Allen Severs His Raider Ties : Pro football: Running back accuses Al Davis of having a vendetta against him and says he won’t be back with the team.

MIAMI — Marcus Allen has declared his Raider career over.

Allen, the Raiders’ all-time leading rusher, spoke with reporters after Monday’s night game and after ABC aired a halftime interview in which Allen accused owner Al Davis of having a vendetta against him and attempting to ruin his career.

Allen, in his 11th season with the Raiders after a Heisman Trophy-winning career at USC, said his feud with Davis began somewhere in his first few years with the club.

And the nature of that feud?

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Allen said. “I tried to find out what was wrong, to make amends for something.”

At that point, Allen paused to chuckle over his own choice of the word amends .

Allen said he chose to remain silent about the feud, to avoid controversy, because he refused to give Davis ammunition to “justify” any action taken against him.

But now, with the Raiders reduced to two basically meaningless games, Allen decided to go public.

Allen was asked if a pending settlement between players and owners that could result in his free agency was a factor in his decision to speak out.

“Whether (that happens or not), what it comes down to is that I’m not going to be here,” Allen said.

Allen theorized that the feud might have started on the day in 1982 when the Raiders made him a first-round draft choice.

“One theory,” Allen said, “is that because he didn’t draft me, he didn’t want me in the first place. He’d say, ‘That’s your guy. That’s your guy.’

“The last couple of years have been the most frustrating, the most painful, the most humiliating I’ve had to go through.

“This is what I’ve wanted to do as a kid. . . . To have what you wanted taken away for some reason unbeknownst to me is frustrating. It could have been eliminated. I could have gone elsewhere.”

Allen said Davis renewed Allen’s contract every year, “just to retain me, not to play me.”

In the ABC interview, taped last weekend, Allen said Coach Art Shell was not responsible for his situation.

“Art is a good friend,” he said. “He has been honest with me. He has told me this is out of his hands.”

In the press box, Davis told a reporter that Shell’s insistence that he makes all personnel decisions on the field “refuted” Allen’s claims.

In the locker room, Davis was in the trainer’s room and could not be reached for comment. But Shell reiterated that he and he alone makes the decision on who plays.

“It doesn’t mean Al always agrees with me,” Shell said, “but I make the decision on who plays.”

The Allen-Davis feud became increasingly public in recent years. First Bo Jackson and then Eric Dickerson were brought in to compete at running back with Allen.

Davis countered claims of a feud by citing Allen’s almost annual summer holdouts and injuries that had limited his availability. That, say the Raiders, was the reason to search for a substitute ballcarrier.

That was also the reason, say the Raiders, that Allen has not received a pay raise in several seasons.

This year, Allen was demoted to third string behind Dickerson and Nick Bell, eventually bringing things to a head.

In the ABC interview, Allen described his relationship with Davis as “acrimonious at best.”

“What do you think of a guy who has attempted to ruin your career?” Allen said. “When someone messes with your livelihood--this is what I’ve wanted to do since I was 8 years old, and this very thing has been taken away from me and not, I don’t think, for a business reason, but for a personal reason.”

Asked if it was a personal vendetta, Allen said: “No question about it.”

In conversations with Davis, Allen said: “He told me he was going to get me and he has. I don’t know for what reason, but he told me he was going to get me.

“I think he has tried to ruin the latter part of my career, tried to devalue me and tried to stop me from going to the Hall of Fame.

“It has been an outright joke to sit on the sidelines and not get an opportunity to play.

“Looking back, I don’t think I did anything. Maybe it’s just the way I am, and I can’t change that and I don’t apologize for that. Maybe that offended him. Maybe it rubbed him the wrong way. I just can’t fathom what happened. It’s a mystery to me.”

Times staff writer Larry Stewart contributed to this story from Los Angeles.