Natural Selection

Photo by Marco Lima on Pexels.com

Now that I have your attention (I kid!) – have I ever mentioned I’m not a big fan of women augmenting themselves in certain parts of their bodies? I love the female form, don’t get me wrong – but I’ve always thought of women who get boob jobs and whatnot to be “cheating” more or less.

I didn’t always feel that way, of course – but as opinions are often formed, one such instance changed my view forever. It took place at a room I was staying in at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas in June of 1996 when I stayed out there for a few weeks.

No, the story doesn’t involve prostitution or anything like that – I knew that was illegal in Clark County (where Las Vegas is) before I left. Back in the days before on-demand video was a common thing as it is now, the Luxor had it. To pass a bit of time, I watched a James Bond movie that was relatively new back then, Goldeneye. Later that evening, I discovered that for a small fee – you can watch, ahem, more raunchy flicks.

I don’t think the phrase “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” was a thing yet, but I certainly had that feeling hit me in the privacy of my hotel room – so I selected a movie that had a former Playboy model named Teri Weigel in it. As the movie and the – ahem – “plot” progressed, Teri revealed a bit more of herself including some heavily augmented breasts.

Let’s just say it took me right out of the “mood” I was in, seeing those “Frankentitties” sit on her chest like a couple of immovable Las Vegas desert boulders – and let’s just say I’ve been a fan of the “real thing” ever since.

The Old Guy With The Semi-Afro

Binion’s Horseshoe in Las Vegas.

The last time I was in Las Vegas was sometime in April of 2000. I had to Greyhound it back to Charlotte, North Carolina, and settled up where I had lived downtown with a few hours to spare.

I walked around the downtown casinos, mainly because I didn’t know if and when I’d head back again. I made a point to stop inside Binion’s Horseshoe casino, because I had just missed the start of the World Series of Poker by a few days.

Mind you, this was a few years before the series of tournaments they hold each year was immortalized by ESPN and the “poker boom” that came with it. I stood and watched the action from the rail for a few minutes, and noticed this older gentlemen with a bit of hair on him. It almost looked like the Afro hairstyle that was so popular in the 70’s.

Heading east, I wondered to myself, “Who the heck wears his hair like that?!?”

Fast forward a few years. I’m back in my home area of Tampa Bay, and ESPN is airing the World Series of Poker that Chris Moneymaker won. One episode introduced most sports fans to the successful but enigmatic Phil Hellmuth, but I recognized one of the men at the table who had the semi-Afro at Binion’s.

It was T.J. Cloutier, who not only was a top tournament player, but an author of a poker book or two in his day. At one time, he held the all-time record for the most tournaments win on the poker circuit, but I’d have to think someone has that eclipsed by now.

It was one of those “if I knew then what I know now” moments in my life, and I have my share of those.

Raiders Of The Las Vegas

Word broke Monday that the NFL approved the proposed move of the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas, Nevada. The current thinking is that the Raiders will begin play there in 2019 at Sam Boyd Stadium on the eastern end of town, as the domed stadium will likely not be ready until 2020.

It’s a big acquisition for Las Vegas, who now have a NFL team to go with the new NHL team beginning later this fall, the Vegas Golden Knights. I can’t imagine the NBA and MLB being far behind in efforts to expand or move there. Plus, Las Vegas probably gets to host a Super Bowl sometime in the future.

I do feel bad for Oakland, who has now lost their beloved Raiders yet again. Their football stadium was the last facility left in the States sharing a facility with a baseball team, the Oakland Athletics. They needed a new stadium, but the city leaders somehow decided it wasn’t going to be.

As I’ve probably said before, the Raiders in Las Vegas are a perfect fit, and the days of wondering if Sin City can be a big league sports town are nearing its end.

They will have challenges to overcome being the 40th biggest media market in the country at present. They do have the advantage of being a town everyone wants to visit, which is what I think the NFL is banking on to make the venture viable.  Or, as Brent Musburger suggested in a recent VSIN.com column, could this move pave the way for legalized sports wagering nationwide?

I’ve long been a Las Vegas fan, so I’m happy for them.

We Have A Winner

About a year and a half ago, I asked who would get a sports franchise based out of North America first: London or Las Vegas?

It seems we have a winner to the answer of that question: the NHL is widely rumored to pick Las Vegas as its 31st franchise when their poobahs discuss expansion in the near future. The Vegas team would begin play in the fall of 2017.

As someone who has lived in Vegas twice (albeit for less than a month each time), congratulations, Vegas! Glad to see this city take its place among those with major sports teams.

Glitter Gulch Memories

I’ve been reading the news out of Las Vegas that the Glitter Gulch is going to be closing up soon.

