LAS VEGAS -- Two hours before Canelo Alvarez faced Amir Khan on Saturday night, Oscar De La Hoya was walking around Hyde Lounge, a swanky club perched above the new T-Mobile Arena, greeting business partners and invited guests. Hyde is known for its decadent nightspots in Hollywood, South Beach and Las Vegas but has never opened anything quite like the 18,000-square-foot club which was built inside of the arena. Its calling card is two lighted triangular platforms on each side, protruding over the lower bowl of the arena, where guests pose for pictures, leaning over the pointed railing with their arms outstretched, as if they were recreating a scene from "Titanic."
While preliminary fights took place below, VIP guests sat on plush couches and looked over the bottle-service menu while a DJ played music next to a dance floor between rounds.
The scene was quintessential Las Vegas, while at the same time being something the city had never experienced before.
"This is a game-changer. This is one of the best arenas I've ever seen." Oscar De La Hoya
For all of its excess and extravagance in constructing a neon-lit fantasy world in the middle of the desert, Las Vegas has always lacked a professional sports-quality venue.
The MGM Grand Garden Arena and the Mandalay Bay Events Center have served as the two most popular locations for events along the Strip over the past two decades, but both are quaint by major league standards, built into the casinos with fights and concerts in mind. They were already outdated compared to other NBA and NHL facilities before they even opened their doors for the first time in 1993 and 1999, respectively.
In the new $375 million, 20,000-seat T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas not only has its newest attraction, but one that has finally gained the attention of teams and leagues that had for years viewed the city as nothing more than an exhibition game pit stop at best and a wasteland with legalized gambling at worst. Now, they are thinking about the city in terms most never thought possible before. They're thinking about it as a future home.
"This is a game-changer," De La Hoya said as he looked over the crowd. "This is one of the best arenas I've ever seen."
Ground was broken on what would become the T-Mobile Arena almost two years to the day before it hosted its first fight Saturday. The groundbreaking ceremony was attended by Floyd Mayweather, UFC president Dana White as well as NBA and NHL hall of famers Bill Walton and Luc Robitaille. Las Vegas was already the home of boxing and mixed martial arts but there was no question MGM Resorts International and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), 50-50 joint partners in the venue, were hoping to make an impression on the NBA and NHL with the arena.
MGM owns and operates 15 properties in Nevada, Mississippi and Michigan, including the MGM Grand, Bellagio, The Mirage, Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur, New York-New York and Monte Carlo. AEG meanwhile owns, controls or is affiliated with over 100 venues around the world including the Staples Center and StubHub Center in Los Angeles as well as the 02 Arena in London. The company also has ownership interest in the Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Lakers. Both teams recently announced they would play a pair of exhibition games at T-Mobile Arena in October.
The plan was to not only keep major boxing and MMA events in the city for the foreseeable future but attract a professional sports team as well. It was built with the NHL and NBA in mind, a first for a Las Vegas venue. There are already two NBA and two NHL locker rooms built into the arena as well as a storage room for two Zambonis. The arena is ready to be the home of an NBA and NHL team today if called upon and would be viewed as arguably the best arena in either league if the city got a team.
"We wanted to construct a state-of-the-art arena and I would put it at the top of the list," said Dan Beckerman, AEG president and CEO. "Everyone who has been here has been absolutely blown away. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. It's such an important market for us when you look at our network of venues from around the world. It's an iconic market and a word class destination and for us to have a brand-new, world-class arena in a market like that was critical."
There is cautious optimism around the city that Las Vegas will be awarded an expansion NHL franchise as early as next month, with the team beginning play as early as the 2017-18 season. The NBA has no current plans to expand, but Las Vegas is ready and willing if that day comes or if a team was looking to relocate. Seattle is also hoping to get an NBA team after losing the Sonics in 2008, but last week the Seattle City Council voted 5-4 to reject giving up land to entrepreneur Chris Hansen so he could build a $500 million arena.
Las Vegas isn't just "shovel-ready" to build an arena for an NHL or NBA team in the future; it is open and ready for business to host the city's first major professional sports team.
"We haven't had a new venue in this market in so long, we missed generations," said Rick Arpin, senior vice president of entertainment for MGM Resorts. "We wanted to be accommodating to the NHL and NBA. We're building this for the long term. Who knows? The NBA could be 10-20 years down the road, but in the interim we want to host games. We hope to be the home of an NHL team soon. We also want to future-proof this building so we can have one of the best arenas in the world for years to come."
Spend enough time around downtown Las Vegas and you're sure to hear stories of the way the city used to be from regulars. Back when the Rat Pack performed two shows nightly at the Copa Room inside the Sands, Elvis performed at the Las Vegas Hilton where you could get a seafood cocktail for $1.50 and a fight wasn't really a "megafight" unless it took place outdoors at the Caesar's Palace Sports Pavilion.
