Sin City Before The Raiders: A History of Pro Football in Las Vegas
Since its origins as a railroad town turned gambling mecca, Las Vegas has always prided itself on new beginnings. This common theme has been told hundreds of times in films, literature and television: a man or a woman is down on their luck, suffering from the realities of financial hardships or the belief that their future is limited in their hometown roots. They see the mesmerizing neon skyline dead smack in the middle of the desert, overwhelmed with the possibility that with a stroke of luck in the casino that they too can rewrite their fate and become everything they’ve wanted to be.
This narrative, however, doesn’t only apply to the citizens and tourists that roam the street of Las Vegas, but rather reflects the development of the town itself. Originally established in 1905 after the opening the San Pedro-Los Angeles-Salt Lake Railroad Line, Vegas become a hotbed for “social clubs” that featured gambling and prostitution for entertainment, and remained so even after these activities were outlawed in 1910. With the railroad sector taking turn for the worst in Vegas, President Herbert Hoover authorized the construction of the Boulder Dam, later renamed Hoover Dam, in 1931.
The project brought an influx of young male workers, but gambling and prostitution were still outlawed. This led to the expansion of illegal gambling rackets and bordellos at the hands of LA organized crime refugees, most notably corrupt LAPD vice cop Guy McAfee. After the liberalization of gambling, Mob influence and crooner icons would infiltrate and dominate Vegas’s image for years to come until billionaire Howard Hughes bought up the casino landscape and embarked on legitimizing the gambling industry. Flash forward to the 1990s and Vegas had become a corporate town, filled with “Mega Resorts” that attracted families looking for a vacation destination that included not only gambling but children friendly entertainment options, such as state of the art swimming pools, arcades and shopping centers. Indeed, these transformations all but indicate that the success and image of Las Vegas has relied and thrived on it’s ability meet entrainment needs.
Today, Vegas, though still identified by it’s gambling and nightlife, has ventured into a new arena of entertainment: professional sports. While Vegas has had minor league sports in the past, the arrival of the the Las Vegas Knights of the National Hockey League marked Vegas’s foray into the major professional sports market. And now in 2020, Vegas will be the new home of one of the most recognizable brands in professional sports: The Raiders of the National Football League.
The NFL’s decision to choose Vegas to host an NFL franchise is certainly ironic to the older generation that listened to the NFL’s constant hostility toward Sin City, fearing that the gambling and unsavory characters associated with Vegas would serve no positive influence on the players and could potentially compromise their play. The 1963 indefinite suspension of All-Pro’s Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, among other incidents, sent a message from the League office to the players that any association with gambling would not be tolerated. Vegas, a town synonymous with gambling, was a problem they always had to keep an eye on. But now, there is too much opportunity and profit to ignore.
The Cowboys
While the reception and excitement of an NFL team in Vegas is something that only the future knows, history has not been kind to the pro football franchises that have played in front of the Las Vegas home crowd in the past, dating back to 1968 with the arrival of the Las Vegas Cowboys of the Continental Football League.
The Continental Football League was established in 1965 when owners from the defunct United Football League and the Atlantic Coast Football League agreed form a new major league to rival the NFL and the rapidly emerging American Football League. The Las Vegas Cowboys franchise only existed for the last two seasons of the league’s five year existence, having been established as the Quad Cities Raiders of the Professional League of American Football before being absorbed into the Continental League. The relocation to Las Vegas in 1968 was followed by a disastrous season, securing last place with a 1-9 record.
With a revamped roster and new coaching staff, however, the Cowboys emerged as one of the league’s most competitive teams. Longtime Lou Saban disciple Paul Massey was hired as the head coach. Massey brought in many former AFL players looking for a new opportunity, such as former AFL Rookie of the Year Bobby Bunnett and Dewey Warren, a former stand out college quarterback at the University of Tennessee before splitting time at quarterback with Sam Wyche of the AFL’s newest franchise, the Cincinnati Bengals. The team displayed talent and played tough football, amassing an 8-4 record with a playoff win over the Sacramento Capitols. Their season ended a week later with a loss to the San Antonio Toros, 21-17, falling one game short of the Continental Football League championship.