When I first visited Las Vegas in June of 1996, I stayed at the Plaza Hotel my first night there. Taking a shower after a two day spell on a Greyhound bus, I decided to look around this canopied complex called the Fremont Street Experience. Looking around, I saw the strip club right in the middle of all these casinos.

I remember thinking, “What a novel place to put a titty bar!”

Back then, I used to love going to strip clubs and nudie bars, basically because it was something to do. It was a good habit if you had money to spend I suppose, but if you didn’t have money to burn, it was a terrible habit. Plus, that that I loved all the shapes and sizes a woman could be. Some girls were short, some girls were tall, some girls are naturally chested, and some weren’t.

I don’t remember too much about how much I spent there, other than getting a dance from two girls simultaneously, which was a thing I was into back then. All I remember is that I thought I was being hustled, which wasn’t an unfamiliar story at the Fremont Street Experience at that time. A few of the establishments there were casinos with slot machines, and female attendance who would watch you play to make sure they got a cut of whatever coins came out of the machines. Now that was a hustle and a half, so I got the hell out of there, much to the chagrin of the Asian lady watching me.

Las Vegas is a city that doesn’t treat its history well. I’m not too shocked that the Glitter Gulch and some of the ripoff joints looking like casinos are now going to go away. It’s probably a good thing. It also taught me in a sense to appreciate women of all sizes and shapes, and that not all beauty shows.

Flashback: “Highwayman” by The Highwaymen

I have always found this song to be quite powerful and to have a hidden meaning, though I didn’t realize it as such until the last decade or so of my life. It was a big deal when the song and album were released in 1985, as this was the very first country video MTV had ever aired.

You know, back when they actually played music?

You have Willie Nelson lending his voice in the first part of the song, saying he was a roving outlaw who pillaged in the early 20th century western United States as he pleased. He was hung by “bastards” in the spring of 1925.

Kris Kristofferson is the voice of a sailor who has a fatal accident in the Gulf of Mexico during a storm of some kind.

Waylon Jennings voices a builder on what’s now referred to as the Hoover Dam south of Las Vegas (a place called Boulder on the wild Colorado River, buried in a great tomb that knows no sound), again the victim of an apparent accident.

The song’s most powerful verse goes to Johnny Cash, talking about how he flies a starship some point in the future, saying that yes, he was once a highwayman, and the sailor, and a worker on the Boulder/Hoover Dam. What I get out of it is that a life can take on many possible roles, and can end many ways by choices or by fate. However, your spirit lives on forever, and isn’t taken from you once your respective life ends. There is a bigger picture that you play a part of than even the one present life you currently have has in store for you.

That’s what I get out of that song anyway, and it’s a beautiful sentiment.

Kids From 1 To 92

There are some Christmases in my life that I wish would last a bit longer. But sadly, the Christmas of 2015 wasn’t among them. At the end of the day, I was wishing time could move a little faster.

As some of you many have heard, it was the warmest Christmas Day Tampa has had in recorded weather history that dates back to 1890. The thermometer soared to 86 degrees, breaking the old record of 83 that’s been set a few times, lastly in 1984. I was reminded online that the Christmas of 1955 was even warmer, but with the western United States getting colder than normal weather (and Las Vegas getting snow), I couldn’t help but wonder if I was in the wrong place in both the literal and figurative sense.

I bought the Christmas gift for my mother well ahead of even Thanksgiving: a signed 8×10 picture of the late baseball great Duke Snider that I got off of Amazon, and a sturdy frame to go with it. She’s a bit of a collection enthusiast, though I’m partially in charge of the storage of said collection. She had a very large portrait of Duke that she keeps in her bedroom that takes up a lot of space, so now she has a “Little Duke” to go with the larger one.

Harry, my 7 year old tabby cat who I acquired from my landlord back in January, got a brand new water/meal bowl, plus a trip to Petco this past Monday for some nail care so that he’s not grabbing furniture with his claws every time I need to pick the little fella up.

As for me, I’m getting a new external hard drive for the computer which will arrive Sunday (yep, Sunday) in the mail. I’ve had the same 1TB drive since 2009, so this new 4TB drive took care of the most immediate need. I don’t want to come off as ungrateful (though I’m afraid I’m going to), but one of the options on the table, unbeknownst to me, was that I’d get some Christmas money, let’s just say it’s a three-digit sum with zeroes on the end. What I wasn’t told that by accepting the hard drive, that would come out of my allotment of cash. If I was fully aware of all of the options, I would have simply taken the money, but I can’t help but feel sandbagged on the deal, so I argued a bit with my Mom, who I felt was trying to provoke me.