Of course, nothing lasts forever, and the shelf life is even shorter in Vegas where buildings are demolished and constructed in between trips for most visitors. Fans who have grown accustomed to fights at the MGM Grand Garden Arena or the Mandalay Bay Events Center might sound like their older counterparts on Fremont Street, yearning for simpler times in the city before future fights, as they pay to park their cars at hotels and walk across pedestrian bridges to the arena.
On Saturday night, the normally bustling area around the MGM Grand Garden Arena on fights nights was empty with the fight taking place across the street. There was always a certain charm of fights being at the Garden, which is attached to the MGM. The same colorful carpeting on the casino floor led you to the arena, and you were never more than a 10-minute walk to the arena doors from your hotel room, pool or the blackjack table. Most fans never left the property during fight week with everything under one roof.
With T-Mobile Arena, MGM is trying to get fans outside and exploring its other properties along the Strip. It opened The Park, a $100 million outdoor area lined with trees, waterfalls and restaurants between New York-New York and Monte Carlo with a pathway that leads directly to the arena. Before the fight, fans played cornhole and Jenga in an outdoor beer garden while kids ran around a 40-foot steel sculpture of a woman dancing. The scene seemed completely out of place on the Strip, which is what makes it one of the more refreshing additions to a town that has often been more concerned with recreating another city's distinctive traits than carving its own unique path.
"The environment is different, but it doesn't necessary mean it's better or worse -- it's just different," Arpin said. "At the MGM you can go to the pool, your room, to the tables and then to the event. You can do the same thing here but you leave the resort and wonder through the park to the arena. It's just a different experience but we want other resorts to embrace this arena too. To sell 18,000 tickets, you need everyone rolling in the same direction."
The night before the T-Mobile Arena hosted its first fight, the Toshiba Plaza, a two-acre area outside of the arena, hosted the Canelo-Khan weigh-in. That was followed by a five-fight card put on by Golden Boy Promotions that took place inside of a makeshift ring, which was surrounded by a fan fest with food trucks and live music. The lighted replica skyline of 1940s New York from the New York-New York hotel provided a picturesque backdrop for what MGM hopes will be an attractive destination for teams and leagues looking to hold similar events.
"This is something different that we couldn't have done before this arena and this area was built," said former light heavyweight and middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins, who is a minority partner in Golden Boy Promotions. "When was the last time you had fights outside on a Friday before the big fight on Saturday? You now have two venues where you can have the warm-up before the main event. Everyone is going to want to fight here. I just wish I could still get one fight in here."
When Alvarez knocked out Khan in the sixth round Saturday night, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones got up from his ringside seat and gave Alvarez a standing ovation along with a crowd of 16,540 at the T-Mobile Arena.
Jones was an invited guest of De La Hoya. The two met in Dallas back in February to discuss possibly hosting Alvarez's next fight. Jones also hosted Gennady Golovkin and his promoter, Tom Loeffler, at a Cowboys game last November and presented Golovkin with a Cowboys jersey at midfield. Jones isn't so much a fight fan as he is a fan of bringing premier events to the AT&T Center and has gone as far as clearing the stadium's calendar for Sept. 17, the Saturday after Mexico's Independence Day, when a megafight between Alvarez and Golovkin could potentially take place.
"I invited Jerry Jones personally," De La Hoya said. "That's how serious he is about taking a Canelo fight or several fights to his stadium. I am going to be doing a lot of work in the next week. I have to fly to Dallas, and there are other people who want to stage Canelo fights. It's a matter of just taking maybe one day off and then start working my magic. Jerry Jones' arena is a huge possibility for Canelo's fights in the near future."
Jerry's World, as the $1.3 billion stadium is affectionately called in Texas, is another reason Vegas needed to build T-Mobile Arena. The arena can't compete with the stadium's 80,000 seats, which can be expanded to 105,000 standing room, but it can hold its own against any other arena in the world. While the thought of staging a fight in front of 100,000 fans would make any promoter salivate, the prospect of staging a fight in a half-empty stadium usually keeps them at arenas.
That doesn't mean De La Hoya and other promoters won't look at other venues to host their fights, but chances are they'll come to the same conclusion De La Hoya is expected to with most of Canelo's future fights and the same conclusion the NHL is anticipated to come to next month: It's hard to bet against Las Vegas right now.
"Las Vegas will be Canelo's home for many years to come," De La Hoya said. "Obviously we will sit down with the MGM group to discuss future fights and making this arena Canelo's new home. It's one of the best arenas we've been in across the country."