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I.
His real name was Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, and in 1968, after he wore out his welcome in Miami, he moved to Las Vegas. The story went that Rosenthal had ties to prominent organized crime figures in the Chicago Outfit, but here is what he said about all that in a wild interview with writer Roberto Santiago:
In 1974, Las Vegas reduced its sports betting tax from 10 percent to 2 percent. Soon after, Rosenthal opened the first-ever sports book inside a casino, the Stardust, around the same time a new NFL pregame showed debuted on CBS, and an anchor named Brent Musburger evoked a new catchphrase, You are looking live, as a shout-out to a nation of gamblers, some of them clients of Rosenthal’s new venture.
What happened next was such a classic Vegas story that it became a Martin Scorsese film, Casino, starring Robert DeNiro as a character based on Rosenthal named Sam “Ace Rothstein.” The sports book became an essential element of the modern-day casino, and Rosenthal became its face, hosting a television show for several years until he got banned from Vegas due to his alleged ties to organized crime figures, somehow survived a car bombing outside of a Tony Roma’s, semi-retired and moved to back to Florida, and died in 2008. And other than acknowledging that this rather brutal scene was based on a real-life incident…
…Rosenthal refused to admit to much of anything in his interview with Roberto Santiago, other than the fact that Las Vegas built its mythology on a fundamental lie.
II.
The thing I realized the first time I went to Las Vegas—and I know this is not an especially novel thought, but hey, I was in my 20s and I idolized Hunter S. Thompson and I was under the influence of medical cannabis transported across state lines—was that there were no clocks anywhere. Stepping into a casino meant removing yourself from space and time; you walked and you walked and you walked, tracing the garish carpet patterns and inhaling the second-hand smoke and eventually arriving in the same exact place, next to a gift shop selling faux-leather purses and a man in an Elvis suit eating a ribeye.
There’s a reason the most popular book ever written about Las Vegas is essentially one long drug trip: It’s because this was not a place that has ever had any interest in grounding itself in day-to-day reality. It was designed as a hallucination; it was engineered to drag you into some vortex that either resembled heaven or hell, depending upon your tolerance for cheap buffets and tiger-wielding magicians and your attempts to relive the Hangover films, and depending upon your willingness to buy into the misguided belief that you could outwit the oddsmakers.
Over time, this literally became the city’s advertising slogan: Show up in Vegas, indulge your fantasies, engage in sordid (but legal) acts, and then go home and say nothing about it.
The last time I went to Vegas, last year, I stayed with a few friends several miles outside of the strip. It was an anodyne house on a lifeless cul-de-sac where walking to the nearby big-box store involved either crossing a harrowing four-lane highway and/or walking on an attenuated sidewalk barely wide enough to hold a ten-speed bike. There were people all around us, living their day-to-day lives, leaving for work at eight p.m. and coming home at five a.m. while we sat inside and watched NCAA tournament games and Ubered to the nearest casino to eat ribeyes and place twenty-dollar bets on next season’s Heisman Trophy race.
And it made me wonder if a town like this, sprouted out of the desert and fertilized with decades of bullshit and populated largely by tourists who treat as a destination spot for their transient alter egos, could ever manage to merge with reality.
III.
The first time a professional sports team flirted with a move to Las Vegas was in 1984. The Utah Jazz, struggling to attract fans in Salt Lake City, played 11 games at UNLV’s Thomas and Mack Center. ““It was very unique and very odd and very weird and it didn’t fit right in a lot of ways,” former Jazz public relations director Laura Herlovich told the Review-Journal. “And it was weird.”
Vegas has long trafficked on this weirdness. Weirdness was its currency. It was a place for men like Lefty Rosenthal; it was a place where Scorsese characters lurked around every corner. It was not respectable, and it did not pretend to be respectable, which is why it literally advertised itself as a place to do unspeakable things. But then an opening arrived: The idea of gambling as an illicit activity began to fall away. You can gamble anywhere now, so Vegas became a hockey town, and then a football town, and maybe—idiotically—a baseball town. It all went above-board. I’d say it sold its soul, but the whole idea of Vegas was that it never had a soul.
So I have no idea where a place like this goes from here.
IV.
“Longtime residents will often say Vegas was better when the Mob ran it,” Geoff Schumacher, vice president of exhibits and programs at The Mob Museum in Vegas, told Yahoo’s Jay Busbee. “They’re looking back with nostalgia, a time when Vegas was a smaller place. If you were a regular at the Sands, you’d walk in, people would recognize you, comp you a buffet or give you a better seat at a table. You walk into these megaresorts today, you’re one of a million. No one recognizes you, prices are higher, there are not as many freebies.”
The Super Bowl feels like the ultimate line of demarcation. The Old Vegas is dead. The bodies are submerged in Lake Mead. Vegas is now a place that strives to compete for tourist dollars with other major cities; it is an Irish rock band in a virtual-reality dome and a corporate boondoggle disguised as a football game inside a stadium built for a team with almost zero hometown fans. It is an expensive town so desperate to get bigger and bigger and BIGGER that it is willing to serve as a bailout destination for the worst owner in modern Major League Baseball, even though literally no real person in this city seems to want him there in the first place.
And maybe all of this is enough of a fantasy to sustain the idea of Las Vegas, but at some point, bigger isn’t better. At some point, people start to see through the lie. They emerge into the sunlight, check their watches, and realize there’s nothing actually there.
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