ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 2, 1996 TAG: 9609030160
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BALTIMORE
SOURCE: TIMOTHY W. SMITH THE NEW YORK TIMES
LONG-STARVED NFL fans in Baltimore flock to see the Ravens rock the Oakland Raiders 19-14.
The railings around Memorial Stadium were festooned in red, white and blue bunting. Grown men wore bird cages over their heads. Scalpers got four times the face value of a $29 ticket.
The National Football League was back in Baltimore Sunday for the first time since the Colts sneaked out of town in the dead of night back in 1983. A festive, near capacity crowd of 64,124 - the largest crowd to attend a professional sporting event in Baltimore - watched its new Ravens team kick off its inaugural season in style with a 19-14 victory over the Oakland Raiders.
The Raiders were an appropriate opponent: They had returned to Oakland last season after a 13-year stay in Los Angeles, and their history as an old American Football Conference rival of the Baltimore Colts played into the retro theme of the day.
The Colts are alive and playing in Indianapolis, but for the people in Baltimore the franchise remains linked to their city. So before the game, several former Baltimore Colts players, including Hall of Famers Art Donovan, John Mackey and Ted Hendricks were introduced on the field. They wore their old blue Colts jerseys, which they ceremoniously covered with white jackets bearing the Ravens logo on the back and the words ``Former Colt'' on the front. Johnny Unitas, the great Colts quarterback, trotted out the game ball and embraced Ravens coach Ted Marchibroda - the former Baltimore Colts coach.
And in the end, the Ravens put an old-fashioned whipping on the Raiders, rallying from a 14-7 second-quarter deficit to win.
``It was just a great day for Baltimore,'' said Ravens quarterback Vinny Testaverde, who completed 19 of 33 passes for 254 yards and rushed eight times for 42 yards, including a 9-yard touchdown run. ``The adrenaline was running early. It was a great beginning for this franchise.''
Fittingly, the game came down to a couple of teams searching for identity. The Ravens aren't the Browns anymore, and the Raiders aren't the intimidating bunch that rode roughshod over opponents in the 1970s. They're the penalty-crazed gang that couldn't shoot straight. They were flagged 12 times for 60 yards Sunday afternoon.
For a time, the Ravens, despite their garish purple jerseys and black pants and leggings, looked a lot like the Browns. In the first quarter, when ``Purple Haze'' by Jimi Hendrix blared from the stadium speakers, it could very well have been describing Testaverde's vision after getting smacked by a Raiders defensive lineman. The running game, spearheaded by 33-year-old Earnest Byner, was mired in quicksand.
It wasn't until the Ravens started playing like the Colts - the ones in Indianapolis that Marchibroda coached last season - that they took off. The Ravens took their game into overdrive by shifting to the no-huddle offense, a tactic Marchibroda popularized while in Buffalo and brought with him to Indianapolis as head coach.
The Raiders got out of sorts. The crowd became louder. Baltimore's defense seemed to feed off that enthusiasm. The Ravens held the Raiders scoreless in the second half, while getting a pair of Matt Stover field goals (25 and 37 yards) and a 1-yard touchdown run by Byner.
Raiders quarterback Billy Joe Hobert, who started in place of an injured Jeff Hostetler, picked the Ravens secondary apart in the first half, throwing two touchdown passes to Tim Brown (7 and 10 yards). But he couldn't get anything going in the second half. see microfilm for box score
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP John Weisengoff sits outside Memorial Stadium beforeby CNBthe first NFL regular-season game in Baltimore since 1983. color KEYWORDS: FOOTBALL