How former Mayors Oscar, Carolyn Goodman helped attract major league sports to valley

Las Vegas tourism is thriving thanks to professional sports concepts Las Vegas Mayors Oscar and Carolyn Goodman championed when in office as they served on the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority board of directors.

Between them, the Goodmans spent 25 years in the city’s top municipal office, and from his first days, Oscar Goodman shared that he had three major goals: to develop a cultural centerpiece, to upgrade the community’s medical facilities and for Las Vegas to get major-league sports.

“I wanted Las Vegas to have great culture because Carolyn and I come from cultured families, cultured cities and culture was very much a part of our development and education,” Oscar Goodman said in an interview. “And Las Vegas really did not have a cultural hub.”

Culture has been enhanced with the development of the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the opening of several museums, including downtown’s National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, known as the Mob Museum, which the Goodmans had a hand in.

After a slow start, the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV was established in August 2014 and saw its first class graduate in 2021.

But fostering major-league sports may be the Goodmans’ legacy contribution to tourism.

Rebel basketball

When Oscar took office in June 1999, the biggest sports teams in town were UNLV’s Runnin’ Rebels basketball team, which won the NCAA national championship in 1990 with Final Four appearances in 1977, 1987, 1990 and 1991.

The most popular professional sports team was the Las Vegas Stars, which eventually became known as the Las Vegas 51s and the Las Vegas Aviators, and over the years has been the top farm team for the San Diego Padres, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Toronto Blue Jays, the New York Mets and the Oakland Athletics.

It wasn’t until 2017 that the first big-league team was established in Southern Nevada as the Vegas Golden Knights. Up until then, the city has had major boxing and mixed martial arts matches and NASCAR races and numerous brushes with big-league sports teams, hosting preseason NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball games. But until the Knights arrived, Las Vegas never had its own franchise in one of the major sports leagues.

While the Goodmans view pro sports as a community asset, the teams that already have planted their flags in Las Vegas see hundreds of supporters of the opponent in the seats at games, spending money on hotel rooms and meals as well as game tickets.

When Oscar Goodman said one of his ambitions was to bring Major League sports to Las Vegas, critics said it would never happen because leagues and team owners feared Nevada’s strong gambling culture could lead to influences on game outcomes.

“Sports are a part of your fabric and you grow up rooting for sports and it is a way that you identify with your hometown,” Oscar Goodman said. “And we didn’t have that. The closest we had to it, and it was pretty darn good, were the old UNLV basketball teams under Tark (former UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian) where they were running and developing a national, if not worldwide, reputation.”

Philadelphia, New York homes

Oscar, raised in Philadelphia, and Carolyn, raised in New York, lived in families that were passionate about their sports teams. Oscar, a self-described bench-warmer on college teams, once shared a basketball court with Philadelphia 76er great Wilt Chamberlain. Carolyn, whose father was a physician and often took her to New York Yankees games, was in the stands when Don Larson pitched the only perfect game in World Series history.

Early on, both Goodmans realized that the only way they were going to get Major League sports to Las Vegas was through personal relationships with the movers and shakers of sports.

“I realized the whole purpose of how you achieve everything is through personal interaction,” Carolyn Goodman said in an interview. “And from day one, he (Oscar) started with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman who was his very first call. It’s all about establishing a relationship and we still maintain relationships and hear from (NBA Commissioner) Adam Silver and (Commissioner) Don Garber from MLS (Major League Soccer).”

Throughout their lives, before and during their time in public office, the Goodmans strengthened their personal relationships with players and executives in sports with the ultimate goal of getting teams here.

“It just gets instant information and with every one of the relationships, whether it was Bruton Smith at NASCAR or (NFL Commissioner Roger) Goodell, which actually started with (former NFL Commissioner Paul) Tagliabue,” she said.

Over the years, the Goodmans worked with local officials to meet with the executives that would make decisions about where their teams would play. They noted that former LVCVA executives Manny Cortez, (father of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto), and Rossi Ralenkotter, former Clark County Commissioner and LVCVA board member Larry Brown, who was a minor-league pitcher, Las Vegas Aviators executive Don Logan and real estate executive Dan Van Epp, formerly of the Howard Hughes Corp., were key figures in the teams that brought big-time sports to the city.

They also applauded the drive of Golden Knights owner William Foley to bring a Stanley Cup to Las Vegas within six years of the team’s founding as he promised.

Helping Tommy Lasorda

Sometimes, the interactions with sports personalities were more personal than professional.

The Goodmans recalled sharing a ride with former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda to a hotel when attending the 1980 World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Kansas City Royals in Kansas City.

“We were the last people leaving the airport,” Carolyn said. “There are no more cabs, but we had a driver (arranged by one of Oscar’s former clients) pick us up to take us to the hotel. We happened to have our four children with us, the youngest one being about 3 or 4. We were the last people in baggage claim, because we were trying to herd the four kids. And so we look over and one of our sons says, ‘There’s Mr. Lasorda from the Dodgers.’ So Oscar went up and said, ‘Are you stuck here? There are no more cabs. Would you like to ride with us?’ And that’s where that relationship began. Cara, our little daughter, sat on his lap in the front seat and the five of us squished into the rest of the car. And that is where that relationship began.”

