By Alan Snel
LVSportsBiz.com
Raiders owner Mark Davis said his word of the day Monday was “compartmentalize.” How else was he going to mourn the death of his best friend, former Raiders receiver great Cliff Branch, while also celebrating a lucrative stadium naming rights deal with Summerlin-based Allegiant Air during Monday’s stadium topping out event.
Here’s Davis discussing losing Branch, who won three Super Bowls in 14 years with the Raiders, and also explaining the importance of the Allegiant Stadium-Raiders naming rights partnership with the ninth largest airline. LVSportsBiz.com last week explained the business strategy behind a Raiders-Allegiant naming rights partnership.
The Allegiant naming right deal appears to be a 30-year deal because Davis told LVSportsBiz.com after the topping out ceremony, “I think (Allegiant Air CEO) Maury Gallagher is somebody I’d like to work with for the next 30 years.”
Neither Raiders nor Allegiant execs commented on the terms of the naming rights partnership, but LVSportsBiz.com believes the annual value of the deal is less than $20 million a year.
LVSportsBiz.com spoke with Allegiant Chief Marketing Officer Scott DeAngelo about how the Raiders-Allegiant deal came together.
A topping out ceremony is a construction site rite for the hardhats and local famous people to scrawl their names on the final beam that is installed at a media event to create buzz. Although in this case, it’s hard to imagine that more media attention can be granted to this $1.88 billion stadium project, which includes $1.37 billion for the actual construction cost of the domed, 65,000-seat palatial venue that is scheduled to open July 31, 2020.
Here’s a video look at the beam being hoisted for its stadium installment.
Three construction workers helped place the final beam into place — Myron Todichinii, Sonny Begay and Jason Gilbert.
Many of the 1,500 construction workers who work at the the 62-acre site daily signed the beam. Here’s hardhat Eric Johnson of Laborers Local 872 explaining what signing the beam meant to him. “I means I had a lot to do with getting this together. It’s personal,” the 872 Laborers member said.
Here’s Allegiant Air Maury Gallagher looking skyward at the beam that is being hoisted into place.
Even Congresswoman Dina Titus, whose District 1 includes the stadium site, attended the event and offered a few words. She impressed not a few football fans when she mentioned former Raiders defensive lineman Otis Sistrunk and Pro Football Hall of Famer Fred Biletnikoff in her few words at the topping out event.
Davis comes out to share lunch regularly with the construction workers who are now working two shifts and weekends at the site on the west side of Interstate 15 across from Mandalay Bay hotel-casino and is bounded by Hacienda Avenue on the north, Polaris Avenue on the west and Russell Road on the south.
“When you get close to the stadium, the scale of it blows you away,” said Lawrence Epstein, chief operating officer of MMA fight promoter UFC in Las Vegas and vice chairman of the Las Vegas stadium board. Epstein noted the stadium schedule will include at least one annual UFC event in addition to ten Raiders games and six UNLV football contests.
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