Close Friend of Raiders Owner Mark Davis Provides Advisor Role For Davis While Serving As Las Vegas Aces CEO
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Officially speaking, Larry Delsen’s Las Vegas Raiders business card says he’s a member of the NFL team’s board of directors.
Unofficially speaking, Delsen — a certified public accountant from San Diego — has known Raiders owner Mark Davis for more than 30 years and is a close friend.
How close is Delsen to Davis?
Well, this January 2020 photo celebrating the official “Las Vegas Raiders” welcome to Nevada event published on the Raiders own website offers a strong clue about what Delsen means to Davis.
From left to right in the photo below, that’s current team president Dan Ventrelle who was the team lawyer at the time; Delsen next to Ventrelle; and also Delsen next to Davis who is in the center. There are also former team President Marc Badain and then Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak at the end on the right vis Raiders.con.
Sisolak officially welcomed the Raiders to Nevada at an announcement event at the Allegiant Stadium construction site on Jan. 24, 2020.
LVSportsBiz.com met Delsen in person one time — May 11, 2021 when Davis introduced Nikki Fargas as the team president of Las Vegas Aces, the WNBA team owned by Davis. Delsen is the team’s CEO.
In fact, Delsen posed with Fargas and Davis at that May 2021 event at a club inside the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium.
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Delsen has not talked publicly about the Aces or the Raiders in interviews.
But he is a longtime friend of Davis, serves as an advisor to the Raiders owner and has known the Davis family for more than three decades. Delsen is listed as Managing Partner of Delsen and Company LLP in San Diego on its website.
Delsen outlined his history with Davis during an April 2019 chat that was posted on the Jewish Nevada Facebook page.
It was around 1989-1990 when Delsen was playing catch with his boys in their San Diego neighborhood when a neighbor who was a commercial bank lender came by and told Delsen he had a friend who needed a financial statement.
“Do you know who Mark Davis is?,” the neighbor asked Delsen.
“Absolutely, he’s a pitcher with the Padres,” Delsen answered.
“Not that Mark Davis,” the neighbor responded. Delsen was told it was Mark Davis, the son of Raiders owner Al Davis. “Do you know Al Davis? It’s his son.”
Delsen recalled he met Mark Davis in a restaurant in San Diego for three hours and they hit it off. At the time, Mark Davis was creating a football hand warmer product called the “muff” and was manufacturing it in San Diego. The Raiders were playing their home games in Los Angeles when Delsen met Davis.
“We developed a close friendship and relationship,” Delsen said of Davis.
There was one more thing. Mark Davis told Delsen his father wanted to interview him, too.
So, Delsen drove north to the Los Angeles area and recalled he was “grilled” for two hours on finances, taxes and football.
It worked out well.
Delsen remembered Mark Davis telling him that his father, Al Davis, thought he was “sharp.”
“That’s all I needed to hear,” Delsen said on the Facebook video post.
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Delsen went on to check out the financial books for the Davises and the Raiders organization. In 2014 he was asked to fill an opening on the Raiders board of directors.
And then two years later in 2016, Delsen got a phone call from Davis, who told him the team was looking at a site for a potential football stadium. Delsen didn’t think Las Vegas would go for an NFL team and a stadium because of the NFL’s previous policies about gambling.
But the Nevada Legislature approved a hotel room tax increase in Southern Nevada and stadium supporter and former Gov. Brian Sandoval signed the stadium funding bill into law — a bill that was crafted by the Raiders’ Ventrelle and Jeremy Aguero, a current Raiders executive who was principal analyst at Applied Analysis at the time. The Raiders’ stadium, Allegiant Stadium, opened July 31, 2020 during the pandemic but fans were not allowed inside for Raiders games that year.
But in 2021, Delsen — like thousands of others — have attended Raiders games and other events at Allegiant Stadium after fans were allowed to watch the programming inside the publicly-subsidized stadium starting in July 2021. Southern Nevada contributed $750 million in public money to the stadium’s construction.
In 2014, Delsen did go to San Antonio to check out the scene there for a potential Raiders’ relocation.
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LVSportsBiz.com reached out to Delsen for an interview request. We didn’t hear back on the request. Because Delsen serves as Davis’ advisor, it would have been newsworthy to hear his thoughts on the Raiders’ difficult times this year.
We did report on Davis restructuring the business operations with the hires of Michael Crome as chief financial officer, Kevin Manara as general counsel and former stadium board consultant Aguero as the Raiders chief operations and analytics officer.
The turbulent times for the franchise extended to both the front office and the field in 2021. The Raiders have performed wildly inconsistently on the gridiron through 13 games, winning heart-thumping overtime games against Baltimore, Miami and Dallas but losing winnable games against mediocre teams like the Bears, Giants and Washington Football Team.
The Raiders are coming off their least competitive game of their up-and-down season, trailing 35-0 in the first half against rival Kansas City before losing, 48-9, Sunday. The team has lost five of its last six games and stands at 6-7 after winning five of the first seven games.
Delsen’s close friend, Davis, has also dealt with the resignation of former coach Jon Gruden, who left the team after his personal emails to his pal, Bruce Allen, the former Washington team executive, were leaked and made national news for their racist, anti-gay and sexist content in the emails when Gruden was an ESPN Monday Night Football broadcaster. Gruden sued the NFL, alleging the league leaked Gruden’s emails to Allen.
Plus, Davis saw two first-rounders — Henry Ruggs III and Damon Arnette — get cut last month because of major off-the-field behavior problems. Ruggs was charged with DUI resulting in death in connection , while Arnette was cut after he was seen in a video threatening to take a life.
Davis did celebrate the NFL owners’ decision Wednesday to award Super Bowl 58 to Las Vegas in 2024. “When you’re not winning on the field, it’s kinda nice to win off it,” Davis said yesterday.
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Delsen has spoken out about anti-Semitism. In his April 2019 talk with Hayim Mizrachi of Jewish Nevada that was posted on Facebook, Delsen discussed his parents surviving the Holocaust by escaping Poland, avoiding getting killed by the Nazis on a harrowing journey while on the run and reaching the Allies in Russia.
Delsen’s words about his parents’ escape for a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in Henderson were also quoted in a KTNV-TV news story at the time in April 2019.
If Delsen gets back to LVSportsBiz.com about his advisor role to Davis for this story, we will include any comments.
