Thriving rodeo has outgrown home arena

It's like that closet your parents made into a bedroom. It was adequate enough at first. It did the job through grade school because you had a bed and a desk and enough floor to throw all your clothes and junk on. You didn't know any better.

Then you began to grow. You got bigger and smarter, looked around one day at the old cabinet they stuck you in all those years and considered turning the folks in for child abuse.

It's a little like where the National Finals Rodeo has come from and where it's hopefully going. It ended another 10-day run of shiny buckles and sold-out crowds and incomparable success at the Thomas & Mack Center on Saturday night, its 23rd straight year being housed in the building that is now quaint and hospitable in an archaic and murky sort of way.

The most luminous jewel on a crown of special events held here annually needs a new home, and you don't need to be splattered with beer while trying to maneuver through a cramped concourse to know why.

The NFR celebrates its 50th anniversary next year. With any luck, it won't reach 52 without a lavish new setting for fans to enjoy the action and far more room for cowboys to perform it.

There are countless reasons to celebrate the news that plans for a $500 million, 20,000-seat arena to be built just east of Paris Las Vegas and Bally's are on schedule to break ground next spring and open in the fall of 2010, that the partnership between Anschutz Entertainment Group and Harrah's Entertainment appears headed towards a successful venture that could take Las Vegas as a sports and special events city to an entirely higher level.

That the endeavor isn't drowning in the red tape that has stalled an elaborate (fantasy?) $10.5 billion downtown area project of REI Neon/Warburg Pincus.

"It's easy to talk about a new facility, but the Thomas & Mack has been awfully good to this rodeo," said Keith Martin, board chairman and interim commissioner of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. "It's easy to knock it and say it's old, but it got us to where we are.

"I don't want us to ever get so excited about a new one that we forget who brought us to the dance."

Have a beer or five spilled on you.

You'll forget quickly.

Major league sports have to be part of any arena discussion, and you shouldn't fall over in complete astonishment if during construction of the AEG project an announcement arrives about the National Hockey League locating a team in it as the anchor tenant. But even if that doesn't happen at first, the potential for existing events to improve and new ones to be identified is immeasurable once the new facility opens.

"From a hospitality point of view, from taking care of sponsors and clients and all the rodeo fans with the amenities and comforts they deserve, we need a first-class arena," said Pat Christensen, president of Las Vegas Events. "The NFR is the cornerstone of our events, and a new venue would make it bigger and better. We don't even know yet all we could potentially do in a new facility until we get into it.

"You never know until you actually see a shovel being put into the ground, but I'd be shocked if we don't have the (AEG arena) by 2011. I'd like it to be for 2010."

The NFR shouldn't get much bigger from a literal sense. It sells 175,000 tickets annually as it is and this year offered 35 satellite locations from which to watch. The further you sit from dirt, the more difficult it becomes to differentiate bulls from the guys riding them.

They likely could sell out 10 nights of 30,000 seats for this end-of-the season party, but it doesn't mean they should aspire to. You shouldn't totally reduce the intimacy of the event, although fans like Bert and Gretchen Johnson think that happened years ago.

The couple from Los Gatos, Calif., have attended every NFR here, beginning their journey sitting in the balcony and slowly improving their vantage point to plaza level seating.

Dr. Johnson is a clinical professor of gynecology/obstetrics at Stanford and a rancher who competed in rodeo for years while once serving as president of a beef council, which means dinner at his house never wants for fascinating conversation. His wife is a former president of the California Cattlewomen. They absolutely love the NFR.

"We'd relish a new arena for this," Bert said. "The (Thomas & Mack) just isn't ideal. They've made it work by adapting a basketball arena for 10 days every year. But it's not what it should be for a first-class rodeo. It's too tight."

When it comes to the NFR, it's that closet you used to call a bedroom.

It needs a new home.

Ed Graney's column is published Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. He can be reached at 383-4618 or egraney@reviewjournal.com.