By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
The ambulance tech was wheeling me into the ER at Lawnwood Medical Center in Fort Pierce, Fla. on a stretcher three years ago to the day when he leaned over and uttered softly to me, “You’ve been hit by a car.”
I was on my back and couldn’t move on March 7, 2017. My head was in a fog. My bicycle frame was broken, the rear wheel contorted into a pretzel and taken to the St. Lucie County sheriff’s office evidence center located about two hours north of West Palm Beach, Fla. But I understood those six words strung together on the morning of March 7, 2017.
“You’ve been hit by a car.”
About a five miles away an hour earlier, a person driving a 2016 white Chevy Cruze drove his car into me from behind as I bicycled on a quiet two-lane road on the mainland side of the Intracoastal in St. Lucie County, about three miles north of the Fort Pierce city line. It was a violent collision, one that typically would kill many people pedaling a bicycle.
But I survived a crash caused by a distracted motorist who told the responding deputy that he never saw me even though he drove his motorized vehicle right into me from behind.
The St. Lucie County sheriff’s office deputy didn’t even give the driver a ticket for smashing into me, telling a newspaper reporter weeks later that Dennis Brophy — the driver — did not wake up that day with the intent to drive his car into me and injure me.
I don’t recall being struck. The information I’m sharing is documented in a Florida traffic crash report I have since laminated and keep in a folder in my bookcase behind my work desk.
Symptoms from a severe concussion eventually faded, and two broken vertebrae didn’t stop me from returning to my bicycle. Every day, though, I still feel a pasty, dried liquid under my skin on my right knee running to the bottom of my quad.
Three months after nearly being killed, I returned to Las Vegas in June 2017 to launch LVSportsBiz.com, a news site devoted to reporting on a genre of stories that are at the journalistic crossroads between business, sports, marketing, politics, sales, fan issues and stadiums. The site’s web traffic stats say LVSportsBiz.com has drawn 346,901 readers since it was launched nearly three years ago. For nearly three years, I have been riding the wave of reporting the crazy and glorious Las Vegas sports industry, which tosses me new sports-business stories to write just about every day.
In fact, a day like today.
I’m marking this dubious three-year anniversary of nearly being killed by a distracted motorist in Florida by reporting three diverse sports-biz stories: the Cubs-Reds spring training game at Las Vegas Ballpark at 1 p.m., the Mountain West basketball conference championship game between San Diego State and Utah State at Thomas & Mack Center at 2:30 p.m. and UFC 248’s MMA fight show at T-Mobile Arena at 5 p.m.
“What better way to celebrate being alive than covering all these sports events,” Las Vegas Channel 5 sports director Kevin Bolinger mentioned to me before San Diego State and Utah State tangled at The Mack.
So, how about coming along for the news reporting ride with me around Las Vegas for Major League Baseball in Summerlin, a big-time college basketball game at Thomas & Mack Center and ferocious and brutal MMA cage fights at UFC 248 at T-Mobile Arena today?
Kris Bryant knows home. It’s in Las Vegas, and he’s home batting lead-off for his Chicago Cubs, playing the Cincinnati Reds at a $150 million Taj Mahal of a ballpark in Downtown Summerlin in the heart of Vegas’ western suburbs 12 miles off the Strip.
Howard Hughes Corporation, Summerlin’s master developer, also owns the Triple A Las Vegas Aviators and the 10,000-seat stadium used by the Oakland A’s affiliate. The ballpark’s dark brown exterior is practical and lacks architectural distinction. But if you pay the money necessary to walk through the turnstile to get inside, you’re treated to a palatial baseball park packed with amenities like fancy suites, an open restaurant club area on that suite level and a retail store that easily cleared $1 million in sales last year. Oh, there’s a swimming pool and eating area for groups beyond the centerfield wall.
Howard Hughes went from the basement in old Cashman Field in downtown Las Vegas to the penthouse in Las Vegas Ballpark, so named under an $80 million, 20-year naming rights deal with the local public tourism agency charged with drawing visitors to Las Vegas. It seems odd that this Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) would spend so much on a stadium used by locals when its sole job is to promote Las Vegas outside the region to lure visitors.
But the Cubs-Reds game Saturday and a match-up Sunday actually are daily ballpark events that attract out-of-towners spending money at hotels and restaurants. It’s called Big League Weekend and Las Vegas baseball fans welcome the big leaguers coming to Sin City every early March to play two spring games.
The Chicago Cubs faithful are legendary for tracking their team like groupies following their favorite band.
