By Cassandra Cousineau of LVSportsBiz.com
Vasyl Lomachenko traveled from the Ukraine to reintroduce himself to the boxing audience in a ten-rounder vs. Masayoshi Nakatani of Japan. The last time the former lightweight champion was in Las Vegas, he lost his title to 22-year-old Teofimo Lopez in the MGM Grand Garden Arena bubble during the COVID pandemic last year.
As of Saturday night, both Loma and big time boxing returned to Las Vegas with audiences soaking up the boxing matches.
The Virgin Hotel wrapped up an incredible month of world-class boxing last night. The newly-branded venue, the former Hard Rock, was dotted with familiar names that helped make Las Vegas the sport’s mecca. This year, well-known Vegas-based promoter, Top Rank Boxing, along with London-based DAZN have hosted several cards that, little by little, have brought back fans thirsty for jabs and knockouts in the world’s boxing capital. Raiders/Aces owner Mark Davis, KISS rocker Gene Simmons and UFC personality Daniel Cormier were in the crowd.
The Virgin Hotel Las Vegas, with its desert-themed motif, had a relatively low-key opening in March and was forced to operate at a maximum of 50 percent capacity to comply with Clark County pandemic safety requirements.
The hotel renovated what was the former Hard Rock venue called, The Joint, where the sport’s Hall of Famers like Shane Mosely once showcased their boxing skills before they became champions. Virgin’s new venue holds 2,200 seats in a comfortable fight-viewing location for fans looking to get an up-close and personal view of a night’s worth of jabs and knuckle sandwiches.
LVSportsbiz.com sat down with Top Rank founder Bob Arum as the promoter prepared for Lomachenko to take the ring. The soon to be 90-year-old shared his thoughts on opening the gates for boxing fans in Las Vegas.
“The Virgin is a terrific venue.” It’s a great hotel. They’ve treated us tremendously. The room is without a doubt the best place in the country to watch a boxing event,” Arum told LVSportsBiz.
“Every seat is a good seat and people have loved it. This is our fourth event that we’ve done here and it keeps getting better and better. The thing I like so much about it is we’ve presented an international array of talent. For our first fight, we had one of the champions from Scotland, Josh Taylor, who has a tremendous audience in the U.K. Then, we had Shakur Stevenson, [Newark, NJ] who is very, very popular. Then we came with this fight, with what I think is going to be one of the classic fights with a tremendous Japanese lightweight [Masayoshi Nakatani], against the pound-for-pound, one of the great fighters in boxing, Vasyl Lomachenko.”
Boxing’s bounce-back in Las Vegas comes at a time when Las Vegas has established itself as a solid sports market, The creation of the Vegas Golden Knights in 2016, launch of the Las Vegas Lights in 2017, arrival of the Las Vegas Aces in 2018 and the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium opening in 2020. And this year, it was announced that expansion indoor football and lacrosse pro teams are starting in 2022.
Arum acknowledged the success of those leagues while pointing to the big entertainment history of boxing.
Having bigtime boxing back in Las Vegas isn’t just important to the city, it’s critical to the boxing community. In particular this city, before the Golden Knights, and before a lot of other activities in professional sports like the WNBA women’s basketball team, all we had here in Vegas was boxing. So, really boxing owes a lot to Las Vegas and Las Vegas owes a lot to boxing. It’s a great, great relationship and we hope to continue it here in Las Vegas in the months and years to come. — Bob Arum, Top Rank Boxing founder
Saturday’s Lomachenko vs Nakatani main event headlined the fourth Top Rank boxing event at the Virgin Hotel. Each could be considered warm-ups for one of the biggest fights the city will host all year when Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder return for a heavyweight trilogy bout.
That fight will be held at T-Mobile Arena July 24 in front of an already-sold out crowd of 18,000.
Then, another high-profile boxing event will bring thousands to Manny Pacquiao meets Errol Spence in a welterweight unification on August 21. Like Fury-Wilder, Pacquiao-Spence will also be at T-Mobile Arena.
Lomachenko dominated Nakatani before a sold out crowd of a little more than 2,000 fans, eventually earning a ninth-round stoppage. Fans leaving the venue were just as high on the evening’s entertainment as Top Rank’s Arum was.
“We’re very up about this place and we really believe that the Virgin is a perfect venue for fights and we hope to come back here time after time because it’s really a good place to showcase boxing,” Arum said.
PSA