Swashbuckling Raiders owner Al Davis just passed away. A person with tremendous capacity for both good and bad, Davis was one of the people most responsible for the NFL-AFL merger which created the modern NFL, even though he didn’t want his upstart AFL to merge with the more established league–he wanted to kick its ass. From a 1981 People article about the take-no-prisoners football executive, who made the Raiders an outfit for social misfits, on the eve of his team winning Superbowl XV:

“No one kicks the hell out of Davis for long—his competitive instinct is too finely honed. According to an instructive popular myth, former San Diego Coach Harland Svare is said to have approached a light fixture in the visitors’ locker room at Oakland once, yelling, ‘Damn you, Al Davis, I know you’re up there.’ Asked later if he had indeed bugged the Chargers, Davis would say only, ‘The thing wasn’t in the light fixture, I’ll tell you that.’

Davis’ father, Lou, was a successful children’s clothing manufacturer who moved the family to the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn when Al was 5. Strictly second-string as an athlete, Davis had the time and inclination to contemplate strategy. After graduating from Syracuse (in English) in 1950, he became assistant football coach at Adelphi University, then took a series of college jobs before becoming an assistant with the Chargers in 1960.

When Davis joined the Raiders, they had won only one game the season before. The following year he led them to a 10-4 mark. Though he owns only 25 percent of the team’s stock and there are 14 other partners, nothing happens in the franchise without Al Davis’ approval. It was his decision to choose little-known punter Ray Guy in the first round of the 1973 college draft, and to pick a widely belittled defensive back named Lester Hayes in 1977. Both rewarded him by becoming All-Pro performers. Equally decisive in matters of style, Davis also selected the team’s distinctive colors, silver and black. ‘I used to be color-blind,’ he explains.”

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Part of the dark side of those macho, lawless 1980s Raiders teams is that drug use was rampant and Lyle Alzado, John Matuszak and numerous others died young. Alzado believed that steroid abuse was behind the brain cancer that killed him at age 43 in 1992. Alzado gets his pump on in 1984 with the aid of a couple of gallons of milk: