Norm Johnson recalls Mint 400’s dusty infancy

By John Katsilometes

Friday, March 27, 2009 | 2:22 p.m.

But for a happily unclean casino executive, the Mint 400 Off-Road Race might not have survived its first year. It was 1968, night had fallen on the 115 buggies and bikes making roaring from the Mint Hotel on Fremont Street out on the dusty acreage between there and Beatty. By then, the desert was littered with racers and their disabled vehicles. It was dark, disorganized, and the race looked doomed before any of the $15,000 in prize money was awarded.

“The racers are all stretched out over the desert, and a lot of them had broken down – Parnelli Jones (in his Ford Bronco and one of the event’s top draws) had broken down three times,” race founder Norm Johnson said during a phone interview today. “It was looking really bad, and a lot of people thought it was a mistake to even try this.”

One of those people was a Mint Hotel executive Johnson cares not to identify, other than to say the complaining official had the influence to halt the race (pun unintended) in its tracks. “He said, and I quote -- and you can clean this up however you want -- ‘This is a (f-ing) disaster!’ ” said Johnson, himself a member of the Mint Hotel family as the casino’s PR man whose dream event seemed about spun out. But one of the drivers who had broken down, a resort exec, soon arrived to rescue the event.

“An hour later, the president of the Sahara, Earl Thompson, and his navigator come in and they’re just filled with dust,” Johnson said, laughing. “He walks up to me and says, ‘This is the greatest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen!’ That helped change some minds. (Mint Hotel President) Bill Bennett backed it, too. If not for that event, the race might never have made it past the first year.” The event is back, under the Mint 400 title but without Johnson’s involvement. About 225 drivers will charge into the dust devils at the Moapa Tribal Plaza, which is just off Exit 75 about 25 miles north of Las Vegas on Interstate 15 (click here for race info).

The race prospered, under its original title, for 20 years. The first year, 115 vehicles participated in the first U.S. off-road event to offer prize money and contingency awards from such sponsors as STP and the now-defunct Gates Tires. Johnson, himself an avid race enthusiast, was inspired to organize the race after reading a magazine story about the Baja 1,000. “That was the only off-road race, and it was not yet established, and I’d read about the six or nine Jeeps that went down to Baja to race and thought it would be fun to try that here.”

A former Las Vegas Sun reporter who moved to Vegas in 1965, Johnson was on staff when Hunter S. Thompson stormed into Vegas to cover the 1971 race for Rolling Stone magazine, the legendarily drug-inspired endeavor that led to the epic “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Johnson had only fleeting correspondence with Thompson. “I met him and knew how dopey and crazy he was, and I think I even had a drink with him, but that’s the only direct contact I had with him,” Johnson recalls. But Johnson was a consultant for the film of the same name starring Johnny Depp as Thompson. Johnson warned against filming scenes of motorcycles racing side-by-side against dune buggies and pickups; the film showed that footage anyway, which was filmed on the desert lake bed near Primm. “I still got paid as a consultant, even though they didn’t listen to me.”

Johnson has no plans to take part in this year’s race and declines to specify just why he’s not still involved. At age 76, he’s not interested in raising hackles, but it’s certain that a political dustup has left Johnson off the course for the new event. Regardless, Johnson still keeps busy doing PR work and creating artworks as an accomplished sculptor. And he still holds all those Old Vegas memories. “I think what I’m most proud of is that (off-road racing) became a worldwide sport,” he says. “The Mint 400, the original, helped make that happen.”