Oakland Raiders, you can start packing your silver and black stuff and get on with your move to Las Vegas. We’ve got a new team in town and they look like winners. According to the latest scouting report, “these guys are fit, agile and strong. They work well as a team and play a clean, error-free game. Very few illegal formations or missed assignments.” A handwritten note scribbled at the end of the report concludes, “these guys play with such focus and concentration you’d think their lives depended on it.”
The scouts got that right — their lives do depend on it. While this team doesn’t play football, they’re just as exciting to watch as they climb way, way up and dangle by a cord while operating seemingly dangerous equipment. As construction workers on the three new high rises which are going up near my office on 17th Street in downtown Oakland, they are easy to spot in their bright orange and sometimes optic yellow shirts and vests. And did I forget to mention that they’re very nice and walk with a “I own this town” swagger? That’s pride and poise for sure.
Team Orange is making itself felt all over the city. With a record number of high-rise buildings now under construction in downtown Oakland, these workers are giving us locals a sense of the excitement to come.
Sadly, it won’t be long before the Oakland Raiders move to a city that seems soulless and incapable of loving them as much as we do. Around the same time, thanks to many people and especially Team Orange, Oakland, a city that thought its heyday was in the 40’s and 50’s, will have been transformed into a place that looks to the future. Ironically and fittingly, exactly the kind of city that the Oakland Raiders would have liked.