Carol Davis, mother of Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis and widow of the team’s late iconoclast owner, lit the memorial Al Davis Torch to christen $2 billion Allegiant Stadium before tonight’s home opener against the New Orleans Saints.
It is the first regular-season NFL game played in Las Vegas and the first time the 95-foot tall torch, the largest 3D-printed structure in the world, has been lit.
“There’s only one person that can possibly light it, and she’s agreed to do it, that’s the first lady of the Raider Nation — my mom,” Mark Davis told ESPN of his 89-year-old mother, who made the trip to Southern Nevada from her Bay Area home.
“I get chills thinking about it. I get goosebumps thinking about it. Probably tears thinking about it. But there’s nobody that could have lit it other than her. Because it’s really a tough time in the country, but also here in Nevada, we don’t want to seem that we’re celebrating or anything of that nature. But to have my mom light that torch means so much, and I think it will mean a lot for everybody in this valley, so I’m excited.”
Davis reiterated that he will not attend home games as a show of solidarity with fans, who are not allowed into 65,000-seat Allegiant Stadium during the coronavirus pandemic.
He made his decision after NFL owners voted 32-1 (Davis being the dissenter) to tarp off the first eight rows of seats from the field to use for advertising during games.
“I couldn’t do it,” Davis said. “I believe it’s all or none. There’s just no way to tell a guy who’s sitting in the first eight rows, ‘You can’t go.’ But the guy sitting one row behind, ‘You can go.’ There’s just no way to choose in that [scenario].
“We’ll just wait for next year and have Inaugural Season 2.0, and everybody can enjoy it.”
Davis, who did travel with the team to Carolina last week, is watching the game while hosting a socially distanced viewing party at the team’s facility in suburban Henderson, some 11 miles south of Allegiant Stadium with “a number of people who helped us get here.”
The Raiders had called the Oakland Coliseum home from 1966 through 1981, and again since 1995, after playing at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum from 1982 through 1994.
The league still has strict rules barring players, coaches and league personnel from betting and entering casinos, to reduce the “potential risks to the integrity” of the game.
But for decades, the league also held the gambling industry at arms-length, even though football is by far the most popular sport for bettors.
Those walls have crumbled as new technology like cellphone apps, daily fantasy and, most significantly, legal rulings undermining Las Vegas’s monopoly on sports wagering have driven sports gambling into the open.
The arrival of teams like the National Hockey League’s Golden Knights in 2017 and the W.N.B.A.’s Aces in 2018 also broke the taboo against professional sports leagues operating in Las Vegas, where for years officials thought players would be compromised by living in proximity to the casinos.
To celebrate its arrival in Las Vegas, the N.F.L. had planned to host the draft on The Strip, but the event was canceled because of the pandemic and will now be there in 2022.
Gambling has deep roots in the N.F.L., going back to its earliest years, when team owners like Charles Bidwill of the Cardinals owned racetracks.
But to fight the perception that games might be fixed, the league bars players, coaches and other staff from betting on games, sharing insider information or entering sports books.