UFC Diary: Sport's gamblers set to rain down in Vegas
Dark, swirling crowds gathered over Red Rock Canyon and rolled east into the city. Our west-facing bedroom window at the Luxor hotel meant we had a pretty enviable view of this meteorological phenomenon. Just one of the many benefits of sleeping in a glass pyramid.
So the clouds rolled in. And then it rained. It was a good healthy dousing, they didn’t spare it. But it didn’t cause us to look up from our tablet (well, we were in a pyramid) for too long. Having gone to a school in Sligo that was only separated from the Atlantic Ocean by about three golf holes, dark rolling clouds lost their aura quite early in life.
To put the rain in those primary school terms, it was the kind of downpour that you’d probably get away with being allowed stay indoors if it was the small break. But the big break? You’d definitely be put out in it. Yet the same rain found its way to being the lead story on the Las Vegas local news bulletins...for the next two days.
Whatever about Monday’s reports, Tuesday evening’s headline, delivered breathlessly by the anchor, went something along the lines of ’After yesterday’s huge downpours, will it rain again tonight? Stay tuned to find out.’ Sure, you could stay tuned and find out.
Alternatively you could have done as the native tribes who used to call this scorched corner of the Mojave home did - pull aside the flap on the teepee and have a look for yourself.
On Tuesday you would have seen that more rain was about as likely as finding somewhere on the Strip that sells fresh fruit or a few vegetables. Not very, in other words.
Because Sin City is such a hub of sameness, anything that’s different, any novelty, such as a few drops of the wet stuff, is jumped upon. Sport has for so long been treated as a novelty here. The Fight of the Century had the place breathless a couple of months ago. This week it’s Conor McGregor’s turn (although the UFC is admittedly seen as a novelty by many outside Nevada too).
Combat sports are tailor-made for Las Vegas. They’re here and then they’re gone. Just like the rain clouds. Just like everyone who fills the 70,000-odd hotel rooms in the place. But the city’s powerbrokers - the politicians but more so the casinos and the moneymen - are desperate to change that. They’re ravenous to get their hands on a sport that isn’t here and gone, one that’s here and staying here.
For decades they have unsuccessfully courted any franchise from the big four Stateside sporting organisations - the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL - that was looking restless. But this was the one area where the house never won. The tired excuse that would perennially be cast up was that sporting teams were reluctant to move to a gambling mecca.
Fed up, Las Vegas has now changed tack and gone for the ’build it and they will come’ approach. In what was once an overspill car park behind the New York New York and Monte Carlo casinos a great, hulking state-of-the-art arena has risen up out of the desert.
It’s a damn impressive sight. At $350million it would want to be. Co-financed by entertainment giants MGM and AEG, it will have a capacity of 20,000 and will be ready to throw open its doors mid-way through next year.
And it looks like the tactic might just have worked. With the stigmas surrounding gambling in sport fading, the NHL are taking a long, lingering look at Las Vegas as the site for their next expansion team. Ice hockey in the desert could only make sense here but the city is considered the frontrunner for the new team. A trial season ticket drive vastly exceeded the original target and attracted over 13,000 fans.
But the NHL had better make up their mind soon as they may not have the place to themselves for long. On Monday, just about the same time as the heavens opened, the owner of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks threatened to move his team here if the state of Wisconsin didn’t grant him and his men $250million of public funding for a new arena of their own. It was the first move in a political game but the threat of moving to the desert can no longer be seen as an empty one.
The novelty may soon be about to wear off for sports in Vegas. That would be no bad thing. And anyway, they’ll always have the rain.
