Mark Davis did not yet own the Oakland Raiders in 1998. His father, the legendary Al Davis, was still alive and in full control of the franchise, so Mark was relegated to the retail and equipment side of things. Among his innovations was the muff-style hand-warmer that football players use in cold weather. He invented it in 1986, ESPN reported a couple of years ago.
But Davis wasn’t just ahead of the curve on hand-warming outerwear. On Christmas Day 1998 — years after the Raiders had moved from Oakland, Calif., to Los Angeles and then back again to Oakland, and only years after the Internet became a thing — he registered the domain name LasVegasRaiders.com, as you can see from the WHOIS registry image below.
Nearly 19 years later, Davis went from longtime domain-name squatter to the owner of a valuable piece of Internet property when the NFL’s owners voted to allow him to move to Las Vegas.
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TMZ spoke to Davis in February, when news of the Raiders’ possible move was just ramping up. He confirmed that he had owned the domain name since the late 1990s.
“I think it’s only $8 per year … so, it’s worth it in case we end up there,” Davis said.
The Chargers and Rams, who both will be playing in Los Angeles next season, weren’t quite so prescient.
Both LAChargers.com and LosAngelesChargers.com have been owned since 2000 by a San Diego company called Blowout Video, and if you type in either of those URLs you get a landing page for a blog devoted to Chargers news, though it hasn’t been updated since January. One post, however, does seem to suggest that the domain name’s owner isn’t all that interested in selling it to the team after the Spanos family decided to move the franchise to Los Angeles.
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“Today, I’m a big fan of Philip Rivers, Antonio Gates, Eric Weddle, Keenan Allen and the other players that make up our roster. But I’ll never be a fan of the Spanos clan,” writes the blogger, who calls himself Norman. “I’ve finally come to terms that my hometown team, part of my life for the last 40-some-odd-years, is going to move to Los Angeles. It’ll be a sad day for me, my family and this entire city. With that in mind, I decided that true Charger fans need a place to voice their opinion about the impending move, team ownership & anything else Charger-related that they want or need to vent on. I created this site with the motto ‘By Charger Fans, For Charger Fans.’ ”
An email seeking comment from Norman, which also is the name of the person listed as the administrator of the site on the WHOIS lookup, was not immediately returned. The team itself is going with Chargers.com as its official URL.
LosAngelesRams.com, meanwhile, belongs to Brian Busch, the owner of a used car dealership and storage facility in Rapid City, S.D. Busch told the Argus Leader in 2016 that he first registered the domain name in 1997, two years after the team moved from Los Angeles to St. Louis, and has spent between $1,000 and $2,000 since then to keep it. It’s under his control until 2024, and the longtime Rams fan originally intended the site as an homage to the team’s Southern California past (it’s a blank GoDaddy.com page at the moment).
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Busch also said he hoped to work out some type of deal with the Rams over the domain name, but apparently, that hasn’t happened yet. The team is going with TheRams.com as its URL.
Only Davis had the foresight to nail down his team’s future URL, and he did so at time when the Internet still was in its relative infancy, decades before the Raiders’ move to Las Vegas even was an idea that existed in anyone’s head. So yeah, go ahead and make fun of his hair, or his weird minivan, or his love of P.F. Chang’s and Hooters. Davis is headed to Las Vegas after a low-stakes futures bet finally paid off, and is laughing last.
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