“When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.”
It’s been greater than a half-century since Hunter S. Thompson went in quest of the American dream on his drug-addled, off-the-rails highway journey to Las Vegas.
His 1971 ebook, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” turned an important learn for generations of youngsters who had been simply beginning to query the world and got here to outline the desert playing mecca. The ebook additionally gave beginning to a brand new literary type, gonzo journalism, by which the reporter was a number one character — on this case a pill-popping, pot-smoking, tequila-swilling, acid-dropping “dope fiend” plunging headlong into the story.
Probably the most enduring achievement of Mr. Thompson’s wealthy portfolio from the late Nineteen Sixties and into the ’70s might be how he — regardless of the medication or due to them — so aptly distilled what was taking place in the US, because the disillusionment from the failures of a counterculture motion had taken maintain like an iron glove across the throat.
Included in his catalog is a far much less remembered piece Mr. Thompson wrote a number of years later for Rolling Stone journal, “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” the place he introduced his caustic eye to the game he beloved, utilizing the backdrop of the massive sport to discover how the authoritarian strains that had been infecting politics had additionally poisoned soccer.
The story stemmed from an existential disaster, which arrived for Mr. Thompson when he got here to appreciate throughout an interview with Richard Nixon, whom he’d caricatured as a political monster lengthy earlier than Watergate, that they shared a typical trait — an obsession with soccer.
Now, all these years later, right here we’re this week in a spot that appeared unimaginable then and feels so good and inevitable now: Tremendous Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas.
The pairing of those transmogrified exemplars of American extra is primed for an assault on … what? the senses? decency? style? modesty? … No, these are lengthy gone.
So, too, is Mr. Thompson, who shot himself to dying in 2005 at age 67, abandoning his spouse, his son and a suicide notice titled “Football Season Is Over.”
This looks like a second manufactured for him, as Las Vegas furthers the sprucing of its picture with the imprimatur of the N.F.L., which has made a seminal flip of its personal with a public embrace of the playing business.
“It would have been interesting to see how Hunter would have written about this,” stated Douglas Brinkley, the historian who’s the literary executor of his works.
Las Vegas, he stated, “no longer has the charm of motorcycle gangs, fringe gamblers and desert drifters. It’s this corporate zenith of mass consumerism run amok.”
He added: “The Super Bowl is a TV commercial extravaganza, a retail mall set up in the parking lots where the game is just one component. Because Hunter had learned the tricks of the trade — he was a sportswriter by training — he was perfectly suited to puncture the hypocrisies and the hype of the Super Bowl.”
The 2 groups in Sunday’s sport, the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, usually are not absorbing Las Vegas in the way in which of most guests. They’re banned from casinos by the N.F.L. till Sunday night time, venturing close to the Strip solely from the consolation of the buses that shuttled them to a media occasion on Monday night time.
The Vegas-ized Tremendous Bowl occasion scene that kicked into overdrive on Friday will go on with out them.
“Obviously, there’s a lot going on,” stated Blake Bell, a good finish with the Chiefs. “But we don’t really see it.”
The groups are sequestered about 20 miles east alongside the shores of Lake Las Vegas, a synthetic lake lined with faux-terra cotta resorts. To get there, you cross by way of the true Las Vegas: middle-class suburban tracts and mini-malls, then industrial zones, then blocks upon blocks of latest houses below development earlier than the highway climbs into huge empty expanses of crimson rock, given a richer hue in the previous couple of days’ persistent rain.
Turning again, Las Vegas is a glittering speck within the heart of an expansive, barren valley.
The Las Vegas that Mr. Thompson left behind additionally requires some squinting to see.
A lot of it’s gone. Circus Circus nonetheless exists, however it’s now not the place the place, as he wrote, you would wander in at any hour and see a gorilla splayed on a neon cross that abruptly turns right into a pinwheel, spinning round above a bustling on line casino ground — the principle nerve of the American dream.
The on line casino the place Mr. Thompson discovered psychedelics virtually irrelevant now begs for anti-depressants. It’s the form of place the place room charges begin at $25, the pit boss’s swimsuit is three sizes too large, and the air this week carried a scent of cigarettes, fragrance and despair.
A person named Daniel, along with his spouse and two kids tucked away of their room, sat vacantly at a slot machine late one night time on the Circus Circus on line casino ground nursing a beer and staring blankly throughout the room. He was down a pair hundred bucks, hoping his luck would flip.
Close by, a girl named Hazel, with faux Chinchilla boots and an obscene T-shirt that was far too small, lamented seeing a homeless woman win $500 after which proceed to faucet away on the identical machine till she was right down to 56 cents. “If you got lots of money, you enjoy yourself in Vegas,” she stated. “If you’re like me, with a couple hundred bucks, you’re here.”
The scene was a bit extra upbeat downtown, a number of miles north of the Strip. Alongside the Fremont Road pedestrian mall, below indicators that marketed a steak and lobster dinner for $13.99, pairs of flamingo ladies lingered of their flamboyant headdresses and lingerie, chatting up guys to have their image taken with them.
After a couple of minutes, one pair discovered a mark. First, they posed facet by facet, smiling coyly. Subsequent they draped a thigh throughout his lap. And for the coup de grâce, they pivoted, bent over and took a number of lashes with a leather-based flogger for the digicam.
When it was over, they advised him the worth: $100.
He haggled it right down to $80.
The shakedowns take many types.
On the Strip, a bustling miles-long, neon mall, which attracts the opposite finish of the socio-economic spectrum, some costs are sufficient to make a Manhattanite blanch. A nine-ounce Japanese A5 Wagyu Ribeye units you again $560 on the Bellagio and a Fendi purse barely giant sufficient to carry a cellphone runs $4,400 at Aria. Any pocket change remaining may be blown on a $35 Excessive Curler Ferris wheel journey.
