Raider Family Values

The team is 4-0. The star receiver is 40. The owner is ornery. And then there's Amy Trask, the most powerful woman in the NFL

By Michael Silver

Issue date: October 14, 2002

She picks at an oversized chocolate-chip cookie and tosses some crumbs to the ground, attracting a flock of pigeons that gather near her black leather pumps. The toughest woman in football is suddenly causing quite a stir at the Royal Ground Coffee House and Art Gallery on an otherwise mellow afternoon in the luxuriant Oakland hills. "I wonder if people here will get mad at me if I do that?" Amy Trask asks, temporarily ceasing to throw the crumbs that are causing a feeding frenzy under her table. Then the chief executive of the Oakland Raiders drops another piece of cookie and says, "Oh, well.... "

In her professional capacity as Al Davis's right-hand woman, Trask makes no apologies for her rebellious and occasionally off-putting behavior. At 41 she is regarded as the most powerful woman in America's most macho pro sport, and the words and actions that have propelled her to that position have been as subtle as a Ray Lewis tackle. "The big thing is, she's fearless," says Davis, who worries that Trask will be plucked away by a big corporation. "Early on I wondered, Will she be intimidated? Because she was going to be a woman in a man's world. But she's been tough."

Virtually unknown to football fans, Trask is hardly the product of some affirmative-action initiative. There's no way to know for sure, but Davis, 73, strongly suggests that Trask is a heartbeat away from taking over day-to-day operations of one of the sports world's most conspicuous properties. While the man Davis is grooming to replace him on the football side, senior assistant Bruce Allen, is the son of a Hall of Fame coach (George) and is generally well regarded in league circles, Trask, says one of her many detractors, a top executive for a rival team, "is like a younger, sharper, meaner version of Al -- with a law degree."

Wrap your brain around that: The next Al Davis may well be a 5'3", 107-pound, pearl-wearing spitfire who wouldn't be caught dead in a nylon warmup suit. Yet no one who has been in business settings with Trask doubts that she could fill Davis's shoes. Indeed, Trask has enough in common with her iconoclastic mentor--including a long list of football people who revile her--that the Raiders, who at 4-0 after their 49-31 win over the Buffalo Bills on Sunday seem to be poised for another Super Bowl push, are in no danger of going soft anytime soon.

"She's a flyweight with a heavyweight punch," says Montreal Expos president Tony Tavares, who as the head of Spectator Management Group negotiated with Trask on a planned renovation of the Los Angeles Coliseum in the early 1990s. "Al could search his entire lifetime and not find someone as trustworthy and loyal as Amy, or someone who could represent him better than she does."

Who besides Trask would have dared to enliven a '97 league meeting by trading barbs with Carmen Policy, the San Francisco 49ers president at the time, and then refusing to yield the floor when ordered to do so by NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue? Who else would have hovered over 77-year-old league observer Art McNally in a packed Foxboro Stadium press box at the pivotal moment of last January's divisional playoff game between the Raiders and the New England Patriots--the replay review of Pats quarterback Tom Brady's apparent game-ending fumble--and screamed, "You'd better call 911, because I'm going to have a f------ heart attack if you overturn this f------ call!"?

Once again Davis, who hired the league's first Hispanic head coach (Tom Flores) and the first African-American head coach (Art Shell) of the modern era, has proven to be a boss who doesn't discriminate -- as well as an equal opportunity annoyer. It makes sense that the litigious Davis would groom a successor who is as well versed in causa proxima as she is in the Cover 2 defense. But Trask, who first worked for the Raiders as a legal-department intern while attending USC law school in 1983, is also gifted in areas of business ranging from management to marketing. She has reached out to Raiders' support base by enhancing the team's Internet profile, adding e-commerce and foreign-language components, and by expanding opportunities for fan interaction with youth camps and related programs.

While Trask has no plans to get involved in player-personnel decisions, she's more than a football novice. Says Trask's friend Andrea Kremer of ESPN, "Does she need to break down a zone defense to do her job? No. Could she? Damn right."

Ask Trask to list her career highlights, and she'll start with the final game of the 1993 season, describing in detail the dramatic catch by wideout Alexander Wright that tied the Denver Broncos with no time remaining. With a playoff berth hanging in the balance, the Raiders secured an overtime victory, and winning seems to be the only way Trask measures success. "Nobody gets that," Trask says. "People look at me and say, 'She's a businesswoman who happens to be involved in football.' I say, 'No. That's why I'm in this business. The football is everything.'"

Consider what happened the week after that dramatic '93 victory, when the Raiders hosted a rematch with the Broncos in the first round of the playoffs. At one point players from the two squads fought near the home team's bench, and James Trapp, an injured Raiders defensive back, entered the fray. "I'm up in the press box," Trask recalls, "and the NFL observer comes over and asks, 'Which player in street clothes came off the sidelines?' Well, I'm not giving state's evidence, so I say, 'I don't think that was a player. I think it was a fan.' A minute later a reporter runs up screaming, 'I know who did it! I know who did it!'--just like a third-grade tattletale. I'm so mad that I kick my chair, and it goes down two flights of stairs. I scream, 'Hey, are you here to write a story, or are you here to be the story?' He stares at me, shocked, and I say, 'Sit down and write your story!'

"I knew I was making a scene, but I didn't care. Because part of me knows that if the situation were reversed, if I were the one on the sidelines in street clothes, I would've done the same thing James Trapp did."

