In the pre-dawn hours one Monday morning following the 2007 NBA All-Star Game, a fight broke out at Minxx Gentleman’s Club & Lounge on Wynn Road in Las Vegas. A patron had been throwing cash all over the club from a garbage bag full of bills. A brawl ensued, and the man with the bag of money was tossed from the club by two men, a bouncer and club manager Tommy Urbanski. Outside of the club, shots rang out. Hit four times, Urbanski survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.
A fight in a Vegas strip club isn’t usually front-page news, but the man with the bag was the NFL player Adam “Pacman” Jones—and the alleged shooter, accused of doing the bidding of Jones, was eventually sentenced to up to ten years in prison. The shooting at Minxx was the culmination of a weekend of chaos across the city; the Las Vegas Sun reported that “403 people were arrested from Thursday to Monday night, more than half in relation to prostitution.”
It was meant to be something of an experiment: the first time the All-Star Game had ever been held in a city that didn’t have an NBA franchise. To many, the weekend was seen as an audition for Las Vegas, where the mayor, Oscar Goodman, had made no secret of how eager he was to woo a professional sports franchise to the growing city. Goodman worked hard to develop personal relationships with many of the commissioners of the major sports leagues. His dogged pursuit of the NBA’s David Stern led to Stern telling Goodman that Vegas would only have an NBA team “over my dead body.” (“That can be arranged,” Goodman jokingly replied.) But Goodman didn’t give up, and the All-Star Game was his first breakthrough.
Las Vegas had long coveted pro sports, but no league wanted to be associated with Sin City, or at least with one sin in particular: gambling on sports. Prior to the 2007 All-Star Game, all attempts to bring a team to Vegas had come up short. That event signaled a thawing of the icy attitudes held by the sports-industrial complex toward the city. But by the time the sun came up on Monday morning, Mayor Goodman was receiving calls from casino owners and league officials. If the weekend had been an audition, Las Vegas wasn’t going to book the part.
It was a setback for Goodman, a former mob lawyer who famously played himself in the movie Casino. By 1999, the year he was elected, the city had undergone a stunning makeover. Las Vegas had long had a reputation as a seedy place, visited largely by gambling junketeers and men looking to cheat on their wives. The 1990s saw a dramatic shift in the focus of the casino business from gambling toward conventions and family tourism. Palaces of swank and excess were replaced by pirate ships, roller coasters, and medieval castles. Instead of blackjack and free booze, fine dining and world class entertainment became the draw. By the time Goodman was elected mayor, Las Vegas had eclipsed Chicago as the top convention destination in America, less than half of casino revenue came from gambling, and the city was experiencing a construction boom of mega resorts that employed tens of thousands, with at least five thousand people moving to Las Vegas every month.
Goodman was elected on a platform that highlighted three major policy goals: develop a cultural centerpiece for the city, upgrade the community’s medical facilities, and land a major-league sports franchise. He pulled off the first two, adding a number of museums and performing arts centers during his tenure, as well as playing a role in establishing the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. But big-league sports? That proved more challenging.
For many decades, Las Vegas had no hope of attracting a major league. The only sport that wanted anything to do with the city was boxing, which had always been closely associated with gambling and never seemed to mind. In fact, Las Vegas was considered the boxing capital of the world, host to numerous marquee fights over the years, stretching all the way back to when Archie Moore and Nino Valdes fought for the heavyweight title at old Cashman Field in 1955. Outside of boxing, leagues and team owners were in lockstep opposition to sports gambling and feared that Nevada’s strong gambling culture could lead to influences on game outcomes. And even if they didn’t, the public might assume as much, which would hurt the credibility and integrity of the sport.
From as far back as the 1950s, public support for gambling (outside of the Northeast, anyway) had been low. The anti-tax attitude that swept the country in the 1970s, however, paved the way for the spread of gambling as one state after another turned to lotteries or casinos to fill budget gaps created by tax cuts. As more Americans had access to gambling closer to home, the stigma started to wither away. But while gambling grew into a major industry across much of America, sports betting was only legal in one state: Nevada. While millions of Americans were playing the lottery or pumping nickels into slot machines at home entirely legally, betting on sports remained the province of underground bookies and illicit gamblers. And betting on sports was the one type of gambling that actually saw public support decrease during the last half of the twentieth century.
Gambling scandals involving high-profile athletes like Pete Rose and Michael Jordan likely contributed to a general feeling that gambling and sports shouldn’t mix. The stigma persisted, with Las Vegas bearing the brunt, even though betting on sports was legal and regulated in Nevada. As far as the leagues were concerned, association with Las Vegas was association with sports betting, which was no better than associating with criminals. This attitude was so extreme the NFL rejected the city’s bid in 2003 to run one of their famous “What Happens Here, Stays Here” promotional ads during the Super Bowl and forbade NBC from airing any ads for the drama Las Vegas during any NFL broadcasts.