When I argue, especially with family, I do not argue to win or lose. I argue to make my argument, and I let the chips fall where they may. With parents, either as a child or as an adult, losing arguments is something that’s just going to happen whether you like it or not. We worked out a compromise that I could use, and that settled the matter.

I spent a lot of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day watching stuff off of Netflix and a 30-day trial subscription to Amazon Prime. Watched some movies, and a series called The Man In The High Castle which is excellent from what I can tell two episodes into the first season.

But like the old Mac Davis song, happiness is this Christmas in my rear view mirror. Heck, if they all went the way I wanted them too, what would be the point, right?

Onward to what I think will be a better year in 2016.

Braves In My Backyard?

There’s been serious talk as of late about a new baseball stadium being built in the old “Toytown” section of northeast St. Petersburg, about a mile east of where I live.

It would NOT be for the Tampa Bay Rays, whose owners are desperately seeking a new home to play ball in, but a spring training home for the Atlanta Braves, who’d move over here from their home in the Disney World part of Kissimmee, which is just to the southwest of Orlando. The complex, that would cost $662-million to build, would be ready for the Braves in 2018.

My personal opinion is the deal is a slap in the face to the Tampa Bay Rays organization and sports fans of Pinellas County. Finding a new home for the Rays in St. Petersburg or in Pinellas County should be a higher priority, so it seems to me that the politicians of the area would rather lose the Rays to Tampa as opposed to keeping them on our side of Tampa Bay.

Such disorganization amongst our civic leaders might also mean that not only Pinellas County could lose the Rays, but the Bay Area as well. Montreal would love a major league team, so would cities that have never had baseball such as San Antonio, Las Vegas, Vancouver, Portland, Charlotte, San Antonio, and so on.

I’ve written before about how disorganized the formation of the Tampa Bay MLB franchise has been, and how minor league teams around the area have really hurt the Rays at the gate. Perhaps the problem is much bigger than that. I don’t want to be the guy that says “I told you so” when the Rays franchise gets moved to another part of North America, but I see nothing to make me believe that the franchise won’t go down that path eventually.

The Hobo Fight

Eastern and Fremont Streets in Las Vegas, March 2000.

In the spring of 2000, I lived for about a month on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. It was not an experience I choose to remember fondly, because the trip was rushed and not thought out well on my behalf, though I had some unique adventures there.

One Saturday afternoon, I went to a nearby gas station to pick up a few things for the day, and I noticed that these two hobos were having a very spirited conversation. Words were exchanged of the four letter variety, then punches were thrown, then a wrestling match broke out complete with the use of a grocery cart as a weapon.

My brain knew not to get involved in such a fracas, but this fight was a train wreck I could not look away from. I did not know what they were fighting about, I just wondered why they were fighting to the death, or at least until one of them passes out. After a few moments of this, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself gawking at the fight, so I whistled softly and walked away from the scene without knowing the fight’s outcome. For all I knew, this could have been a setup of some kind, with myself as the live bait.

I do wonder what happened to those two men all these years later. I wonder if they’re still alive, or if they’re still hobos. It’s not like they left me their business cards or anything, so I can’t look them up the next time I go out there.

Escalator Phobia

When I was a kid, I used to hate escalators for some strange reason. I don’t remember the logic of why I hated them, I just did. Maybe I thought once when I got to the top of one as a child that it was going to gobble me up or something.

Whenever I went to Tampa International Airport, I had to take stairs or elevators to get from floor to floor, which wasn’t always the most convenient thing to take. This drove my parents crazy, allowing me to let these phobias control me instead of me controlling them.

In my middle school years, I took a PSTA bus to Pinellas Square Mall from west Largo one day. It doesn’t exist as it once did anymore, as a shopping center sharing an air-conditioned common corridor. It had loads of escalators to get from one level of the mall to the other. I got there one morning and just hopped on as many as I could find, and the phobia was gone.

Many years later, I was at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 1996. They had an entrance to the place by the monorails where you had to go through all these shops to get up to the casino, which required an escalator to get to. This one day, there’s a couple with a baby stroller above me, the wife (or girlfriend) is holding the baby, the guy holding the stroller.

When they get to the top, the wife and baby get off fine, but the guy is fumbling around with the stroller, and it gets stuck. I have someone to the left of me either a step up or down, so I’m stuck running into this guy if he can’t get the stroller out of the way.

As I’m thinking about what to say, only able to get out a mumble or two, the guy thankfully is able to get the stroller out of its tango with the top of the escalator. I breathe a sigh of relief, going on to whatever business I had that day, imaging what I would be thinking if I had still been an escalator-phobe.

Inside Information

Manny Pacquiao is on the left, Floyd “Money” Mayweather on the right in their much ballyhooed fight on May 2, 2015. The fight went the scheduled 12 rounds, with all three judges agreeing that Mayweather won the fight.

