SAN DIEGO — Sixty years after it began, the Chargers-Raiders rivalry will break new ground Sunday starting with the ground itself.
At the Kroenke Dome in Inglewood, for the first time in a series that will renew for the 122nd time, the teams will trot onto a "fake grass" surface instead of the stuff goats eat.
So Raiders players won't smell chalk as tight end Dave "Holy Roller" Casper did when he famously fell on the skittering ball in San Diego Stadium's east end zone in 1978. And Chargers players won't smell grass as they did three years later in Oakland where Chargers Hall of Famers Dan Fouts and Kellen Winslow teamed up for five aerial touchdowns, leading Air Coryell to a 55-21 rout.
An appropriate fragrance would be freshly minted cash, even if the stadium's 70,200 seats will be empty amid the COVID-19 scourge.
Fake grass enhances a venue's versatility, in turn its revenues. When Rams owner Stan Kroenke penciled out private financing for the Disneyland-sized, NFL-anchored mixed development, he counted on the stadium's ability to host other events including an Olympics. A canopy above the field increased the versatility.
And if San Diego voters had approved $1.15 billion in public money toward a Chargers stadium and convention-center annex?
A "fake grass" surface was planned in the East Village venue, a few downtown blocks from where the 1961 Chargers of Hall of Fame coach Sid Gillman wiped out the Raiders, 44-0, at Balboa Stadium in the first San Diego-based game of the rivalry.
Las Vegas is a new piece to the Chargers-Raiders rivalry, which until this week always featured at least one of the teams calling either San Diego or Oakland home. The NFL logic was the same: greater profit.
Seven hundred million dollars in stadium money earmarked by Nevada lawmakers toward a football pleasure dome lured the Raiders from California, where public money for NFL venues wasn't plentiful.
What hasn't changed in the rivalry is one of its top features: Recognizable uniforms and logos. Powder Blue. Silver & Black. Both teams still occupy the AFC West, the NFL neighborhood they joined after a decade together in the American Football League.
"I throw out the Las Vegas and Los Angeles — it's Raiders-Chargers week. I'm pumped," said former San Diego Chargers team captain Hank Bauer.
Bauer, who'll work the game Sunday as an NFL analyst for Sports USA Radio, said of playing against the Raiders: "I frickin' loved it. Oh, my God."
An undrafted, no-frills player out of Cal Lutheran who went on to set the NFL's single-season record for tackles (52) on special teams, Bauer saw the Raiders as kindred spirits. Players could get away with more rough stuff in those years, when TV cameras and replays were less intrusive.
"By today's standard, it would be considered mayhem — the Wild West, lawless," said Bauer, whose special teams dominance earned him a team MVP award, "but we policed ourselves. If a guy was doing something wrong, we knew how to take care of it."
Bauer, 66, counts Raiders Hall of Fame running back Marcus Allen among his friends. The two golfed together this week in Thousand Oaks.
The laughs and reminiscing didn't rid Bauer of the pain Raiders teams dealt him some 40 years ago, in two games at the Mission Valley stadium.
"I don't know which was worse, losing the 'Holy Roller' game or losing the 1980 AFC Championship at home to them to go to the Super Bowl," he said. "Do I want to die by people sticking needles in me or just being left in the desert with no food or clothes? I don't know."
Saying nice things about the Raiders doesn't come easily to Bauer, who saw three Raiders teams win Super Bowls in an era in which the Chargers won three consecutive AFC West titles and reached two AFC title games.
He did it anyway. He lauded the Raiders and their fans, noting the popularity the Raiders enjoy in Los Angeles and Oakland — their former homes — and now Las Vegas despite only one winning season in the past 17 years.
"The whole thing is legit," he said. "Some organizations just aren't as authentic. The Raiders Nation is just authentic. They have been forever. They travel with their teams."
Sharing a secret, Bauer tossed another verbal bouquet to the former arch-rival. "Deep down inside, as perverse as it sounds, I always wanted to be a Raider," he said. "If I couldn't be a Charger, that's the team I would have gone to. Because I loved that personality."
He said he bears no grudge against Casper and mates for the Holy Roller TD that dealt the Bolts a 21-20 defeat after Bauer had rushed for two TDs. Actually, he harbors grudging admiration.
"It was illegal, he scooped the ball forward; he wasn't trying to pick it up," Bauer said of both running back Pete Banaszak and tight end Casper, who flung or knocked the ball forward after quarterback Kenny Stabler, in the grasp of Woodrow Lowe, flung what should've been ruled an incomplete pass "How smart are those guys to have that wherewithal? That's the Raiders way. They know how to cheat. I say that respectfully."
