LAS VEGAS — One month from today, Las Vegas plays host to a Super Bowl inside a spiffy domed stadium near The Strip that houses an NFL franchise.
A stunning sentence to both older natives and anyone who has lived here for 20 years or so, but league commissioner Roger Goodell will beam that all of this was so meant to be.
“Surreal,” Dave Sharapan says.
This show has been 10 years in the making. Still, the Pittsburgh native and veteran Vegas oddsman sounds as stunned by those plans as if they’d just been revealed.
“No other way to say it, it’s freakin’ surreal.”
In his office, South Point sportsbook director Chris Andrews is succinct about ever envisioning a Super Bowl landing in this town, in his backyard.
“Oh, god no. You kidding me? Geez. No. Hell, no," he said. "They wouldn’t even let us advertise. They weren’t even allowed to mention ‘Vegas’ in ads. Now? It’s incredible.
“We’re one of the centers of the sports universe.”
Money (what else) finally brought NFL to Vegas
Too bad Hunter S. Thompson isn’t around to paint this scene with panache, perhaps parking his Red Shark, that beast of a 1973 Chevrolet Caprice convertible, anywhere he pleases outside that shiny black-metal barn.
The past 10 years have been pure gonzo, befitting his fictional-narrative style. And, as is often the case, it's all about the money.
In late 2014, former Navy and Raiders tailback Napoleon McCallum, UNLV’s president and Bo Bernard, then the executive director of the International Gaming Institute, chatted with Raiders owner Mark Davis in Oakland.
A clandestine meeting was arranged for February 2015, to explore possibilities with Las Vegas officials and politicos, who would approve $750 million in stadium aid. In March 2017, NFL owners voted 31-1 to let the Raiders relocate to Vegas.
On July 31, 2020, the $2 billion Allegiant Stadium opened for business. Deliver a shiny new stadium to the NFL, get rewarded with a Super Bowl. That’s the nutshell version.
Of all the sportsbook directors, gamblers and city figures with whom I’ve chatted over the past year about the NFL’s marquee game coming to Las Vegas, Michael Gaughan was both abrupt and insightful.
Asked if his Vegas-pioneer father Jackie Gaughan, who was 93 when he died in 2014, might have ever envisioned a Super Bowl in Las Vegas, 80-year-old Michael Gaughan howled.
“Had I told him, before he died, that the Super Bowl would be here in the 2020s, he would have laughed at me. But he never thought they’d charge for parking in this town, either.”
Like a plague, paid parking arrived with investments from Southern California about 10 years ago. It’s still free, however, to park your rig at Michael Gaughan’s South Point hotel and casino.
“But he would say the Super Bowl is great for the town,” Michael said, “and I think it’ll be great for the town, too.”
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Major sporting events now regular occurrence in Las Vegas
The title game of the new college football playoffs had been penciled in for Allegiant next January, but it conflicted with — and lost out to — the mammoth Consumer Electronics Show.
The Final Four, however, will cap the 2028 NCAA Tournament at Allegiant, a natural fit considering Vegas plays host to five conference hoops tournaments every spring.
Hopefully it acknowledges Jerry Tarkanian, who first made this a relevant sports town with high-octane UNLV squads that went to four Final Fours and won it all in 1990.
The NCAA’s Frozen Four will take place inside T-Mobile Arena, home of the reigning Stanley Cup-champion Vegas Golden Knights, in 2026.
Major League Baseball owners recently approved the transfer of the Oakland Athletics, who will build a stadium where the Tropicana now stands, and rave global reviews greeted Formula One’s début Vegas race in November.
Before they even ran that race, F1 officials extended a 3-year agreement to 10 years, fully aware of this fertile terrain.
If and when the NBA comes to town, the irony will be that many long-timers believed, due to Tark the Shark’s wild basketball success, it would be the first of the four major sports to call Vegas home; now, it’ll be No. 4.
A center of the sports universe, indeed.
What 2024 Super Bowl matchup would draw most fans to Vegas?
Who will battle here in Super Bowl LVIII come Feb. 11?
If it’s the San Francisco 49ers, Sharapan says, look out.
“We will become a San Francisco suburb. This place will be incredible, as far as economic impact. They’ll come, stay and spend money. The Rams would probably be okay, too. The Cowboys would be a monster, an absolute monster.
“I know the league is hoping it isn’t Tampa Bay.”
I presented him with my wish; Cleveland-Detroit. Neither squad has ever played in a Super Bowl.
The Browns won the last of their four NFL titles in 1964, the Lions’ crown in 1957 was the last of their four, too. Detroit defeated Cleveland in championship games in 1952, ’53 and ’57, the Browns beat the Lions in 1954.
Since 1990, Cleveland owns two playoff victories, and Detroit is 0-for-8 since 1992.
In November, at Circa Sports, patrons could have grabbed Lions over Browns, in a championship exacta futures proposition, at 140-to-1, Browns over Lions at 150-1.
Sharapan being from Pittsburgh and I hailing from Milwaukee, we’ve been lifelong supporters of teams that squeaked into this postseason. At Circa, Steelers over Packers was 8,000-1, Packers over Steelers 10,000-1.
On a more likely note, Niners over Chiefs was 14-1, Chiefs over Niners 15-1. Sharapan agrees that Browns vs. Lions would be madness.
“My god, bring THAT party here! Get them out of that Rust Belt, February in Vegas, with the Super Bowl being here? Over. Over! Done! We’d look back at it like a big fight weekend.
“Two Midwestern cities like that? They won’t have enough food, booze and whatever else that people will come here to do.”
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Hunter S. Thompson's Vegas Super Bowl thoughts would have been epic
In 1971, the party favors might have run dry when Thompson visited to cover the Mint 400 off-road race. He told an editor, “Only a genuine freak could have created the Circus-Circus, which is where I finally found the American Dream.”
Three years later, to another editor, he described his style. “It’s too heavy, too rude, too weird and with too many sharp edges … besides all that, I like it.”
During Super Bowl XXII festivities in San Diego, in January 1988, I attended Thompson’s show in a downtown club, and it went south the moment he opened his pie hole, slurs and mumbles spilling forth.
Refund-demanding patrons emptied the place, but I remained with maybe two dozen. At the foot of the stage, we fairly gawked at this incoherent cartoon who was finally helped off the stage.
At 67, Thompson killed himself with a shotgun on Feb. 20, 2005. Two weeks earlier, New England beat Philadelphia in Super Bowl XXXIX. He was a rabid football fan and, to his wife, titled a suicide note, “Football Season is Over.”
Courtesy of widow Anita Thompson, Hunter’s Red Shark returned to Vegas in August 2018, in conjunction with, of course, a cannabis museum’s grand opening.
Fifty-three years ago, his two-part “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” series for Rolling Stone magazine became a best-selling book, in which he detailed the contents of the Caprice’s trunk.
“Two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers …”
Supposedly, a pint of ether, too. Hunter flirted with fact and fiction, uproariously blurring lines. He would have been the perfect historian to document the NFL marking its territory here in one month, a reality that still stuns many locals.
Football season in Vegas has just begun.
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