Despite the unexpected turnaround and the newfound success of the franchise, the residents of Las Vegas didn’t gauge enough interest to support the Cowboys, often playing for less than 2,000 paying fans. The support was so low that the franchise eventually folded months after their final game. In an article for the Professional Football Researchers Association, Ace Hendricks, son of a player who was a part of the 1969 Vegas Cowboys team, writes:
Why did this team fold after the season ? Money, mostly. A millionaire named Thomas M. Redmond, from Anderson, Indiana who made his money in insurance, owned the Cowboys. He took a shot at owning a team in Las Vegas with the hopes of possibly someday owning an NFL team in the casino town. He in essance was no different than the ballplayers that he paid. Somebody trying to reach the top by playing lower level ball. By season's end, his dream had slipped away ; due mostly to the fact that he found out that owning a professional team took a lot of time, effort and paying customers. And paying customers in Las Vegas were hard to come by
Hendricks continues to detail the efforts, and ultimate failure, of Massey to gain exposure for the team:
Blocks of tickets were sold to Caesars Palace, which in turn were given to youth clubs in the area. They hired the Las Vegas Youth Band, had a "Miss Cowboy" contest and had a cheerleading squad.
Massey checked with the gaming industry and found that a majority of its employees were off on Tuesdays , so he chose that night to play its home games after originally having them on Saturday. It was chosen as not to interfere with high school football, UNLV games or promoter Bill Miller's fight of the week. Still, no support.
The Cowboys had no exposure to television or radio, although KLAV offered to carry their games on radio at a total cost of $1,800 or $200 for each of the nine games. The station owned by eccentric [sic] Howard Hughes even offered potential sponsors free air time. All [sic] they had to do was pay the line charges. Nobody bought.
The Hughes Nevada Operations reportedly did their part when it was announced that a block of 400 tickets was purchased for all home games for the employees.
" If you bring a winner, " the management was promised, "We will fill the stadium."
Unfortunately for the Cowboys, these efforts proved futile. The Cowboys franchise would be sold to a syndicate in Memphis, Tennessee, but never actually relocated after the Continental Football League folded in 1970.
The Posse
For nearly 25 years, professional football would be absent from Las Vegas. The void would be filled when the Canadian Football League was experiencing financial catastrophes in which seven of it’s eight franchises were accumulating debt after the CFL’s lead sponsor, Carling O’Keefe, withdrew it’s television sponsorship. Fan attendance and viewership were declining rapidly, as the product on and off the field was becoming equally dysfunctional.
Organizational overhauls ignited the new direction of the Canadian Football League to salvage league. Multiple team were now being run by venture capitalist as opposed to the community ownership model. The newly appointed commissioner Larry Smith was hungry for profits and his ideas fit the bill for how the new owners believed the league should be revitalized. This belief was rooted in the expansion of the Canadian game to America, relying on expansion fees to pull the CFL out of their financial free fall.
The expansion began with the birth of the Sacramento Gold Miners in 1993. One year later, three more teams would be added to the league, including the Las Vegas Posse, paying the standard expansion fee of $3 million. Nick Mileti, the founder of the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA and former owner of the Cleveland Indians of the MLB, along with investment bankers Glenn Golenfold and Marshall Geller, founded Las Vegas Major League Sports Inc. to purchase the franchise and funded the operation through stock shares. Mileti hired former New England Patriots and UNLV Rebels head coach Ron Meyer to lead the squad that had signed future CFL Hall of Fame quarterback Anthony Calvillo, who retired as the all time leading passer in the history of professional football. Other notable names on the roster included linebacker Greg Battle, a two time CFL Defensive Player of the Year winner, and kick returner Tamarik Vanover, who had a modest fiver year career with the Kansas City Chiefs after his stint with the Posse.
Though the roster was certainly filled with promising talent, that’s where the promise would end.
In his feature about the 1994 Las Vegas Posese, VICE columnist Perry Lefko wrote,
Training camp provided the first snapshot of how different the Posse would do things. The team had two practices a day—the first during the morning at their home field, Sam Boyd Stadium, and the second taking place toward the evening at a grass field on the property of the Riviera Casino & Resort, where the team was headquartered during training camp. The field, which was only 70 yards long and did not have goalposts, had previously been a parking lot with yellow lines, and sported a large sign that read "Field Of ImPOSSEable dreams
With the Canadian game being played on a 150 yard field and featuring end zones that were 20 yards deep ( 5 yards deeper than American Football), the Posse were obviously ill prepared to practice plays or simulate in game situations with such a crucial handicap. This didn’t stop Mileti, however, from exercising optimism that his team could be successful, or at the very least profitable, with the Las Vegas crowd. Mileti had the personality that fit right in with the casino moguls that resided in Vegas, having promoted the team the way only Vegas would allow: through G string strippers moonlighting as cheerleaders, top end seats with cocktail service and halftime equestrian exhibitions that ended with the horses defecating on the field.
