Word: wynn
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What Las Vegas has instead is Steve Wynn, a casino king who is the son of a compulsive gambler and has an eye disease that could make him blind; who in his late 30s took up steer roping, wind surfing, rock climbing, motocrossing, jet skiing and body building; who once called Donald Trump "twinkle toes"; who let Frank Sinatra pinch his cheek in a commercial for his casinos; who divorced his wife, never moved out and remarried her five years later; and who shot off his index finger two years ago while handling a pistol in his office...
...that is not what makes Wynn interesting. He is on a mission to gentrify gambling in America, cleansing it of its associations with high life and low life while delivering it to a suburb near yours as the innocuous extension of the middle-class weekend outing. Wynn's gambling has neither neon, push-up bras nor black-tie croupiers from the French Riviera. In fact it is not even called gambling. "I'm in the recreation business," he insists...
...many ways, Wynn represents the new face of gambling in America, ingratiating and scrubbed, ready to join with Reagan's "Morning in America" adman to soften resistance to what once was considered a slightly sinful indulgence. Partly because of salesmen like him, gambling is spreading so quickly and quietly across the country these days, says David Johnston, the author of Temples of Chance, that "few people realize Minnesota has more casinos than Atlantic City." The business has exploded in just over a decade, with casino revenues going from $2 billion a year in 1978 to nearly $10 billion today...
...this crowded field, Wynn stands out not because he owns the nation's biggest casino company (Caesars is, with revenues last year of $928.5 million in contrast to $833 million for Wynn's Mirage Resorts Inc.) or because he is the first to think of inserting family fun into betting parlors (Circus Circus Enterprises Inc. did in the mid-'70s, with acrobats and clowns performing above the casino floor). But he is the first to apply to gambling the Disney formula for class-crossing, universal family leisure: cleanliness, measured frivolity and a sense of architectural detail. In the right environment...
...Wynn philosophy seems to work. His three-year-old, $730 million casino in Las Vegas, the Mirage, is the biggest moneymaker on the Strip, at least in part because patrons come to see the man-made volcano out front that erupts at night every 15 minutes, the sharks swimming behind the registration desk, the white tigers lounging below Roman columns in their glass cage and the dolphins in the seaquarium. His new Treasure Island casino, to open in October, will re-create at hourly intervals a cannon fight between two battleships and offer a permanent home to the elegant Cirque...