The two big little men of prizefighting had their big fight Saturday Night past, with Floyd Mayweather beating Manny Pacquiao to unify three portions of the jigsaw puzzle of trying to decipher who is the champion of boxing’s welterweight division.  It was later revealed that Pacquiao was fighting with a sore shoulder, which wasn’t revealed to the organization running the fight, the state athletic commission of Nevada.

The fact that Pacquiao hid his injury wasn’t surprising at all, at least to me.

When I lived briefly in Vegas in 1996 (which I’ve mentioned on this blog a few times), I happened to meet one of Julio Cesar Chavez Sr.’s attorneys a few days before his (Julio’s) fight with Oscar De La Hoya at the Luxor Hotel sportsbook. When I asked how Julio was doing in a general way of speaking, he got tight lipped for some reason, saying he couldn’t say too much about it for legal reasons.

When the fight took place, I figured out right away why the lawyer was so tight lipped.

Julio got a bad cut from a punch only a minute and change into the very first round, losing the fight on cuts in the fourth round.  It is very rare in big time professional boxing to lose on cuts that quickly unless the fighters happen to butt heads or a massive cut opens up.

A lot of these fighters start off in poverty, hungry to make money for themselves and their family, and perhaps it’s a mindset that can’t be escaped.  Chavez was almost 34 when he fought Oscar that night in 1996.  Manny Pacquiao is 36 now.  When these fighters get to that age, perhaps they think a bit more about that financial security than their injuries and condition, and whether or not they can win against a fighter of equal or greater skill.

As for boxing and the decades old marriage between prizefighting and Las Vegas, were will they go from here?  Glad I didn’t spend nearly $100 for that fight, but it’s possible the fight game won’t see a fight this big for a long while.

The Travels Of A Prizefighter

It was one of those fights that felt like it happened yesterday, although this yesterday was 25 years (and now a day) ago.

On March 17, 1990 at the Las Vegas Hilton arena, Meldrick Taylor met Julio Cesar Chavez for a semi-unification of the junior welterweight boxing championship.  Both fighters were undefeated (although Taylor had an earlier draw against his record), with Taylor holding the International Boxing Federation version of the championship while Chavez simultaneously held the World Boxing Council belt of the same weight class.

All is going well for Taylor, the Philadelphia fighter, as he’s winning round after round of the fight scheduled to go a maximum of twelve rounds.  As Taylor is winning most (if not all) of the rounds, you could see that Chavez was getting his own quality of punches in.  Taylor’s face was taking most of it, as you could see a cut inside his lip and one of his eyes looked in bad shape.  After the fight, Taylor was diagnosed as having a fractured orbital bone in one eye.

Chavez was down in the scoring, or so it was speculated.  (Scoring is kept by three judges stationed at ringside, and typically only they know the score.  It is usually not posted anywhere in the arena like other sports do.)  In boxing, if you’re down on points, there is one great equalizer: the knockout.  Score a stoppage and you win the fight, no matter the scoring.  The Mexican fighter, known for his knockout power, wobbled Taylor with 25 seconds left in the fight, scoring a knockdown with a thunderous right seven seconds later.

All Taylor had to do was get up and survive the last few seconds to win.  Taylor rose with 11 seconds to go, with referee Richard Steele’s count at six.  The count had to go to a minimum of eight to comply with the mandatory eight seconds a fighter gets once he falls.  Steele looks at Taylor, asking twice if he is okay.  Taylor doesn’t respond to either of the questions, so Steele waves his arms to signify the fight was over, and that Taylor was finished.

Only two seconds remained in the fight, stopped at 2:58 of the 12th round.

A crescendo of emotion and amazement hit the arena, some amazed Chavez could pull off the fight, others amazed Steele had the huevos to stop the fight so close to its conclusion, denying Taylor what would have been a legendary victory.  Neither fighter was ever the same after that night, with Taylor taking the worst of it, moving up in weight and taking more beatings from more skilled fighters.

Fast forward to June of 1996.  I had briefly lived in Las Vegas for that month, and Chavez had another big money fight with 1992 Olympian Oscar De La Hoya while I was there.  The day before the fight, I went to the weigh-in at Caesars Palace, and they were showing the Taylor fight on the sportsbook TV screens with no ball games going on that morning.

I already knew the outcome, but when I had to go to the bathroom I can hear people reacting to the fight outside as if they had seen it for the first time. Someone came into the bathroom, talking to a buddy, saying “Did you see that f***ing fight?!?”

I did, six years prior to that.  I wasn’t a Meldrick Taylor fan, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy. I still can’t.  But those are the travels of a prizefighter.