News You Can't Use

Can you believe that a “sportswriter” actually draws a paycheck from a major media outlet while writing the following: “…The game will be decisively lost. You Raider fans will endure all of it because you still believe your heart rather than your own lying eyes, and good on you and your blind, delusional faith. It's good to believe in something, even if it's just a sham.”

Wow, you can pull a hamstring hating like that.

The author of this love letter, of course, is none other than Raider Take’s favorite columnist, the bloviating wordsmith of unintentional haiku, the guy who assured us that Al Saunders was the next head coach of the Raiders, and that winning big was the only way for the team to sell out the Coliseum. You know, the guy who last year wrote not one, but two Raider-hating articles within a span of 24 hours.

Do you think we might have a bias problem here?

Let’s return to this latest love letter, which was published before the recent Chargers game, and which has been stuck in my craw ever since. As a Raiders fan, do you not feel personally attacked? You and your “lying eyes” and “delusional faith,” you "blind" imbecile! The sad thing is that this man was likely once a sports fan just like us. But he has forgotten what it’s like, or means, to be a fan. The job has apparently worn him down and crushed his soul. He hates the Raiders, he hates you, and he probably hates professional sports.

I’m sure that it’s hard to maintain a fan’s innocent and unwavering fanaticism when you’re on the sports beat and grinding out stories under deadline. Any time something becomes your job, it naturally loses a bit of luster. But that’s no excuse to denigrate the very basis of your existence as a sportswriter: the reader, a.k.a. the fan. I’m sure that Jerry McDonald of the Oakland Tribune and Phil Barber of the Press-Democrat have some rough days, too, but they still seem to love the sport and respect the fan.

The above-referenced "lying eyes" column was published on Friday morning, November 24. Think about that. Unless our friend had this piece in the can for a few days, he must have written it on…Thanksgiving! What a joyous way to spend the holiday. It pains me to think of what he has planned for Christmas.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. Just yesterday, he published yet another column ripping the Raiders, in which he wrote the following: “His (Al Davis’s) team, in fact, is 15-45 since the morning of Super Bowl 3XV2I, and is as irrelevant as it was since the day he landed in 1963.”

His grammar here is twisted as usual ("is as irrelevant as it was since?"), but he seems to be saying that the Raiders have been irrelevant since 1963. Good grief, isn’t there an editor in the building over there on Mission Street? Or does our guy simply have carte blanche to conduct drive-by journalism, no matter how absurd his statements, grammar or logic?

Maybe we should all chip in and buy our favorite columnist a one-way ticket to Canton, Ohio, where he can learn about the Raiders’ irrelevance since 1963. In fact, he can fly out on December 25. He’s clearly overdue for a happy holiday.

And that, Raiders fans, is news you can’t use.

P.S. Thanks to LeighRaider in England and BamaRaider for sending links and helping inspire this take.