The Las Vegas Raiders once had a different nickname when they were back in the old AFL, and it was far less menacing.
If you’re a Las Vegas Raiders fan whose history with the team dates back to the old AFL, you know that some pretty weird things used to happen back in the day. The AFL was a free-wheeling league where major decisions about the league and its teams were often made on the fly and off the cuff, especially in the first few years.
Take the nickname. It’s now one of the most revered in sports, partly due to the stability, but also because of teh outlaw image it projects. According to Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk, though, the Raiders were once known as “the Señors” for a period of nine days back in 1960.
How do we know this? The team posted about the change on its Twitter account, stating that this change happened 66 years ago on this date. The video attached to the post includes quotes from local officials who explained that the change was made due to “public” demand.
So how did that happen? By design, sort of. The franchise partnered with the Oakland Tribune to hold a contest to come up with a name for the team, and more than 10,000 submissions were offered.
The finalists, per a 2020 item in the San Jose Mercury News, were Admirals, Lakers, Raiders, Diablos, Mavericks, Seawolves, Gauchos, Nuggets, Señors, Dons, Costers, Grandees, Sequoias, Missiles, Knights, Redwoods, Clippers, Jets, and Dolphins.
Somehow the Raiders became the Señors, but the team resisted the change. According to Florio, this was due to a practical reason offered by Tribune sportswriter Scotty Sterling, who would later become the team’s GM.
“We don’t have the accent mark for the ñ in our headline type,” Sirling said, referring to the punctuation mark that’s technically known as a tilde.
As a result, Oakland Señors disappeared just nine days after they were born. The Raiders arrived, and the nickname and famous logo represented a pivot point in the team’s history.
One of the bits of history that was lost in transition from Oakland to Las Vegas is the virtual disappearance of the old “Black Hole” in what used to be the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum. That was where the combination of motorcycle garb and Halloween costumes first emerged, and there are plenty of stories about opponents who experienced bad things when they ended up close to that section.
Today, of course, things are far more tame, but it could be worse. At least the Raiders didn’t become some variation of "the Oakland Gentlemen” although that would have been hilarious for whatever time the name might have lasted.