raiders played in Los Angeles (the team moved back to Oakland in 1995 after 13 seasons away), but Perez still cringes anytime he sees an L.A. Raiders logo. Someday, he thinks, the L.A.-adorned gear will make for a nice collector’s item, a relic of a long-forgotten time, but not yet. “When the stadium deal gets done, then, maybe, yeah,” he says. “But not until then.”

Mark Davis, the team’s owner and Al’s son, has said repeatedly that he wants to stay. But the Coliseum is one of the oldest and most dilapidated venues in the NFL — a concrete husk with few amenities and zero charm, a place most famous this year for the overflowing of its dugout toilets. So L.A. beckons, as it does to most every cash-strapped team, but “Oakland,” Davis recently told ESPN.com, “is absolutely where we would prefer to get something done.”

Right now, the Coliseum and Oracle Arena sit surrounded by a giant parking lot, which is surrounded by still more parking lots, which are surrounded by low-income neighborhoods. This disconnects the venues from city life, but it allows for tailgating and for ease of transport — it’s all right off the freeway. It also enables the longstanding Oakland tradition of postgame white flight. Dobbins is a lifelong Oaklander and a member of the city’s school board, but he says bluntly, “People from the suburbs want to be able to come to Oakland for a game without feeling like they have to spend any time actually in Oakland.” Talk of pro sports’ importance is often talk of economics. People come from out of town for a game, the thinking goes, but they stay in town for dinner or drinks or a stroll around town. In Oakland, because of the venues’ isolation, this effect is virtually nonexistent.

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