If there's any doubt whether Trask was born to be a lawyer--and, for that matter, a Raider--consider this story from her childhood: One afternoon young Amy and a classmate chased the dogcatcher's van up Mandeville Canyon Road, in L.A.'s affluent Brentwood district. When the van stopped, she proceeded to tell the man how mean and insensitive he was for caging the canines.

Trask says she struggled with "behavioral problems" in grade and middle school: "Basically, I just spoke my mind." She morphed into a model student at Palisades High, which was a great relief to her mother, a lifelong educator, and her father, an engineer who at 77 remains a consultant in the aerospace and defense industries. Amy, the youngest of three children, graduated from Cal in '82 and enrolled in law school at USC that fall. She considered it her great fortune that the Raiders, with whom she had "fallen in love" during her time in the East Bay, made their move to the L.A. Coliseum at precisely the same time, triggering years of litigation against the NFL.

In law school she was "the ultimate guy chick--a warm, bubbly, friendly woman you could go to the game with," says agent Jerome Stanley, who befriended Amy and her future husband, fellow student Rob Trask, while attending USC.

Remember the scene in There's Something About Mary when Cameron Diaz asks Ben Stiller at the end of their date, "Hey, you want to go upstairs and watch SportsCenter?" The fictional Mary has nothing on Trask. On the day she and Rob wed in December '85 the bride delayed the start of the ceremony because the Raiders' game against the Broncos had gone into overtime. Not that the groom was complaining: "Hey," says Rob, "the guys and I were watching the finish in my room, too." (The outcome: Raiders win; let the wedding begin.)

In 1987, after two years at an L.A. law firm, Trask got a call from Raiders legal counsel Jeff Birren, who offered her a job in the team's legal department. She accepted on the spot, then made a quick impression on Davis with the tenacity she displayed during the team's perpetual legal battles as well as her eagerness to learn about all aspects of the organization. By 1992 Davis was sending her to league meetings, where she often was the only woman in the room. At Trask's first meeting one owner began his response to one of her comments by addressing her as "girlie."

"The fact that she is attractive and was young when she came in lent itself to people underestimating her resolve," says Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. "But she can certainly hold her own in any conversation about running a football team."

There was no denying Trask's intelligence--"Everybody has insecurities," she says, "but one thing I've never been insecure about is my brain"--and her audacity stood out even more. Trask's defining moment came at that '97 league meeting in which she tangled with two of the league's biggest power brokers. After Policy attacked the Raiders, she rebutted his comments, and Policy fired back. Tagliabue then tried to end the sniping, but Trask wouldn't yield. Four times he told her the subject was closed, and four times she demanded to speak. Finally Tagliabue, who declined to be interviewed for this story, snapped, "Make it brief." Says Birren, who was in the room, "Wild horses couldn't have kept her from speaking."

That observation is one to which Trask can relate. She has been riding horses since she was 10, performing in jumping competitions until about seven years ago. She still rides her thoroughbred, Championship Game, on a recreational basis. "You achieve an almost telepathic communication with the animal," Trask says, "like you don't know where the horse ends and you begin."

That's nearly the same phrase used by a former NFL executive, who says of Trask, "You just don't know where she stops and Al begins. My impression of her is that her veins run ice-cold water." Like Davis, Trask is viewed by many of her peers as a contentious, destructive force--a "Princess of Darkness," as the same ex-league official jokes. Indeed, two sources interviewed for this story suggested that Trask "drank the Kool-Aid" in assessing her almost cultlike loyalty to Davis. "She really used to be a nice chick; it's amazing," Stanley says. "She's not mean to me, but I know a lot of people in league circles who think she's heavy-handed. It's like she's been Raider-ized, turned into a Raider assassin."

Trask argues that she's anything but a yes-woman, and both she and Davis insist they have had plenty of heated disagreements. But she also does nothing to discourage the comparison. "I can be very, very tough," she says, "and what's wrong with being tough? If tough were used to describe a man in my position, I don't think it would be perceived as a negative."

Critics take Trask to task for harping on legal technicalities pertinent only to the Raiders' interests and for repeatedly calling Tagliabue's integrity into question. "I think people respect her intellect and talent, but she uses it in such a negative, unproductive way that no one respects her as a businessperson," says another team's second-highest ranking executive. "It's always about ripping you down, and because of that she's despised."

These days at owners' meetings Trask has at least a little company in the ladies' rest room, where, she says, "There's never a line." Cincinnati Bengals executive vice president Katie Blackburn, owner Mike Brown's daughter, has become increasingly influential, and two other owners' daughters, Charlotte Anderson (Cowboys) and Linda Bogdan (Bills), hold VP titles. San Diego Chargers VP Jeanne Bonk, the team's chief financial officer, also regularly attends league meetings. (The NFL has two female owners, the 49ers' Denise DeBartolo York and the St. Louis Rams' Georgia Frontiere, each of whom has delegated day-to-day authority to men.)

On another beautiful day in the Oakland hills, on a bench outside another upscale coffee house, Trask fiddles with an earring and takes the last sip of a double latte. Men with Raiders caps walk past as she praises her boss's imprint on football, lashes out at the tuck rule that may have cost her team a playoff victory over the Patriots and declares, "I believe that the Raiders are treated differently than other teams in many respects. Al Davis has opened the doors of the NFL to Hispanics, African-Americans and to women, and I don't think that sits well with everybody."

To the untrained ear it all starts to sound suspiciously like what a Tass report in the '70s might have said about Soviet foreign policy. "Hey," Trask says, "it's not propaganda if you believe it."

Pigeons scatter as the Princess rises, walking briskly and grinning from ear to ear.

Issue date: October 14, 2002