Columnist Dean Juipe: XFL exec says league will succeed

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, July 12, 2000 | 10:25 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

We all know Las Vegas has been a graveyard for professional sports teams.

It's a story that has been written many times, with the multiple failures -- and the few exceptions -- documented accordingly. Sports of every kind have tried this market and most eventually saw the futility of the struggle and capitulated.

As a result, any new endeavor runs headlong into a well-bred skepticism on the part of the media, if not the community as well. Given the track record of pro football, pro basketball, pro hockey, pro soccer, pro tennis and pro roller hockey in Southern Nevada, it's easy to dismiss an incoming team or league as doomed before a ticket is even sold.

As such, when the Xtreme Football League announced its intention to go forward and place a franchise in Las Vegas for its debut season in 2001, it was dutifully speculated in this space that the project was apt to go swirling down the drain after a year or two.

And maybe it will.

But with the formal announcement coming today (at 5 p.m. at Sam Boyd Stadium) that Las Vegas will field a team in the upstart league, perhaps it's only fair to put an optimistic slant on the XFL's presence here. After all, the local team will play only five home games and maybe even a hard-sell city such as Las Vegas can handle that minimal investment of interest.

"This isn't the NFL and no one says that it is," the XFL's senior consultant for special projects, Las Vegan Rich Rose, said Tuesday from Los Angeles. "But it's going to be the second-best place for a football player to be compensated and it's going to be American football played in major U.S. cities.

"As for the caliber of play, there are plenty of guys out there who can play this game and there are plenty of Kurt Warners waiting to be discovered."

Warner, of course, is the quarterback who emerged from the obscurity of the Arena Football League to lead the NFL's St. Louis Rams to the Super Bowl last season. He's the poster boy for ambitious and opportunistic athletes everywhere.

Rose cites four reasons why the XFL will work: its season, which begins in February, comes when interest in football is still high and other winter sports are in the humdrums of mid-season; that the players will be well paid and that a $100,000 per game bonus that will be split by the winning team insures a competitive setting; that TV network NBC -- and UPN and a cable network yet to be announced -- guarantee widespread, prime-time exposure; and that league founder Vince McMahon has the creative wherewithal to bring the XFL the type of audience that has made his World Wrestling Federation a major success.

Those are quality arguments that would gain Rose points if this were a debate, yet he also knows Las Vegas is a tough nut to crack. He has lived here a long time and put on more than a few spectacles during his lengthy tenure as president of Caesars World Sports.

"I think the XFL will succeed because there's a large audience of Americans who like their football and who will enjoy a competitive game that has its exciting components to it," he said, and there's no debating that critique.

So, dubious notions aside, we'll see what happens. We'll see if the XFL can break the local trend.