When the dysfunction starts at the top, it has a tendency to trickle down. The Posse players, when not suffering from the scorching temperature of the southern Nevada heat during practice, could often be found late into the night and early morning at the craps table gambling their paycheck away. Even before the players had a chance to showcase their skills, controversy was being brewed in front of a meager 12,000 fans when local Las Vegas singer Dennis Casey Parks sang the Canadian anthem “O Canada” to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree,” causing backlash from the Parliament of Canada. Furthermore, the LA Times reported that Saskatchewan Roughriders claimed that the Posse cheerleaders were loitering around their sidelines to distract them.
As the season commenced, the Las Vegas Posse were drawing crowds that barely topped 2,000, even after Mileti slashed ticket prices to $9 a seat. Rumors began to circulate that the team would be relocated, with Milwaukee being the favorite to host the Posse. In a game against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, color commentator Lief Pettersen said in the pregame, “They don’t know if they’re going to be here next week, let alone next year. The players tell me this week that they played in front of bigger crowds in high school.”
Front office turmoil added fuel to the fire. Glenfold and Geller voted Mileti, the face of the franchise, out of the operation. Efforts to sell and relocate the franchise were becoming just as hopeless as the season itself. Singer Jimmy Buffet and his business partner William L. Collins had assembled a syndicate to purchase the franchise and move it to Jackson, Mississippi, and even began putting a front office together, but ultimately fell through when the Posse board of directors raised the sales price of the team at the last minute.
Right before their season finale against the Edmonton Eskimos, the franchise announced that it would disband. Their final game was moved from Vegas to Edmonton for the lack of local interest, and the Posse lone season would culminate in a 5-13 effort, second worst in the league. The Posse averaged 9,527 fans a game in attendance, nearly 4,700 below the second worst American expansion team attendance average of the CFL in 1994. Head coach Ron Meyer claimed it was “his toughest year in coaching football.”
The Outlaws
In 2018, Vince McMahon announced that the XFL would be revived for the 2020 season. McMahon, majority owner and chairman of the professional wrestling outfit WWE, partnered with NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol to launch the original XFL in 2001 as spring league that featured “less rules and more roughness.” McMahon wanted to combine football with the showman culture found in pro wrestling, allowing in game interviews with coaches and players that contained ample amounts of trash talk and featured cheerleaders dressed in scantly clad uniforms. The reincarnated version of the XFL distinguishes itself from its predecessor, taking a much more serious approach to the quality of the game and not preoccupying itself with providing extracurricular tabloid content in the middle of the game or creating gimmicks to enhance the game’s violence.
Though the XFL was referred to as a “colossal failure” by McMahon, and again illustrated the abysmal likelihood of running another successful professional football league in America, the XFL does hold a memorable place in professional football’s history, as many of it’s technological and broadcast experiments were later adapted to the TV networks’ production of NFL games.
It also secured another chapter of pro football’s failed venture into Sin City.
After the Las Vegas Posse ceased operations following their 1994 season, the Arena Football League’s Las Vegas Sting, also established in 1994, moved to Anaheim and rebranded as the Anaheim Piranhas in 1996. McMahon, seeing an opportunity in Vegas, selected the city to be one of the eight that would host a franchise in his new league. The team would be called the Las Vegas Outlaws.
Unlike the NFL and CFL, the XFL used a single entity model, so there was no owner to run the operations of a franchise. Jim Criner, former Boise State University and NFL Europe coach, was hired as the team’s head coach. Much like the previous minor league football teams in Las Vegas, the roster consisted of NFL rejects looking to use the XFL as a stepping stone to enter (or re-enter) the big league.
One player, however, stands out among the rest, and was arguably the most famous player in the XFL: running back Rod Smart, better known as “He Hate Me.”
Rod Smart was born in Lakeland, FL and played collegiality at Western Kentucky University under acclaimed coach Jack Harbaugh. After a brief training camp stint with the San Diego Chargers, Rod joined the Las Vegas Outlaws. Since the XFL allowed players the option of using nicknames on their jersey instead of their legal name, Rod became famous for his nickname “He Hate Me” that led him to being the most identifiable player in the XFL. Brett Forest, the author of Long Bomb: How the XFL Became TV's Biggest Fiasco, writes that “He” was referring the coaches that nearly cut him right before the team’s until the last day of training camp when Smart returned a punt for a touchdown, securing a spot on the roster. In an interview with Tim Silverstein of the Milwaukee Journal, Smart elaborated on his nickname further:
"Basically, my brother's my opponent," he said. "After I win, he's gonna hate me. It is what it is. It's a saying I was saying when I'd feel something wasn't going my way. For example, (when) I was on the squad in Vegas and coach was putting other guys in.
"If I felt I'm better than them, you know, hey, he hate me. See what I'm saying? Give me a chance. That's all I ask. It came from the heart. Within. The way I felt."