Meanwhile, the boom in Las Vegas had produced a city like none other in the United States. The rapidly growing hospitality workforce had been highly unionized since the 1940s. As a result of a strong local labor movement, the jobs each new casino development created came with high pay and good benefits, including employer-paid health insurance and pensions. These jobs brought more job seekers to the city than there were good union jobs to give out, leading to high levels of inequality. Nevada’s lack of income tax also made Vegas an attractive destination, but this, too, created problems. With so many people moving to the city in such a short period of time, public services were pushed to their limits, and schools were underfunded and overcrowded.
Vegas’s limited tax base also made it difficult to attract a sports team. Throughout the 1990s, owners of professional sports teams were increasingly asking state and local governments to provide tax breaks or even public money for the construction of stadiums and arenas. The old canard usually offered as a justification was that a pro team would invigorate the local economy with tourists spending money in local businesses. This has largely been debunked over the years, as we now know that professional sports franchises produce almost no benefit relative to the public money they take and are sometimes even a net negative for local economies and governments.
For Las Vegans, however, the arguments for public financing were unpersuasive even at face value. The city hardly needed sports to bring in tourists or to convince people to spend more money in their town. For the millions of new Las Vegans, and for their new mayor, having a sports team was less an economic proposition for the new millennium than a civic one. In 2007, Las Vegas had 1.7 million residents, more than twice as many as in 1990. But despite being as big or even larger than many metropolitan areas that already had pro teams, Las Vegans couldn’t shake the feeling they were invisible to the forty million people who visited the city every year. To Goodman, who grew up in sports-obsessed Philadelphia, having a professional team would show the world that Las Vegas was an actual city that didn’t necessarily belong to the tourists, one that continued to exist even after they flew back home.
Casino No Aware
Even had the 2007 All-Star Weekend run smoothly, the city would have had to contend with its lack of a facility capable of hosting a major-league sports franchise. At the time, the hotel and casino company Harrah’s was in the process of securing funding for a twenty-thousand-seat arena they hoped would serve as a sports facility. Like a lot of wealthy sports team owners, Harrah’s felt the city or state should foot some of the bill. Unlike a lot of wealthy sports team owners, the company failed to secure any public funding. While leaders of the casino industry were major power brokers in Nevada, they were less powerful when the casinos didn’t all align. The other casino companies opposed any public support for a sports arena. “It makes no sense to us to take the tax dollars we’re creating and build another competitor down the street,” Alan Feldman, a spokesperson for MGM Mirage, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007. It would hardly matter, as the 2008 financial crisis hit Las Vegas particularly hard, putting major construction projects in the city on ice.
“It’s as if the entire history of Las Vegas was leading up to hosting the Super Bowl.”
By 2012 the economy in Las Vegas seemed to be on the rebound, and the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns a number of sports teams and stadiums around the world, including the Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles, had decided Las Vegas deserved a shot at hosting professional sports. They partnered with MGM to build a multipurpose facility on the Strip that would meet both NHL and NBA standards. Most importantly, they financed it with $375 million of entirely private funds, something increasingly uncommon in modern professional sports. Of the fifty-seven stadiums built between 2000 and 2020 in the United States, forty-three were at least partially funded with municipal bonds. The construction of the arena prompted businessman Bill Foley to organize a consortium of investors to make a bid for an NHL expansion team. The league was skeptical there would be support for ice hockey in the desert, so the ownership group set out to get commitments for season tickets. They sold ten thousand in fewer than six months. The NHL unanimously approved the bid, and the Vegas Golden Knights were set to be the NHL’s newest franchise in October of 2017.
On October 1, just nine days before the Golden Knights’ season opener, a gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers at a music festival from his room in the Mandalay Bay, killing fifty-eight people and wounding hundreds more. When the team played their first home game, the mood was somber, but the community chose to rally around the team, hoisting banners in the arena that read #vegasstrong and holding a ceremony to honor the victims before the game. Incredibly, the expansion team made it to the Stanley Cup finals in their inaugural season, with “Vegas Strong” as their rallying cry all season long, and the city of Las Vegas went crazy for hockey in the process. Just as Oscar Goodman had predicted years before, the team served as a bond for the community and gave the once-invisible citizens of Las Vegas a platform upon which to be seen.
