Columnist Dean Juipe: SI story inaccurately portrays LV

Dean Juipe

Monday, Oct. 22, 2001 | 9:48 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.

I've never been a parent but I think I just realized how a father feels when someone takes it upon themselves to criticize your child. You get protective.

And a little mad.

I knew the moment I saw the headline in the Golf Plus edition of the current Sports Illustrated that I wasn't going to be happy with the reporting. There, with a photo of Tom Lehman taken at last week's Invensys Classic in Las Vegas, was a headline that read "Things were looking up for Tom Lehman in Las Vegas. If only the city could say the same."

I was immediately outraged.

Beyond the fact that the tournament was won by Bob Estes and that he was mentioned only in passing in a story that focused on Lehman, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Las Vegas, it seemed as if SI's judgment was faulty all the way around. Estes -- who has played 17 straight rounds in the 60s and has finished no worse than eighth in any of his last four events -- was clearly slighted and we in Las Vegas were as well.

In the article, which was written not by one of SI's primary golf writers but by second-stringer Seth Davis, Las Vegas is all but portrayed as a desert ghost town that was disproportionately affected by the events and subsequent turmoil resulting from the tragedies of Sept. 11. The typical reader in Des Moines probably had to dry a tear or two.

Of course Las Vegas has suffered as a result of the terrorist attacks, and the proof is that some 15,000 casino employees have been laid off. Yet the tone of the article implied that the city -- and its many golf courses that rely on a certain affluence within the community -- might never recover.

Hogwash.

Three weeks ago a friend and I literally went listing by listing through the golf section of the Yellow Pages and called every course in the area looking for a Saturday afternoon tee time. Shut out from getting a spot on any of the full-length courses in town, we settled for a noon opening at Desert Willow, a short, par-60 course in Henderson.

Seasonally high greens fees or not, the courses are packed around here. If Walters Golf laid off 50 employees, as was stated in the magazine article in a quote from a Walters spokesperson as a way of documenting the valley's fiscal tailspin, then maybe those 50 were relatively extraneous long before Sept. 11. (Quick aside: Billy Walters' name in a story with negative connotations for Las Vegas is getting to be commonplace of late.)

Also explored within the article was the possibility of Las Vegas losing its annual spot on the PGA Tour, and how that was the talk of the press room. Well, if it was it apparently escaped the attention of the Las Vegas writers at the tournament, as there was no mention of it locally.

We'll defer to the national publication in that the Invensys could be on better financial ground, yet it's a good bet Las Vegas will always have an event on the tour schedule. It has a significance that the LPGA and Senior Tour lacks, and the "rumors" that Davis referred to sound more like the musings of a bored contingent of national writers that wished it was back at Caesars Palace gambling instead of grazing in the press room at a golf tournament.

Another thing: Davis said occupancy rates in Las Vegas hotels are decent but only because the rooms are filled with "bargain hunters." That's nonsense, given that it still takes a good $125 to get a room for a single night on the Strip.

And his premise that Las Vegas has to worry because only 2 percent of its visitors play golf fell laughingly short of portraying the truth, given his use of golf-mecca Myrtle Beach, S.C., as his comparison. Do the math: If only 2 percent of the 200,000 tourists that are here every week play golf, that's still just as many rounds of golf as Myrtle Beach can claim even if all 2,000 of its weekly visitors played a round.

Aside from slanted, contrived and stilted far too much toward Lehman at the expense of Estes, what the SI story ended up being is an example of a good writer having a bad day. Just last Thursday I had the pleasure of conducting a seminar at UNLV with some 25 high school sports writers and I mentioned that even in a magazine of Sports Illustrated's stature, there's usually one story that comes across as dull or misguided. My intent, while pushing the kids to always give it their best shot, was to point out the difficulty even the best writers occasionally encounter.

Little did I know that just a few hours later the Oct. 22 SI would be in my mailbox and that this week's dud of a story would be so obvious.

Like every city in America, Las Vegas has had to come to grips with additional concerns in the wake of what happened back East. And, obviously, we're more reliant on such items as the nation's economy and people's willingness to travel.

But -- the critical words of a passing journalist notwithstanding -- we'll be OK. And if something in Las Vegas or related to our golf situation needs criticizing, we have long since proved that we are perfectly able to address it on our own.