Al Davis has never been so popular. Within minutes of the news of his death today, obituaries were lauding him as a visionary (OK, he often was) a great football man (not lately) and a good and sensitive guy (not so much).

And the litigation-happy man who had brought gangsta NFL fandom to Los Angeles and who had presided over nearly two decades of Oakland Raiders incompetence … was a latter-day George Halas.

Taken as a whole, his career in pro football was remarkable. It certainly was long, and it certainly was eventful. He even made the pages of The National, here in Abu Dhabi; all the North Americans in the room knew him, and he got 300 words as well as one of his less-scary photos from recent years.

How he should or will be remembered in Southern California is much more subtle and layered than the “don’t speak ill of the dead” obits, however.

Before 1980, Davis was known in SoCal only as the odd guy who owned the thuggish Oakland Raiders. But then the Rams abandoned the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum after the 1979 season, and a guy who had managed to leverage a small piece of a franchise into control of it (becoming rich in the process) saw a chance to trade a tiny and depressed market for a major one, and he plotted a move to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles was inclined to like him; a guy takes the NFL to court over his insistence to be allowed to move to the Coliseum … well, it’s a bit flattering.

Eventually he won his case, and buckets of money, and in 1982 the Raiders were in L.A.

(Backing up a minute. Before we get all verklempt over what the man meant to the fair burg of Oakland, these past 17 seasons, can we recall that he dropped the East Bay like a bad habit after the 1981 season? I still remember a columnist for the Oakland Tribune shouting at Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, during the press conference before the 1980 Super Bowl; the guy couldn’t decide if he was more angry than crushed that the Raiders were going to Los Angeles, and I was embarrassed on his behalf but relieved that he didn’t have to be dragged off by security.)

The Raiders won a Super Bowl after the 1983 season, and that secured their SoCal fan base for the next decade.

Unfortunately, their SoCal fan base turned out to be a replica of the Oakland fan base. To wit: Down-market, blustering and angry, trending towards biker-gang-like, trending towards street-gang-like. For a decade, the Coliseum was a particularly dangerous place to see a Sunday game, and the Raiders’ silver-and-black colors and logo were embraced by the area’s criminal element.

(I am reminded of the occasion when the Rose Bowl in Pasadena declared itself open to becoming a home to any NFL team — except for the Raiders. Really. This happened. “Anyone … but the Raiders.”)

The Raiders still tended to win, during their L.A. incarnation (only three losing seasons), and generally were interesting to watch — on television. They had Marcus Allen (until Al Davis decided he wanted to destroy him) and Lester Hayes and Howie Long and a bunch of other characters almost as colorful as the Oakland crew.

But after 13 seasons, Davis had the bright idea of abandoning the Coliseum, which steadfastly had ignored his demands for expensive improvements, and returning to Oakland and the same crappy stadium he had left in the previous decade. And all these years laer, the Raiders still play in the last baseball/football combo stadium in the league. Nothing like preseason games on the dirt of a baseball field, is there.

The Oakland return was even stupider than it sounded (even with Oakland showering him with free money) because the Rams, who had been in Anaheim for 15 seasons, also chose the same moment (after the 1994 season) to quit SoCal and move to St. Louis.

Thus, Davis abandoned the country’s No. 2 market at the exact moment that the other NFL team did … giving up the chance to play Anaheim against the Coliseum against the Rose Bowl for the best deal. If it sounds incredibly lame … it was.

One more item before moving ahead with the Oakland Raiders 2.0.

I didn’t often cover the Raiders on the road, but sometime in the 1990s I went to see a game in another NFL city … it might have been in Foxboro, a Raiders-Patriots game. Anyway, at some Raiders road game, reporters on press row somehow were able to hear everything said (or shouted) in a private box above us.

By a fluke, we happened to be right below Al Davis’s box. (Davis always preferred to sit in the press box; he thought sitting in a luxury box with fat cats wasn’t NFL-ish enough for a true football man like him.) And throughout, the reporters there got an idea of Davis’s infamous in-game demeanor.

Yes, he was a guy screaming and shouting at his team and his coaches, cursing like a sailor, demanding to know why this or that moronic move had been made and having a flunky get in touch with the coaches about changing something this instant. It was eye-opening.

So, anyway, Davis leaving Los Angeles for Oakland in 1995 might have been a good thing for SoCal football fans, because the man who actually served as coach and general manager as well as “managing general partner” … was losing it. He was 66 by the time the Raiders resumed playing in that dreary stadium in Oakland, and his football sense was deserting him.

He resisted trends toward short passes, insisting on his old preference for a “vertical” passing game, complete with fleet receivers and quarterbacks who could throw deep … and basically was left on the ash heap of NFL history.

In 1998, Jon Gruden brought the Raiders kicking and screaming into the 1980s, and he won two AFC West titles, and the team he put together reached the Super Bowl after the 2002 season (under Bill Callahan). But the Raiders have been awful since.

Since their return to Oakland the “commitment to excellence” crew have won 105 games and lost 153, and since the Super Bowl in January of 2003, they have been awful — at 39-92, they compare to the worst teams in the NFL over the past eight-plus seasons.

If Al Davis gave the Raiders an edge, when he was young and savvy but also the owner … he hurt them over the past nine years, certain he was still on the cutting edge when he clearly was not.

He apparently was still micro-managing the franchise as recently as last season when they blundered into an 8-8 record, their first non-losing season since the Super Bowl.

In the end, we have a guy who followed the money … who insisted on loyalty but showed it only when it was convenient … who not only tolerated the high-jacking of his team logo and colors by gang members but seemed to think it was fine … who sued his own league as well as a governmental entity in the city that took him back … who wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to get a stadium deal in SoCal when he could have had the market to himself …

He was a memorable figure. An important one. But a good guy? The smartest guy? “Hardly” and “certainly not lately” are the answers.

Al Davis, RIP. You’re getting smarter and kinder by the minute.