DAVIS, Al(len)

(b. 4 July 1929 in Brockton, Massachusetts), football coach and executive who built the Oakland Raiders into one of the dominant National Football League (NFL) teams of the 1970s and 1980s.

Davis is one of two sons of Louis Davis, a businessman, and Rose Kirshenbaum Davis, a homemaker. The family moved to the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, when Davis was five, and he spent his youth playing sports in the public parks. At Erasmus Hall High School Davis played varsity basketball for coach Al Badain, his first major influence in sports with whom he retained a lifelong connection, and was named "Most Popular Boy." Davis enrolled at Wittenberg College in Ohio in January 1947, but after one semester transferred for the fall term to Syracuse University, where the six-foot-tall student played on the junior varsity basketball team. Seeking more playing time, Davis tried Hartwick College in New York for a month in the fall of 1948 before returning to Syracuse. Failing again to make the varsity basketball team, Davis drifted toward football. He studied intensely the new, innovative coach hired by Syracuse for the 1949 season, Ben Schwartzwalder, observing his practices and poring over playbooks borrowed from friends who were team members.

After graduating from Syracuse in 1950 with a B.A. in English, Davis was hired as a line coach at Adelphi College in Garden City, New York, and also served as head baseball coach. He began regularly attending coaching clinics; his first article, "Line Quarterbacking at Its Best," published in the May 1952 issue of Scholastic Coach, was followed by many others. Drafted into the U.S. army in 1952, Davis became the first private ever to be chosen head coach of a military football team, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. His most notable victory came over the University of Maryland, the defending national champions. Davis left the army in 1954 and was hired by head coach Weeb Ewbank of the Baltimore Colts as a player-personnel scout, an area in which he excelled.

Davis married Carol Segall in the fall of 1954; they had one son. The following year, General Mark Clark at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, hired him as head line coach and top recruiter. In 1956 Davis asked Clark to appoint him to fill the vacant head coaching slot, but when Clark refused his request due to his relative youth and rumors of excesses in recruiting, Davis left The Citadel. In 1957 he was named line coach at the University of Southern California (USC). At USC, Davis promoted his blocking system (two hits per block), known as "Go-Go-with-Oomph." He continued to recruit successfully and was named defensive coordinator for the 1959 season. The creation of the American Football League (AFL) in August 1959 opened up employment opportunities, and the ambitious Davis became offensive end coach for the Los Angeles Chargers in their inaugural 1960 season, remaining there for three years.

On 15 January 1963 Davis achieved his ambition to be a head coach when he was hired by the new Oakland Raiders (relocated from Minnesota), who also named him general manager with full control of the team. At age thirty-three, Davis was the youngest person ever to hold such posts in modern professional football. The franchise had fared poorly, having had three different head coaches in three years, gone .214 overall, and winning only one game in 1962. Davis changed the operation rapidly, choosing a black and silver color scheme with a pirate emblem on the helmet, and introducing a team motto, "Pride and Poise," to which was later added a second motto, "Commitment to Excellence." Davis's first Raiders team, half of whose members were rookies, went 10–4, and he was named Coach of the Year. He remained head coach for two more seasons before being hired as AFL commissioner on 8 April 1966. At his first press conference, Davis announced, "I have dictatorial powers," and warned that the league would "fight for players."

Davis favored an aggressive policy against the rival National Football League (NFL), focusing on signing star quarterbacks, but the NFL was interested in a merger, as were the AFL team owners, and Davis was at the heart of the negotiations. Davis resented the merger, which was announced on 6 June 1966 (to take full effect in 1970), because of the indemnities required of the AFL teams to "join" the NFL and the selection of Pete Rozelle as the sole commissioner of the newly merged NFL. Davis referred to the merger as "Yalta," recalling the 1945 Allied conference, and was uninterested in the newly created position of president of the AFL and returned to Oakland as a managing general partner (with 10 percent ownership) for the 1967 season.

The 1967 Oakland team earned the best record in AFL history, 13–1, but lost Super Bowl II to Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers, 33–14. Their first Super Bowl win came in Super Bowl XI on 9 January 1977, 32–14 over Minnesota. Davis was more of a trader than a drafter, favored size, and sometimes found castaways, notably quarterback Jim Plunkett, who, although supposedly over the hill, led the Raiders to victory over Philadelphia in the 1981 Super Bowl XV, the first wildcard team (or added team that was not champion of its division) to win the event. Between 1963 and 1996, the Raiders went .644, the best record of any professional sports franchise, enjoyed a streak of sixteen consecutive winning seasons (broken in 1981), and played in four Super Bowls, three of which they won: in 1977 and 1981, as the Oakland Raiders, and then in 1984 as the Los Angeles Raiders, with a score of 38–9 over the Washington Redskins.

The Raiders' mystique shone especially on the American Broadcasting Company's (ABC) Monday Night Football, an instant national institution that started on ABC television in 1970. That year the Raiders began their streak of appearing at least once every season on Monday Night Football, as the network favored "glamour" teams that, it hoped, would attract high ratings. The Raiders were 29–6–1 in their appearances on the show through 1990, which was the longest streak of any team. The only season in which the Raiders did not play on a Monday night was in 1998, and they continued to appear after this season, but the mystique of their "always-winning" reputation had vaporized after 1990.

When Davis learned in 1979 that the Los Angeles Rams were planning to abandon their home field at Memorial Coliseum to move to Anaheim, he began negotiations to move the Raiders to Los Angeles. In pursuing these negotiations, Davis ignored NFL rules regarding such propositions because he believed, correctly, that he would be opposed by both the Rams and the league office. Davis signed an agreement with the Coliseum on 1 March 1980, and the lawsuits began. A Los Angeles jury ruled in favor of Davis's antitrust arguments and the Raiders on 7 May 1982; a second jury on 13 April 1983 assessed $35 million in damages (upheld on appeal), which the NFL paid the team. Davis then signed a ten-year deal, and the Oakland Raiders were no more. After their 1984 Super Bowl win the team went into decline, with only three playoff appearances from 1986 to 1997, and the NFL blackout rule for nonsellouts, combined with Coliseum's 90,000 plus seating capacity, meant that few games were locally televised. Davis took the Raiders back to Oakland in 1995 to begin anew, but he was unable immediately to replicate his previous success. In 1996 Davis became the commissioner of the American Football League and gave up his coaching position.

Davis personified the AFL image—upstart, innovative, and individualistic. From his start with the Raiders he had no appearance or dress code for his players, then an unusual policy, and he favored the wide-open style of play. He gained for himself and his team an iconoclastic, outlaw reputation, which was epitomized in his familiar saying, "Just win, baby." Davis was the future of the NFL before it happened, and he helped make it happen. He was named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992.

Davis is profiled in Ira Simmons, Black Knight: Al Davis and His Raiders (1990); Glenn Dickey, Just Win, Baby: Al Davis and His Raiders (1991); and Mark Ribowsky, Slick: The Silver and Black Life of Al Davis (1991).

Lawson Bowling