A man was shot outside, not far from the MGM Grand, inside just over 50,000 people had queued patiently to wager just under $30 million (£20m) in bets and wandering the property, as a casino is called out here, was a fighting relic called Leon Spinks.
Welcome to Fight Night in Las Vegas.
In the aftermath of the fight I tried to track down a boxer whose life story is among the sport's craziest, a man who was known to mix partying and training and once took the world heavyweight title from Muhammad Ali.
Spinks lost that title in the rematch, which was only his ninth fight, and continued to drift through the sport in what must surely be the most ridiculous career in the history of boxing. I never found Spinks on Saturday night or Sunday morning, but there was no shortage of burly men of all colours, wearing fur coats and smiling gold teeth, hollering at the lights and punching the air. Sadly, more people remember 'Neon Leon' for his exploits outside the ring than for his boxing.
Spinks is now 61 and sightings are rare, meaningful interviews virtually non-existent and even the authors of a book about the two Spinks brothers, a brilliant read, had to stop a planned interview because the former heavyweight champion of the world was making no sense. I guess it does make sense for Spinks to be in Las Vegas, which has been collecting derelict fighters for decades and probably has more dead boxers in its cemeteries than any other city in America.
Every time there is a big fight, the old boxers creep out and hang on the edges looking for recognition and possibly a ticket to the fight; on Saturday nobody had any luck in search of a freebie. Spinks, I'm told, asked but was politely refused entry; thousands of others were given the same cold shoulder in a fight that, for one night only, altered the accepted landscape of a big-fight audience.
Both Mayweather and Pacquiao bought tickets for their immediate entourages and a few of the men and women that have helped them during the last three months for Saturday night's show. The probably paid millions of dollars between them but it needs to be remembered that just about every statistic with this fight has an alternative and all numbers were pliable.
In the aftermath, a time to collate the pay-per-view figures and adjust the total take, names were being suggested for Mayweather's future fights. The list is long and does, I think, include Pacquiao. On Saturday Mayweather won comfortably but in 12 months there is every chance that the fight could get repeated and this time with a bit of anger. Hey, it's business and if you don't like, don't buy it or read about it.
Mayweather insists that he will be back in the gym this week and I believe him. Pacquiao, meanwhile, will be out for months because he needs surgery on his bad right shoulder. The public will get to recover before any solid news emerges about future fights involving either man; it looks like Mayweather in September in Las Vegas and little Manny as soon as he is fit again.
In the day or so since the clean-up started, the streets of Las Vegas have emptied of the fans, the transients and the thousands of hustlers that arrived for the fight and transformed the city into a giant circus of the grotesque. It was, trust me, worth every second of the mayhem to be ringside.
It was not the greatest fight ever to take place in Las Vegas, not the best fight of either boxers' career but it was a major event; Bob Arum, a strip veteran since the Seventies, called it the "biggest event in Las Vegas history". That, my friend, is good enough for me.