Bags packed, Brad Bauer headed out the door for his annual trip to Las Vegas when his wife stopped him. She had just delivered their second child three days earlier. Yet he was still going.
And she had a message for him, one his mother-in-law seconded.
“Put 20 dollars on black 11,” his wife said.
With that — their daughter had been born on the 11th — Bauer left, bound for an annual Vegas trip with friends, many of whom attended Langley High School with his wife, Kelly.
Two years later, he spoke the obvious: “I have a great wife.”
He’s more than made it up to her, babysitting on her getaway weekends. But she understood the importance of the trip — and likes visiting Vegas herself.
It was also the first weekend of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
“It’s our biggest event,” said Robert Walker, sports book director for the MGM/Mirage. “It’s very contagious. It’s like the two minutes of the Kentucky Derby for four days.”
Reston’s Frank Carulli, the track handicapper at Pimlico and a regular for the first weekend of March Madness in Vegas since the early 1990s, recalled four years ago arriving at the Mirage at 5:30 a.m., three-and-a-half hours before the first game’s tip-off. Every seat was taken. He asked a lady what time she arrived for her seat. The response: “2:30.” So Carulli and a friend quickly headed to another casino, where they got the last two seats.
The growing first-weekend tournament crowds drove WTEM SportsTalk 980 host Steve Czaban to ditch the first weekend for the second.
“It’s too many zombie-like unshaven middle-aged white guys an inch from being belligerent all the time who bump into you at sports books and elevators,” said Czaban, who makes the trip with high school buddies.
That’s not all that’s hard to deal with.
“You have to have a strong stomach to go out there if you’re betting,” Carulli said. “People are cheering on every basket. You’ve got to block it out. I don’t like watching games when they’re one of my bigger bets because it gets on your nerves. People are yelling after every two points; they’re drinking all day and they’ve probably only got 25 bucks on the game.”
Czaban, who has attended these outings with Bauer, did miss in 1999 for the birth of his daughter, Catherine.
“To make me feel better, [friend Craig Saunders] FedExed me an In-and-Out burger in the mail,” Czaban said. “It was all rotten and disgusting.”
Of course, it’s not the burgers that lead people to Vegas.
“Anyonecan say after the game, ‘I knew Michigan State would win,’ ” Czaban said. “Oh yeah, where’s your ticket? That’s the moment of truth and that’s the allure of [Vegas], the adrenaline rush of bringing home your win.”
Side bets
» According to the Nevada Gaming Control Board, the state’s 341 casinos reported a total gaming win last March of $1.06 billion, which, at the time, was the second best month ever. Also, there was $195 million bet on basketball last March — they don’t get a breakdown by college or the NBA. That’s $25 million more than the previous March. Growing interest in the women’s tournament has fueled those numbers as well.
» Las Vegas Hilton executive director of race and sports Jay Kornegay said attendance for the first weekend in the desert city grows five to 10 percent each year. At the Hilton, he said they’ve set up an extra ballroom with five giant screen televisions to accommodate the overflow crowd.
» One of the fun parts of attending the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament in Vegas is listening to the crowds. “The actual score is secondary,” said WTEM Sportstalk 980 host Steve Czaban. “You get the junk end of a game, where a team is down 10 with 30 seconds left and they throw up a desperation three and you’ll hear this huge, ‘Ooooh.’ It’s so funny because guys are needing that to cover the spread.”
