Davis, Al

Al Davis, byname of Allen Davis, (born July 4, 1929, Brockton, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 8, 2011, Oakland, California), American gridiron football coach and executive who, as commissioner of the American Football League (AFL), was a key actor in the merger of the AFL with the National Football League (NFL) and was either a part owner or principal owner of the Oakland Raiders football franchise (1966–2011).

Davis was raised in Brooklyn, New York, where his disciplinarian parents instilled a highly competitive disposition in him. After graduating from Syracuse University in 1950, he talked his way—despite having had no previous coaching experience—into an assistant coach position at Adelphi College (now Adelphi University), which he then parlayed into a job as the head coach of the U.S. Army football team based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in 1952. He made his first foray into the NFL in 1954 as a scout for the Baltimore (now Indianapolis) Colts before returning to college football as an assistant coach at The Citadel and at the University of Southern California.

In 1960 Davis was hired as an assistant coach for the AFL’s Los Angeles (later San Diego) Chargers, and three years later he became the head coach and general manager of the Oakland Raiders. In his first season he led the Raiders to a 10–4 record one year after the team had finished 1–13, and he was named the AFL’s Coach of the Year. He became AFL commissioner in April 1966, and, per Davis’s instructions, AFL teams immediately began signing away some of the NFL’s star players. Davis believed that the AFL was a better product than the NFL and could stand on its own, and his aggressive approach forced the NFL to recognize the growing influence of the younger league. Unbeknownst to Davis, the NFL and a number of AFL owners agreed to merge the two leagues just two months after Davis’s reign as commissioner began. Unhappy with the merged league, he resigned his post in July 1966 and became the Raiders’ director of football operations as well as a minority owner of the franchise.

Davis quickly built the Raiders into one of the most dominant teams in professional football. The team won the AFL title in the second season of his return and qualified for the play-offs in 10 of his first 12 years of guiding the team, including a Super Bowl victory in 1977. Davis bought out (and, in some cases, forced out) the other members of the Raiders’ ownership group over the course of the early 1970s until he gained sole control over the team in 1976. Davis’s impact on the team’s on-field production was mirrored by the effect he had on the Raiders’ lasting reputation. He coined the phrase “Just win, baby,” which came to serve as a rationale for the notoriously rough—and sometimes illegal—play that was a hallmark of the team in the ’70s. In addition, Davis’s tendency to dress in all black, which he complemented with dark sunglasses, was in keeping with the Raiders’ “bad boy” image.

In 1980, despite the fact that the Raiders had enjoyed a 12-year streak of home sellouts dating from 1968, Davis announced that he was moving the team to Los Angeles because he was unhappy with the conditions of the Raiders’ home stadium. The city of Oakland, the NFL, and Davis then entered into a prolonged legal battle over the fate of the team. Despite the off-field turmoil, the Raiders captured a second Super Bowl championship in 1981. In 1982 Davis won a landmark antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, and the Raiders relocated to southern California. The team won the Super Bowl in its second season in its new home, but Davis once again became disenchanted with the quality of his stadium over time, and he returned the Raiders to Oakland in 1995.

After the glory years of the Raiders in the 1970s and early ’80s faded, Davis’s reputation among football fans began to diminish. The team was one of the worst in the league in the early years of the 21st century, and Davis became known for habitual poor personnel moves and public clashes with players and coaches, which often stemmed from his tendency to assert undue influence on on-field decisions from his front-office position. However, he did make some significant personnel moves at this time, including the hiring of Art Shell as head coach in 1989, which made Shell the first African American head coach in the modern era of the NFL. Davis was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992.