Sports
Some families hand down dishware and handmade quilts. Other families hand down aliases, casino luck, and hip-smashing, hard-hitting, skirt-rocking roller sports. Jane Hammer’s family falls into the second category. Hammer is team captain and coach for The Oakland Outlaws roller derby team – a group of women athletes who represent, “tenacity, fire, and drive.”
Imagine a series of summer afternoons at the Oakland Coliseum a few years in the future. The sun-dappled parking lot has become a Tower of Babel—English, Spanish and a smattering of Scandinavian tongues—but all are mutually intelligible in their passion for one sport: soccer. It might just happen, since Oakland is bidding to host the 2018 or 2022 World Cup.
Oakland resident Wilbert McAlister grew up watching Westerns at the movie theater in his rural hometown of Madera, Calif. For years he reveled in the exploits of white heroes, but as an adult he began to ask himself why none of the actors resembled him or his ancestors, who were ranchers in Oklahoma. As he explained to Oakland North, this question of identity led him to become president of the Oakland Black Cowboy Association, which keeps East Bay residents connected…
Oakland as a future soccer World Cup host, racial disparity in the awarding of city contracts, and a possible teen youth center in West Oakland were among the discussion items at Oakland’s City Council meeting Tuesday night.
The third annual Scraper Bike Day celebrates yet another Oakland phenom that has gone bigtime. An O.N. video, plus music that will get stuck in your head.
Video report: Michael Jackson devotees dressed as zombies and assembled in North Oakland on Saturday as part of Thrill the World, a yearly event when thousands of people around the world dance to the song “Thriller” at the exact same time.
The race, last run in Oakland in 1984, will take marathoners from City Hall through North Oakland, and then all over town.
At the Golden Gate Public Library on Tuesday night, a diverse group of young dancers celebrated Diwali, the Festival of Lights, continuing a tradition that is thousands of years old .
An ambitious east-west bike plan proposal set off agitated debate at a meeting Tuesday in North Oakland’s Longfellow district, where one speaker likened the neighborhood to a bride on her wedding day. The plan to remove medians, he said, is going “to take her dress, smear her make-up, shave her head, and pare her down to a tank top.”