At 93, a Raiders fan is going to her first-ever game
Helen Emerson moved from the Bay Area to Las Vegas over 50 years ago. When the Raiders did the same in 2020, they were following her, she jokes.
Emerson is 93. She’s been a Raiders fan since the team’s inception in 1960. On Friday, she finally got to go to her first-ever game when her beloved team hosts the New England Patriots in a preseason contest.
After the long wait, Emerson almost didn’t make it inside. A combination of traffic and finding the right place to enter the stadium meant by the time she made it inside the game had already started and she had missed some of the scoring.
The pregame trouble did little, however, to dampen Emerson’s enthusiasm about her experience.
“It’s very awesome,” Emerson said of Allegiant Stadium. “I was just amazed at the amount of people in there. Holy smoke, it looked like every seat was taken. I know there had to be some empty seats somewhere, but I couldn’t spot them.”
The Raiders did their part capping off a perfect preseason with a 23-6 win.
“I was hoping my first game was going to end in a win and it did,” Emerson said. “A nice win … it was a really decisive win.”
She said the Raiders kept the Patriots in check and she enjoyed watching individual players, “to see what exactly are these guys doing to help win this game.”
“The players just always amazed me,” Emerson said, recounting the days of wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff, center Jim Otto and other Raiders legends of the 1960s and 1970s.
True black-and-silver fan
Through the Super Bowl victories in 1976, 1980, and 1983, the moves from Oakland to Los Angeles and back to Oakland, then to Las Vegas, and all the ups and downs in between, Emerson has been there for the Silver and Black.
“About as long as they’ve been in existence, I’ve been a fan,” she said during an earlier interview.
The New York City native said she grew up with three brothers who listened to football on the radio before games were broadcast on TV. Instead of trying to fight them for radio time, she joined them and became a football fan.
She and late husband Ernest, who was in the military, became Raiders fans because they lived in the Bay Area near Oakland when the team started up.
With five kids growing up in the family, there was never enough time or money to go to a game. Especially after Ernest’s death in 1977.
“Once I became widowed, the whole responsibility of family raising was mine,” Emerson said, sitting on the patio outside the same Las Vegas house near Pecos Road and Owens Avenue that she, Ernest and the family moved into in 1968. “I didn’t have the time or the resources. Instead of two salaries now, we only had one. It was pretty tough.
“I had a lot of responsibilities,” she continued. “I couldn’t throw money away on my entertainment. When television came on the scene and everything like that, I could watch the games on Sundays.”
Bucket list for both
Emerson’s daughter Dianne Wiseman also a Raiders fan since the 1960s, took her mom to Friday’s game.
Neither had ever been to an NFL game.
“This is on my bucket list of things to do,” said an excited Wiseman, 69, who drove down from her home in Carson City.
“I figured she would just tell me no,” Wiseman recounted, thinking her 93-year-old mom, even though she’s a superfan, wouldn’t want to go to a big, loud, crowded football game.
Still mentally sharp, with her hearing and eyesight still strong, Emerson, who uses a walker and a wheelchair, said before the big game that she was looking forward to being in her wheelchair in the stadium and taking in the full spectacle, however loud that may be.
“I just kinda nonchalantly said, ‘Do you want to go to a Raiders game?’” Wiseman said. “And she just said, ‘Yes.’ So I was kinda jazzed.”
Contact Brett Clarkson at bclarkson@reviewjournal.com or 561-324-6421. Follow @BrettClarkson_ on Twitter. Review-Journal staff writer David Wilson contributed to this report.
