The Thomas & Mack Center is outfitted for the 2007 NBA All-Star Game.
How did a wrestling coach come to manage one of the most successful arenas in North America and later helm the largest venue association in the world?
For former Thomas & Mack Center GM Dennis Finfrock, it was a little bit of entrepreneurship, a lot of listening and plenty of vision for the potential of live entertainment in Las Vegas. For the eight former and current employees who came together Oct. 7 to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the Thomas & Mack Center, Finfrock was a pioneer and a role model. He created an entrepreneurial spirit at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas arena that has been carried on by each subsequent GM following in his footsteps.
“We were bred with the mindset that we had to make money. Thankfully they also gave us the freedom to try new things and take some risks,” explained Daren Libonati, a Finfrock protégé who ran the Thomas & Mack Center from 2001 to 2011. Libonati was one of four current or former general managers who took part in the eight-person reunion inside 35 Steaks + Martinis at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas
“I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to Dennis Finfrock,” said Brad Rothermel former UNLV Athletics Director from 1981 to 1990. While Finfrock led a facility revolution in Las Vegas, it was Rothermel who helped put the building on the national stage with the success of the Men’s Basketball Runnin’ Rebels, a top ranked program that went on to win the National Championship in 1990 and fell one game short of defending their title in 1991.
Beyond basketball, Finfrock helped secure rock concerts, professional basketball and boxing. When he left in 1992, he was succeeded by a lineage of GMs he had mentored, and those men took the arena to new heights, securing a number of annual events that have become defacto anchor tenants at the facility. The concert business would eventually shift to the Las Vegas Strip where casinos would pay millions more to host music acts, but Thomas & Mack Center would continue to thrive through unique partnerships that took advantage of the building’s full array of assets; everything from in-house ticketing and F&B to sponsorships and suite sales. Even in a hyper-competitive market like Las Vegas, Thomas & Mack Center remains an economic powerhouse, ranked eighth among U.S. arenas on Venues Today’s 2012 Top Stops of the Decade, with over $222 million in ticket sales reported for the 10-year period.
‘Tear Them Out!’
Thomas & Mack Center was constructed in 1983 using $30 million in state funds but, once it was built, lawmakers were terrified that the university would come back and ask for more money.
Finfrock, who had come to Las Vegas in 1980 to coach wrestling and was promoted to assistant athletic director three years later, was put in charge of running the building (he was still expected to coach wrestling as well). Early on, during construction, Finfrock spotted a glaring problem with the arena’s design — the event floor was too small.
If the arena was to be financially self-sufficient and eventually support UNLV Athletics, it would have to host a range of events and be reconstructed as a multiuse facility rather than a basketball-only venue. Finfrock eventually got the state legislature to invest about $200,000 to remove the first nine rows of seats at both ends of the arena and to make room for retractable seating. By expanding the floor, and using portable seating for basketball games, it would open up the arena for other types of activities and entertainment promoters.
“From the very beginning, Dennis was lobbying the regents that he could run the building,” said Pat Christenson with Las Vegas Events, a Finfrock protégé hired by the wrestling coach in 1980.
“I still remember at the time he hired me, he told me ‘Your official title is event coordinator, but you’re really the assistant wrestling coach,’ Christenson recalled. Looking back, Christenson said he believed he and Finfrock were given the green light to run the new arena because they were the only ones naïve enough to think they could manage the building without an operations budget.
“We were told we had the job on an interim basis,” Christenson explained. “If we could make the building profitable, then we could stay.”
It wasn’t long before the pair were doing their own arena tour of North America to get an understanding of how other facilities were run. Knowing that the building needed to operate like a major market arena to be profitable, Finfrock and Christenson skipped other college facilities and instead paid visits to The Forum in Inglewood, Calif., Madison Square Garden in New York and the Houston Summit.
“They were professionally operated and we needed the same events they were hosting to generate dollars,” Christenson said. “In about two months, we got a very quick course on venue management. We learned how to structure rent deals, how to operate the building and how to make money.”
Early Success turns into Million-Dollar Moments
Despite some early hiccups, Thomas & Mack Center was a success right out of the gate. When the men’s basketball team played their first game at the building in 1983, they were ranked number one in the country.
“We sold out the second basketball game we hosted at the building,” explained Rothermel, athletic director for the school when Thomas & Mack Center first opened. “Keep in mind we were going from a 6,500-seat venue to an 18,500-seater and there were a lot of concerns that we wouldn’t be able to deliver the fans.”
