Inside the ‘can-do attitude’ that landed the NCAA Tournament in Las Vegas

By Case Keefer (contact)

Sunday, March 19, 2023 | 2 a.m.

Andre Agassi made the rounds in a private suite of an Orlando, Fla., hotel repeating the same message to anyone who would listen, and perhaps even some who didn’t want to.

“Las Vegas has a can-do attitude,” the tennis legend and local native told some of the most influential executives in college athletics.

This was in the summer of 2015, almost eight years ago, as a collection of Las Vegas officials had started to put the full-court press on the NCAA to bring some of its championship events to Southern Nevada. Representatives from Las Vegas Events, MGM Resorts International and a pair of former UNLV athletic directors had traveled to the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) convention to push their cause.

Agassi was being honored at an adjacent gathering in town, and a plot to bring him in as a reinforcement for Las Vegas’ sales pitch materialized. The group reached out to Agassi through his longtime confidant, Cisco Aguilar — who is now Nevada secretary of state — and didn’t have to fully explain the mission before the eight-time Grand Slam champion agreed to it.

Agassi had “absolutely no hesitation,” he recalled in a statement, as he was not only bought in but also equipped with his own catchphrase.

“For Andre to be able to talk to so many people and say, ‘Vegas has a can-do attitude, we’ll find a way to do this,’ you could just see the doors open and people willing to have different conversations,” said D.J. Allen, former UNLV associate athletics director who had been contracted to help with Las Vegas’ NCAA efforts at the time. “You could feel in that moment, in that suite, that the perception of Las Vegas was changing.”

The evening amounted to one of many small victories that added up over the years, if not decades, to ultimately bring the NCAA to Las Vegas after it long resisted the idea. A new era will begin Thursday when the NCAA’s most prestigious event, the men’s basketball championship tournament, arrives at T-Mobile Arena for three games through Saturday to determine the winner of the West Region and a Final Four participant.

Las Vegas has now hosted, or will host, many of the biggest events in sports, but few required more man hours to secure than the NCAA Tournament.

• • •

The athletic directors’ annual meetings were once held here, in the early 1980s, before the NCAA had gone out of its way to emphasize a hardline stance against anything involving Las Vegas.

The national organization, buoyed by its opposition to gaming, didn’t budge even when leagues like the Big West and Western Athletic Conference became pioneers by holding their conference tournaments in Las Vegas during the 1990s. City officials never gave up on their basketball dreams but for many years were content with taking what scraps they could in terms of games and tournaments staged locally.

A milestone occurred in 2006 when local sports and events industry mainstay Steve Stallworth convinced national powers Kansas and Florida to play a neutral-site game at Orleans Arena. The schools only agreed to it because the venue was separated, with its own exterior doors, from the resort’s casino.

Dan Quinn, MGM Resorts’ vice president of entertainment operations, remembered a similar “path of travel” concern from the Pac-12 when the company first lured the conference’s tournament to MGM Grand Garden Arena in 2013. The Pac-12 didn’t want its student-athletes having to walk through the casino floor.

“But then ultimately, one event in, all those things went out the window as they started to realize all of the cool things about Vegas,” Quinn said. “Like at the Grand Garden, you walk down from the hotel room, through the district and into the Grand Garden, and all the fans ended up gathering in that space, and it became a cool march. It was like you were going through the gauntlet where your fans are cheering you on and maybe you’re getting a little riled with words of encouragement from the other teams’ fans. It actually added to the environment not just from fans’ experience but also players’ experience.”

The immediate success of the Pac-12 tournament in Las Vegas — where it’s continued to stage the event every year since — helped start to shift perceptions around the country, but the work was far from done. Jim Livengood was certainly aware as he stepped down from his post as UNLV’s athletic director to retire a few months after the first local Pac-12 tournament.

The longtime Arizona athletic director planned to spend two years at UNLV to end his career but wound up nearly doubling that timeline because of how much he loved Las Vegas. But he knew the feeling wasn’t shared with many of his peers.

“Everyone talked about UNLV being a mile from the Strip and all the issues it created, but that was not what I found at all,” Livengood said. “I found the casino people and everyone associated with UNLV, it was the least of my worries, and yet around the country, there was such a fear of sports books and gaming.”

• • •

Livengood found he wasn’t the type who could retire and spend the rest of his days relaxing away from the constant action of his past pursuits.

He began taking on consulting work, and within a year of leaving UNLV, that grew to include a deal to help Las Vegas. Rick Arpin, an executive with MGM at the time as the company broke ground on T-Mobile Arena in 2014, brought on Livengood and Allen to assist in penetrating the college basketball world.

The pair started working closely with Las Vegas Events’ Pat Christenson and Dale Eeles, and they all reached out to their wide-ranging connections.

Not all the initial conversations went so well. Allen remembers some administrators laughing in his face and even a local sports-industry veteran writing off the idea of an NCAA Tournament in Las Vegas as something that would never happen in his lifetime.

