Sports
Former Warriors players gathered at City Hall last week to honor the head coach who helped them win the Oakland team’s first championship. The event, hosted by the city, honored Al Attles for his innovation and being one of five Black coaches in the NBA. Attles, who spent his entire career as an NBA player with the Warriors in the 1960s before becoming the team’s coach from 1970 to 1983, died in August at age 87. “We had two great…
The Oakland A’s and the Texas Rangers are tied in the bottom of the ninth as rookie Jacob Wilson comes to the plate with a man on second. He rips the ball up the middle and Zach Gelof breaks for home, sliding across the plate just before the ball reaches the catcher’s mitt. The players rush onto the field. The crowd of 30,000 yells and cheers. For one split second, the A’s glory days are back. But this is the…
The Oakland Athletics affiliate Coliseum Way Partners announced Monday that it has agreed to sell its stake in the Coliseum for a $50 million profit. The deal, which still needs to be approved by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, would provide the African American Sports and Entertainment Group with complete ownership of the storied sports complex in East Oakland. Should the supervisors approve, the A’s will receive $125 million for a stake in the Coliseum that they bought from…
Oakland has officially sold its stake in the Coliseum, setting aside concerns that the city’s adopted budget relied too heavily on a deal that had not yet gone through. At a news conference on Tuesday, Mayor Sheng Thao, City Administrator Jestin Johnson and Ray Bobbitt, managing partner of African American Sports and Entertainment Group, signed an agreement that would finalize the $105 million sale. The deal, which was announced in May, will likely allow the city to scrap a contingency…
Oakland has agreed to sell its stake in the Coliseum, ending decades of ownership at the storied East Bay event complex, Mayor Sheng Thao said at a news conference Wednesday. Following years of negotiations, Oakland and the African American Sports and Entertainment Group have reached an $105 million agreement for the city’s 50% ownership stake in the stadium site. The deal comes as city officials scramble to address a significant budget deficit while dealing with the loss of the city’s…
Before the tractors showed up, Raimondi Park didn’t look like the future home of a professional baseball team. Sitting in the shadow of Interstate 880, the long-standing West Oakland field felt forgotten. Almost every patch of grass was overgrown and the infield dirt had long since been blanketed with a thin layer of sod in a lighter shade of green. The pitcher’s mound, not much more than a bump, had become the territory of large Canadian geese that were seemingly…
At a news conference at City Hall on Tuesday, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao called on Major League Baseball to reject the Oakland A’s request to build a new stadium in Las Vegas. Thao said the city is ready to work with the team to build a stadium in Oakland. “We have a roadmap to get this done. Las Vegas is just getting started,” Thao said. MLB is expected to vote on the A’s relocation request later this month. The City…
Figure skater Michael Xie is a familiar face at the Oakland Ice Center, where he has been training for the past year and a half under coach Laura Lipetsky. The 16-year-old from Washington comes to Oakland for weeks at a time to master jumps and perfect his performances before national competitions. The rink is becoming more widely known in the figure skating community, having nurtured Olympian Alysa Liu, who came in seventh at the Beijing games this winter and until…
As the Oakland Athletics proceed to finalize a development agreement for the new baseball stadium at Howard Terminal, some community members who have been involved in the project worry that it won’t provide enough benefits to residents, including jobs and affordable housing. “This deal is going to bring value to the property owners and create more displacement,” said Jabari Herbert, a contractor and a member of the steering committee that worked on a Community Benefits Agreement. The committee, which included…