Las Vegas couple decides to name son Raider

Dan Saley and his wife, Stefanie, were expecting their first child and couldn’t decide what to name it. They only agreed that the baby’s name, like the city they call home, should be unique.

Two weeks before his wife was due, the expectant father was driving on Interstate 15 near Las Vegas’ new NFL football stadium.

Eureka!

No, that wasn’t the name he came up with.

Nor would the couple call their baby boy Allegiant or Stadium.

But what about Raider?

Dan thought naming their firstborn for his favorite football team didn’t have a Holy Roller’s chance with his wife.

But Dan said Stefanie was mostly neutral, perhaps owing to her Swiss upbringing. Stefanie literally grew up in the shadow of Habsburg Castle, a medieval fort on the river Aar not far from Zurich.

But that’s where they left it. And a day after Stefanie gave birth to an 8-pound baby boy at Summerlin Hospital, the infant still didn’t have a name.

Like Derek Carr checking off to a pass receiver in the flat, Dan floated “Raider” out there again.

“I looked at her, she looked at me,” Dan said.

“Let’s do it,” Stefanie said.

Touchdown!

Raider Rolf Saley turned a month old this week.

He has yet to have his face painted silver and black. He still doesn’t have a Raiders onesie, because baby shops are not considered essential businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.

“I wanted him to have a strong name, and I wanted it to be unique — but not weird,” Dan Saley said. “I didn’t want it to be ‘Apple’ like Gwyneth Paltrow’s kid.”

Names that he liked: Charlemagne (as in the emperor of Franks and Romans) and Aurum, the latin word for gold.

Names that Stefanie liked: Zander, Zane … and Rider.

What’s adding a vowel when it comes to a birth certificate?

Dan said he and Stefanie are planning to make a teammate for little Raider, and that papa also is a Golden Knights fan. Stefanie’s dad was a hockey coach and her brother a hockey player.

But if it’s a boy, they said they would probably just name him Sterling.

Around the horn

— “Live from San Quarantine,” a free concert streamed by singer-songwriter Jewel to benefit Las Vegas’ tennis-based Inspiring Children Foundation during the coronavirus pandemic, raised $550,000 in pledges — about one-third of the Foundation’s goal of $1.4 million after two major fundraising events were canceled by the virus threat.

“We had over 200 million social media impressions. What was really cool was how many small-dollar donations we got,” founder Ryan Wolfington said of the foundation that is responsible for sending more than 100 Las Vegas youth to Ivy League and Ivy League-caliber colleges.

— Despite finishing 29th finish in last week’s inaugural eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series race, Kyle Busch said he is looking forward to trading e-paint in Sunday’s second simulated event that will use virtual Texas Motor Speedway. (FS1 will televise at 10 a.m.)

“Everyone’s doing it — it’s the hot thing to do — and it was certainly fun to do last weekend to help everyone forget about everything that is happening in the real world,” the reigning Cup Series champion from Las Vegas said about driving stock cars via online simulator during the coronavirus pandemic.

Denny Hamlin edged Dale Earnhardt Jr. for the victory in the first race at virtual Homestead-Miami Speedway that attracted 903,000 viewers, making it the most-watched sports-related broadcast on cable last Sunday.

— Instead of checking WHIPs and WARs and the other preparations one must make before opening day, Oakland A’s radio play-by-play voice Ken Korach of Las Vegas spent the past week doing voiceovers for kids’ Wiffle Ball games and other backyard baseball-related videos sent in by A’s fans during the pandemic virus threat.

It was nearly as much fun as pursuing Bigfoot and other aliens with former A’s slugger Jose Canseco.

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During a teleconference hosted by the NHL on Friday, Logan Couture of the San Jose Sharks said a security guard once told him he had seen only two players carrying books into the rink: Him and Marc-Andre Fleury.

To which the Golden Knights’ goaltender replied: “I must have been holding it for someone else.”

Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.