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On our way to the Super Bowl XV Championship, the Oakland Raiders played a frigid 1981 AFC playoff game in Cleveland, in which the temperatures plunged to -35 degrees. I remember looking up in the stands to see a dedicated Cleveland Brown fan celebrating topless.
I think a lot of games in Oakland were just time being wasted, for a lack of a better phrase. I felt like I would play in some games that were four quarters, just like every other game, but it didn't feel like I was doing anything. It just felt like I was out there.
I was born in Oakland and grew up, probably about five miles from Oakland, in Hayward. And Hayward was OK. Like, Hayward wasn't - very much a working-class area and had definitely went through a decline and is now, seemingly, coming back around, which is nice to see.
I moved to L.A., and I lived in the Oakland Apartments, which is this notorious hub for actor children and their stage moms. For the first few years that I lived there, Hilary Duff and Frankie Muniz frequented the apartments. I was much younger than them at the time.
Now that Sacramento is building an arena downtown, they're the only one not in an urban core. The only one. It's really not good business. It's nothing against Auburn Hills, Oakland County or L. Brooks Patterson. An arena in the middle of a field is not an ideal thing.
One of a handful of films made in Detroit, '8 Mile' doesn't feature the Motown renaissance that Mayor Coleman A. Young dreamed of in the 1970s. Instead, it's the beaten-down city: 8 Mile refers to the line of demarcation between Detroit and suburban, mostly white Oakland County.
It's hard to find someone who did as many drugs for as long and in such dangerous combinations as Nic - spending years going to Oakland and finding abandoned warehouses, getting beaten up, getting threatened by a guy with a crossbow. By all accounts, he shouldn't have made it, but he did.
The Black Panthers was what we would call today a criminal gang that was formed by Huey Newton. Now, interestingly enough, I knew Huey Newton before he formed the Black Panthers. He was a student of mine when I was a teacher, instructor at Oakland City College back in the very early 1960s.
That's your dream, to play professional baseball. When you get the opportunity like that, getting drafted - especially by Oakland, a California team, pretty close to home - it was tempting. At the time, I just didn't think I was ready or mature enough mentally or physically to start pro ball.
You talk about rowdy - in Oakland the players were on you. The refs were on you. The stands were on you. You had to talk back or you were a sissy; you'd get run out of the league. Afterward? Yeah, it was kind of a, uh, struggle to get out of the gym. Cops had to be everywhere. Which was lucky.
This whole 8 for $8 tour, I handpicked every city, every market on this tour, I handpicked myself. I wanted to go to New York, I wanted to go to Baltimore, I wanted to go to Philly, I wanted to go to Chicago, I wanted to go to Atlanta, of course I wanted to go Memphis, I wanted to go to Oakland.
When I was traded from the Oakland A's to the Atlanta Braves before the 2005 season, a childhood dream was realized. I grew up a Braves fan just a few hours south of Atlanta, and it was hard for me to believe that I was going to actually play for the Atlanta Braves and legendary manager Bobby Cox.
At the time when I was in college, Oscar Grant had just lost his life in Oakland, Calif. He was an unarmed young black male who had a record. And at the time when his death was making headlines, more people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life.
Safeco Field is a lot like a National League park. Because of that, we're more of a pitching-defensive type club. Anaheim and Oakland - and even Texas - are more offensive oriented. We're a club that doesn't blow anybody out, but at the same time we don't get blown out much. We're in most of the games.
Before playing football, I didn't fit in anywhere. My parents didn't have a lot of money, which they spent on our education to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school early; I was young. So I'd come back to my hood and read.
As I and the rest of my Pittsburgh Steelers teammates prepared that week in late December 1974, we knew one thing: The road to the Super Bowl in the AFC went through Oakland. To achieve your dreams as a team, you had to slay the Oakland Raiders. They were the barometer of what it took to be a championship team.
I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world... I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.
Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.
I wanted to represent the brothas I have seen when I go to the rhythm section of Oakland, hearing brothas speak and tell me about their journeys. Men who have been to prison and found themselves, brothas who have made mistakes but are loving their wives and children, trying to protect them and educate them. These men do exist.