“Getting the initial feedback, there was probably a little more pushback than we anticipated,” Allen said. “You’ve got to realize that, in this industry, people aren’t willing to make big changes for somebody else. So it was, ‘OK, we’ve got to go about this differently. How do we get the industry to think about Las Vegas differently?’ ”

The answer, in Livengood’s and Allen’s minds, lied in telling the story of Las Vegas to the highest level of college-sports decision makers. Before Agassi’s “can-do attitude,” Livengood had a different mantra of his own — “the new Las Vegas.”

He wanted to share what he felt was a new age locally with friends and colleagues he had established over decades of working in college athletics. Livengood had universal respect in that world after having previously served as chair of the men’s basketball selection committee and president of NACDA.

The group believed it could make use of that background to get stubborn figures to give them a chance. NACDA was the target.

If they could convince athletic directors that Las Vegas was not what they thought it was and bring them to town, then NCAA championship events would follow.

“The reason why I thought that was a critical step is because there were still people that up until last summer hadn’t been to Las Vegas in 25 years,” Livengood said. “They had no idea of how it had changed in a quarter of a century. It was really just trying to convince them that this was going to be one of those places around the country that was going to become a great sports city.”

Less than six months after the 2015 convention that was capped by Agassi’s appearance, NACDA announced Las Vegas as the future site for its convention in 2020 and 2022. The former was eventually canceled because of the pandemic but the latter went off without a hitch last summer at Mandalay Bay, with Livengood as the unofficial ambassador.

• • •

By then, everything had changed with regards to Las Vegas’ reputation in college athletics — and not all of it was city officials’ doing. The NCAA had virtually no choice other than to lift its ban on Las Vegas when the Supreme Court overturned a federal law and began allowing states to legalize sports betting in May 2018.

But it took a long-term view from many people locally to have the city in a position to pounce as soon as the bid process to host NCAA events from 2023-26 opened in August 2019. None more so than those at MGM, which built a venue in T-Mobile Arena fully equipped for the basketball tournament despite having no guarantees it would ever happen.

In addition to what Quinn and his staff call the “NBA” and “NHL” sides with a pair of locker rooms tailored for each professional sport, T-Mobile Arena has four extra standardized locker rooms “for the exact purpose” of a multiteam event. The NCAA doesn’t like its schools having divergent amenities, and T-Mobile Arena was constructed with that in mind.

The organization also typically likes new cities to host the first weekend of the basketball tournament so it can show it’s capable of a regional, but Quinn said that requirement was waived for Las Vegas after multiple site visits and the success of the Pac-12 tournament.

T-Mobile Arena was deemed ready to cut straight to the deeper portions of the tournament, much to the relief of events and convention officials. The first weekend of the NCAA Tournament is already one of the busiest tourism stretches of the Las Vegas calendar, so the second made for a more natural fit.

“It’s beneficial for us to host this instead of the first round given that during the first round, the city is insanely busy, but if that’s what they gave us, we would have welcomed it with open arms,” Quinn said. “We didn’t want to cherry pick anything. We were excited for whatever opportunity.”

The 2028 Final Four has also since been awarded to Allegiant Stadium, another event that was more than a decade in the making. When Raiders owner Mark Davis was still in the preliminary stages of potentially bringing his franchise to town in 2016, he met with Allen, Eeles and Christenson to get a sense of how the NCAA viewed Las Vegas.

The only downside of the Final Four having already been scheduled is that it threatens to make Las Vegas fall into the familiar trap of anticipating the next big thing without enjoying the one at hand. Organizers are adamant that won’t happen with the West Regional, though.

Too much went into securing it to look past the upcoming weekend.

“We’ll take a step back and breathe it all in,” Quinn said. “There’s been so much preparation, hopefully it’ll just be, roll the ball out and enjoy three great games.”

• • •

Looking back on when the process of convincing the NCAA to come to Las Vegas started in earnest, the mere possibility of taking this year’s West Regional for granted might sound unbelievable.

Nine years ago, sports in Las Vegas was a shell of what it would turn into. There were no Vegas Golden Knights, with the NHL’s season-ticket drive not occurring for another year. There were no Las Vegas Raiders, as those relocation talks started even later.

Dreams of hosting a Super Bowl, as Allegiant Stadium will do next year, or a $1 billion F1 race on the Strip, scheduled for this November, would have been laughed off even harder than the NCAA Tournament.

But, instead of accepting defeat, Las Vegas kept moving forward with what it thought it “can do.”

“We’re the best in the world at what we do, and once it was OK to do business with us, (the NCAA) saw that,” Allen said. “When people tell Vegas we can’t do something, we have a tendency to prove them wrong. It’s amazing what you can do when you get a group of talented people together that don’t worry about who’s taking the credit. This is going to be great for the city.”

That’s a similar message Allen has been repeating for years, including in his current role as a speaker and performance/communication coach for his own company, The Xs & Os of Success. And it’s a similar message to the one Agassi drove into the minds of some of the power players who may have opposed Las Vegas eight years ago.

“Our community is so special — and it’s so different from what most people from the outside perceive it to be,” Agassi said. “Any chance I get to tell the story of the great people of Las Vegas and what we can accomplish, I’m in.”

“It’s fascinating to think that evening and those conversations were almost eight years ago. Las Vegas has completely repositioned itself in the world of sports — particularly college athletics. Our city and its residents deserve that.”

Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or