Enter the Mongolian

HOW TO COVER A LAS VEGAS SPORTING EVENT AFTER THOMPSON: PART I

You hear about the tournament from Mac, a friend who used to wrestle for his high school in the California high desert. Mac taught you to revere men who bring honor and integrity to combat sports: Cael Sanderson, the Iowa State wrestler who went undefeated (159–0) his entire collegiate career; Dan Gable, the wrestling legend who coached Iowa to fifteen national titles; Rulon Gardner, the Greco-Roman wrestler who ended Alexander Karelin’s thirteen-year undefeated streak in the 2000 Ol­ympics. Mac is a sumo fan. Over the phone, he tells you sumo’s grand champion is a massive Mongolian who has taken the world of sumo, indeed all of Japan, by storm, and now he’s coming to Las Vegas. He stresses this is something you both need to see. Even though it means you’ll probably end up pinned to a beer-soaked carpet at three o’clock in the morning, you agree to go.

Your plan is to drive across the desert with a third amigo—Christian—and a cooler full of beer. It’s a poor parody of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and you know it; but Hunter S. Thompson’s sudden passing in 2005 is fresh in your mind, making the trip feel necessary, urgent even. You will pay homage to Thompson by immersing yourselves in a spectacle you don’t understand. “We’re going to get drunk and yell at fat men!” Mac shouts as he rings off.

There is only one way to ap­proach the city and that is by automobile traveling at a high rate of speed, but the week before the tournament, Christian breaks his leg in three places in a skateboarding mishap and Mac has a family emergency. You consider renting a big red convertible, but the sad truth is there’s a Texas oilman in office and in the autumn of 2005 it’s cheaper to buy a ticket on Southwest Airlines than to drive a Carter administration–era vehicle across the desert. Your lead-foot fiancée’s Pepsi-can of a Volkswagen will have to do.

Your journey is fueled not by cold beer, LSD, and ether, but by tubs of gas-station coffee laced with French vanilla–flavored cream­er. You arrive at the hotel mid­morning, check in, get your press credentials. Check your equip­­ment: notebook, laptop computer, digital camera, shotgun mi­­crophone, minidisc recorder, head­phones, backup tape re­corder, and a shitload of batteries. You have everything you could possibly need except the co­mestibles essential to the job, and like the great man says, the job is all that matters.

Remember that every casino has a convenience store that contains a variety of chilled alcoholic...