#MIDDLEBURY #SPORTS
By Mark Vasto
Looks like when you bring $750 million to the table, having a professional football team in Las Vegas doesn’t look like such a bad bet anymore, does it now?
Since Vegas’ inception as America’s gambling mecca, professional sports has eschewed the town, ostensibly because they didn’t want to be hit with the gambling tar brush. And it wasn’t without good reason – in those days, the people taking bets weren’t math nerds working for corporate, capeesh?
Not that gambling hasn’t always been pervasive in sports in any city anyway. It’s just that putting your sport in Vegas would be like locking yourself in a cage with a mama grizzly after she just saw you kick her cub through the uprights. (She bet the under.)
On March 27, the great city of Oakland got kicked in its rotten teeth yet again by the Davis family, those leather jacket-wearing sadists who love nothing more than to bring pain to the NFL’s most passionate, cosplaying fan base. Unable (read unwilling) to hash out a deal with Oakland that made sense to both parties, the Raiders were able to secure the extra money in various ways (that don’t really matter for the purposes of this story) in order to make the move. In the words of my great journalist friend Nadia Pflaum at the Ogden Standard, “Moving is expensive, yo!” The upshot is the Raiders have a new stadium on the way, Las Vegas will have an NFL team and Oakland will plan ahead for 2030, when New Orleans and Jacksonville will need new stadia (Tampa Bay will too, but I doubt they’ll pull up stakes).
But breakups are never easy. Oakland fans are left cursing themselves for having fallen for it again. From the first Reagan administration to the Clinton administration, the Raiders were rotten in Los Angeles. Then they came back. Now they’re leaving … two years from now. With a season-ticket waiting list. Awkward.
It gets weirder. The vote to allow the Raiders to move was supposedly heavily lobbied for by both Davis and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Davis is, by all bank accounts, considered to be the poorest of the rich, and he could not pass up the deal of a brand-new, municipally funded stadium. Jones, who pushed hard for the San Diego and St. Louis to Los Angeles deals, has vested interests in new stadiums everywhere: His entertainment services company, Legends, handles the luxury box contracts. He’s happy, the league is happy. San Diego lost the Chargers, but it can be calmed with soccer. St. Louis is a baseball town.
Since Vegas went corporate, it’s been one of the safest towns to host a sports team. The question will come down to fan base. It’s a resort town, service-industry heavy and there’s a high unemployment rate and a relatively small population for a NFL city … less than half the size of Oakland’s metro area. The NHL will break the ice, so to speak, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t enjoy the same rapturous success that met the Atlanta Thrashers.
But Mark Davis and the Raiders will stick around as long as someone is dealing. That’s a bet you can always count on.
Mark Vasto is a veteran sportswriter who lives in New Jersey.
(c) 2016 King Features Synd., Inc.