That brush with Lasorda was Carolyn’s entry into discussions with Major League Baseball and meetings with the league’s commissioners at the time, Bud Selig and Rob Manfred, at league meetings.

In their home, Carolyn has pictures of her meeting with two of Las Vegas’ biggest baseball stars, Phillies infielder Bryce Harper and the Rockies’ Kris Bryant.

Showgirls opened doors

Oscar Goodman’s relationship with NBA executives led to a league experiment that ended up not going well. Goodman began opening doors with LVCVA-employed showgirls and a sponsorship with Bombay Sapphire gin. In public appearances, he would have a showgirl on each arm and an oversized martini glass in hand. Between that and his past career of representing mobsters in court, everybody knew who he was and he used that as an entry toward selling Las Vegas.

“Las Vegas is a great place, but there weren’t any teams that wanted to move at the time and no talk of expansion. But (Commissioner) David Stern basically gave me the confidence to know that I wasn’t going to be hitting my head against the wall,” Oscar said. “And Stern said, after we met for a little bit, in his curmudgeonly way and with a twinkle in his eye, told me we’d never have a professional NBA team here. ‘I won’t allow it. The only way you’d ever be able to get that is over my dead body.’

“So, you know, coming freshly off my criminal law practice, I said, ‘Mr. Commissioner, I think I could arrange that.’ So there was a little bit of a chuckle and a little bit of a twinkle. Eventually, we became the only city ever that did not have a franchise to have the NBA All-Star Game here. So we got a little bit of a taste of it and the owners got a little bit of a taste of it, the owners being the hotels.

Over time, the NBA got over gambling issues and today it appears likely Las Vegas will be in the mix for an expansion franchise with at least three potential venues to host a team – T-Mobile, and NBA-ready arena proposals by Oak View Group near the Rio and the LVXP group between the Sahara and Fontainebleau Las Vegas on the north Strip.

It was during Oscar Goodman’s term that Las Vegas and the LVCVA got international exposure during the run-up to the Super Bowl when the NFL forbid Las Vegas from presenting television ads about the city during the game’s broadcast. Those were the famed “What happens here, stays here” ads produced by the LVCVA’s marketing and advertising consultant, R&R Partners, and didn’t feature any imagery of casinos or resorts. Las Vegas ended up getting more exposure as a result of the advertising denial than the ads themselves.

It was shortly after that when Major League Baseball’s Montreal Expos paid a visit to Las Vegas to investigate relocating the team to the city. And former Commissioner Bud Selig was livid.

“Bud Selig heard that they came up to my office in City Hall and called up,” Oscar said. “He says, ‘I don’t want you messing with our owners.’ I said, ‘Mr. Selig, I don’t mess with anybody.’ ‘Well, I don’t want you talking to them.’ I said, ‘Look, you tell them they shouldn’t talk to me. They’re the ones who wanted to see me.’”

The Expos eventually moved out of Montreal — but to Washington D.C., where the team became the Washington Nationals.

Over time, Major League Baseball got past its gambling and Las Vegas issues, thanks in part to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 overturning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, enabling sports books to take wagers nationwide. So far, Washington D.C. and 38 states have legalized sports wagering and 20 of those are home to major-league teams.

Carolyn Goodman’s first encounter with Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis was when his father, then-owner Al Davis, would make occasional visits to the Riviera, where Goodman worked in the advertising, marketing and public relations department.

“There was my boss and me, and one of our frequent visitors, and I don’t know why to this day, was Al Davis and (his wife) Carol,” Carolyn Goodman said. “It was incredible how many times he would come and see my boss. I can remember once or twice bringing this little red-headed kid (Mark Davis) into the office, who had to be 7 or 8, who touched everything. I remember when we went to the groundbreaking of Allegiant Stadium, I was asked to speak among the other electeds and I said, ‘It’s just mind-blowing to me that all these years later, they never stayed at the Riv, they stayed at the DI (Desert Inn).’”

Looking back

Now retired from city politics, the Goodmans look back with pride at their contributions to sports in Las Vegas.

“You can see there’s a difference in our personalities,” Oscar said. “Carolyn used to be called St. Carolyn when she founded the Meadows School. I mentioned it again when they were kind enough to honor us or honor her with the Civic Center downtown. I’ve seen it in public meetings. She’s loved. I was never loved. I didn’t want to be loved. I wanted to be respected and feared. But that’s a big difference.”

And Carolyn, who left office last month, is happy that Las Vegas has the NHL, the NFL, a good lead toward the NBA and, in 2027, Major League Baseball when the Athletics take up residence in a $1.75 billion stadium being built on the Tropicana site.

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on X.