Just Vegas Baby!

Why the Raiders’ pending move to Vegas makes the most sense of all the things ever.

By Andrew J. Pridgen

The guy who cuts my hair is a Raider fan. He and his cousin have season tickets. <-For starters, this gives credence to my theory that all Raider fans know their way around a no. 2 and have cousins that are Raider fans. Silver and black runs just as thick as blood.

…The last haircut featured a trio of haircut conversation highlights from him.

They were:

Re: Playboy no longer featuring nude pictorials: “I didn’t think I was old-school like that till they took it away. Something about jerking off to my phone then ordering up an Uber then calling up my girlfriend—all within five minutes—is kind of creepy.”

Re: Walking home from the bars the other night and seeing two college kids get in a fight: “It was in front of a 7-Eleven so I just went in, grabbed a beer and watched. It lasted like 8 minutes. That’s a long time for a college fight.”

Re: The Raiders possible relocation: “I started out a LA Raiders fan and was OK with the move to Oakland. I don’t want them to go back to Southern California. There’s no way to get in and out of Carson in under a day—that’s a fact. And then you’re like, ‘Fuck, I came all this way to be in Carson.’ Vegas on the other hand…that would be my dream and my nightmare come true.”

There you have it Raiders marketers, along with Just Vegas Baby!®, Viva Las Raiders!™ …a third-tier slogan might be Las Vegas Raiders: Your Dream and Your Nightmare Come True.

Everyone knows this is going to happen. It’s not the Spanos family trying to fleece the apathetic taxpayers in the heart of the Whale’s Vulva to shoehorn a new stadium right in the heart of San Diego’s downtown and waterfront district. It’s not the 49ers selling their fan base out to Goldman Sachs, moving it two (cross out) four hours south on the 101. This move is pure greed-backed competency (<-which, btw, should be Vegas’s new slogan…’What happens here, stays here’ is ready for its Kobe farewell tour.)

You’ve got Mark Davis, the Dutch Boy stunt double son of sweatsuit provocateur Al. The late Davis Sr.’s slicked back Kiwi polish black hair and gum-snapping sensibility was Vegas before there was Vegas, and his prodigal Mark is ponying up $500 million of the family fortune to make this happen. Keep in mind, this is the same Mark Davis who is more leery of a one-year lease at the Oakland Coliseum than most folks are of timeshare presentations.

There’s Sheldon Adelson, the only man in this country who makes the Koch Brothers look like Peace Corps returnees drafting specs of their art car for this year’s burn. Adelson best known for using his massive Vegas hotel/casino fortune to reshape right-wing politics here and in Israel has made headlines over the last six months. In December, he financed a $140 million takeover of the Las Vegas Review-Journal basically asking, “Why should I keep suing this paper when I can own it?” then firing everyone who knew how to write. In February, he became embroiled in a Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission investigation for his company’s operations in Macau where there were potential illegal dealings with public officials.

Adelson, who will somehow come through cleaner than Andy Dufresne—after all, he’s the 13th richest man in the U.S.—has pledged to give Davis an additional $150 million marker for a total of $650 million private dollars toward a stadium build. The balance of the estimated $1.3 billion cost to erect a domed stadium next to McCarran (see: this scene in Biodome for what it’s going to be like) would be offset by a hotel tax—so Vegas tourists paying an extra buck/night for the next 20 years would about cover it.

What makes this project different from the onset, is instead of a waterfront axe wound dormant but for 24 hours a year in San Diego or a giant Saturday Costco line equivalent of cars clogging freeways in Carson or Santa Clara—Vegas is going to use the shit out of this stadium. Every entertainer from Carrie Underwood to Celine Dion to Cher (OK, basically every entertainer whose name starts with a ‘c’) is going to fill this thing to capacity weekend after weekend. The proximity to the airport and the strip means public transit will be involved making it easier to get in/out of games than it is to find an exit at Caesar’s.

The Nevada State Legislature’s approval seems all but a Battle Born-sized rubber stamp formality, especially with the blessing of the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee already codified. It would behoove them to call a special session between now and February, 2017 because they want to lock the Raiders down before the Chargers announce what they’re doing. Nevada is like a guy who doesn’t necessarily want to leave the bar at 11 p.m. but he’s got a girl down with him now and who knows what’s going to happen during the last call-bell scramble.

