Getty Image / Chris Unger
Mark Davis is one of the most unintentionally funny team owners in all of sports. The son of legendary owner Al Davis has some interesting quirks, like an undying love of Chinese fast food chain PF Chang’s. Any billionaire who is eating at PF Chang’s multiple times a week is not totally normal.
But, to his credit, Mark Davis got the team his father owned for decades a sweetheart deal to move to Las Vegas, as Clark County contributed $750 million towards Allegiant Stadium, which the now-Las Vegas Raiders moved into in 2020 after being an occupant of the Oakland Coliseum as the Oakland Raiders.
And, on Wednesday, news broke that the Oakland Athletics would be moving to Las Vegas in the near future, as an agreement to build a new stadium in Las Vegas was reached. But, Mark Davis is not a fan of the team joining his team in Las Vegas, and the bad blood comes from disagreements around the Coliseum in recent years.
Here is Pro Football Talk with more details.
Davis holds a grudge regarding the way the A’s handled things when the two teams shared a venue in Oakland.
“I won’t forget what they did to us in Oakland ,” Davis told Katsilometes on Thursday. “They squatted on a lease for 10 years and made it impossible for us to build on that stadium. . . They were looking for a stadium. We were looking for a stadium. They didn’t want to build a stadium, and then went ahead and signed a 10-year lease with the city of Oakland and said, ‘We’re the base team.’”
That move, in Davis’s mind, killed the Raiders’ chances of remaining in Oakland.
“They marketed the team as ‘Rooted in Oakland,’ that’s been their mantra through the whole thing,” Davis said. “The slogans they’ve been using have been a slap to the face of the Raiders, and they were trying to win over that type of mentality in the Bay Area. Well all they did was **** the Bay Area.”
“For them to leave Oakland without anything is pretty [screwed] up,” Davis said. “Because that site that the stadium was on was a good site. . . . We ended up in Las Vegas, which is absolutely fantastic and couldn’t be better. But the A’s never gave us a real good chance to stay up in Oakland.”
If/when the A’s come to town, Davis has no interest in cooperating with the baseball team.
“Not with that management group,” Davis said. “I just have, again, a lot of personal animosity toward the front office. But with a new management group? Absolutely.”
Unfortunately for Mark Davis, the Oakland Athletics are almost certainly going to moving Las Vegas very soon.