The success of the Golden Knights proved that Las Vegas was a viable sports city. Mark Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders NFL team, had long wanted to move his team to Las Vegas. The last time he suggested it to one of the league’s executives in 2014, he was laughed at. Now he saw a new opening. He partnered with Sheldon Adelson, billionaire owner of the Venetian hotel and prominent backer of Donald Trump, to help him find public financing. While the Harrah’s arena deal didn’t take off ten years before, Adelson seemed to have more political juice in Nevada, securing a record $750 million in public funds for a new football stadium in Las Vegas. The deal—then the largest public contribution to a stadium in American history—did not pass without controversy. While excited about the prospect of an NFL team, Las Vegans were generally against the idea of publicly financing it. State legislators came up with a compromise that allowed residents to have their cake and eat it too: fund the stadium with a tax on hotel rooms. The tourists would pay for the stadium, not the citizens of Las Vegas.
The bill passed the House on a 28-13 vote without allowing any time for debate. By promising thousands of union construction jobs, the deal’s supporters successfully courted unions to help them lobby for the arena. The real power broker was Adelson, however. State senators voted to absolve themselves from reporting any conflicts of interest around the bill, probably because so many of them had taken campaign money from Adelson. Even still, opposition was bipartisan, with one Republican legislator from Sparks, Ira Hansen, calling the deal a “disgrace.” “The big power players got their way and the real losers are the Nevada taxpayers,” he told the Reno Gazette-Journal. While there was general agreement that a tax on hotel rooms would be less of a burden on locals, the question remained: If we can raise nearly a billion dollars from raising taxes on tourists, why don’t we use it for things like education and housing? “If you think it’s worth it socially, culturally to have a football team, then it’s fine to vote for it,” Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economist who studies sports stadium deals, told the Gazette-Journal. “Just don’t do it if you think it’s an economic benefit. It’s an economic cost.”
After a considerable amount of backroom wheeling and dealing, the NFL eventually approved moving the team from Oakland to Las Vegas on a 31-1 vote among team owners in 2017. The Raiders wouldn’t get to play a game in Las Vegas until 2020, however, continuing in the meantime to play in the Bay Area in front of their spurned fanbase. Less than a year after the Raiders’ first season in their new home, the NFL made a stunning announcement: the 2024 Super Bowl would be played in the Raiders’ stadium in Las Vegas. It seemed like only yesterday the NFL had rejected the city’s request to air a tourism ad during the Super Bowl broadcast. Now the game would be held right in the heart of the city that nearly all of professional sports once held to be too unholy to associate with.
Most observers agreed one factor trumped all others in the about-face by professional sports leagues on Las Vegas: the 2018 repeal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) that led to the widespread legalization of sports gambling. As soon as the Supreme Court overturned PASPA, dozens of states moved quickly to legalize and regulate betting on sports. Rafts of money from gambling interests began to flow into the sports industry, from media to ballparks to the teams themselves. Within a couple of years, not only were people in many of the NFL’s biggest markets betting on football legally, they were sometimes doing so right in the stadium. A study by the American Gaming Association predicted that the four major sports leagues combined stood to reap as much as $4.2 billion in additional revenue from things like advertisements, sponsorships, and data fees from sports betting companies. One by one, the major sports leagues ended their longstanding opposition to any association with gambling, signing deals with sportsbooks and gaming corporations and dropping any pretense of concern about the integrity of sports. The final stigma had given way, and Las Vegas could now stand shoulder to shoulder with the other major American cities, a pariah no more. As Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal remarked, “It’s as if the entire history of Las Vegas was leading up to hosting the Super Bowl.”
Strip Mining
Not long after news of the city landing the Super Bowl broke, Las Vegas lured another big-time sport. Liberty Media, an American company that had purchased the global motorsports league Formula 1 a few years before, announced plans to hold an annual race on the streets of Las Vegas. The league promised to bring its global fanbase and incredibly luxe line of sponsors to the city by racing the fastest cars in the world up and down the Las Vegas Strip.
The Super Bowl would be, by all accounts, a major success. Unlike the 2007 NBA All-Star Game, the city was well prepared for the influx of 330,000 visitors, leaving them and the NFL impressed at how well-suited Las Vegas was for hosting an event that had vexed, in its size and scale, some larger cities. Tickets sold for an average of $7,790, an all-time high. The economic impact to the city has been estimated at $1 billion, with additional tens of millions in tax revenue.
“Nevada politicians singularly focused on financing a ‘world-class’ stadium for a California billionaire.”
Formula 1, however, began to test the limits of Las Vegas’s appetite for professional sports. After originally promising locals they wouldn’t need any public financing for the race, the government ended up footing a $40 million bill to repave the roads. Added to this cost was the constant construction around the Strip for several months before and after the race, creating traffic and confusion for nearly half of the year, costing local businesses between $20 and $30 million. While locals could rally around the Golden Knights and the Raiders, as well as WNBA’s Aces (which had been the San Antonio Silver Stars until relocating in 2018), Formula 1 was different. Ticket prices were so outrageous only wealthy international tourists seemed to be able to afford them. Locals who were promised discounts found their tickets were only for practice sessions, not the actual race. By the time the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix arrived, “Fuck Formula 1” bumper stickers were a common sight around town. Voters were demanding the city council figure out a way to get out of the ten-year contract with Formula 1.
