The NFL Is Gone and L.A. Lives On

The last time that no NFL franchise called Los Angeles home, America had a president named Roosevelt and a car named Packard.

The NFL’s half-century presence in the Southland officially ended with Sunday’s regular season kickoff. The erstwhile L.A. Raiders were back in Oakland, the onetime L.A.-don’t-call-us-Anaheim-we’re-the-St. Louis Rams now were playing at the Jerusalem of football, Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

On this first weekend in pro football-free L.A., did the earth tremble? Wrong question; did Los Angeles notice anything was missing? Fleetingly, maybe, after we had unstrapped our Rollerblades on the Venice Boardwalk, packed up the fishing tackle at Puddingstone Reservoir, reached the end of the hiking trail in the Whittier Narrows.

For me, the Raiders’ L.A. sojourn seemed to round the bases of Thomas Hobbes’ adjectives: short, brutish and nasty. Their dozen years here coincided with the advent of the backward baseball cap. They brought south with them a rough-edged reputation that was more than PR. The one Raiders’ home game I remember was because a man in a Steelers’ shirt was beaten up by a Raiders fan who objected to his attire.

Ave atque vale , Raiders, which in Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s approximate translation means “good riddance.” You leave behind many unbroken hearts, a $10-million gravel pit in Irwindale that might have been a stadium, and piles of unsold silver and black Raiders caps and shirts and jackets that are unwelcome in classrooms from Santa Clarita to Long Beach.

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In a small, immaculate shop in Pasadena, down the arroyo from the Rose Bowl, sports memorabilia marketer Inman Moore has for 20 years done a fine trade in college and pro sports souvenirs.

The wire shelves along the shop wall still hold a few Raiders shirts, the shield shaped like a highway sign, the crossed cutlasses, the pirate in the eye patch. Another shirt bears a coarse sketch of a beer-gut Raiders brute, with teeth missing and fists bigger than his head, and the mocking legend, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

Moore is a courtly man, something one recognizes even without benefit of seeing the divinity degree from Emory University that has pride of place on his office wall. His business partner is his wife, Nellie; they met on a church bus trip. His son is a sportswriter. The former Methodist minister’s stock in trade is Tournament of Roses paraphernalia--”tournament,” a word evocative of knighthood and chivalry, a long way from the Raiders’ renegade swagger.

“I always felt closer to the Rams,” Moore says. “I couldn’t tell you why, but I did.”

The Rams had ornate, gentlemanly names like Norm Van Brocklin and Roman Gabriel. They came to L.A. in 1946 and didn’t leave until 1980, when--like kids who beg to go camping and then stake the tent in the back yard--they only got as far as Anaheim, and as former L.A. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn declared memorably, “Who’d go to see the Anaheim Rams?”

Not enough to keep the Rams here. Not enough to keep the Raiders either, though they seemed not to care much about drawing in locals. Their Oxnard training camp was shrouded in black tarpaulins, not unlike the tarps that covered thousands of empty seats when they played in the Coliseum--seats the Trojans, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen filled effortlessly.

Inman Moore stopped ordering Raiders gear more than a year ago, when he read the wanderlust in Al Davis’ words. Anyway, much of the Raiders’ paraphernalia never did have “L.A.” on it--just “Raiders,” as if they were a team from nowhere, a team always poised to leave.

Moore’s friend, Blake Coleman, who runs The Main Event shop between the Coliseum and the sports arena, always tried to find Raiders’ merchandise that did say L.A., but that accounted for about a third of it, he figures. Whoever was buying it--fans, gangbangers or collectors--Raiders stuff was about the biggest single seller in the NFL, Coleman figures. Of 28 teams, 30 this year, the black and silver accounted for 29% of the sales.

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The average Californian moves once every five years; that being the case, Al Davis is already one move behind.

Moore admits that “I never did think of him as being a genuine L.A. citizen.” True enough; I don’t remember any Raider parades, Raider public service announcements, Raider kids night.

Even monopoly firms need to generate a little interest in the product. The Raiders always have; they just didn’t do it here. Over the weekend, an Oakland fan who admitted only to the name of D. Pondoc--although by now his family knows who he is--took the $7,000 he’d been saving for a down payment on a house and put it toward Raiders tickets. “A man’s got to have his priorities,” he said, “no matter how out of whack they are.”

Oakland has its Raiders back. And what do we get out of the deal? Maybe we’ve seen the last of those backward baseball caps. I’d call that a fair trade.