Sad, angry Raiders fans:
In a city that supported the Raiders after their previous departure, a second goodbye is hard to swallow, East Bay columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. says.
In 2014, fans of the Oakland Raiders traveled to see their team play in London. In November, they flew to Mexico City to cheer for the Silver and Black.
Will they fly to Las Vegas when a Raiders stadium opens there in a few years? Don’t bet on it.
“Not happening,” Nancy Dowell, a season-ticket holder, said as she sipped on a large Coke at Ricky’s Sports Theatre & Grill in San Leandro.
It was just after noon Monday on her birthday, and the lifelong fan, wearing a black Raiders cap with rhinestones, didn’t want to grieve at home.
“They’re just not moving the team,” Dowell, 52, said. “They’re taking family. I have to say I haven’t had a worse birthday present.”
Dowell, who was 5 years old when she went to her first Raiders game in 1970, has tried traveling to home games before. When the Raiders played their first season in Los Angeles in 1982 — the first time the team bailed on Oakland — she took road trips to four games. It wasn’t the same as seeing the team play in Oakland.
But to see her Raiders play in Las Vegas, she’d have to do what Oakland refused to do: break the bank. After a 12-4 season, the team raised ticket prices an average of 40 percent. Dowell said she paid $3,000 for four season tickets.
She’s not even considering season tickets in Las Vegas.
“You can’t do it,” she said. “You’ve got tickets that are triple the price. Plus PSLs.”
She was referring to personal seat licenses — the fee that ticket holders are required to pay to purchase season tickets. About $300 million is expected to be raised through the sale of seat licenses at the Las Vegas stadium.
And even if she and her husband splurged for season tickets, Dowell estimates the trips — flights, hotel and food — to each game would cost $2,000, or about $16,000 per season. And that’s before hitting the slot machines and blackjack tables, because that’s what you do in Las Vegas.
“You fly in Saturday night, what are you going to do? You’re going to lose money,” Dowell said.
Dealing with the Raiders has cost Oakland too much money already.
Oakland didn’t cave in to the NFL’s demands, because the city couldn’t afford to dig taxpayers a deeper hole by betting public money on a team that made the playoffs last season for the first time in 14 years. What’s more: Oakland and Alameda County are still on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in stadium bonds that financed the Coliseum facelift — the monstrosity known as Mount Davis — that lured the Raiders back in 1995. The nearly $83 million that is still owed is set to be paid off by 2025.
The stadium proposal Oakland put together was rejected because the NFL couldn’t leave Las Vegas’ offer of $750 million in public money for the $1.9 billion stadium on the table.
But, man, the Las Vegas Raiders just doesn’t sound right.
Justin Reina, who was one of a handful of people at Ricky’s watching wall-to-wall TV coverage of the Raiders’ move, agreed. Reina, 27, was drinking Hennessy slowly out of a shot glass with his dark sunglasses tossed onto the bar next to his phone blinking with text messages.
He was wearing Hall of Fame wide receiver Tim Brown’s black No. 81 jersey, as well as a Raiders scarf and baseball hat. He pulled up a leg of his gray sweatpants to show me tattoos of Brown and Charles Woodson, a former defensive back.
Reina will not be going to Las Vegas.
“They tore the hearts out of a lot of people,” he said. “They think they’re going to get the same love in Vegas.”
He’s mad at Mayor Libby Schaaf for not doing enough. But what could she really do when team owner Mark Davis stopped meeting with officials trying to keep the team in Oakland? Reina turned his anger toward Davis, who took over the team when his father, the revered Al Davis, died in 2011.
“He’s had his foot out the door since his father died,” Reina said.
Sitting alone at a table covered with Bud Light-branded Golden State Warriors coasters, Ivan Davis said he was done with the Raiders. But it’s just about impossible to ignore the Raiders in the Bay Area, which is exactly why he kept his eyes glued to the TV.
“I’ll hear about it,” Davis, 50, said. “It’s still going to be on the news.”