No one, although, has mastered the artwork of financial extraction just like the N.F.L.
Eight years in the past, it moved media day — when gamers and coaches from each groups are bombarded with largely foolish, banal or redundant questions from shops and different assorted consideration seekers — to prime time on Monday night time from Tuesday morning.
It’s now branded as Tremendous Bowl Opening Evening, broadcast by the NFL Community, sponsored by a sports activities drink firm and open to followers for $30. Should you overlook headphones, you should buy a set for $20 on the stadium’s bank card sponsored N.F.L. Store.
The N.F.L. introduced 23,823 followers attended Opening Evening, a file.
Tremendous Bowl VIII, which Mr. Thompson chronicled in 1974, might maintain a distinction all these years later as essentially the most boring. Miami floor out touchdowns on its first two possessions, pitched a shutout till late and throttled Minnesota, 24-7. Miami quarterback Bob Griese threw simply seven passes, finishing six, a file low for a successful quarterback that appears sure by no means to be damaged.
That’s a very good place to begin when contemplating how a lot the N.F.L. has modified in 50 years. Patrick Mahomes, the superlative Kansas Metropolis quarterback, might full that many passes on his first drive Sunday.
One other is playing. In “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” Mr. Thompson’s dispatch from the sport, he grabs any wager he can on Miami with different sportswriters, so sure is he that the Dolphins will win. The Vikings had been interminably uptight. Their coach, Bud Grant, Mr. Thompson wrote, “spent the week acting like a Marine Corps drill sergeant with a terminal case of the piles.”
When Mr. Thompson’s postgame chat with Miami proprietor Joe Robbie, whom he had identified from the 1972 presidential marketing campaign, is interrupted by the author Larry Service provider handing him a $50 invoice, Mr. Thompson realizes this isn’t a very good search for Mr. Robbie.
“The only thing worse than being seen with a known gambler is finding yourself in the white-light glare of a network TV camera in the company of an infamous drug abuser … ”
Now the N.F.L. has agreements with sports activities betting firms reportedly value almost $1 billion over 5 years, regardless that betting on sports activities stays taboo for gamers and league staff. One crew even has a sports activities ebook inside its personal stadium. A billboard proclaims that Boyd is the official native on line casino of the Las Vegas Raiders.
When Mr. Thompson got down to doc the Nixonian similarities between politics and professional soccer, he unwittingly glimpsed immediately’s N.F.L., the place entry is restricted, interviews are stage managed and the times of reporters watching follow from the sideline — not to mention sharing a post-practice beer with gamers or coaches — are lengthy gone.
If Las Vegas’s picture has been remade as an leisure vacation spot, its progress has continued to be fueled by a renewable useful resource: Californians looking for cheaper houses and decrease taxes. However as a result of jobs in that business tilt towards low expert — and the company on line casino income don’t stay in the neighborhood — incomes have largely stagnated over the past decade.
Nonetheless, the most recent waves have continued to diversify the town, making certain that Nevada is intently watched in election years, because it was throughout Tuesday’s main and in Thursday’s caucuses.
It was out into this world that Gregory A. Borchard, a professor at U.N.L.V., would ship his journalism college students, most of whom had grown up in Las Vegas, when he taught a category on “Fear and Loathing.” Their project: go discover the American dream.
“Everybody knows this drug guru mystique and they celebrate it, but what they lose track of is the writing style,” Mr. Borchard stated. “It’s clean and pure. He was a hell of a wordsmith.”
Few books start with a sentence that higher informs the reader of the wild journey forward: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” And few shut with a extra vivid summation of an unrepentant soul, bouncing right into a bar after a pair hits of amyl: “I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger … A Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.”
Mr. Brinkley stated the way in which Mr. Thompson’s abilities as a classy political thinker, gumshoe reporter and deft author got here collectively in “Fear and Loathing” is its personal Horatio Alger up-from-his-bootstraps story.
However over time, the load of his masterpiece’s brilliance and his superstar as a persona author turned a millstone — that and the years of alcohol and drug use that wreaked havoc on his physique. To a school pupil who felt the siren name of journalism at a time when Watergate’s wake had not but receded, an early lesson on the folly of idol worship arrived my senior 12 months when Mr. Thompson spoke at my college. He spent a not-very-long interview mumbling incoherently.
“It gets hard and tiring,” Mr. Brinkley stated, describing his good friend as a mensch and a storm who perpetually wanted work to fund his way of life.
“As he got older, the good news is Hunter had a distinctive style. It’s hard to find a voice and he did. On the other hand, people wanted Hunter Thompson attending the spectacle and it’s hard not to repeat yourself. You can be stuck in your own shadow.”
Again on Fremont Road, away from the soccer bubble and the Strip, a specter of the monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger appeared very a lot alive.
Milling about with Edward Scissorhands, Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka and so most of the characters Johnny Depp has performed, there was Hunter S. Thompson himself: Hawaiian print shirt, Tilley hat, yellow tinted aviators and a cigarette holder — an inexpensive facsimile of Mr. Depp within the film model of “Fear and Loathing,” itself now greater than 25 years previous.
No low cost shucks or misdemeanors right here.
Certainly, having immersed himself in “Fear and Loathing,” he had finished a deep character research, having pushed in from Los Angeles with the trunk of his convertible loaded up with sufficient medication to disable an elephant, dedicated unspeakable acts in Las Vegas and made a grim evaluation of the state of issues.
Um, sorry, dude.
“I know nothing about the book,” the impersonator stated.