Geoffrey Willhardt, 33, travelled from Bozeman, Montana with his wife and two small kids for the wife’s trade show and then a Cubs ballgame in Las Vegas of all places. He spent $200 for a single box seat on the third base side. But when the whole family wanted to come, he spent $100 for each of four seats — $400 — on the first base side for today’s game.
“I grew up watching the Cubs on WGN in Montana, Sammy Sosa hitting home runs and Kerry Wood striking out 20 guys in one game,” Willhardt said, holding his son, Hunter, who had a neon green baseball glove. “Even if the Cubs are not winning you still root for the Cubs because the players
Today’s game was a sellout of more than 10,000, with Cubs fans wearing jerseys bearing the names of Bryant, Rizzo, Contreras, Sandberg and Santo everywhere at the upscale ball yard — at beer lines, concession stands and along the field looking to snag an autograph.
Last weekend’s two Oakland Athletics vs Cleveland Indians games drew crowds of 8,159 on Saturday and 7,521 on Sunday.
But it’s easy to see that today’s Cubs-Reds game would draw an announced sellout crowd of 10,385 as the Reds won the spring game, 8-5, Saturday. Another game is set for Sunday.
They came to see the Cubs and Las Vegas’ prodigal baseball son, the lanky Bryant who has won an MVP award and fielded the ground ball in Cleveland in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series that would lead to the Cubs’ first world championship in 108 years. Bryant got a hit out of three at-bats, while striking out twice today.
Home for me meant leaving Vero Beach, Fla., where I was living when a motorist by the name of Dennis Brophy said he was blinded by an eastern sun when he hit me from behind with his car on a road that ran north-south that day three years ago.
I missed Las Vegas and the magnificent desert of Southern Nevada and the mountains of the West and a certain cactus that would explode with color every March in places from Lake Mead to Red Rock Canyon.
I look at March 7 as a near-death experience, but I see the final weeks of March as re-birth in the form of those marvelous and inspiring pink and fucshia flowers sprouting from the beavertail cactus. When I saw them in March 2018 for the first time after returning to Las Vegas, I gazed at them in wonderment and joy while bicycling the River Mountains Trail in Lake Mead.
I adored the fact that a terrain perceived by outsiders as so barren and brown and lacking in life can be adorned with such dazzling colors.
It felt like home to see these pink blossoms after I returned to Las Vegas.
Home meant planting roots a few miles from Red Rock Canyon and launching LVSportsBiz.com to report on the dizzy amount of sports development of venues, teams and events washing over the metro Las Vegas area.
The night of March 7, 2017 will never be forgotten: Blinding bright light in the ICU room and falling in and out of a shallow slumber in the early morning. I was a whisker away from being paralyzed, said doctors who looked at images of the break in my second cervical vertebra known as the C2.
Instead, I would leave Vero Beach in June 2017 to launch LVSportsBiz.com just in time to report on the Vegas Golden Knights roster being stocked with the Original Misfits and the dirt flying to make way for the Raiders’ $1.97 billion stadium project on the west side of Interstate 15 across from Mandalay Bay hotel-casino.
And here I am on March 7, 2020 — three years to the day after the brutal crash — with more than 1,200 stories published on LVSportsBiz.com heading from the Big League Weekend Cubs-Reds game at Las Vegas Ballpark in Summerlin to the Mountain West Conference championship game 15 miles to the east at Thomas & Mack Center on the UNLV campus 2:30 p.m.
It’s a tripleheader of sports-business news today and I’m full of gratitude I have the chance to make the reporting rounds when I think about that day three years ago.
Two passionate college basketball fan bases collided Saturday at 2:30 p.m. at Thomas & Mack Center, where the UNLV basketball venue was cleansed of any Runnin’ Rebels’ markings or signs and converted into a neutral conference tournament that boiled down to two powerful teams — the fifth-ranked San Diego State Aztecs and the formidable Utah State Aggies, which won the tourney title a year ago. A sea of red Aztec fans including former San Diego State coach Steve Fisher filled the arena’s bottom bowl, with a few sections of Utah State dark blue at The Mack.
The Mountain West Conference receives $300,000 from Las Vegas Events, the non-profit event promoter arm of the LVCVA. It’s considered an investment as fans from Southern California and Utah traveled to Las Vegas, paid for hotel rooms and food and screamed their brains out Saturday afternoon for a thriller of a title game.
