The Love of a Raiders Fan

With all the recent bickering on this site about the Raiders and all the haters, I thought it time to share my story about my love for the team and the fans of the Silver and Black.

In the late 90's I was a 30-something guy raising my three kids in the foothills of the Gold Country in Northern California. One day I found the Raiders Usenet newsgroup, alt.sports.football.pro.oak-raiders (ASFPOR).

Thinking this would simply be a forum for discussing the Raiders, I subscribed and began reading. Boy was I ever wrong. What I found was an eclectic group filled with sharp minds from all over the country and even on other continents. The Raiders weren't the only topic of discussion by a long shot.

WWW is generally understood to stand for World Wide Web, but in this forum it stood for Wild Wild West. The belly laughs were abundant; the caustic wit dripped from every post, and the absolute love of everything Raiders was the glue that bound them together.

I jumped in and began throwing in my two cents and was welcomed into the family with open arms. Over the next couple of years, "family" became a very real word I'd use to describe these folks. Although it was a cyber family, we leaked enough of our personal lives in our posts to get to know each other pretty well.

The haters, or trolls, were in abundance in the group, most usually posting some drivel about how all Raiders fans were costumed Halloween wannabe's, or former and future residents of the California penal system.

It was these poor witless victims of their own lack of originality that provided the daily entertainment. The mental assassination of these clowns brought tears to my eyes at times, leaving me laughing so hard that literally falling out of my chair was a regular occurrence.

Then one day in 1999 I broached the subject of us all getting together for a game at some point. Some of the group were locals who regularly attended games, and many of the others had never been to the Mecca of all things Raider, the House of Thrills in Oakland known as the Coliseum.

As we discussed the possibilities, a name for our little gathering was born. A simple typing error about the impending Tailgate party (I left off the T in Tailgate) and the moniker was born, we would call it Alegate. And so it came to pass, one Sunday night in 1999 that we gathered in Oakland for the first of many Alegates.

We had folks fly in from all over—Manhattan, Hawaii, Philly, LA, etc. The stories they told in the aftermath were priceless, and it was like meeting long lost brothers. The tailgating was hosted by a couple of locals, and to a man (and a few women) it was like coming home.

If you have never experienced tailgating in Oakland, there is no way words can properly describe the mass of humanity. A shanty town of pop-up tents, music blaring from every direction, the smoke of BBQ's creating an absolute environmental nightmare for the EPA, all done in the name of Raider love.

Over the next couple of years we continued these get togethers, including a road trip meeting in San Diego where we spent a couple of days in the Gaslamp Quarter partying amongst the sedate locals.

Most of us came without game tickets, and much to our amusement found Chargers fans willing to drive down to the Gaslamp to sell us their season tickets.

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