That Time the Raiders Almost Moved to Irwindale

The Irwindale Raiders doesn’t quite roll off the tongue but it almost became the team’s home.

Xavier Hermosillo — they called him Mr. X — was a PR man for the Miller brewery in Irwindale in the mid-’80s when he first saw the gravel pit and dreamed of running a beer pipeline to a football stadium almost 20 miles northeast of downtown.

In 1987, word circulated that the L.A. Coliseum was balking at Raiders owner Al Davis’ demand for expensive renovations to the historic stadium. Hermosillo was handling PR for Irwindale. Hermosillo convinced the tiny town, fattened with state redevelopment money, to sweeten the deal with a $10 million check. Weeks later, Hermosillo took a helicopter ride with Davis over the 20-story-deep pit and gave him the check with no strings attached.

“I’ve had 14 successful careers,” Hermosillo says, recalling his life in politics and talk radio, and dropping names from King Hussein to Biggie Smalls to Oprah into fantastical tales. “I’ve been pronounced dead twice!” he blurted. “I can solve anything!”

What he couldn’t solve were delays that caused stadium financing to fall apart after the city of L.A. filed suit over the project’s environmental impact study. The Raiders (now in Las Vegas) went back to the Coliseum, then returned to Oakland in 1995.

A conveyor belt only recently filled in the gravel pit after years of dumping dirt from the nearby hills. "As far as we know," says Andrew Goodman of the Trammell Crow Company, which helped sell the site. "It’s the deepest fill site in the United States." The current owner plans to build more than a million square feet of logistics warehouses, hoping someone like Amazon or Walmart will move in.

Do you have a question about Los Angeles? Email Los Angeles historian Chris Nichols at askchris@lamag.com .

This story first appeared in the July 2024 issue of Los Angeles magazine, on newsstands now; click here to subscribe today.