Don't count on this former Vegas mayor to be at the Super Bowl

It was just after 4 p.m. on a recent weekday, and Oscar Goodman, the mob lawyer turned Las Vegas mayor and civilian cheerleader, was drinking perhaps his first Hizzoner of the day.

The drink – made with Bombay Sapphire gin, more Bombay Sapphire gin and a slice of jalapeño pepper, served in a tall martini glass – is not only Mr. Goodman. It's a tribute to a faded version of Las Vegas that he's been celebrating and trying to keep alive for decades.

After sipping the fluffy elixir, Mr. Goodman took a seat in a booth at Oscar's Steakhouse, an upscale restaurant in downtown Las Vegas, where he is paid to lend his name and evoke his heyday by mobsters like Meyer Lansky and Tony Spilotro, staring at the FBI and appearing as himself in films like “Casino.” He still plays the role well. Mr. Goodman, 84, has no qualms about expressing opinions in his bare feet on everything from graffiti and gambling to prostitution and the plight of the homeless.

Mr. Goodman is more than just an “only in Vegas” relic, though. During his 12 years as mayor, starting in 1999, he also helped restore the city's blighted downtown, long since overshadowed by the Strip a few miles to the south. But one thing he couldn't do during his tenure was convince America's major sports leagues to locate a team in Sin City. Try as he might, the leagues could not be convinced that the city's connections to gambling did not threaten the integrity of their games.

That stigma disappeared in 2018 when the Supreme Court struck down the federal law banning sports betting outside Nevada. The floodgates opened and even the National Football League, which had pushed back the hardest against Mr. Goodman, now calls Las Vegas home. The Raiders began playing here in 2020 and since then the city has hosted the Pro Bowl and the league's draft.

The crowning moment will follow on February 11, when Las Vegas will be the location of Super Bowl LVIII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers.

Mr. Goodman regrets not being in office due to the arrival of professional sports, including the Golden Knights of the National Hockey League in 2017 and last year's announcement that Major League Baseball had given the Oakland Athletics permission to relocate to the city. But he gets a vicarious thrill as he watches his wife, Carolyn, who succeeded him in office and remains mayor of Las Vegas, cut the ribbon.

“You want to succeed in everything you try,” Mr. Goodman said of his efforts. “But look, I'm a realist. I didn't succeed, but I was very lucky that my wife was able to do what I couldn't do.”

What Mr. Goodman did was tell anyone who would listen that the leagues were sanctimonious charlatans. Professional sports benefit from gambling, he said, because fans become more interested in games when there is money on them. He told league commissioners concerned about gambling's impact on players and coaches that Las Vegas was the safest place to play because its casinos and sportsbooks were highly regulated.

“It was a joke,” Mr. Goodman said of the leagues' opposition to the city.

He did not come into contact with sports by chance. In his own words, he bets on everything that moves, apparently including cockroaches. Before ordering his drink, he told a visitor that he had bet on the two underdogs — the Chiefs and the Detroit Lions — to cover the spread in the NFL's conference championship game. (He won both bets.) Then Jonathan Jossel, who runs the Plaza Hotel, home of Oscar's Steakhouse, stopped by to give Mr. Goodman $150 in cash, his cut of their winning fantasy football team.

“I can't take the chance that I owe this man a dime,” Mr. Jossel joked.

Bathed in neon from the signs outside the restaurant, Mr. Goodman said he recognized how the Runnin' Rebels of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, united the city when they created one of the top men's basketball teams in the late 1980s and early 1980s goods. the nineties. He believed that Las Vegas needed professional sports teams, not to stimulate the economy — as many mayors claim when they try to convince taxpayers to subsidize stadiums for teams — but to generate enthusiasm and signal that Las Vegas is a city is world class.

“The truth is, he really has vision,” Carolyn Goodman said of her husband's attempt to lure a team. “I know some of it was selfish because he loves sports and of course he loves gambling. The way he supported our romance through college was playing poker.”

Mr. Goodman, who wasn't afraid to use the word “whack” when he was mayor and, in a nod to a particularly memorable scene from “The Godfather,” still has a plastic horse head in his office, was a rare lawmaker who was willing to mention the leagues' rigid opposition to sports gambling. He would rightly point out that some team owners had once been bookmakers and billions of dollars were bet on games.

“You have that hypocrisy, and Goodman certainly captured it,” said John L. Smith, a longtime journalist in Nevada and author of “Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman's Life From Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas.”

“He has a certain anarchy about him,” Mr. Smith added. “He sees that and wants to break it.”

Mr. Goodman trolled through the competitions in his flamboyant style. He sat courtside during basketball games with a showgirl on each arm. He publicly reprimanded then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue after banning Las Vegas from advertising on television during the Super Bowl in 2003. Mr. Goodman dropped by Major League Baseball's winter meetings with showgirls and a martini glass, while he embraced the former Los Angeles club. Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda and other baseball stars told reporters that Las Vegas was ready for a team.

The leagues were not impressed. Mr. Goodman recalled how he visited the National Basketball Association office in New York in 1999 and David Stern, the commissioner, told him that Las Vegas would get a basketball team only over his dead body.

“Basically, like everything else in my life, we're in a fight,” Mr. Goodman said. “I said, 'You want to know something, Commissioner: Before I became mayor, I represented well-known gangsters, and I could arrange that.'”

All these feuds feel like ancient history now, as gambling commercials appear on TV during game broadcasts, fans bet using cell phone apps and Las Vegas prepares to host the nation's most famous sporting event.

As Las Vegas' first husband, Mr. Goodman could easily snag a seat in a luxury box at Allegiant Stadium, where the Super Bowl will be played. But after years of battling the leagues, he's not interested in fighting the traffic to hobnob with the same people who stiff-armed him. Instead, he watches in his living room with his family and an ample supply of Bombay Sapphire gin.

If Raiders owner “Mark Davis called me and said, 'Please come sit with me,' I wouldn't go,” Mr. Goodman said. “I love being home with my wife and the kids come over. I am the happiest man in the world. I get drunk and I see 44 players on the field at the same time. I mean, it's my favorite day of the year.”