The LA Raiders Fans' Commitment To Excrement

At my first football game, my grandmother dropped four of us cousins off at Jack Murphy Stadium, where we watched the Chargers batter the Bengals from the upper deck.

In the 4th quarter, the crowd grew restless. The game was out of reach. Alcohol sales likely ended for the afternoon, but a burnt-copper scent permeated the concrete edifice.

A greasy, skunky musk, that mixed with sweat and sunscreen still reminds me of those first Sundays in Autumn. And by "autumn", I mean the mildest changing of seasons imaginable, as all San Diegans can attest.

So there we were, four teenage boys, without parental supervision, getting our very first taste of attending an NFL game.

Around this point in the game, an enormous Pacific Islander walked up the aisle, scanning the section for... something. He looked like John Conner had been born on O'ahu, and Skynet had sent him back to infiltrate a Tongan tailgate party.

Eventually someone else took offense at the man's thousand-yard stare and called him out on it.

"You got a problem, buddy?"

"Yeah. I'm lookin' for Raider fans, cuz I'm gonna wax their ass."

Unprovoked aggression coded in the language of a divisional rivalry caught the attention of the entire section. Still, for us it was more than just a momentary diversion: this was the manifestation of an ancient grudge. This was Capulets and Montagues. This was Jets and Sharks. This was Van Helsing walking towards us, asking if we had ever fucked with Dracula.

Like the fictional kingdoms from a J.R.R. Martin novel, the Raiders would not exist without the Chargers; Whether it was original Chargers owner Baron Hilton's insistence that the American Football League establish a second team in California to create a rivalry, or a famous assistant coach from Sid Gillman's staff leaving to become Oakland's head coach, general manager, robber baron, and eventually, controlling owner, like Lucifer choosing a bigger office to wield more power in hell.

That first game sparked an ember in our tiny, impressionable minds. The danger heightens the stakes. If this is what grownups do for fun in garbage time of a game in September, then we couldn't wait to go back. At an NFL game, you could go looking for fights with Raiders fans even when your team was NOT playing the Raiders!

Chargers safety Tony Jefferson is also a San Diegan who, like me, was born into the rivalry.

"It's actual hate between the two organizations," said Jefferson on the Chargers Weekly podcast. "I've seen that."

Asked about confrontations with Raider Nation growing up Jefferson said:

"I went to the movies, and I was wearing a Chargers jacket, and some Raider fans came up to me and were like, 'Take that jacket off.'"

Which should illustrate that Raider fans don't travel well. They can't afford to. When they show up in their dusty Warren Sapp, or Ken Stabler, or doctored Aiden O'Connell jerseys at your local pub, or stadium, I'd wager that they have lived there all along.

Current Raiders players take notice too.

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“To have the fans there, supporting us, it’s fantastic,” said veteran left tackle Kolton Miller.

Since SoFi Stadium opened in 2020, the Raiders are 1-7 there, including seven straight losses. Their only win came during the pandemic, when fans weren’t allowed inside. Once they were though, the Silver and Black have provided season ticket owners with a valuable clientele to exploit.

In other words, Raider Nation has paid through their noses and shown up, but they still haven't left celebrating a victory. Though this hasn't stopped them from yelling, "RAAAAAAAAIDUHS!" in the men's room—some maladaptive behaviors are ingrained from puberty.

“We know the fans over there in L.A. are heavy, for sure,” said Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby. “We appreciate all the love and support.”

“It’s a division game. It is SoFi, it is L.A. I know how our fans travel,” said Miller. “But above all, it is a division game.”

Their Southern California following has never been questioned. Actor James Garner co-opted the colors first, hip-hop legends N.W.A. second, and finally, in a form of trickle-down cognitive ergonomics, the criminal aspirant youth.

The Raiders called Los Angeles home from 1982 through 1994, playing at the  Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and winning a Super Bowl along the way. The Las Vegas Vagabonds have not called LA "home for 31 years, but 13 seasons were apparently enough to establish a bond strong enough to survive their return to Oakland and, eventually, their move to the desert. You know what they say: Roaches are hard to kill.

Tiaina Baul Seau Jr., drafted fifth overall on April 22, 1990, by the San Diego Chargers, finished his college career at USC, where he played home games in the Coliseum. This is the fork in the road. Sent across the ocean to find the sacred heart of Te Fiti.

The native Samoan grew up in Oceanside, California, but his roots alone could not turn around the Chargers. That took desire, a deep-seated fear of disappointing his family, but more significantly, it took the granite body of a comic book hero willing to sacrifice everything—as though 3rd-and-inches were mortal combat to save Metropolis from Doomsday. Which, sadly, is exactly what happened.

Look it up.

From the day the Chargers drafted Seau, they would no longer be bullied by Al Davis's mercenaries. They also started winning the battle of Los Angeles. When the two teams played in LA, from 1990 on, the Powder Blue have left the Raiders black and blue.

The Chargers are 11-3 in that span and lead the overall geographic matchup 13-10, if you track it all the way back to 1960 when the Chargers called the Coliseum home.

Though the teams only returned to rejoin the hostilities in the last decade (the Chargers relocated in 2017 , the Raiders in 2020), the allegiances amongst the two fan bases have only curdled. For Raider fans, the team should have never left, though they struggled to fill both the LA Coliseum and the Oakland Coliseum in their decades of irrelevance to follow.

That first Sunday, when my grandma picked us up on Friars Road after the game, she asked how it went.

We told her about Mark Seay, Natrone Means, and how strangers went looking to start fights with a fanbase that wasn't even invited to the trist! She told us that, no, we couldn't go to the Raiders game. Then, she took us to Mission for the 5:30 Mass to meet the next obligation on her moral punch card for raising teenagers to grow up into the type of adults who pay their taxes, manicure their lawns, coach youth soccer, and never drink too much in front of their kids.

And perhaps, in the apogee of that moment of Catholic introspection, mingled with the chagrin of Chargers fandom, she inadvertently had invoked a forbidden fruit for us too.