LAS VEGAS — The first time I met him, Gene Kilroy was the right hand of Muhammad Ali. He ran the fight camp at Deer Lake, served as business manager, kept all the free loaders at more than arm’s length from the champion, looked after Ali’s business and traveled the world with him. If the Muhammad Ali Flying Circus retinue was a circus, Kilroy was its ring master.
But after the cheering stopped, Kilroy was considering a job at Bally’s in Atlantic City when a man he did not know named Morris Shenker called him and said, ”Don’t go there. I know all about you. Meet me in New York.”
Shenker knew what Kilroy had yet to learn. He had the perfect resume for Las Vegas, which is where he signed on in 1978 with Shenker at the Dunes Hotel.
Nearly 40 years later, he is a respected consultant with the MGM, as much a part of Las Vegas as the Luxor’s pyramid, the dancing waters of Bellagio and the golden Lions that front the MGM Grand.
He is the perfect weather vane to test the potential windfall that the welterweight unification fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao brings to a town where tourists are its life blood.
”When I came here, the biggest draws were New Year’s Eve, July 4 and the Super Bowl,” Kilroy says. “The fights picked up and went from good to great. But we have never had anything like this upcoming fight.
”The Arena seats around 20,000, and with closed circuit, it extends to all of the MGM properties. The fight is huge, so huge that people will be coming to town just to say they were here, to go back home and say, ‘Yeah, I was there.’
“Most of them are not going to have tickets, unless you deal with scalpers and at their prices, you probably can’t buy one. People have become educated. A guy comes here with a $2 million line of credit at our hotel and he gets the tickets. If, for example, he usually gambles at, say, the Wynn and he wants tickets, he’ll have to come to our place instead and establish that similar line of credit.”
People stand around at the Super Bowl just to say they were in town. Here, if you actually want to see the fight and you don’t have a ticket, you have to go to a local MGM property. They are the only places you can go and watch the fight on closed circuit and eat and drink.
“Some hotels are unhappy about that and I know the sports books that aren’t in an MGM property are angry because they can’t show the fight. So are their bookmakers,” Kilroy said.
“But that’s business and you don’t hear complaints from restaurants or even hotel executives about that and you won’t because there’s still a lot of money to be made.”
MAYWEATHER vs. PACQUIAO: Full coverage of welterweight title bout
He’s right when he says this is the best-equipped town to handle a megafight like this one and he should know.
”After all,” he says, ”I lived through Ali-Frazier I and that was crazy. Now with all the internet, all the television (cable and main-line) all the writers from around the world, this one is so promoted it’s going beyond crazy.”
It is his contention that no fight has affected the blue-collar workers like this one will. He says, ”Everybody is gonna make money, people that got kids in college, people with families to feed. This is gonna be their bonus. They’ll make maybe more in a week than they do in a month.”
He will tell you that he has the best barometer of the fight on his desk. It’s called a telephone. ”You get calls from everybody and his cousin. People you haven’t heard from in years. ‘How are you? Just calling to check. Remember when we met at that dinner six years ago. Had fun, didn’t we? By the way …”
It’s the magic phrase. When he hears that “by the way,” he knows what’s coming next.
”That’s the segue into the inevitable sentence of ‘I sure would like tickets for me and the wife,” he says. His phones are ringing constantly.
”You know,” he says, ”a Super Bowl in Miami in some ways is like this fight even in Vegas ? with one major difference. Both cities have restaurants and hotels for every size pocketbook. But the difference is that here they are all lined up and within easy distance of each other. You don’t need a car. You don’t need a highway. You’re already here.”
The Super Bowl bet total goes straight to the Gaming Commission so the figures are accurate. But the fight totals are folded into all the other sports gambling that day.
“That really fascinating,” Kilroy said ”because that same day there are NBA playoff games, NHL playoff games and the Kentucky Derby. Roll those totals into one and you can be sure they will add up to the second heaviest bet total of the year.”