With their roster set, the XFL would kick off the inaugural season on February 3, 2001, with a primetime game between the Las Vegas Outlaws and the New York/New Jersey Hitmen at Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas, ending with an Outlaw win, 19-0. After a 3-1 start and a strong defense that was nicknamed “The Dealers of Doom,” the Outlaws ended the season with a 4-6 record and the finished last in the Western division. Compared to the Cowboys and the Posse, attendance faired much better, yet was still considered average compared to other XFL franchises. The XFL, however, saw steep declines the ratings week after week, due to the poor quality of play, the lack of any recognizable NFL talent (aside from league MVP Tommy Maddox) and the media perception that the XFL was a sensationalized gimmick as opposed to a legitimate contender to the NFL. NBC decided to pull out of its two year deal after one season. The league folded on May 10, 2001.
Though many of the players on the Outlaws roster bounced around minor league football organizations, or simply abandoned professional football altogether, some went on to have productive careers in the NFL. Smart, finishing as the Outlaws leading rusher and the second leading rusher in the XFL, had a five year career in the NFL, highlighted by his three year stint as punt returner for the Carolina Panthers that resulted in Super Bowl XXXVIII appearance, only to lose to the New England Patriots, 32-29. Other players included Seattle Seahawks cornerback Kelly Herndon who picked off Ben Roethlisberger in Super Bowl XL, and Mike Furrey, a receiver that had the second most catches in the NFL in 2006.
The New Beginning
Since the XFL’s closure, Vegas has fielded two arena football teams: the Las Vegas Gladiators from 2003-2007 before relocating to Cleveland, and the Las Vegas Outlaws (no relation to the XFL squad), a team owned by Motley Crew front man Vince Neil that folded after one season in 2015. In 2009, the United Football League established a franchise in Sin City, the Las Vegas Locomotives. While the Locomotives attendance records were unimpressive (though better than the Cowboys or the Posse), the team won the first two UFL championships in a league that featured only a four game schedule. Vegas would win the final championship in 2012 before the league disbanded that same year.
While Vegas has not been friendly to pro football, the success of the Raiders remains to be seen. Throughout it’s history, Las Vegas had been able to reinvent itself to stay relevant, and appears ready to branch into a new realm of entertainment that can transform the city’s image into a full scale entertainment capital. The Raiders, meanwhile, have struggled to remain relevant since their Super Bowl defeat in the 2002 season. Having relocated to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, and returning to Oakland in the mid 90s, the Raiders organization has been the subject of scrutiny and mockery for not only creating a losing culture to a once proud franchise, but for leaving their loyal fanbase in Oakland yet again. Like Las Vegas, however, Mark Davis and the Raiders are embarking on quest to reinvent themselves for the better. Maybe this will be a match made in heaven.
After all, crazier things have happened in Vegas.
References:
Earley, Pete. Super Casino: inside the "New" Las Vegas. Bantam Books, 2001.
Hendricks , Ace. LAS VEGAS COWBOYS – 1969. www.profootballresearchers.org/archives/Website_Files/Coffin_Corner/25-04-992.pdf.
Ac. “1994 Las Vegas Posse • Fun While It Lasted.” Fun While It Lasted, 24 Jan. 2020, funwhileitlasted.net/2015/08/08/1994-las-vegas-posse/.
Lefko, Perry. “The Bizarre Story of the Las Vegas Posse and the CFL's Stint in Sin City.” Vice, 22 June 2017, www.vice.com/en_ca/article/mbjyyn/the-bizarre-story-of-the-las-vegas-posse-and-the-cfls-stint-in-sin-city.
Scavone/Contributor, Jason, and Las Vegas Newswire. “DOWNWARD SPIRAL: The Short-Lived Las Vegas Posse Rode into the (Canadian) Football Sunset on Nov. 5, 1994.” Las Vegas Newswire, 20 Nov. 2019, www.lasvegasnewswire.com/downward-spiral-the-short-lived-las-vegas-posse-rode-into-the-canadian-football-sunset-on-nov-5-1994/.
Durfresne, Chris. “Cutting Them Off With the Pass : The Posse, Las Vegas' CFL Franchise, Comes Up Short With Its Field--but Has Been Long on Controversy.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 22 Aug. 1994, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-08-22-sp-29928-story.html.
http://goodseatsstillavailable.com/listen/2019/2/2/episode-98-the-original-xfl-with-brett-forrest?rq=xfl
Silverstein, Tim. “Fans Love ‘He Hate Me.’” JS Online: Fans Love 'He Hate Me', 30 Jan. 2004, web.archive.org/web/20070513161851/www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=203873.