Would you get a load of this ugly piece of shit right here:
That, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is a rendering of the hideous Las Vegas Raiders-themed, uh, house(?) team owner Mark Davis plans to build and reside in on a six-acre plot of land he owns in Henderson, Nev. Here it would be appropriate to observe that no amount of money can buy a scintilla of good taste, if this observation had not been rendered redundant for all time by literally any photograph of Mark Davis not wearing a hat taken during any point in his adult life:
Before today, perhaps the bleakest and most revealing detail I've ever learned about another human being came via this devastating profile of Davis written back in 2014 by ESPN's Tim Keown: That for years upon years, Mark Davis routinely traveled roughly 500 miles from Oakland to the city of Palm Desert for that haircut, which is called a "bowl" cut because you can get it by simply inverting a large bowl over your cranium and then cutting the hairs that hang down below the rim of it with a pair of kitchen shears.
Back to the house!
You might say to yourself that the saddest fact about this 15,000-square-foot monstrosity is that, as the Review-Journal notes, it looks like the Raiders' team practice facility, and thus suggests that the team's demi-billionaire owner could think of nothing more exciting, home-wise, than living and sleeping and brushing his teeth while imagining that he is where the Las Vegas Raiders watch game film and, like, get e-stim treatments or whatever before going home to their families. That is, indeed, a very sad fact about this butt-ugly Raiders-themed pile of shit, and about the stunted born-rich man-child spending untold millions to construct it! But it is not the saddest fact about Mark Davis's great big Paw Patrol headquarters-looking eyesore, nor the most harrowing insight it allows into the life of the crazy-eyed Moe Howard-ass failson whose vision of enjoying hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth is to reside in it.
Here is an excerpt from the Review-Journal's article about the house:
According to the project plans, the house would have a “man cave,” a prep kitchen, a bar, a steam room, a library, a sleek pool area, a porte-cochere and an area for “guest/vendor parking.”
Review-Journal
Mark Davis is a lifelong bachelor. He owns a professional football team. He spends all of his free time around the professional football team he owns, and literally all of his time is free time, because he has never had to have anything like an actual job in his life and because he is a lifelong bachelor. Why does he need a "man cave" in the 15,000-square-foot Las Vegas Raiders-themed house in which he will live alone? Why would he even want a "man cave" in it? What does it even mean to say that a part of a 15,000-square-foot Las Vegas Raiders-themed mansion that looks like it was designed by an 11-year-old boy is a "man cave"? Mark Davis's whole fucking life is a man cave. The 15,000-square-foot Las Vegas Raiders-themed mansion is almost literally a man cave: It is a large cavernous space with a foreboding and grim exterior, which will contain one (1) man.
The whole idea of the "man cave" is sort of inescapably obnoxious: It takes as a given the essentially misogynist idea that a man's participation in, like, normal domestic family life, in a normally outfitted home, is a concession he makes to the feminizing forces of The Dreaded Wife (the generally unspoken part of this is that it's in exchange for sex). That's why the living room looks the way it does—tasteful, intentional, like a pleasant place for adults to be—rather than an overstuffed pleather-festooned, neon-lit micro-TGI Friday's plastered with Fathead wall decals of, like, Ben Roethlisberger. The man, the idea goes, must have a retreat from this participation—from, just to be clear, the family and home he chose for himself entirely of his own volition—to a place where he can indulge his fundamental and otherwise repressed animal need for stupid ugly macho shit and appalling decor choices and not having to compromise on the subject of what to put on the TV. Where he can be a man, where "man" is defined as "11-year-old boy."
The whole thing is a fantasy, in all cases: The steady lifelong fantasy of needing that shit; the fantasy of having a built-in genetic excuse to view the contours and relations of your domestic lifestyle as something alien imposed upon you and for which someone else bears fundamental responsibility; and then the temporary fantasy, while reclining in the ugly overstuffed La-Z-Boy furniture with the embarrassing cupholders in the windowless basement lair, stewed in bad beer and watching your 11th straight hour of NFL football, of a life indistinguishable from squatting at a Buffalo Wild Wings. But Mark Davis does not need those fantasies; his man cave cannot facilitate them. Every minute of his life is the expensive ritualized avoidance of adulthood and the benign domestic compromises of marrying a whole other person; every place he goes bears only the design choices of a guy who never outgrew football fetishism. He has spent half a century and many millions of dollars making it so.
The fantasy, for Mark Davis, is of what it would be like to be the other kind of guy. The man cave is where he will go to fantasize that he has a family to avoid.
