Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2004 | 9:57 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
Last week, less than an hour after a Florida Marlins official asked that a meeting between the stadium-shopping major league baseball franchise and city hall be kept quiet, Mayor Oscar Goodman was on the phone with reporters, doing exactly the opposite.
The next day, the mayor told reporters during his weekly news conference that he was headed to Anaheim for another round of "confidential" meetings with major league types during baseball's annual winter meetings. Then he showed up at the Anaheim Marriott with a showgirl on each arm and an Elvis impersonator covering his backside.
What, no marching band?
Strolling through a hotel lobby with a couple of 6-foot-4 inch beauties and a guy sporting foot-long sideburns and a gold lame jacket isn't the way most ordinary public officials would choose to begin a confidential meeting. But then, Oscar Goodman is no ordinary public official.
Everybody's got a favorite Mayor Goodman story or anecdote and mine happened last New Year's Eve. During his traditional stroll down Fremont Street, the mayor spotted a reveler with a bare midriff who obviously was no match for him in martini drinking and asked where she was from.
"L.A.," shrieked the Paris Hilton wannabe while pumping her fist in the air, as if that was something to be proud of.
"L.A. sucks," our esteemed mayor shot back.
Call me narrow minded, but I couldn't imagine Rudy Giuliani strolling down Times Square on Rockin' New Year's Eve and telling some party gal from the Left Coast that her hometown sucks. But then, he already had two big league baseball teams. Or at least one and the Mets.
So while some may question the mayor's less-than-subtle approach to getting the word out that Las Vegas is ready, willing and able to support a big league franchise, I think it's the perfect strategy. Why try to hit behind the runner or bunt him down to second base when we live in a city that specializes in three-run homers?
According to those who were there, the mayor's Bombay (Sapphire, his gin of choice) and bombast were well received by the baseball suits, if for no other reason it gave them something to talk about other than their golf handicaps and the size of Barry Bonds' biceps.
So now, when the club owners use Las Vegas as leverage to obtain financing for a new stadium or a sweetheart deal on a lease extension, the ordinary public officials in their ordinary cities will have to attach some legitimacy to what once was an idle threat.
The mayor's carnival barking notwithstanding, that air of viability currently blowing out over the left-field wall -- that is, if we had a left-field wall -- can be traced to center field, or at least Centerfield Management Group.
That syndicate, which included consultant Mike Shapiro and New York financier Robert Blumenfeld, earlier this year put Las Vegas on Bud Selig's short list as a potential home for the wayward Montreal Expos. It also did the legwork that showed our city may be up to the task sooner rather than later.
To repeat the catch phrase of the snowballing campaign to bring real pro baseball to Las Vegas, it's no longer a matter of if, but when we get a team. So credit Shapiro and Co. for making one heck of a quality start.
But now that they have left the game, Las Vegas is turning to its big guy warming up in the bullpen to finish the job.
I know, I know. That 61-acre tumbleweed depository adjacent to the Spaghetti Bowl was going to be used for a hockey arena and then a furniture mall and then a medical center and then a housing project and then a permanent home for the Harlem Globetrotters and then ... well, you get the idea. One could argue that if Mayor Goodman's legacy is going to rest on that vacant parcel of land downtown, he has been about as effective as the Cubs' bullpen in protecting it.
But with respected outsiders such as Sports Illustrated jumping on Las Vegas' bandwagon, MLB seemingly having nudged the legalized gambling stumbling block closer to the back burner and the fact that the mayor and his escorts weren't arrested for trespassing and/or disturbing the public in Anaheim over the weekend, it's almost as if he has developed a new pitch. One, I might add, that is sawing off critics of our city's short-term potential as a major league market.
Like this one.
Sure, everybody agrees there's still a lot of work to be done, starting with the financing for Field of Dreams II. So the goal is for the Las Vegas Oscars (which the mayor plans to call the team, lest anybody forgets who was driving the bus) to take the field on Opening Day 2008 or whenever Conan O'Brien takes over as host of the Tonight Show, whichever comes first.
By then, Mayor Goodman's head may be so big that not even Jason Giambi's batting helmet would fit. In addition to naming the team, he may want to manage it, too. Or play center field and bat cleanup.
Hopefully, he'll settle for throwing out the first pitch.
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