As a kid growing up in Las Vegas, the best Valentine’s Day present I ever received wasn’t a box of See’s chocolates, a sappy card, or even a kiss from a pretty girl. Nothing so tame, pal.
My mother, bless her heart, took me to the fights.
Not some scrap between no-names in the smoky upstairs ballroom of the Silver Slipper, but a heavyweight battle between Muhammad Ali and Joe Bugner on Feb. 14, 1973, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
For a boy not yet 13, it was a transcendent night that overwhelmed my senses and remains indelibly etched in my memory. British fans from “across the pond” — as the sportswriters put it — had come to watch the strapping Bugner try his luck against the great Ali. Women in the crowd of 5,700 dazzled in their sequins, men barked opinions, and the air was pungent with cigar smoke, sweat, and ozone.
Her hair as red as Lucille Ball’s, mom wore her best (and only) mink stole. I was forced into a cheap suit I’d outgrown that fooled no one into thinking I belonged in the crowd. I didn’t care. I had lucked into a seat in the Vegas I’d imagined.
The handsome Ali was on his way to etching his reputation as the greatest heavyweight of all time. Bugner, an underrated boxer-brawler in the last great generation of heavyweights, was out to remind his decorated opponent that the path to the pantheon was not paved with palookas.
It was the night I saw Sammy Davis Jr. pass by so much smaller than I’d imagined him. It was the night I saw a larger-than-life Ali give the durable Bugner a first-class boxing lesson.
It was the night I became convinced that Las Vegas was a big-league sports town.
More: The Path to the Big Leagues Runs Through 51ԹϺ
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You’re hearing that a lot these days, with the booming Las Vegas market now home to multiple major-league professional sports franchises. Locals are snapping their imaginary suspenders and bragging that we’ve finally hit the big time — pointing to our city’s Stanley Cup and two WNBA championships as proof. To hear them tell it, we’ve finally made the grade as a major-league sports metropolis.
Time for a history lesson:
Long before the Vegas Golden Knights were forged as an NHL expansion team, long before the Aces set the WNBA ablaze, and long before the Raiders and Athletics abandoned Oakland, California, for Strip addresses and fat public financing agreements, Las Vegas was America’s great city of sports spectacle.
When it came to drawing a crowd and captivating fans around the world, only the Rome of old rivaled Las Vegas. (It was, of course, also very good for the casino business.)
None dare call it a sport, but when it came to grabbing the world’s attention, few athletic daredevils could approach Evel Knievel, whose disastrous attempt to jump the fountains at Caesars Palace on Dec. 31, 1967, crushed his bones but made international news. Robbie Knievel, Evel’s son, would cement the family legacy with a successful jump on April 14, 1989.
Want more proof we were a major-league sports city in everything but name? I was a newspaper columnist on the night of April 5, 1984, when Los Angeles Lakers center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar set the NBA all-time scoring record against the Utah Jazz. That happened on 51ԹϺ’s campus, which hosted 11 “home” games for the Jazz that season in the university’s newly built Thomas & Mack Center.
We might not yet have been recognized as a major-league sports town, and certainly not respected, but we sure had our moments.
From world championship boxing extravaganzas and the World Series of Poker — yes, I consider Texas hold ’em a sport — to PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, and star-studded tennis tournaments, as well as the National Finals Rodeo, Las Vegas always played above its weight class when it came to big-ticket sporting events. Keep this in mind, too: Las Vegas played host to Formula One races more than 40 years before the series inked a 10-year deal to stage the Las Vegas Grand Prix on and around the Strip beginning with a race in mid-November.
The Sands Hotel marquee welcomes the Las Vegas Grand Prix race in 1963. The race is returning to the Strip as the Formula 1 Heineken Silver Las Vegas Grand Prix in November 2023.
In the Las Vegas I grew up in, the Strip was a veritable senior citizens center for a generation of retired boxers and ballplayers who had found work in the casino industry (the great heavyweight champ Joe Louis chief among them). Also, bookmakers who had come to Nevada from cities where sports betting was illegal — places where underground bookies often were bullied by the underworld — never stopped being grateful for being allowed to practice their profession without looking over their shoulders. (With due respect to championship-caliber athletes, I’ve always wanted to see a Vegas bookmaker on a box of Wheaties.)
Professional sports leagues that got their starts — and grew in popularity — thanks in no small part to sports betting were only too happy to point fingers at wicked Las Vegas and its bookmakers who threatened to sully the grand American pastimes. The hypocrisy was thick.
And Las Vegas would always remain under a cloud as long as sports betting remained a national pariah. Legal and regulated in Nevada, our sportsbook industry was vilified throughout the country as a corruptor of amateur and professional athletes alike — despite a total lack of supporting evidence.
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Then one day, Las Vegas grew up. With approximately 2.4 million people now living in Southern Nevada, and another 40 million-plus annual visitors who can’t wait to see what Las Vegas comes up with next, the big-league city dream suddenly makes good business sense for professional sports leagues.
America also grew up when it came to sports betting. The country that had spent recent decades accepting an ever-widening gambling culture saw the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 strike down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 that had essentially limited wide-open legal bookmaking to Nevada.
Suddenly, state and local governments — along with sports teams and the leagues themselves — were standing at the window of a multibillion-dollar industry hoping to cash their tickets.
With wide acceptance of sports betting and a booming professional sports market in Southern Nevada comes potential career opportunities that extend far beyond the playing field — to business administration, marketing, and hospitality management, of course, but also to performing arts, architecture, engineering, and law. 51ԹϺ, meanwhile, adapted its degree programs while its leading researchers were partners in addressing issues such as problem gaming, developing international regulatory standards, and exploring emerging markets such as e-sports.
So by all means, go ahead and tout our new professional sports teams as yet another sign of our “big city” arrival, of the maturation of a city that exceeds much of America’s expectations. Just know that some of us have enjoyed that major-league feeling and heard the roar of the crowd in Las Vegas for a long, long time.
John L. Smith is a longtime Nevada journalist and author. A member of the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame, his latest book is Saints, Sinners, and Sovereign Citizens: The Endless War over the West’s Public Land.