Right after the draft, when I came out to Oakland, there was a press conference and a dinner with the owner, GM, and Coach Nelson. We did some sightseeing and some house searching the next day, but to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. I tried to find a spot close to our gym, because I figured that's where I'd spend most of my time.
I was born in San Francisco. I was raised in Oakland, so I'm, like, super Bay Area born, and, you know, it's just really multicultural up there, and there's a lot of subcultures just from, like, anything, like from rockabilly to, like, crazy punk scenes to, you know, a huge rap scene, and there's just all kinds of things you can do out there.
The murder rate in Chicago is skyrocketing, and you see who's doing it and perpetrating it - they all look like Chief Keef. When it comes to the point that, you know, that kids who are doing the killings, and they're kids 13 to 19 years old, and you can replicate that in New Orleans, you can replicate that in Oakland. All the kids look the same.
Oakland, by far, is really gorgeous; it still has these pockets that are really dangerous. Certain things are kind of normal. I think kids out there can be tested in a way where his right of passage ties into a bit of violence and how that has become these markers in masculinity and you being kind of validated after having to pass through things.
Teaching in Providence and Oakland, I realized that the first thing is that it wasn't good enough to come in and assume that I had what my students needed in terms of knowledge and skills. I also had to show them that I was their ally. I had to show them that I was concerned about them, wanted to relate to them, and that I was fundamentally on their side.
At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement's aims: They're anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life - just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth.
The influence that Oakland has on my sound is about 90%. There's so many different elements to Oakland. Of course you have the street elements, but then you also have the culture and there's so much culture around. It's a competitive city, it's full of just great artists and talent. It gave me the confidence, the passion, the realness I try my hardest to portray, so it has had about 90% influence on me.
A city suffering from chronic poverty, out-of-control crime, a $76 million budget deficit and a 15 percent unemployment rate (nearly 50 percent for Oakland's youth) can hardly afford such social justice follies. But a pushover Democratic mayor and an overwhelmed police force have left what's left of gainfully employed Oakland taxpayers at the mercy of professional freeloaders and anti-capitalism saboteurs.
When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea.
Abandoned by the existing political system, young people in Oakland, California, New York City, Quebec and numerous other cities throughout the globe have placed their bodies on the line, protesting peacefully while trying to produce a new language, politics, imagine long-term institutions, and support notions of community that manifest the values of equality and mutual respect that they see missing in a world that is structured by neoliberal principles.
Al Davis is a legend and his contribution and influence on the game of football, the National Football League, and the Oakland Raiders has been profound for decades. To view his contribution and influence on a season-by-season basis does not make sense: he has dominated the industry for a lifetime. I can't tell you how he may have impacted or guided other individuals during their careers but I can speak from personal experience. He inspires me to be better every day than I was the day before.
Up there we see everything, Oakland to the left, El Cerrito and Richmond to the right, Marin forward, over the Bay, Berkeley below, all red rooftops and trees of cauliflower and columbine, shaped like rockets and explosions, all those people below us, with humbler views; we see the Bay Bridge, clunkety, the Richmond Bridge, straight, low, the Golden Gate, red toothpicks and string, the blue between, the blue above, the gleaming white Land of the Lost/Superman's North Pole Getaway magic crystals that are San Francisco.
The first thing we should be concerned about the BLM movement should be the issues that the Black Lives Matter movement is bringing forward. There's no fundamental platform being brought by activists in Oakland, Baltimore, or New Jersey. The main issues that you see, the commonality between activists all around the country, are trying to deal with the challenges in the criminal justice system, something that is very much central to my work. So my hope is that people stay focused on the urgency to create justice here at home.
Right after the 9/11 attacks I was living near Oakland in California with a buddy who had also grown up in the skate/punk scene of the 80s. We were so shell-shocked from the attacks that we sort of regressed into this childlike mode of filling our apartment with '80s memorabilia. We got all of our favorite skateboard decks off of eBay, bought a bunch of old independent trucks, we got a credit card so that we could buy 720 off of a videogame vendor, we sat around listening to T.S.O.L. and The Misfits playing 720 and pretending that we were still living in our childhood.
