Responsible for bringing Las Vegas its biggest college football games to date, John Saccenti, Executive Director of the Las Vegas Bowl, is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪ -Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

A Brooklyn native and UNLV graduate, he got his start working with Las Vegas' Minor League Baseball and hockey teams.

After short stints as a mascot and with Vince McMahon's XFL, he joined ESPN Events, which in 2014 chose him to lead the Las Vegas Bowl.

Under his leadership, the Bowl games' attendance skyrocketed.

John Saccenti, Executive Director of the Las Vegas Bowl and of the Vegas Kickoff Classic, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

(John Saccenti) Thanks for having me.

It's good to see you.

-First off, your obvious passion for sports, where does it stem from?

-You know, growing up playing sports-- you said on the front end I grew up in Brooklyn, but we moved to New Jersey just before high school.

And I played soccer, I played basketball, played baseball.

That was never in the cards.

I came out to UNLV to be an architect, of all things, and wanted to play baseball here.

And I lasted two weeks out there before our UNLV baseball coach told me I just wasn't good enough.

So, you know-- -How did you take that?

-I cried, of course, yeah.

And he was right.

I wasn't good enough.

But, you know, the architecture thing didn't really work out according to plan either.

And Don Logan, who's president of the Aviators, grabbed me one time and said, Hey, do you want to work in sports?

Never thought about it at the time.

And he said, Perfect, what do you want to do?

And my answer was, I have no idea.

And me thinking I bombed it, Don actually looked at me and said, Good answer, and gave me an opportunity to hop around a couple different areas of the organization and found a home working in sports somehow.

-Why did he say that was a good answer?

-At 19, 20 years old, do you have to know exactly what you want to do?

Do you know where your skill set is?

Do you know what you're good at, not good at?

He allowed me to spend a couple months in PR, allowed me to spend a couple months in sponsorships and ticket sales, in marketing.

And then when a full-time job opened up and an opportunity opened up, I ended up working in the marketing department.

And so he saw something in me, thought that I had, you know, the little "it" to work in sports, and I was appreciative of the opportunity and just kind of rolled with it.

-I've known you for a while, because I used to work in sports, and I remember you telling me a story about him, his advice to you.

What was it?

-Yeah.

Well, one, he said, Do you play golf?

And I said, No, I don't really.

He goes, Well, you better start playing more golf if you're gonna work in sports, which was the best advice ever.

But he sat me down.

He says, If you want to make it in sports, be the last one to leave the bar, be the first one in the office.

I didn't quite take the message exactly right at the time.

I thought I had to go to the bar every night.

[laughter] There was an underlying theme there, and he was 100% right.

And the theme was "you're in the office early" means you're working hard, right?

You're there, you're showing up early, you're working hard.

The bar, the bar thing, he wasn't really telling me to go out and drink every night.

It was, you know, form relationships, be social.

Relationships are huge in the world of sports, and you can kind of navigate pretty well.

And, you know, a lot of the great things that I've had in my career have stemmed from having good relationships and having, you know-- -From being at the bar.

-From being at the bar.

I mean, the biggest event I ever did and the biggest event I ever worked on came from sitting at the bar having a drink.

And one drink into it, we formed great events.

And so it was a matter of having relationships.

-Tell me the biggest event.

-Well, it just happened here in 2024, the Vegas Kickoff Classic, LSU-USC.

I was at a bar-- we're not an alcoholic, for the record.

Again, it's being social, it's forming relationships.

But I was down in Phoenix at some spring meetings and ran into a friend of mine who'd just been named the interim athletic director at USC.

And we had just broke ground on Allegiant Stadium.

And he was asking me about the stadium, and I said, We got to get you to play in a kickoff game.

And he said, it's a perfect fit for USC.

It's right down the road.

Vegas is a big market.

Let's figure out a way to make it happen.

At the time, my friend, who's now here at UNLV, Dan Mullen, was at Florida, we called Dan and asked him to play it right off the bat.

Dan said, I'm in.

