Return To Las Vegas To Complete The Cycle: The Long Trek To LVSportsBiz.com

By ALAN SNEL

LVSportsBiz.com

 

A year ago I was spending most of my life on my back in a bed with a neck brace at my home in Vero Beach, Fla.

 

And at that time in March 2017, I could never imagine that I would be back in Las Vegas a year later on a Sunday afternoon preparing to mine business news at both a NHL game and a Major League Baseball pre-season game on the same afternoon here in Sin City.

 

But here I am in Las Vegas near Red Rock Canyon with 50,000 readers of LVSportsBiz.com, a news website covering the convergence of business, sports, politics and fan issues in our country’s most fascinating, trickiest and dynamic sports market.

 

I don’t like to think about life a year ago.

 

On March 7, 2017 around 8:15 a.m., I was struck by a distracted, careless motorist who drove his car into me from behind as a I bicycled from Vero Beach to Fort Pierce on a daily bike ride.

 

I was left with a bad concussion, a C2 vertebrae fracture that could have resulted with paralysis or death and an unknown future.

 

But I was left with a pulse.

 

I was lucky. Many bicyclists have been killed in Florida.

 

I dodged the grim reaper of Florida better known as the Florida motorist. I had dropped out of full-time journalism in 2006 and worked on bicycle rights issues for seven years in the Tampa Bay area, so I had a pretty good handle on bicycle safety issues. The Tampa Bay Times wrote an editorial on Florida’s failure to protect bicyclists after a car driver smashed into me.

 

After my concussion issues subsided and I collected my mental and emotional marbles, I decided to sell the house I bought in Vero Beach one year earlier near old Dodgertown and return to Las Vegas to launch a news website that would document the journalistic intersection of business, sports, politics and fan issues.

 

The driver who slammed into me got away without a traffic ticket thanks to the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department, which believes you can drive your car into a bicyclist with immunity. An eyewitness told the sheriff’s deputy who responded to this car-on-bicyclist crash that the driver did not attempt to slow down and rammed his Chevy Cruze into me from behind as a I pedaled a few miles north of Fort Pierce.

 

I have to refer to the sheriff’s police report because I don’t remember any of this.

 

I only recall lying on a gurney and being rolled into a trauma center ICU where an emergency tech bowed down to me and uttered, “You were hit by a car.”

 

The night of March 7, 2017 in ICU was awful. I recall the blinding brightness of the room and not sleeping a wink.

 

The next day a doctor checked me out. Two broken vertebrae and a concussion, but you’re good to go.

 

Finally, some good news. I wouldn’t have to stay any more in Lawnwood Medical Center in Fort Pierce.

 

I look back at this and I get emotional.

 

I’m typing this just before noon Sunday in the press box at T-Mobile Arena, about 75 minutes before the Vegas Golden Knights host the Calgary Flames in a National Hockey League game.

 

After the first period ends around 2 p.m., I will leave and head over to Cashman Field, where the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians are playing the second of a two-game pre-season spring series here in Las Vegas.

 

A NHL game and a MLB pre-season game both at 1 p.m. in Las Vegas — who would have thunk it?

 

I’m a former metro newspaper reporter who was always fascinated by the convergence of sports, business and politics in news markets where I worked in Denver, South Florida, Seattle, New York and Tampa Bay. I covered either the business side of sports or stadium issues in those markets before covering the biz of sports beat for the Las Vegas Review-Journal for  3 1/2 years from 2012-early 2016.

 

So, last June I launched LVSportsBiz.com to report on the business-sports-politics axis here in LV because Las Vegas is the most dynamic sports market in our country, with new professional teams and new sports venues being built — partially with public dollars.

 

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The return hasn’t been easy. Fixing the physical parts is easier than mending the emotional parts.

 

The emotional healing goes on for a while.

 

I normally have two road bicycles. But I haven’t replaced the bicycle destroyed by the distracted motorist until this week when I bought a road bike from a new friend and talented photographer, Erik Ricardo who has snapped beautiful photos for LVSportsBiz.com. That second road bicycle returns my bike life into an equilibrium of life before the crash. When I rode that bicycle along the Red Rock Loop this week, it was wonderful to know that I had two road bicycles back in the stable.

 

I realized I threw myself into reporting and writing for LVSportsBiz.com as a therapeutic healing process and it was best thing for me. It required me to look forward — and not backward — and to blaze my own news trail of unique journalism and original content.

 

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Along the way, I re-connected with former Las Vegas friends like Scott Sofferman, my bicycle buddy who rides the Red Rock Loop with me, and talented sports columnist Ed Graney, who I chat sports-business news with on his Press Box radio show on ESPN Radio 1100AM in Las Vegas.

 

There are new friends, too, like sports radio man Bryan Feldman, who invited me to talk sports-biz this morning on his Sunday morning radio show on FOX 1340 AM/98.9FM.

 

Reporting sports-business news in Las Vegas is challenging and tricky. Many sports marketers can easily be romanced by the raw demographic numbers of 43 million annual visitors and a growing metro Las Vegas market of 2.2 million. Our market is tourism-based and big-time pro sports occupy a different role in the Vegas market than other markets. If you’re a hot-shot sports marketing pro who thinks you will light the Las Vegas market on fire, you can be humbled in a market filled with dozens of entertainment options at diverse entertainment venues.

 

That’s why this market is so challenging and fascinating for LVSportsBiz.com to cover. And I welcome this chance to report here and live here and ride my bicycle here.

 

Keep reading LVSportsBiz.com and I’m planning a one-year anniversary bash to celebrate this news website. I’ll keep you posted.

 

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Follow LVSportsBiz.com on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Contact LVSportsBiz.com founder/writer Alan Snel at asnel@LVSportsBiz.com