In October of 2024 the Tropicana Resort was imploded, a common and almost ritualistic occurrence along the Las Vegas skyline, where massive edifices are razed to the ground and rebuilt over and over to reflect the ever-changing American culture and zeitgeist. What is planned to go up in its place isn’t another garishly themed casino resort but a baseball park. The Oakland Athletics, who ranked dead last in attendance in the MLB the prior two seasons, announced they were planning to relocate to Vegas. No longer was Las Vegas considered a bold or risky choice for expansion. “I’m very excited about the opportunity in Vegas. The fans there are terrific,” said Athletics’ owner John Fisher, citing the success of the Raiders and the Golden Knights, as well as the Athletics own triple-A team, the Aviators. In contrast to the controversial machinations behind the Raiders move, the MLB’s vote to move the Athletics to Las Vegas was unanimous. The deal was sealed by the Nevada legislature, which passed a bill in 2023 allocating $380 million in public money for the construction of the new ballpark. The day after approving it, Republican governor Joe Lombardo vetoed a bill that would have provided Nevada school children with universal free breakfast and lunch, something Vicki Kreidel, an elementary school teacher and president of her local teacher’s union, called a “knife in the gut.” She and a number of other teachers filed a lawsuit against the state to block the funds for the new ballpark, arguing the funding violated the state’s constitution by diverting money away from education.
Their lawsuit was thrown out by a state judge, but the fact remains that Nevada—with its lack of income tax—has some serious deficiencies when it comes to public education. Clark County, where Las Vegas resides, has the fifth largest public school district in the country, with about three hundred thousand students and over thirteen hundred teacher vacancies. The state spends about $4,000 per student less than the recommended levels. The teachers’ lawsuit stated that “during the last Legislative Session, with important education issues outstanding . . . Nevada politicians singularly focused on financing a ‘world-class’ stadium for a California billionaire.” That California billionaire is John Fisher, heir to the family that founded the clothing retailer The Gap. He took full ownership of the Athletics in 2016, and under his watch the franchise (and the stadium) went to pieces. The Los Angeles Times reported that, during his tenure as team owner, the ballpark flooded with sewage, experienced power outages during games, and had feral animals roaming the corridors. Meanwhile, Fisher doubled season ticket prices.
In a poll released in April of 2024, 52 percent of Nevada voters were opposed to the public financing of the new stadium, with only 32 percent in favor. After losing their lawsuit, the teachers union collected signatures for a ballot measure to block the public financing deal. That effort was also shut down in court when a judge ruled the petitions didn’t include the full context of the referendum and as a result were “confusing” to those who signed. The union is currently working to collect signatures to try again in 2026.
All of this means that Fisher’s plan to bring the Athletics to Las Vegas is currently up in the air. Before he can access any of the public money now allocated for the stadium, he has to show the state that he has at least $100 million of his own money invested in the project. He has yet to do so, leading some to wonder whether Fisher is hesitating given the ongoing public fight. Were he to move forward with the deal and the union’s referendum were to pass in 2026, he may be left to foot the entire bill out of his inheritance rather than the public till. With other cities who might be more amenable to subsidizing the team, everyone patiently waits to see if Fisher will call or fold.
Both Oscar Goodman and his wife Caroyln, who succeeded Oscar as mayor, have at times been critical of the Athletics deal—hard to believe, perhaps, given Oscar’s crusade to bring sports to Sin City at the turn of the millennium. “I may have been the pigeon, but I told them right off the bat I’m not going to let Las Vegas be used as a place that’s going to be played off against another city that’s trying to keep a team or build a stadium,” Oscar told local news channel KTNV. These days, the interests that once united to keep sports out of Las Vegas have conspired to turn Las Vegas into Sports City, USA. With nearly half of all the ticket sales for Raiders games—and more than half of the tickets for Formula 1—going to tourists, it seems all of America (and much of the rest of the world) believes they have a claim on Las Vegas sports. The city’s workers, schoolchildren, and everyday folks who once rallied around the Golden Knights with cries of “Vegas Strong” have once again been moved to the background. But if a group of pissed-off teachers get their referendum on the ballot next year, it’s going to be hard for anyone—tourists and billionaires alike—to ignore them much longer. Oscar Goodman always said that pro sports would give his city something to rally around and unite behind. He was right.