Rooted in green
A rendering of the A’s planned Las Vegas stadium. It looks like a futuristic, AI-generated armadillo.
I’ve been a huge pro sports fan since I was a lower case j when my hometown teams captured my attention and held it.
I grew up in Oakland, aka Oaktown, in the late 80s and early ‘90s during the heart of the Oakland A’s Bash Brothers era when they were the best team in the majors and made making it to the World Series seem routine. Across a wide expanse of concrete and well-manicured ice plants from the outdoor Oakland Coliseum where the A’s played baseball, the Golden State Warriors played basketball in the indoor Coliseum. The Dubs’ high-scoring trio of Chris Mullin, Mitch Richmond and Tim “I got skillz” Hardaway, nicknamed “Run TMC,” along with duper unique humans like 7’7 Manute Bol, Uwe Blab, Sarunas “Rooney” Marciulionis, and Tom “Tomcat” Tolbert made them the funnest team in the league.
Sometimes, I’d go to see one Oakland team play when the other also had a home game. On those magical nights when both teams won and the games ended around the same time, elated baseball and basketball fans would simultaneously stream out of both stadiums to unite in shared victory, joy, and Oakland pride. My friends and I would break out in song and freestyle verse and dance with complete strangers who were still Town family. The Coliseum complex that sat on a giant blacktop parking lot ringed by poorly designed freeways, blandly designed industrial buildings, and dastardly designed slums would get crunk like it was field day, Festival at the Lake, and Million Man March all rolled into one, especially if one of the Oakland teams notched a playoff win.
The Raiders played in Los Angeles when I lived in Oakland, but across the bay in San Francisco, the 49ers were winning Super Bowls and cementing a dynasty. They had arguably the number two GOAT booty-chinned quarterback in Joe Montana (behind Tom Brady, but Montana arguably had the better booty chin), arguably the GOAT Mormon quarterback in Steve Young, arguably the GOAT non-quarterback in Jerry Rice, arguably the GOAT defensive player in Ronnie Lott, and arguably the GOAT Hall of Fame snub in Roger Craig.
For a young guy coming up in the late 80s and early 90s and just getting into sports, the Bay Area, especially The Town, was the place to be.
I’d structure my social life around my teams’ schedule, cry like a baby when “we” lost, and stay up late listening to games on the radio because my family didn’t have cable and Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet. To say I identified with my teams is an understatement.
My family and I moved away from Oakland and “my guys” after seventh grade, but I’ll never forget my Bay Area sports memories, especially attending A’s games at the Oakland Coliseum.
These days, the Coliseum is crumbling, leaking, and falling apart. It’s a relic that’s been unfit to host professional sporting events for at least the last 20 years. But back in the day, at least to the lowercase j version of me, it may as well have been the Eighth Wonder of the World.
The A’s of that era had star players at nearly every position, including super charismatic ones like Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, who took comically large amounts of ‘roids and hit comically far home runs using their comically buff muscles that made them look like Drago from Rocky IV; Dave Stewart, who mowed down hapless hitters with a death stare, forkball, and ferocity that shared a nature with Darth Vader Force choking fools out; Dave and Rickey Henderson, who exuded fun with every smile, steal, slide, snatch catch, and shimmy shake; and Dennis Eckersley, whose uncanny command of both the strike zone and the King’s English, mini ‘manchu mustache, and submarine sidearm delivery defied convention and logic.
A’s games felt like rock concerts, and I went to loads of them. Tickets were cheap for kids with the student discount the old ownership group offered, and I watched my heroes perform and shine on the reg, mostly from the right-field bleachers, the cheapest seats in the house where we heckled opposing right fielders, especially ones rockin Jheri curls like Ruben Sierra when he played for the Rangers.
My sneaky favorite part of attending games was how the food and drink hawkers would stunt when they sold their stuff in the stands. No one navigates the King’s English with quite the creative flair of a brother from the Bay, the most well-represented demographic among food vendors, and they brought that certain swag to their hawk game.
There were some good hawks, but my favorite one was “Hot dog, dig a dooooog!”
A favorite A’s memory was when a friend’s dad got us great seats to a game, and my dream of getting on the massive DiamondVision jumbo screen in the outfield finally came true when we made it doing something that vaguely resembled a dance to what I think was Milli Vanilli’s Blame it on the Rain. At least it was a favorite memory until the next day. It turned out my childhood best friend, Jesse, was also at the game in the right field cheap seats, and Jesse landed a classic cap on me in front of our crew at school when he said the gap between my teeth looked like a massive field goalpost on the Jumbotron. My dream turned into a nightmare when my classmates started throwing up the field goal “it’s good!” sign on me in the hallways and kept it going for the rest of the school year.
