Raiders rev up and head for town

GEORGE KIMBALL: That  loud belch you just heard meant another Raiders fan has arrived in San Diego.

Both the Oakland Raiders and Sunday's Super Bowl opponents, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, employ the skull-and-crossbones as a symbol, but only one of them actually means it.

Their supporters call themselves "Raider Nation". On game days they are given to painting their faces in the black-and-silver colours of the Raiders.

They dress in basic black, augmented by studded dog-collars, chains, Darth Vader face shields, swastikas, switchblades, and body odour. They are the most vocal, most animated, and, some would say, most dangerous collection of football fans outside Britain.

When the New England Patriots played in Oakland late last year, a group of Boston businessmen and their wives had leased a luxury suite at Network Associates Coliseum for the Sunday Night game.

During the fourth quarter a nervous security guard visited the suite and, eyeing the boisterous crowd in the stands, warned the occupants: "Lock the door. And don't come out for at least an hour after the game."

The Raiders themselves arrived in San Diego for Super Bowl XXXVII on Monday night. Their fans have been trickling in all week, and the rest of them will be along as soon as they make bail.

San Diego is only 498 miles by freeway from Oakland, well within the driving range of a chopped Hog or a 1975 Chevrolet pick-up, which appear to be the vehicles of choice for people who wear dog-collars on Sunday.

By game time on Sunday, the car-park at QualComm Stadium will look like a casting call for a remake of The Road Warrior. The cheapest tickets for Super Bowl XXXVII carry a face value of $400. Club seats are $100 more, but you won't find any in either denomination for sale at the box office. According to the NFL's arcane distribution formula, 11,800 tickets are earmarked for the fans of each competing team, but a glance at the classified ads in the San Diego newspapers suggests that those have already been spoken for.

The asking price for Super Bowl tickets is roughly four times face value, and with Sunday's game scheduled to be played in one of the smaller venues, 67,500-seat QualComm, the scalpers who masquerade as licensed ticket brokers in California still hope to make a killing.

But the tour operators whose usual practice is to snap up tickets in anticipation of packaging them with hotel rooms and round-trip airfare weren't counting on the Raiders reaching the Super Bowl for the first time in 19 years.

For the most part Raider fans rarely fly, they drive, and a fellow whose day job involves operating a methedrine lab isn't likely to sleep much anyway. When a Raider fan does nod off it's usually in the back of his truck - and that's a few days after the game, when the beer finally overtakes the speed.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that Raider fans don't ever get on airplanes. Take the case of Charles Dawson Jones, who in 1990, despite no visible means of support, attended every Raiders game, home and away. Only after the security cameras were examined did it come to light that Jones had financed his devotion to the skull-and-crossbones by robbing 24 Sacramento-area banks.

THE proximity of San Diego, not just to Oakland but to the Raiders' former home in Los Angeles, can only enhance the fears of the NFL hierarchy.

When the Raiders travel downstate to play the Chargers in their annual divisional game, QualComm is transformed into the southern California branch of the infamous "Black Hole", as its denizens describe the Oakland stadium.

The toothless swarms from northern California are augmented by the team's old fans from Los Angeles, otherwise known as the Crips and the Bloods. This trend is a hold-over from Raider-owner Al Davis's eight-year tenancy in the LA Coliseum, during which gang violence became a staple of Raider games.

In what has taken on the trappings of a cyclical pattern, Raider fans have in recent years showed up in San Diego in such profusion that Charger fans became thoroughly intimidated, and not without good reason. Two years ago, an Oakland fan demonstrated his allegiance by stabbing a San Diego fan. (That perpetrator is now serving a five-year sentence, but has undoubtedly petitioned for a furlough so he can attend Sunday's Super Bowl.)

The year before that, a group of Raider fans began beating up Charger fans in the stands with such enthusiasm the teams stopped the game so the players could watch.

Given this tradition and the likelihood that history will repeat itself, Charger fans have taken en masse to selling their tickets for the annual Oakland game to Raider fans, pocketing the money and watching the games from the safety of their living rooms while leaving their remaining compatriots at the mercy of the Harley-Davidson set.

Super Bowl XXXVII, in fact, may mark the first time in the history of the event in which Satan has an active rooting interest. I mean, you could approach a man on the street in any one of a 100 cities and ask the question: "What is Lucifer's favourite football team?" and a 100 out of a 100 would reply "The Raiders".

Ever the NFL maverick, Al Davis has always traditionally stocked his rosters with the bottom feeders of the NFL scrapheap. The present incarnation of the Raiders is somewhat unusual, in that as far as we can tell it doesn't include a single convicted rapist, but the team's fans more than make up for that oversight.

Two dozen of the Raiders' more enthusiastic supporters were detained by police after celebrating the team's 41-24 win in last Sunday night's AFC championship game by trashing several blocks of downtown Oakland, torching an car repair shop, and overturning several cars.

You couldn't help but wonder what they might have done if the Raiders had lost that game. The answer could be forthcoming in San Diego this weekend.