High Rollers Always Hear the Bell

On a couple of tennis courts not far from its gaudy swimming pool, Caesars Palace has erected a semi-permanent, 15,100-seat stadium.

It’s a rickety-looking structure, held together with steel beams and pipes and a few thousand nuts and bolts. It doesn’t look much different from the bleachers you might see at the county fairgrounds drag races.

But this little stadium has in recent years become the world boxing capital.

What Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium once were to boxing, Caesars Palace is today. Monday night’s Marvelous Marvin Hagler-Thomas Hearns fight was the hotel’s 34th world championship bout since 1977.

But some of the executives at Caesars would like to take a crack at another major American sports event: the Super Bowl.

Ridiculous? Preposterous? Maybe. But listen to Bob Halloran, vice president of sports for Caesars World, Inc.:

“I’ve known Pete Rozelle for years, and I said to him a couple of years ago, ‘Pete, I want to talk to you some time about a Super Bowl in Las Vegas.’ He kind of smiled at me, but he didn’t laugh at the idea. We’ve got one big strike against us right off the bat--the gambling thing.

“But if I thought we had half a chance, we’d go after it, believe me. Hey, if we pay $4 million for a fight (the fee Caesars paid promoter Bob Arum for Hagler-Hearns), would we pay a much larger sum for a Super Bowl? You bet we would.

“No, we don’t have a stadium. But if we got the game, we’d plant some grass and build 60,000 or 80,000 seats around it. I don’t know that we could do that on our property here, but we’d find a place.”

The way hotel executives look at it, nothing brings high rollers into hotel casinos like a major boxing event. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has a formula for estimating the amount of money boxing visitors spend at events like this. For Hagler-Hearns the numbers came out to $92 million, nearly double that of the previous record-holders--the $55 million spent at the 1983 Hagler-Duran show and the $51 million for the 1982 Holmes-Cooney fight.

Rossi Ralenkotter, research director for the Convention and Visitors Authority, says the average nonconvention visitor to Las Vegas budgets $115 for gambling and $90 for nongambling expenditures daily. Conventioneers spend $175 a day in nongambling money.

But for a major boxing show, those numbers become pocket change.

Hotel executives are loath to discuss money figures in their casinos. But in 1982, Sports Illustrated reported that in the 30-day period surrounding the Holmes-Cooney fight, the “drop” in the Caesars casino was $30 million, the hotel’s record at that time.

Henry Gluck, Caesars chairman and chief executive officer, wouldn’t confirm that figure, saying only: “You must realize, a few of our rated baccarat players from overseas could visit us for a few days and heavily impact any such figure.”

Halloran: “I’ll tell you this, nothing comes close to the action in the casino that a major boxing event creates, not even having Frank Sinatra here.”

You thought T-shirts were strictly small business? At the rear of the casino this week, a concessionaire is selling Hagler-Hearns T-shirts, caps, posters and jackets. As of Sunday night, the T-shirt sellers had taken in more than $400,000--and more than $100,000 on one day.

At the Caesars sports book counter, of course, money flows like a great river. Said sports book manager Art Manteris on Saturday: “I’ve never seen anything like this. We’ve already had about a dozen $50,000 bets by individuals, but on Monday between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., the flood gates will open up. There’ll be long lines of very serious bettors then.

“The electricity you feel in a place like this for a major fight is unparalleled. Super Bowls generate more volume of action, but the feeling for a big fight is far more electric. The way things are going now, I’d say this fight has a chance to approach a Super Bowl in (betting) volume. For sure, it will surpass every other boxing event in history. For us, Holmes-Cooney is the all-time leader, and Leonard-Hearns was a close second. This one will top both by a wide margin.

Who are the high rollers?

“They’re from every affluent segment of society you could name: real estate people, oil people, entertainment people. . . .

“A strange thing happened this morning. A guy came to the counter to place a bet, and you wouldn’t have guessed he was affluent by the way he was dressed. He said: ‘I’ve been in the ring with Marvin Hagler, and no one in the world can beat him.’ He pulled out--I won’t tell you how much it was--but you could say it was several thousand dollars and bet it on Hagler.”

The casino action this week compares favorably with the action for tickets.

Said Doug Glendinning, Caesars director of special events: “We were effectively sold out March 1. The stadium is scaled from $600 ringside down to $50. We could have sold all 15,100 seats for $600.”

Caesars has promoted major auto racing and tennis events at the hotel, but with a wave of the hand, Halloran dismissed both as vehicles for generating revenue.

“I won’t give you numbers, but nothing compares to boxing.”

Caesars doesn’t get all the major boxing shows.

“We pass on some,” Gluck said. “And I might add that some of those we’ve passed on went to promoters who’re no longer in the boxing business.”

Halloran: “One we really wanted was the first Leonard-Duran fight, the one that went to Montreal. That’s the only one we missed on that I really regret losing.

“For this one, I’ve worked two years. We really wanted this one.”

Glendinning said Hagler-Hearns has been a flawless, textbook promotion.

“Everything has worked right for us. For Holmes-Cooney, we had to deal with a postponement. Leonard-Hearns was created very quickly and we did that one in a hurry. For this one we had lots of lead time.”

Caesars also showed the bout on closed-circuit. In its convention area, it had 4,400 seats and five big TV screens.

The closed-circuit TV audience numbered in the millions Monday night. But Gluck wishes that one other boxing fan could have experienced the excitement at ringside with him.

“My father, who died in 1970, was a great boxing fan,” he said. “We used to go to all of Sugar Ray Robinson’s New York fights together. I know when I sit down at ringside, I’ll have that feeling that my one disappointment is that my father won’t be there next to me.”