Revisiting Caesars’ Salad Days

Most think that Caesars Palace is a place in the Los Angeles suburb of Las Vegas where you take your money and give it to poor, indigent casino owners.

It is that, and more. In the last 40 years, Caesars has been where you can go to a blackjack table, or a slot machine, and a weird sports event will break out.

Caesars has seen, really close up, Robert “Evel” Knievel, James “the Fan Man” Miller, non-designer garbage bags, and the Great One and the grasshoppers.

It is where they once carried a famous boxer into the ring, where they held a pro tennis match that brought more betting action than Wimbledon that year.

Caesars remains proud of its tradition and this year is billing itself as “A legend for 40 years.” For once, history backs up the marketing.

It all began on New Year’s Eve, 1967, when a motorcycle stunt rider, Evel Knievel, got the hotel to allow him to try to jump over its long array of fountains in the front of the property, along Las Vegas Boulevard. Evel jumped, missed and his bike landed on top of him. He broke between 17 and 22 bones -- the rule of thumb in motorcycle fountain-jumping is that you stop counting broken bones at a dozen -- and there was no turning back for Caesars.

* November 1993: the Fan Man.

In the seventh round of the Evander Holyfield-Riddick Bowe heavyweight title fight, a man carried through the air by a propeller-driven device circled the hotel and landed in the ring.

At ringside, entourages for Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, thinking it was an assassination attempt, smothered their leaders protectively and whisked them out. In the ring, Bowe’s handlers took turns beating on the intruder with their walkie-talkies.

Eventually, order was restored and James Miller, a.k.a. the Fan Man, was taken into custody.

Henry Gluck, then chairman and chief executive of Caesars World, said, “I remember wondering, ‘What do you charge him with?’ ”

Felonious helicoptering?

* March 1986: non-designer garbage bags.

A fight between Marvin Hagler and John Mugabi, set for Caesars outdoor arena, was only hours away when the skies opened.

Debbie Munch, then a public relations staffer and now a PR vice president, worried about the 600 reporters and photographers sitting ringside, and about their electrical equipment. She had an idea, called the hotel housekeeping department and asked how many garbage bags they had. Thousands, she was told. Soon, as she was standing backstage, cutting slits for heads in garbage bags, she was confronted by Gluck, whom she had never met before.

“Whose idea were the garbage bags?” Gluck growled.

Munch, anticipating sudden unemployment, ‘fessed up.

Good work, she was told, and soon the bags had made their way from press row to the paying customers. Among those was Bo Derek, looking somewhat less than a perfect 10 and prompting Gluck to later suggest to Munch that, next time, they should use “designer garbage bags.”

Rain stopped just before the fights began, and Hagler beat Mugabi.

Thomas Hearns, fighting on the undercard, was so concerned about his footing, though, that he had his handlers carry him from his dressing room into the ring.

* September 1991: the Great One and the grasshoppers.

Rich Rose was president of sports for Caesars, and he thought it would be a good idea to have a pro ice hockey game in the desert. Outdoors. In September.

Go figure.

Rose got the ear of somebody in the NHL front office, who got the ear of Bruce McNall, then owner of the Kings, who agreed it might be a good idea. Soon, the Kings were to play the New York Rangers in an exhibition game.

They made the ice behind the hotel. With the game scheduled for 6 p.m., the plan was to remove an insulation blanket that was propped several feet above the ice about noon.

When a worker didn’t see anybody to help him with that by 12:30, he just went ahead. But instead of lifting the insulation off, he cut the cords holding it, and the blanket covered the ice. Soon, Caesars had riverfront property.

“We were more ready to have the U.S. swim championships than a hockey game,” Rose said.

Somehow, by lowering the temperature to three degrees, they got ice again and actually played the game.

Afterward, the Kings’ Wayne Gretzky was asked how it had gone, and replied, “It was great, but I’ve been skating since I was 4 years old and I thought I’d seen everything.”

And what new thing he had seen?

“Grasshoppers,” he said. “They were everywhere. Skate, crunch, skate, crunch.”

Rose said, “It must have been the lights.”

Coincidentally, the Kings, scheduled for another exhibition the next night at an indoor arena in Charlotte, N.C., got the night off when that arena couldn’t make ice.

Meanwhile at Caesars, the crazy stuff has continued practically nonstop.

In September ‘92, there was a tennis match between Martina Navratilova and Jimmy Connors. Navratilova got to hit into a bigger area than Connors, but the irrepressible Connors was so unworried that, hours before the match, he walked into Caesars sports book and bet $60,000 on himself, not just to win, but to do so in straight sets, which he did. Betting on that match surpassed all the action on that year’s Wimbledon.

Since Evel Knievel, three others have tried the fountain jump. Gary Wells attempted it in ’80 and crashed, claiming that somebody had moved the landing ramp.

Evel’s son, Robbie, did it with ease in ’89 after Gluck, by now fearing lawsuits and an accident that would result in bad public reaction, was assured by his vice president for sports, Jack Leone, that he had nothing to worry about because they had “hired limos to take the family to the hospital.”

On May 4, the tradition continued, when a young X Games performer, Mike Metzger, cleared the fountains easily, back-flipping his bike.

Last Friday, they held the weigh-in at Caesars for the much-anticipated Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo lightweight title fight. Castillo didn’t make weight, the fight was called off, and the scene floated between bizarre and surreal.

None of the Caesars staff seemed to notice.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/Dwyre.