Raiders game vs. 49ers ‘just like old times’ for East Oaklanders left behind

OAKLAND, Calif. — AJ Cole misses the collegiate feel that football fostered at the Oakland Coliseum. Kolton Miller misses the “ride-or-die” fans who filled it to cheer for the Oakland Raiders. Maxx Crosby for sure misses them too, along with the city of Oakland altogether.

Chris Bibbens-Williams misses his mom. Every day. Especially this weekend.

“My first ever game was the Battle of the Bay,” said Bibbens-Williams, 37, an East Oakland native and educator at Unity Middle School, stationed in the Coliseum’s shadow. His mother, Renee, was a stadium worker and took him to the 1999 preseason edition. She died of heart failure at 54 in 2020, the year the Raiders relocated to Las Vegas.

“(I’ll) think about the memories,” the lifelong Raiders fan said. “It’ll be just like old times for a second.”

The Raiders are heading back to their old home this weekend for the 16th edition of the Battle of the Bay, their regular-season meeting with the rival San Francisco 49ers held once every four years. The closest they’ll get to home, anyway, now seven years removed from their last in Oakland, where for 47 they connected a community.

Their ghosts won’t ever go away.

The Coliseum is mostly dormant along with neighboring Oakland Arena — where the Golden State Warriors were at the epicenter of American sport during their dynastic run a decade ago before moving to San Francisco’s Chase Center — and because of the city’s sporting exodus that saw the Athletics leave for West Sacramento and eventually to Las Vegas, too.

But this weekend is stirring the local spirit — almost as if the team were in town. Raiders garb isn’t hard to spot, albeit Oakland Raiders garb, because the city is still synonymous with silver and black — and resilience, too.

“It’s exciting. It’s about to be lit,” said Brianna Kelleghan, 34, an East Oaklander who inherited her fandom from her late father, Darren Brown. A dean, teacher and coach at Unity High School, a few blocks away from the middle school, she called the franchise “a distant relative. They’re still family, but it’s a distant relative. … The love is still there.”

Hard-hit community

The scorn has softened for Bibbens-Williams, Kelleghan — whose father too worked at the Coliseum — and their Raider fan friends. They understand why the franchise left the Town in 2020 for Sin City instead. Money talks and Clark County issued $750 million in public funding to build Allegiant Stadium.

With more pressing public funding concerns, Oakland wasn’t fit to foot that kind of bill.

“It used to be ‘Just Win, Baby.’ That was our logo,” said Kelleghan, whose 5-year-old son CJ and 3-year-old daughter Alana dressed as a Raider and Raiderette, respectively, for Halloween. “It’s just money now. It’s just money, baby. That’s what I see. … It is what it is. I’m still going to be a Raider fan until I die.”

The new Raiders digs might be pretty and pristine, the spaceship stapled to Interstate 15, but the old dilapidated digs had a spirit and soul that hasn’t yet traveled south. Pregame parties in the parking lot — with food, deejays and Raiders chants at which everybody felt like they knew everybody, whether they actually did or not — would spill into the Coliseum for games, bringing tens of thousands of people together in silver and black, no matter the record.

That’s what Abraham Salazar thinks about during drives down I-880 when he passes the empty Coliseum, from which he grew up two minutes away. Now 34 and Kelleghan’s colleague, he loves to share his memories when he’s driving past it with nonresidents, thinking about what used to be.

“We have the best tailgates. We have the best fans. If you know, you know,” said Salazar, a Raiders season ticketholder their last two years in Oakland. “I get it, you know, the money aspect. But this whole community was all Raiders fans. … It hit the community hard, them leaving. The community got hit the hardest.”

It lost the foot traffic, jobs at the stadium, and revenue for nearby businesses that pro sports can bring.

Stroll through the neighborhood a mile east of the Coliseum and find a Raiders logo artistically spray-painted onto an abandoned red, brick building. Another one, more realistic, adorns the concrete of nearby beam that supports the local transit system across the Bay, known as BART to locals.

Graffiti tags line houses and walling. There is also hope with schools and churches developing it and and colorful murals depicting it at every other turn.

Said Bibbens-Williams, whose father, James Hendrix, also had Raiders season tickets in Oakland, moving in 2024 to Las Vegas: “It’s not the greatest in optics. But once you’ve been there and understand the community it’s pretty cool. It’s not as daunting as it might seem. … There’s thoughtful kids I teach every day, not wanting to be a product of their environment.”

Ride or die

Cole, Miller and Crosby serve as the team’s last on-field vestiges to Oakland, the only remaining Raiders players who called it home and the last of soon-to-be-dying breed. The matchup is as meaningful for them as it is for the fans who cheered them then at the Coliseum, many of whom are due to show up Sunday to Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium.

The 49ers aren’t in San Francisco, either, a point to prod at for Raiders fans. Salazar said he’s hunting a ticket, the most expensive of San Francisco’s season.

“Even in my area,” Miller, the longtime left tackle said, as a 2018 first-round Raiders draft pick having grown up outside Sacramento, “it was Niners and Raiders and driving (around), too. It was Raiders everywhere. That’s where it was it. It was ride or die, and that was awesome. So I’m really looking forward to returning to that.”

A punter undrafted in 2019, Cole said he feels responsible alongside Miller and Crosby — a fourth-round draft pick in 2019 turned star defensive and face of the franchise — for teaching his teammates about Oakland’s tradition. The guile and grit inherent to Oakland hasn’t yet traveled or formed in Las Vegas, where Allegiant is speckled on Sunday afternoons with silver and black and opposing colors. “A vacation spot,” according to Hendrix.

“It would never happen (in the Coliseum),” said Hendrix, 57, and a Raiders fan since their Super Bowl XI victory. An East Oaklander, he paraded with his parents around Jack London Square in the aftermath with awestruck Oaklanders, their hands out their windows yelling, “We’re number one!”

And that they were.

Hendrix, a work-from-home entrepreneur who’s attended games at Allegiant Stadium, thinks the spirit will turn toward Oakland’s spirit when the Raiders win. Their 4-4 start with quarterback Fernando Mendoza waiting in the wings is cause for optimism, and Hendrix is hopeful coach Klint Kubiak is changing the culture.

“Raider Nation will be there more, and I think it’ll be more black jerseys in the crowd,” Hendrix said. “It’s a process, basically. They’re not a very good team. It’s a lot of fair-weather fans. Once they start getting good, everybody is going to come out.”

They didn’t have to be good in Oakland for Raiders fans to shower them with love. They simply had to be in Oakland — and Sunday afternoon, they almost will be.

“Every time the Raiders play the Niners, there’s something to talk about,” Bibbens-Williams said. “It’s just one of those things.”

Contact Sam Gordon at [email protected]. Follow @BySamGordon on X.