If the Chargers were to stay in San Diego (not likely) the Raiders could still opt into the Carson deal. But you read what my barber said—it’s not a good deal for the fans or the franchise—which would now have to compete with the Rams as well.

A special session of the Nevada Legislature could happen as soon as August, if the approval goes through then, ground gets broken in September and the Raiders could be dining out at Nobu the night before kick-off in the fall of 2019.

I feel like the only two questions that remain are:

1. What the fuck is David Beckham doing in the middle of all this? Or was that just a hologram? And why does he appear to be at senate judiciary committee hearing facing a tie clip indictment?

Mark Davis and David Beckham are both at this SNTIC meeting #rjnow #raiders #lasvegas pic.twitter.com/Pl01CXl8Wz

— Brett Le Blanc (@bleblancphoto) April 28, 2016

2. The tailgating scene for the Vegas Raiders is going to be something along the lines of Dave & Buster’s boys night out meets ISIS. For starters, Southwest might as well start painting half its fleet Silver and Black and Dan Cortese should come out of retirement to cover Raider Vegas tailgaters—the most extreme of all sport. My barber, a season ticket holder, said he would fly in/out every weekend, “until my liver can’t take it.” I sort of believe that’s going to be all of #RaiderNation’s battlecry. I guess that’s the dream come true part. The nightmare? Imagine every on purposely douchey Jets fan on his or her worst behavior, every parking-lot-banging Bills fan getting to do it in the sun, every mild-mannered KC fan on a once-a-year bender. NFL fans by nature are already not very well behaved. And Vegas will do just…well, just does what Vegas does to people—makes them the worst. Beer bongs at the concessions? A good idea to keep the lines moving. A drunk tank bigger than the home locker room? A necessity. A halftime show featuring a giant pinata hanging from the dome roof stuffed with adult entertainers? Not out of the question.

Even by Raider standards, this most unholy of all A Little White Chapel weddings with Southern Nevada is going to be the stuff of dreams, of nightmares—but in reality, is the manifestation of Al Davis’s wildest imagination: The Raiders finally finding a permanent home in the one place that’s inherently worse than they are.

Image: Joe Robbins/Getty Images

Dean Spanos, Trickster God, is trying to get San Diego to build him a very big, very empty house of lies

Dean Spanos is trying to pull off a cheap trick for his hail Mary to keep the Chargers in San Diego. Below, the three major ways the billionaire is trying to bamboozle everyone in the whale’s vagina.

Written by Kyle Magin

Giving a billionaire hundreds of millions of dollars to build a professional sports stadium is like introducing Ryan Gosling to a girl at a bar.

You don’t need to help a billionaire pay for anything.

Yet, again and again around the world, and especially in the U.S., municipalities hand over hundreds of millions of dollars to billionaires to build pro sports stadiums that most directly benefit those billionaires. Study after study shows the benefit to taxpayers is negligible or even negative.

That’s why human representation of the Paiute coyote trickster god, San Diego Chargers owner Dean Spanos, is trying a little sleight of hand to get America’s Most Beautiful City’s taxpayers to hand him $550 billion to buy land, build a new convention center on it, and, oh yeah, also a new stadium for his team. The proposed $1.5 billion complex’s price tag includes the land ($200 million from the taxpayers), the convention center ($600 million from taxpayers) and the football stadium ($350 million from taxpayers and $350 million from Spanos, plus $300 million from the NFL in the form of a loan and a grant.)

Spanos’s cute way of getting taxpayers to cough up most of the cash is to correctly point out that they need a new convention center, attach his modernistic herpes sore of a football stadium to that venture, and source the funding from a four percent increase in the city’s hotel tax. That way, Spanos can say he’s getting visitors to pay for his new stadium and not his neighbors, who should be really happy to tell to him fuck off if this thing falls through.

Below three more very good reasons San Diego shouldn’t be fooled into putting a giant desk drawer-looking thing that gets used for a total of 26 hours/year on near their waterfront:

1) This is still a tax increase on San Diegans.

San Diego’s tourism industry employs one in every eight city residents. It generates $18.3 billion in economic impact for the city, and $192 million annually for the city in hotel tax revenue (the transient occupancy tax, or TOT, which sounds like a good way to grift drifters). When you tax that industry to build a stadium that will be used 10 times a year for its main purpose, you’re robbing money that would otherwise go to paying for cops, firefighters, teachers and parks departments. Saying that out-of-towners will pick up the tab on the stadium willfully ignores how basic economics works in a tourist town.