Throughout the 1980s, the Runnin’ Rebels Men’s basketball program consistently made trips to the Final Four tournament, culminating in the 1990 National Championship victory.
The building began to host concerts, first Loverboy at the end of 1983 and then Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson (the building’s first country concert) a year later. The Utah Jazz played 11 “home games” at the building during the 1983-1984 season, including an April 5 matchup against the Los Angeles Lakers where Kareem Abdul-Jabbar broke Wilt Chamberlain’s all-time scoring record of 31,419 points. According to legend, Lakers Coach Pat Riley wanted to bench Abdul-Jabbar so that he could break the record at home inside the Forum, but Abdul-Jabbar insisted he remain in the game, telling his coach “let’s get it over with.”
Thomas & Mack Center would host Eddie Murphy for the building’s first comedy show and the pre-Dream Team Men’s U.S. Olympic basketball team in 1988. Finfrock and his team booked Muppet Babies, Big Foot, Guns N’ Roses and packed in 20,321 people in what the local newspaper called a “fire-hazard crowd” for the UNLV game against Navy and their future NBA superstar David Robinson. When riots burned much of L.A. in 1992, the first round of the NBA playoffs between the Lakers and Portland Trail Blazers was moved to T&M.
“There was a great culture for pursuing events and everybody in Vegas and in the facilities industry wanted to work at Thomas & Mack Center,” said former GM Steve Stallworth, who now runs the South Point Arena and Equestrian Center in Las Vegas. “We’d go to conferences and not just be the envy of the collegiate venues, but also a lot of professional venues.” In fact, Finfrock was so successful that in 1996, he was appointed to serve as President of the world’s largest facility trade organization, the International Association of Venue Managers.
Since its opening, Thomas & Mack Center has become a proving ground for some of the biggest names in Las Vegas — managers like Mark Prows at the MGM Grand Garden Arena and Michael Enoch, a longtime Las Vegas resident who now runs the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, China.
“The reason there are so many people in the industry that have a tie to Thomas & Mack Center is because everyone had the opportunity to learn the entire business,” Christenson said. “We did everything in house. We sold our own signage, we did the marketing for athletics, kept food and beverage in house, sold our own suites and eventually did our own ticketing. We created a professional sports model for keeping everything under one roof, and we did it before any of us were really professionals.”
A culture of entrepreneurship and the freedom to pursue new opportunities were reoccurring themes during the Oct. 7 reunion. Libonati recalled how he was given the green light to transform a fledgling parking lot business into a car sales outfit with local dealerships that generated $500,000 per year, while Stallworth remembered finding success as a temporary rental-car parking lot.
“To walk into a culture like this for my first job is just unbelievable,” said Dale Eeles, VP of Development at Las Vegas Events. Eeles got his start at Thomas & Mack Center in 1993. “Everyone was friends and it was fun to be there. We all shared a passion for athletics and finding new ways to make the building a success.”
Anchor Tenants
The annual events that have found a home at Thomas & Mack Center aren’t your typical promoter rentals. The staff at both the arena and Sam Boyd Stadium say events like the Monster Energy Cup and Monster Jam World Finals are true anchor tenants and true partnerships.
The granddaddy of them all is the National Finals Rodeo, a month-long competition every December hosted by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, grossing over $75 million in the last 10 years according to Venues Today’s Hot Tickets report.
“Being a part of the National Finals Rodeo and having the opportunity to manage the building’s assets during the event has been an incredible experience,” said Event Services Director Todd Clawson. “It’s become a phenomenal endeavor that’s put us on a national stage.”
It’s also an event that continues to grow — the 2012 run was the event’s highest grossing to date with $10.9 million in ticket sales, a 24-percent increase in five years.
“Year after year, we’re always making money,” said Chuck Soberinsky, who oversees UNLVTickets, the school’s in-house ticketing system powered by Paciolan. The school switched to Paciolan in 2002 as part of an effort to retain ticket-buyer data in a single database and use it as a successful marketing tool, as well as maintain a unified brand and customer experience. Soberinsky said the arena is now pursuing plans to build its own secondary ticketing market that will give event producers more control over how their tickets are sold and presented to the public.
“We’re continuing to evolve and develop new offerings for our content partners that allow them to create new revenues and build new touch points with consumers,” said Newcomb. “We’ve always focused on improving, whether it’s our customer experience or expanding our concourses. In a city like Las Vegas, you’ve got to keep getting better. The guys who came before set the groundwork and it’s our responsibility to ensure that Thomas & Mack Center is a success going forward for another 30 years.”