OAKLAND \u2014 The Raiders may have departed Oakland years ago for Las Vegas, but Carol Davis had remained nearby in Piedmont, at a longtime home of the family that reigned over one of sports\u2019 most memorable teams.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the storied NFL franchise\u2019s \u201cFirst Lady\u201d kept a residence on Mountain Avenue up until her death Friday at 93. It was the culmination of a life linked intrinsically to the East Bay and football alike, the kind that her son, Mark Davis, described Sunday as \u201cwrapped in a cloak of immortality.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI love you mom; you will be missed,\u201d said Mark, who shared a \u201ccontrolling interest\u201d in the now-Las Vegas Raiders with Carol, a stake inherited from the family patriarch, Al Davis, one of the iconic figures in the history of American sports.<\/p>\n
Carol Davis was omniscient in the owners\u2019 suite at games; she gave the team\u2019s star players and executives a hug \u201chello,\u201d they remembered, and would demonstrate a watchful eye about everything happening in the organization \u2014 even, for instance, a team employee\u2019s divorce that Davis would not be expected to know about.<\/p>\n
Her passing was the latest notable death among memorable Raiders figures from the team\u2019s history. George Atkinson, the last member of the team\u2019s beloved defensive line in the 1970s known for its unprecedented physicality, died Monday at 78.<\/p>\n
Al Davis, a swashbuckling head coach with an unmistakable Brooklyn accent, simply \u201cadored\u201d his wife, the legendary Raiders quarterback and head coach Tom Flores remembered. Al and Carol ran in a tight inner circle of team officials and Bay Area businessmen, even amid the Raiders\u2019 13-year stint in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Al Davis ended his long streak of joining the Raiders on road trips to work out of the Oakland hospital while Carol recovered from a massive heart attack and stroke in 1979 that kept her in a coma for 23 days. Carol miraculously recovered, earning a reputation for toughness that the Raiders themselves rallied behind on the football turf, winning the Super Bowl the very next season.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was a very intelligent and very dedicated woman,\u201d recalled former Raiders executive John Herrera, an Oakland native who began working for the franchise as a teen in the 1960\u2019s and finally departed in 2012. \u201cShe was a very interesting person to be around \u2014 and she kept up with everything that was going on, not just in sports but in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through it all, Carol Davis remained committed to the idea of the Raiders as a model of teamwork, the kind of ideal that made the football team a storied fixture of NFL history, but an ambition that slumped in the 21st century before the team limped to a sleek new stadium in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was a strong behind-the-scenes figure,\u201d said Ignacio De La Fuente, the former Oakland City Council president who in 1995 recruited the Raiders back for their second stint in Oakland. \u201cMy perception was that she would keep Al realistic about things in our negotiations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born Carol Sagal in New York City, she had been a buyer for retail stores even after Al finished military service and before his start as a pro football coach. The couple married in a Brooklyn synagogue but quickly formed roots in the East Bay once Al began with the Raiders ahead of the 1963 season.<\/p>\n
During the team\u2019s most storied years \u2014 an AFL championship in 1967 and a pair of Super Bowl victories in 1976 and 1980 \u2014 Carol stayed mostly behind the scenes, those who knew her recalled, though she always demonstrated an awareness of what was happening on the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were so many instances where she would say something that would cause me to giggle, at times where I should not have been,\u201d said Amy Trask, a longtime former Raiders executive and the first former woman to serve as an NFL team\u2019s CEO.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey tended to be at Raiders business dinners,\u201d Trask added about these occasions, \u201cand usually involved a wise, keen observation about someone in attendance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carol read newspapers every morning, always offering fresh insight about the country\u2019s politics or society at large, friends remembered \u2014 a fitting description of a woman who led a team that broke new ground in diverse hiring.<\/p>\n
Flores, the league\u2019s first Mexican-American quarterback and head coach, recalled the warmth that Carol showed the team\u2019s players, despite her and Al\u2019s penchant for keeping their business private.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo them, people were Raiders \u2014 it didn\u2019t matter which color you were, what ethnic group you belonged to,\u201d recalled Flores, who is 88 and lives in Palm Springs. \u201cShe was just very proud of you when you finished your journey.\u201d<\/p>\n
Al\u2019s passing in 2011, seen as a pivotal moment in the franchise\u2019s history, had Carol lined up in the succession plan as controlling owner. Trask, though, found herself notifying the league that Carol\u2019s son, Mark, would take over operations instead, the outcome of discussions between mother and son that altered how the torch would be passed.<\/p>\n
Trask departed from the franchise not long afterward, and the Raiders \u2014 fed up after stalled talks with Oakland for a new stadium \u2014 departed for Vegas.<\/p>\n
Carol, though, stuck around in the house in Piedmont that Herrera had helped the family secure.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never tried to impose any of my beliefs on Carol \u2014 it wouldn\u2019t have done any good either way,\u201d Herrera said. \u201cShe was very strong in her opinions and she did exactly what she thought was right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, until her passing last Friday, those who knew her remembered her the way they do the Oakland Raiders: a football team with tall aspirations and a swagger.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs the originals, we all had the same dream, but we didn\u2019t know how to get there,\u201d Flores said. \u201cAl and Carol had that dream \u2014 and they knew how to do it. They brought us where we wanted to go.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OAKLAND \u2014 The Raiders may have departed Oakland years ago for Las Vegas, but Carol Davis had remained…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[7,23,100,752,143,145,144,127],"class_list":{"0":"post-26297","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-local-news","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-nfl","12":"tag-oakland","13":"tag-oakland-headlines","14":"tag-oakland-news","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}