How I became a Los Angeles Raiders fan living in Oakland
It’s 1993 and I’m in the third grade. There are no Oakland Raiders and never had been as far as I was concerned. The team moved to Los Angeles before I was born and my family, who felt spurned by the move, didn’t talk about them very often.
It was also a time when the San Francisco 49ers were riding high. That year, as the Niners progressed through the playoffs, they were all anyone was talking about. My family followed along like everyone else, but it didn’t have the same feel as when we watched the Oakland Athletics or the Golden State Warriors.
Being from Oakland, you have a sense of pride in your city that was often made stronger by the fact that San Francisco often gets all of the attention. The fact that we didn’t have an NFL team in Oakland doesn’t mean we would become die hard Niners fans.
And that year was when it hit me… there was no NFL team in Oakland.
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You see, I still spent every year rooting for a baseball, football and basketball team. The difference was that my football team was the California Golden Bears, where my dad went to college. But at such a young age, I didn’t fully comprehend the difference between college and professional football. In the third grade, I was starting to figure all of that out and I still remember the moment it really hit me.
We were out at dinner and the Niners playoff game was on a television in the restaurant. Like everyone else there, we were watching the game as we ate dinner. During a commercial break I asked my dad why we didn’t have a NFL team. He said that we used to but they moved to Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Raiders used to be the Oakland Raiders.
This revelation blew my mind. I pestered my dad for more information but it was clearly not a topic he wanted to talk about. My father was a die hard Raiders fan, just like he is with every other Oakland team. When they left for Los Angeles, he was one of the many who were very unhappy with the move. As a result, he simply didn’t talk much about the Raiders.
Not fully comprehending the significance of the move to Los Angeles, I didn’t really care at the time. In my mind, the Raiders were still more Oakland than the Niners, even if they had moved away. I mean, to a third grader I thought hell, I’m still from Oakland even if I move to another city, so a football team should be the same.
I asked my dad to buy me some Raiders gear and that’s exactly what he did. My father supported my decision to become a Raiders fan and suddenly, the NFL was a more frequent topic of conversation in our household.
Then it happened. The Raiders decided to move back to Oakland. I’ll never forget that moment either. Every morning I would go and get the newspaper for my parents. I would take the sports section out, give that to my dad and the rest of the paper to my mom. But this morning was different. As I pulled the sports section out, it had a huge headline declaring the Raiders were returning to Oakland. I dropped the rest of the paper on the kitchen floor and ran to my parent’s room, yelling “THEY’RE COMING BACK!!” as I threw their door open.
“What? Who?” My parents asked before seeing the paper in my hands. My dad laughed and took me back out to the kitchen where we cleaned up the mess I had made and talked about the Raiders returning to Oakland. It was also when I made my dad promise me he would take me to the very first game back in Oakland. Once again, not fully understanding how the NFL worked, I insisted that it be a preseason game because that was the FIRST game the Oakland Raiders played when back in Oakland.
Seeing how important this was to me, my dad complied and once I attended a Raiders game, didn’t matter that it was preseason, there was no turning back. I was already a Raiders fan before the return to Oakland, but once I experienced a Raiders game in person? There was no way I could be anything other than a Raiders fan for the rest of my life.
And that is how I became a Raiders fan living in Oakland even though the team was in Los Angeles.
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