Chalk It Up to Old-Line Approach : Raiders: Art Shell is to his players what Mike Shanahan never could be--a throwback to the good days.

Old Raiders love Art Shell.

“A fascinating fact is that Art is on the same par with Gen. George Patton and John Madden,” says Lester Hayes. “His 45-man unit distinctly loves him.”

Current Raiders love Art Shell.

“He’s like a John Wayne kind of guy in that movie, ‘The Quiet Man,’ ” says Howie Long. “I wasn’t surprised (by the turnaround). It was the lid being taken off the teapot. It was boiling and some steam needed to be let off. The boys wanted to run free, man.”

Ex-Raiders love Art Shell.

“Art always had a presence,” says the 49ers’ Matt Millen. “There was something about Art, I don’t know what it was. Uppy (Gene Upshaw) would talk and some guys would choose to listen and some wouldn’t. When Art said something, guys sat up and took heed.”

Part-time Raider franchises love Art Shell.

“When I got here yesterday morning, I noticed there was a big difference in the attitude around here, “ said Bo Jackson, a day after arrival. “There were a lot more smiling faces. People are happier.

“I think some big things are going to happen pretty soon.”

Bo knows the future, too?

What’s not to love? Art Shell is warm, soft-spoken except after holding calls--and suddenly a sensation. The first black coach in the modern era of the National Football League is 4-1 and the only fluke was the loss. If his kicker hits two makeable field goals at Philadelphia, he’s 5-0 and Ted Koppel is trying to do “Nightline” from Shell’s living room.

What doesn’t seem possible now? Al Davis standing on the victory stand at New Orleans, accepting the Lombardi Trophy and telling Paul Tagliabue he’s the greatest football commissioner since the NFL-AFL merger . . . or Bo pulling his groin muscle and Davis pulling out for Sacramento? The difference is there’s an upside in sight, which the Raiders have created in five weeks under their new coach.

If this isn’t a dream come true for a rookie mentor, one doesn’t exist, but Shell measures his joy.

He squirmed when approached for this story. He ducked ABC’s “Monday Night Football” last week.

The acclaim he cares about comes from his peers and his family, who are almost one and the same for him.

His idea of fulfillment would be to win the Super Bowl, have Davis pull him aside, look into his eyes and tell him, “Nice job;” then go home, kiss his wife and hug his sons.

Jesse Jackson called the Raider office the week he was hired but Shell didn’t mention it for days, and only after being asked about it.

Without prodding, though, he told of his oldest son, Art Jr., a basketball player at Palos Verdes High, telling him how proud he was, and how overwhelmed he had felt hearing it.

He said he almost cried in the Meadowlands dressing room after his first victory, but his players wouldn’t let him.

The Raiders ride again, or threaten to.

The rest of football could cry, too.

THE HONEYMOONERS

Mike Shanahan is a brilliant guy. The guy--I mean, when we played Denver, he came out on the field and he was rattling off defensive schemes we could run against them, just bang-bang-bang-bang. It was a philosophy thing. It’s like the Japanese in that movie, “Gung Ho,” coming in and running that car factory. The guys were working their butts off, but they did it their way. They’ve got music on the assembly line. And the new guys come in and say, “No. no, no. This is the way we’re going to do this .

--HOWIE LONG Under Tom Flores, it was semi-democratic. Under Coach Shanahan, it was a dictatorship. He thought he was Coach Davis’ twin brother. It was a mind-set. He thought it was his team. Oh, n-o-o-o! There’s only one Coach Davis. So be it. --LESTER HAYES

If the players were glad to see Shell, who had been a friend as long as they had been Raiders, they were doubly so after the brief, tense reign of Mike Shanahan.

It is hard to fault Shanahan for everything that happened. He’d been brought in to update Raider philosophy and his track record was plain to see. In his first post as an offensive coordinator at Florida, he had coached a soft-thrower named Wayne Peace to the NCAA record for completion percentage, better than 70%. This could only have been accomplished by throwing short.

Moreover, Shanahan was from the bitter division rival Denver Broncos and was obliged to assume a holdover staff, assuring an awkward transition, at best.

Shanahan was his own man, which might have served him well if things had ever gotten rolling. He intended to snap the casual Raiders into the businesslike posture employed throughout the league.

Hence the rules: No eating sunflower seeds in the locker room; a seat for everyone and everyone in his seat at meetings; and most sacrilegious of all, no sitting on helmets at practices.

Do you know how tired a Raider could get standing around for two hours?

Raiders were paid to strike terror in opponents’ hearts Sundays, not stand at attention Wednesdays.

“We had assigned seating in the meetings,” Long says, laughing. “I didn’t do well with assigned seating at St. Francis de Sales Junior High and I wasn’t doing very well here with it.”

Nor was Shanahan.

Davis talked later of having wanted “that freshness” from the outside--outsiders had been the only ones really considered to replace Flores--but once it was on the lot, Davis found it more coup than update. He made his doubts known throughout the league and by midseason, Shanahan was on the griddle.

By the start of this season, after the assistant coach scandal during which one of Shanahan’s guys, Nick Nicolau, told one of the holdovers, Shell, that he wasn’t wanted and should take a hike, Shanahan was dangling.

When the Raiders went 0-4 in the exhibition season, he was on borrowed time.

After the Raiders won their opener, Shanahan said their “backs were against the wall,” which was true enough, in his case.

“If we made a mistake in practice, we would run the play over and over and over,” Mike Haynes says. “Instead of just saying, ‘This is what you did wrong, next time do this.’ Art’s a little more relaxed about it. You’re going to make mistakes, but when you made a mistake, Mike would blow up.