At the time, we couldn't get the schedules matched up.

We ended up with LSU, who could match up the schedules.

Turned out to be great for everybody involved.

And you know, at the time, it was five years prior, right?

You had one coach, Ed Orgeron, who was 7 and 5; they wanted him fired.

Clay Helton was 8 and 4; they wanted him fired.

We rolled the dice, like we do in Vegas, took the chance that five years down the line, both teams would be better.

We ended up with Brian Kelly and Lincoln Riley, two top 12 teams.

Set the attendance record for Allegiant Stadium, bring 200,000 people to Vegas, and it was our most successful event ever.

-And historic at Allegiant Stadium.

-We have the all-time attendance record at Allegiant Stadium.

We were the first one to have standing room only.

The game came down to the wire and was settled with six seconds to go.

We broke a TV, TV viewership record for the opening weekend.

So it was my proudest moment as a, as a professional in sports with ESPN.

And again, it goes back to, we can laugh about it now, Donnie Logan was right, right?

Be the last one to leave the bar.

Having that conversation and talking about that led to something really special for me personally, for ESPN as a company, and ultimately for Las Vegas.

-Have you ever met someone that doesn't drink, and then what do you do?

-Yeah, all the time.

-Okay.

-I can still sit at the bar and, and, you know, again, you're having conversations.

-What do you order?

-My go-to is tequila or a nice red wine.

-Straight?

-Oh, yeah.

You don't want to mess up.

-That sends a message.

-I go down to Mexico a lot.

I was with some folks that were part of the upstart of two different brands of tequila, and I made the mistake of ordering one mixed with something and they slapped it out of my hand.

They told me not to put lime in it.

They told me put it straight up with a little orange wedge, and that's kind of my go-to, yeah.

I got you.

I got you.

Now, you can't drink too many of them.

[laughter] But, no, it's a good starter.

But, yeah, I-- Listen, I could sit in the corner of the bar, sitting there having a, you know, in the little lounge areas and having conversations.

But again, the theme of the whole thing is forming those relationships, having those conversations, brainstorming, talking shop, and good things tend to happen.

-I was going to ask you, what is your dream matchup if you could make any college football game happen?

But I am realizing that what you would want now may be different than what you're scheduling for five years down the road.

-Yeah.

College football is tough because they do schedules so far in advance.

And now, with the expanded playoff, teams are a little leery, and you have your bigger conference and conference realignment.

I think I just told you I was out at Mandalay Bay at Big Ten Media Day trying to get some of these Big Ten teams to come, right?

And they're like, We love Las Vegas.

We'd love to open in Las Vegas.

We'd love to play a great opponent, but we have nine conference games, and then, you know, a team like, you know, Texas and Georgia are playing each other, right?

And then Texas and Georgia have to go play an SEC schedule.

That's a, that's a lot of tough games.

And so trying to convince these teams to come to Las Vegas to play another big time game can be difficult.

We, we're going to find a couple here and there.

We have-- We're going to announce six more here coming up soon.

We announced one recently for September of 2027, the Battle of the U, Miami and Utah.

No offense to any Utah fans, but Miami is the "U."

You can't, you guys can't argue about that one.

When you have your own 30 for 30 called the U, you get to stake claim on being called the U.

-Yeah, maybe you should make a trophy for that, a special-- -A nice little U trophy, yeah.

-Something like that.

Okay, you also worked for the minor league hockey team here, the Thunder.

-I did.

-And you were the mascot at some time?

Was this a full-time position?

-I cannot shake Boom Boom; it's been years.

-Boom Boom the polar bear.

-Yeah.

-Was that your full-time job there?

-No, but that's how, that's how I met Don, and that's how I got in the door.

-Were you in the suit when you met him?

-Sometimes.

How it started was I was living in the dorms at UNLV.

And the kid that got the job as Boom Boom came back and said, We're looking for some, some part-time employees to sling T-shirts and to help on game day, give out prizes and, you know, they're gonna pay you $50 a game to do it.

