Word: las
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rivals of Tark the Shark's dominant, scandal-plagued basketball teams at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, UNLV stands for UNLoVed. So not many cried when his 1991 squad, 30-0 in the regular season, lost an NCAA semifinal game to the scholars of Duke. The coach's defenders aver that his rehab program for inner-city tall guys is affirmative action at its most productive. Others, spotting the athletes' BMWs in the gym parking lot, see another moral: it's not whether you win or lose, but how much you make on the side...
...list of tragic American Dreamers, people who martyred themselves for visions that stubbornly refused realization while they lived -- one thinks of rocket scientist Robert Goddard and car manufacturer Preston Tucker -- it seems we must now add the name of Benjamin Siegel. His great notion was the reinvention of Las Vegas, converting it from a sleepy cow town into a gaudy pleasure dome where everything that was illicit elsewhere in the puritanical U.S. of a half-century ago was openly available on a gloriously legal basis...
This was, to be sure, a dubious, not to say tacky, achievement. But it was also psychically and financially a potent one. For Ben was right: America needed Las Vegas without knowing...
That he died prematurely, of an overdose of .30-cal. bullets fired into him at the behest of business associates impatient with the slow return on their ; investment in his dream, is poignant. And ironic as well. Because before Siegel got around to reinventing Las Vegas, his most important project was reinventing himself. Far better known in the press and gossip of his glory days, the 1940s, as "Bugsy," he was perhaps the most famous mobster of his era. Not that he liked his colorful sobriquet (he tended to punch out people who used it in his presence...
Being a father figure for millions is a lonely business. Last year all but six of Bradshaw's weekends were spent on the road. He plays golf with Houston cronies when he can and tries to schedule some seminars in Las Vegas and Reno so he can play the slot machines: he craves the excitement, not the winnings. For nine years he has been involved with a small men's support group in Houston, where he can unburden himself for his own sake, not that of others. "I need a place where I can be real," he says, but adds...