“You had to know he was feeling the pressure. He did a good job of keeping it away from us. He never talked about his job being in jeopardy. But everybody knew it was. There was just a lot of tension when the pressure would get to him.”

After four weeks and three losses, Davis canned Shanahan. Davis had never fired a coach and has since said privately that a 20-game stint might not have been fair, but that he had concluded they would never have a meeting of minds.

He might also have been looking to launch Shell as well as he could. Winnable games against the Jets and Chiefs were next, before the schedule turned tiger.

Under Shell, they won those games. Then the Raiders turned tiger, instead.

HIS OLD RAIDER HOME

In legend, the Raiders present a bristly, porcupine’s ball of quills to the outside, but to a true insider, they’re like an old sofa, all warm and furry and soft.

Raiders have only each other to fall back on, so they support each other.

Raiders are family .

Once in, never out. A Raider official remembers Davis talking on the telephone to retired lineman Steve Sylvester who was now in business in Cincinnati. Davis needed a lineman. Sylvester explained he was now in business.

To which Davis replied: “But what about the Raid-uhs?”

And there were few Raiders like Shell.

It has been 23 years since a little-known No. 3 pick from Maryland State first flew west. It was Shell’s second time on an airplane. He remembers looking forward to this opportunity but missing his family back in Charleston, S.C.

He was an ambitious young man, but so much had always been closed off. Southern schools didn’t recruit blacks. His state had just had its first football all-star game for blacks; an integrated game wouldn’t come till later.

If a faraway Big Ten school didn’t happen on you, you went to a black school. The kids all repeated stories about the lucky ones, like George Webster, of Union, S.C., who went to Michigan State, like litanies.

But you couldn’t depend on luck, could you?

“I wrote (Ohio State Coach) Woody Hayes,” Shell said, smiling at the memory.

“I typed Woody Hayes a letter--took typing my senior year. Never sent the letter. I had it in an envelope. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d sent the letter.”

He went to Maryland State and became a premium draft pick, although he hadn’t been invited to an all-star game. He’d seen those major college guys on TV, he was good enough to play with them, he thought. Davis saw him on film and figured he could.

“As soon as I graduated, I hopped a plane and came out here (to Oakland),” Shell said. “I was out here before training camp, just working, trying to learn the techniques.

“But I was surrounded by people. I stayed at a hotel and players stopped by and called to make sure I was comfortable. That was a big relief.”

He could play with major college guys, all right: 15 seasons, eight Pro Bowls, two Super Bowl victories and the Hall of Fame.

He was a 300-pounder with the footwork of a ballerina, the power of a locomotive . . . and the same, sheepish smile he smiles today.

“Art would kill you with kindness,” says Lyle Alzado, his longtime Bronco opponent and a man who was trying to kill you, for real, on the field.

“The first time we played, he smiled and said, ‘How you doing, Lyle?’ I thought, ‘What the hell is this?’

“He proceeded to drive me off the ground, drop me on my back and run over me.

“Art was impossible to rattle. I’d talk about his mother, his sister and brothers. He ignored me. I hated Art Shell.”

What would Shell be thinking, looking across the line at the rising tide of Alzado’s rage?

“Never let an opponent know he’s getting to you,” Shell said, smiling like a Buddha.

His quiet demeanor hid a burning desire. Before the 1980 AFC championship game at San Diego, he made an impromptu speech teammates still remember.

“It was a little like the E.F. Hutton commercial,” Todd Christensen said.

“Art said, ‘If you have to fight, if you have to hold, if you have to grab, pinch, punch--do what it takes!’ Even grizzled vets like Ted Hendricks were standing there with their jaws open, paying attention.

“Sure enough, we went out and beat a team that quite frankly was better than us. And you know the rest.”

The Raiders beat the Philadelphia Eagles--in New Orleans--and became the first wild-card team to win a Super Bowl.

COACH SHELL

As a Raider star, Shell was the first to extend himself to young players, to offer to teach them techniques. Madden noticed and suggested he think about becoming an assistant.

Shell said that “kinda put a bug in my ear.”

After Shell became an assistant, Madden suggested he might even become a head coach in the NFL.

Shell thought his bug was delusionary.

“I said to myself, ‘John, are you dreaming?’ ” Shell said.

“A head coach in this league? I could see myself a head coach in a college someplace but not in this league at that particular time.”

At the end of Flores’ tenure in 1987, Shell was known to be Davis’ top prospect on the staff, but Davis was going outside.

By the end of the ’88 season, there were regrets all around. The staff was split with dissension. Shell calls it his lowest time as a Raider.

On the sideline of the finale, as the Raiders lost to Seattle, blowing their chance to be an 8-8 playoff team, he and Nicolau argued.

Later, Nicolau asked the why-are-you-sticking-around question.

Davis promptly fired Nicolau.

“The thing on the sidelines, I thought we didn’t have the players on the field to win with,” Shell says. “I just made a statement to (Nicolau), why isn’t a certain individual in the game, we’re trying to win the doggone thing. I guess he took exception to that.

“What happened later on, he came and made the statement to me and another coach: ‘Why don’t you guys leave? Mike doesn’t want you here.’ ”

Those days are over, never to be forgotten or lamented in Raiderdom. Now Shell tells old Raider stories to rapt new Raiders, who long to reignite the legend.

Shell likens Eddie Anderson’s hit on Christian Okoye to Jack Tatum, the defense to the Eleven Angry Men of the ‘60s and says Bob Golic is a “throwback who would have fit in with us a long time ago.”

You can almost hear Ben Davidson’s motorcycle warming up in the background.

The soft-spoken, hard-nosed salvation of the Raider Way smiles his smiles and dreams his dreams.