So I'm like, a little part-time job.

One night I went up to the office and I heard two people yelling and screaming at each other.

It turned out to be the owner of the hockey team and the guy that brought me on board that was actually Boom Boom.

It was a couple games into the first season.

And me being the nosy New York, New Jersey guy that I am, I'm eavesdropping while I'm getting the prizes for the night.

And the argument ends with the guy playing Boom Boom coming out of the office.

The owner of the team coming over says, You, come here.

He handed me $250 in cash and said, Go put the polar bear costume on for tonight.

Don't ask any questions.

And you know, four or five years later, I was still doing it while I, while I got the full-time job.

So I was kind of double dutying it, and it was a lot of fun.

And that was the other thing that at the time Don told me, because he worked for the hockey team as well, as well as the baseball team.

And he's like, If you're willing to do that and sweat your butt off and have kids kick you and throw stuff at you and deal with that stuff, then you're probably pretty committed to this thing.

So it was another positive for me to have that in my-- feather, little feather in my cap, if you will.

-Did kids kick you?

-I still own Boom Boom.

Like, we're just, we're about to move offices.

I just bought a big buff football mannequin, and we're going to put that thing up on display in the back of the, in the back of the office.

The head still sits behind me on all my Zooms, which it freaks people out.

They're like, Why do you have a polar bear head on the back of your, in the back of your office?

-Do you use that as a reminder or some sort of motivation, Look where I've come?

-Yeah.

-How far I've come?

-A little bit, right?

Like, I don't think when they asked me to do that, I never thought I'd be in this spot today, you know, dressing up like a polar bear.

I was an ice skating polar bear who-- -Oh, I forgot.

You had to skate.

-Yeah, we had to skate.

-Did you know how to ice skate?

Well, you're from New Jersey.

-I did, but it had been a few years.

Funny story.

The first night they had me do it, I don't know if you remember the Thunder games, but it was dark, there was lasers, there was smoke.

I had never been in the polar bear outfit on, on ice.

The hockey players were kind of messing with me like, Hey, you gonna be okay here?

You only have about three feet of skating behind the big jackpot slot machine that we had going to kind of get loose.

And that particular night, there was an intern working the National Anthem red carpet.

And you're supposed to put it out to center ice and fold it back twice.

They forgot to fold it back twice, so I come out of there like a bat out of hell, and my ice skate hits the carpet right off the bat.

And I go sliding down the whole end of the ice into the boards.

And when you hit wet ice with a furry polar bear costume, it does not slow down.

It actually picks up speed.

-John Katsilometes of the Review-Journal said you told him that the ladies really liked Boom Boom.

-It was weird!

It was really weird.

I mean, it's been so long and the names will always remain nameless, but in between periods we'd be down at intermission.

That's where I would take my break.

The players would be, you know, fixing their skates and getting their sticks fixed up.

And they would come over, and it was a lot of younger players.

They were all single.

Nobody was doing anything wrong.

But the players would come back, and then they go, Hey, Boomer, red shirt, Section 109, right in the middle.

Go get her.

And so I would go there and find the cute lady that was in the red shirt and say, Hey, one of the players wants to meet you after the game in the red room, because we'd go to the red room after the game.

And they never knew who Boom Boom was, but, inevitably, they'd always be down there.

And the first question they'd have for their friends was, Who's Boom Boom?

We want to meet him.

And I thought it was really, really weird that they did want to meet Boom Boom.

Actually took--because I was working front office--I took a player to a dating show, a radio dating show where people got to call in.

It was Love Connection.

I don't know if you remember that back in the day.

And I took one of our very good looking, fun hockey players there, and we had two callers call in, not for the player, but calling in for Boom Boom.

And he's sitting there, Well, he's sitting right next to me, actually.

-I didn't expect this interview to focus so much on Boom Boom, but we have run out of time.

-Yeah.

-John Saccenti of the Las Vegas Bowl-- -On, Boom Boom.

- --thank you for joining Nevada Week.

-Of course, anytime.