2) San Diego’s new convention center will be cheaper without a football stadium.

There is exactly one thing that San Diego needs in Spanos’s proposal: a new convention center. Events like Comic-con–admittedly the biggest, but the city hosts hundreds of conventions annually–are agitating for a new, waterfront convention center that can handle bigger crowds. Adding a giant-ass football stadium pulls that convention center further inland in service of, again, ten dates as opposed to the 120ish the convention center draws presently–presumably that number would rise with more elbow room.

Adding the corresponding tax increase for an extra $350 million to drop on a stadium robs Peter to pay Paul. Tourists won’t pay ever-increasing hotel taxes just to hang out in San Diego. Watch them flock out of the city to North County or Orange County or any number of desert, Atlantic and Gulf coast towns that can roughly approximate San Diego’s weather without its potential 17-plus percent hotel tax rate. If they do come, that extra four percent will be vacuumed out of the wallets of waiters and bartenders, t-shirt shops and boat tour operators. Visitors won’t magically have more money to spend.

3) Spanos’s proposal contains a ton of fat–add what you need and cut the rest.

The proposal will come to a public vote that will either need a 2/3rds majority this November or 50 percent plus one, depending on how successful Spanos’s army of lawyers can be. San Diegans should vote it down with extreme prejudice and demand a more sensible convention center-only deal. As a general rule, get yours and don’t help rich dudes get richer.

 

You’re not losing a NFL franchise as much as you are gaining civic pride…and tax dollars: Hurrah for San Diego

If a NFL franchise leaves a major metro and nobody cares …does it make a noise?

By Kyle Magin

When you check in on San Diego 8 or 18 months from now, when Chargers owner Dean Spanos and his team finally decide to leave town, don’t be surprised to find out that nobody in that fine burg much cares that they’ve been left behind by the biggest sports league on Earth.

In fact, don’t be surprised if they don’t see it that way at all.

The Chargers and the NFL are cellulite on the thighs of America’s most beautiful city. They played in a dumpy stadium far outside downtown, nestled between strip malls and inexplicably expensive housing developments with names like Sudden Valley.

The league terrorized and turned its back on one of that metropolis’s favorite sons in Junior Seau, leaving him to blow a hole in his chest at the age of 43 so his damaged head would be preserved for science.

SAN DIEGO, CA – FILE: Junior Seau #55 linebacker for the San Diego Chargers watches the offense work versus the Seattle Seahawks in their preseason game on August 16, 2002 at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, California. According to reports May 2, 2012, Seau, 43, was found dead in his home in Oceanside, California. (Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)

The team, under Spanos’ direction, asked the city and county to cough up hundreds of millions from its coffers so the billionaire could re-home his underachieving outfit with other people’s money, making profit realization all the more expedient.

Literally nothing about the team or the league for years has been loveable, personable or fan-friendly. The city’s reasonable $350 million offer (Read: paltry, in the eyes of Spanos and the NFL) to help finance the team’s move to a new stadium was deemed not to be enough for the Chargers, who want their cake and would like to eat it, too. And then help themselves to a piece of yours.

Parting with the NFL is in fact the sanest move any municipality can make, especially when they’re asked to foot the bill. So when you see San Diegans enjoying their ocean-side parks, their fabulous downtown baseball stadium and their warm fall Sundays sans a football team later this year, don’t wonder how they’re getting along, wonder instead how you can get a piece of that contentment.

Who can you ask to screw off when he wants your city to spend money it could be using to build parkways, parklets, beaches and amphitheaters?

Whose moving van can you help pack for the next time they threaten to leave because their 30-year-old venue doesn’t have suite windows tinted darkly enough to do cocaine behind?

Who can you make a laughably ungenerous offer to when they want to see what the public can do to help out with the new digs they’d like to make billions of dollars on without spending their own money?

What oligarch can you happily purge from your city’s rolls by refusing to do business with the NFL on its terms?

I personally can’t wait for the next time the Ford family asks the City of Detroit and the State of Michigan for public money to finance their culturally worthless franchise. I may even move back to the Great Lakes State just to pop a cork when we use our newly found backbone to tell the Lions to take a hike if they think they can get a better deal elsewhere.

The loss of a public welfare-seeking NFL franchise and all of its accompanying baggage in 2016 is cause for celebration, not sadness.

Envy San Diego for all of its million advantages, but especially this week because they get to tell a billionaire to take his ball and go to LA.