Dreaming on her hometown’s behalf, Madyson Marie endured an antithesis of what children typically hear in their age of innocence.
You can be anything you want to be, elders normally state without a second thought.
As an unofficial youth delegate for Las Vegas, Marie yearned to see her city become a major-league sports market.
No! You’re Sin City! You have too much baggage from gambling for any league ever to want to give you a team!
Advocate as she did, Marie was facing, as she said in an email to Awful Announcing, “A debate I could never really win.”
Marie’s higher-up at KLAS-TV, sports director Ron Futrell, had the unenviable task of grounding dreamers on this matter. Working at local affiliates since 1984, he witnessed and felt the passion within the community but understood the misgivings from without.
From the start of Futrell’s tenure, the UNLV men’s basketball team routinely packed the then-new Thomas & Mack Center. With the building seating nearly 18,000 fans, support was not in question. But, Futrell explained, there were glaring and seemingly unattainable prerequisites to wooing any major pro leagues. Naturally, he told AA via email, the first was the “sports betting issue must be settled.”
That matter, he further stated, “was all about perception. Sports betting has been happening illegally forever.”
Yet with Nevada being an outlier on legalized gambling, the time-honored pros balked at appearing to endorse the pastime. That changed dramatically when the State of New Jersey won Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association at the U.S. Supreme Court. That decision landed on May 14, 2018, the day the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights played Game 2 of the Western Conference Final and one week before the WNBA’s Aces first tipped off. With the ruling that the federal government could not prohibit sports gambling in any state, the other leagues lost their cause to eschew Nevada.
“Oh, they saw the dollar signs quickly and reversed their previous stance,” Futrell said.
By then, Marie was preparing to start following her sportscasting dream through college at Alabama. When she left home, the Golden Knights were coming off an inaugural season with a berth in the Stanley Cup Final.
“The longer I was away, the more the city grew,” she said, “and I couldn’t help but feel a sense of duty to remind the city, through storytelling, that its locals built what we have today.”
When she snagged her degree from Tuscaloosa and landed her first sportscasting job in Oregon, the Aces were en route to the 2022 WNBA championship. The Knights followed that with a Cup while the Aces pursued an eventual repeat title and hosted their third All-Star Game.
Meanwhile, Marie’s favorite sport cemented its place in Paradise, the suburb where most of Vegas’s major venues stand. When she came home last year, Allegiant Stadium had already logged five years with the Raiders and hosted Super Bowl LVIII. She has her calendar marked for January, when the 2027 College Football Playoff National Championship comes to town.
“Watching this city overcome that battle and do it with championships in the NHL and WNBA has been a touching run for younger me, who only wanted to watch any game she could,” she said.
Marie wasn’t the only media personality pulled back in by the big-league boom. Bill Bradley, assistant managing editor for sports at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, had left in 2022 to delve into, of all things, the sports betting industry.
Whether it stems from personal excitement or another source, year-round energy and hard decision-making are a must to cover this market now.
“Usually you look forward to a bit of a break in the summers with the Raiders and Knights dominating the fall,” said Futrell, “but there was absolutely no break this summer.”
To wit: The Aces are defending their third championship in four years with another winning season, routinely packing Michelob Ultra Arena and occasionally the larger T-Mobile Arena.
The Athletics — without an acknowledged home city while temporarily lodging in Sacramento — had their first Vegas homestand June 9-14. Bradley noted that coverage of those games at Las Vegas Ballpark would be more expansive before the concomitant Stanley Cup Final shifted his paper’s priorities.
Nonetheless, the A’s are garnering Review-Journal ink two seasons before they’re due to settle into the area full-time. Likewise, the staff bio for Kevin Bolinger, sports director at Vegas’s Fox affiliate, already lists them among his coverage credits.
In the meantime, there’s a yet-to-be-nicknamed Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) franchise to inaugurate this coming winter. Then there’s the NBA Summer League and mounting speculation that, after 23 offseasons of incubating everyone else’s prospects, this town will finally garner its own team. Any buzz about expansion—should it happen—points strongly to Seattle and Vegas.
Bradley and Futrell share their surprise that other leagues have lapped the NBA in placing a team in their area.
“The MLS might still beat them,” Bradley noted.
“I wrongly predicted that the NBA would be the first to come to Las Vegas because the stadium issue was solved with the T&M,” said Futrell. “What do I know?”
Locals are happy to adapt as their little-big home inches further onto the North American sports radar.
“For my first 25 years in Las Vegas, we pretty much had two-person staffs,” said Futrell. “That being said, I do enjoy going to Costco on a Saturday and some guy in his 40s stops me and tells me how I did a story with him when he played shortstop at Bonanza High School. Today, much of the material lands in our lap from the teams through their sources, and we have to decide what to use and how to use it. Perhaps not the best way to do pure ‘journalism,’ but it becomes overwhelming sometimes.”
The delayed gratification in the area accentuated another change over Futrell’s four-plus decades on the beat.
“The teams do not allow us to do ‘feature stories’ as often because they don’t need us as much,” he said. “They have their own ways to reach their fans through social media and TV shows that they produce where they can control the message. The status of the media in all markets has definitely turned on its head.”
Still, when anything extraordinary comes to town, everyone is ready to capture the magnitude. Before the big-league pros came around, Vegas savored the likes of UNLV’s 1990 NCAA men’s hoops championship and the 1985 Marvin Hagler-Thomas Hearns card. Other prize fights plus auto races and UFC bouts primed Futrell and his colleagues for bigger, homegrown sagas.
Now that mainstream teams are taking root, scaling back the UFC beat may be the Review-Journal sports section’s most palpable change. When Bradley arrived in 2015, two writers shared that assignment.
That said, Bradley noted, “The NHL was a rumor, though we were trying to anticipate the news of expansion. We’re a little more nimble these days and focused on the sports that we know will make an impact with readers.”
To make room for the established and prospective major-league teams, that has meant somewhat whittling down UNLV, Aces, and minor-league coverage.
“Like any media organization, we have finite resources,” Bradley said. But, he added, “We likely won’t cut back high schools because that is the backbone of any coverage we do and – even with every pro sport – there is still huge interest here in the preps.”
“I’ve said it time and again,” Marie stressed. “Vegas is a sleeper town for high school athletes. I spent a lot of my high school career on the sidelines of games covering what would become NFL starters. Can’t forget to mention the former 51s (Triple-A baseball team). Locals know the memories that Cashman Field holds.”
Now they know, as do the diehards and some casual followers across the continent, what memories Allegiant Stadium and T-Mobile Arena have banked.
“When the Vegas Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup in 2023, it felt like another big-time event I had gotten used to covering,” Futrell said. “It just happens more often these days.”
So much so that one side effect is trying to ration the spotlight for those entities that used to dominate the otherwise empty five-minute sports segments. Vegas may be reaping a returned favor for the mainstream sports universe with all its marquee franchises and their success in the standings and at the turnstiles.
But it’s not done producing those aiming to be another Andre Agassi (tennis great born and raised in Vegas), NFL quarterback Randall Cunningham (NFL quarterback educated at UNLV), or Greg Maddux (MLB pitcher educated at Valley High School).
“I do feel like the ‘grassroots’ local sports don’t get covered as well as they should these days,” Futrell said. “But that comes with a growing market. Boy, it all happened pretty fast though, didn’t it?”