San Diego State was 30-1, with the sole defeat at the hands of UNLV of all teams. The Runnin’ Rebs also defeated Utah State at Thomas & Mack Jan. 1. But the Rebs have been long gone, dropping a 67-61 decision to Boise State in the tourney’s quarterfinals on Thursday.
The Aztecs fans have been coming to Las Vegas for years to watch their hoops team tangle with the Runnin’ Rebels. They were out tailgating in the massive Thomas & Mack parking lot early Saturday afternoon.
A win and San Diego State would leave Las Vegas a number one seed in one of the four regions of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. The Aztecs will make the Big Dance even with a loss to Utah State. Win and the Aggies join the Madness. But lose, and it’s fingernail-biting time as Utah State will sit on the bubble and await news whether they’re in the Big Dance or not.
“Both teams are playing three games in three days. It’s tough. Both teams are playing on guts,” San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher told a TV game reporter during a break.
But Dutcher’s squad fell to 30-2 as Utah State won, 59-56, thanks to a Sam Merill 30-foot shot to win the automatic ticket to March Madness. The sharp-shooting Merrill led the way for Utah State with 27 points, while sophomore center Neemias Queta chipped in with 15 points. Utah State improved to 26-8.
The Mountain West Conference is one of four college basketball conferences staging tourneys in Las Vegas, with three (Pac-12, $500,000, Mountain West, $300,000 and West Coast, $300,000) of the four receiving $1.1 million in sponsorship money from Las Vegas Events, the promotions arm of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The WAC receives no sponsorship dollars.
Mountain West does its best to convert the UNLV-based Thomas & Mack Center into a neutral venue, with a different hardwood court, conference sponsor signage and even its own game announcer.
It took months to emotionally move ahead after the crash three years ago.
It was cathartic to write a book about it all. I called it, Long Road Back to Las Vegas.
I made wonderful connections with people while I was selling the book. And I have much gratitude for the sports directors at Channel 3, 5 and 8 who invited me on their Sunday night shows to discuss the book. Talking through the crash didn’t bog me down on the topic. Instead, it helped me emotionally move on. Here’s a photo showing an interview with Channel 3’s Bryan Salmond. And Channel 8’s Chris Maathuis and Channel 5’s Bolinger were also kind enough to invite me on their Sunday sports shows to discuss the book.
And the book is also on Amazon.
Sadly, I don’t see the deaths and carnage on our roads improving. The manner in which people are educated about operating a motorized vehicle is broken. It’s hardly disputable that people drive too fast, are too impatient, are too angry, are too distracted and are too incompetent when driving their vehicles.
But bicycles are not meant to be moored like ships in a dock. They’re meant to be pedaled and today I used my bicycle to pedal to the baseball park in Summerlin. And I even used the bike to pedal from my car off the Strip to reach T-Mobile Arena, where I had the best parking in the place. I used these bike racks to secure my bicycle and head into the UFC 248 media center.
UFC is Las Vegas’ multi-billion-dollar operation with a global footprint that doesn’t get as much local attention as you would think.
Helmed by colorful ringmaster and organization president Dana White, UFC sold for more than $4 billion in 2016 and has 587 MMA fighters from around the world on its roster.
No players union here. Every fighter is an individual contractor and UFC puts on a fight show that combines spectacle with knockouts and chokeholds to the delight of fans who come from Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, China and across the U.S. to T-Mobile Arena and other worldwide venues.
Tonight I’m at T-Mobile Arena, the Big Ice House that is home to the Vegas Golden Knights. But tonight the VGK castle is tucked safely in the rafters as UFC takes over the venue for a fight show that lacks the buzz of UFC 246 Jan. 18 here where Conor McGregor’s fight helped draw 19,040 fans — bigger than the Golden Knights’ biggest crowd.
White spoke with LVSportsBiz.com last June in a podcast in which he talked highly of one tonight’s featured fighters: China’s Weili Zhang, who is defending her strawweight belt against agitated Polish challenger and former champ Joanna Jedrzejczyk.
In the middleweight main event tonight, champ Israel Adesanya takes on Yoel Romero.
Whether you love UFC or hate it as human barbarism in a cage, UFC is a financial force. The promotion sold for more than $4 billion nearly four years ago, selling for twice what NBA teams sell for. It’s an economic force for its owner, Beverly Hills, California-based Endeavor (formerly WME-IMG), a talent and entertainment company.
UFC has launched stars like Ronda Rousey to Hollywood and WWE and made fighters very rich like McGregor.
A short walk outside the media tent, my bicycle stands proud.
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