Columnist Ron Kantowski: Las Vegas teams are loss cause

Thursday, April 12, 2001 | 10:26 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column appears Thursday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

The last line in a Bruce Springsteen song called "Thunder Road" (which does not appear on the just-released two-CD live set recorded at Madison Square Garden) proclaims "... This is a town for losers, and I'm pulling out of here to win."

Naturally, The Boss probably was referring to some blue collar burg back east where the windows on Main Street have been boarded up after the textile mill was shut down. But he could just as well have been talking about Las Vegas.

Because, man, do we ever specialize in losers. For starters, that's our primary industry. The casinos prefer to call that big, black number on the bottom line "earnings," but all it really is is a charitable donation from guys who bet on the wrong horse, team, hand, or number on the roulette wheel.

Losers. And with few exceptions, that also describes our sports teams.

I almost laughed out loud Wednesday when one of the local sports talk radio guys, his clock obviously still set on 1991, gushed about what a great town Las Vegas had become for winning sports. He cited the Community College baseball team and the UNLV football team, which is coming off its first winning season in the past six, as the basis for this outlandish statement. (And had the meteor that had John Robinson strapped to it not crashed to earth on the 50-yard line at Sam Boyd Stadium, the Rebel football team probably would be closer to extinction than respectability. Don't forget that the year before Robinson arrived, the Rebels were 0-11.)

Had talk show guy thought it out, he might also have lumped -- if that's the right word -- the UNLV golf team onto our small pile of winners. But beyond those three, when was the last time you heard "magic number" used in connection with one of our teams?

Back in the late 1980s, the UNLV baseball, soccer, women's basketball and women's softball teams were in and out of the Top 25. Today, they'd have trouble getting in and out of a hamburger stand. And the men's basketball team, which put Las Vegas on the map as a sports entity, seems to have lost Rand McNally's number during a roller-coaster decade that has featured far more valleys than peaks.

On the professional (read: minor league) side, our recent sporting past has been even more dubious. We've had ice hockey and roller hockey, indoor football and outdoor football, and indoor soccer and outdoor soccer franchises fold. Two basketball teams also went belly-up.

We're so starved for a winner that when our entry in the abominable figment of Vince McMahon's imagination known as the XFL won its first two games, we had contests to come up with cutesy nicknames for it. By season's end, the "Dealers of Doom," became the "Purveyors of Points Allowed," and a team that radio advertisements shamelessly trumpeted as the "XFL's model franchise" arguably turned into the worst team in a terrible league. The Outlaws lost five of their last six games. Only one team in the fledgling league had a worse record than Las Vegas.

And it has taken our triple-A baseball team, whose new affiliation with the Los Angeles Dodgers was supposed to put in on par with the '27 Yankees, six tries to win its second game of the season. Even with the PCL's split season format, the team hasn't qualified for the playoffs since 1992.

So move over Chicago. Step aside, Boston. You've got company and we're it.