These days, both my gap and my team look way different.
My gap looks way better thanks to modern orthodontia, and my team looks way worse thanks to modern society. The Oakland A’s don’t even live in Oakland anymore. The A’s billionaire owner moved the team to Las Vegas when the City of Oakland wouldn’t throw in free land and money to develop fancy housing and office buildings along with the free land and free money it was already offering to build a waterfront stadium on. I understand that the Vegas baseball stadium money decision-makers offered the A’s owner a little more free land and free money than what the Oakland baseball stadium money decision-makers offered.
Some humans say the A’s owner hijacked the team, and call it a disingenuous jack because the team just ran a “Rooted in Oakland” PR campaign all about promising to stay in Oakland.
My man ain’t breaking no rules. In fact, it’s the exact opposite situation. He followed the rules of our society to a T. He went with corporate values over human values.
Corporate values are always amoral, and they’re only about maximizing profit and putting money first. That’s it. Nothing about human values like love, compassion, empathy, and loyalty. Just money and profits.
Most of us humans use corporate values as a spiritual compass to navigate our reality. Money drives most of the decisions we make in life, including what to do for a living, what to live with, how to live, where to live, and even who to live with.
The A’s billionaire owner is doing the same ca$h money dance we all do, only to a different degree. We do it when we try to squeeze the most money out of the folks who pay our wages, buy our stuff, and do other money business with us. That rich, fancy man ain’t no worse than the rest of us for doing what we do all the time: put money first.
When most of us humans are about putting money first, what you get is a society like ours that’s organized around money.
The trust fund billionaire who bought my favorite team and moved it to the middle of a desert because he can is doing exactly what you’re supposed to do in a society organized around money: start a bidding war, squeeze as much money out of the bidders as possible, and go with the highest bid.
In a society organized around money, you get the University of California, with a view of the Pacific Ocean from campus on a clear day, playing its home football games in the Atlantic Coast Conference, where the TV money’s at. That’s crazy.
And we’re not just talking sports, either. Trump smoked Kamala in the election because he said he’d protect the money, and most folks feel on a basic level that it’s crazy not to protect your money to the fullest in a society organized around it.
The A’s were never “Rooted in Oakland.” They were always rooted in the color of their uniforms, green, just like pretty much everything else in our money-first society. The fact that “The Game of Life,” where the goal is to get the most money, is our most popular kids’ board game tells you everything you need to know about what comes first in this three-dimensional experience we’re sharing.
As we move towards brazen acceptance of putting money first, things like the Vegas A’s will become commonplace. The A’s crotch-grab dunk on the City of Oakland only scratches the surface. In a society where everything’s for sale to the highest bidder, the sky’s the limit. We ain’t seen nothing yet. If you can imagine it, it’s coming. The stuff that went down in the Colosseum in Rome at the beginning of the Empire’s decline previews what’s coming down the pike, only it’ll be more futuristic with lasers. The A’s new host city of Vegas will also likely host loads of these sorts of sports spectacles.
Fortunately for me, I love Vegas and visit all the time. It’s my second-favorite city in America, and arguably the most American city in America. I like to go there to chop it up with my fellow Americans from all walks of life, people watch, see shows, stomp around, and take everything in. I love stomping the Strip, downtown Vegas, and inside over-the-top casinos like Caesars Palace and the Venetian, as much as I do the surrounding red rock mountains and canyons. I had boots on ground in Vegas for years, and I visit there more than any other place outside of Minnesota, where I currently live.
The A’s dumping my hometown over money makes me want to boycott the team. But the ridiculous renderings of the planned Vegas stadium, which looks like my second favorite animal, the armadillo, look way too off-the-wall for me to go through with it. I gotta check it out. I enjoy Vegas and pro sports way too much to even pretend like I won’t attend hella A’s games with my egghead crew when we hit Vegas.
But after how things went with the A’s, I’m not as into pro sports and I won’t bond with a sportsball team ever again. To be clear, I’m grandfathering in my Steph Curry - Draymond Green era Warriors, as you can’t drop your dawgs when they still got bark left in em, but the Dubs are the last squad I rock with like that again. I’m folding into a New Earth where we put love first, and the pro sports cash money boogie ain’t my jam.
