LAS VEGAS IS PROVING TO BE A FANTASY LAND

Las Vegas is a city of both dreams and nightmares.

For the past month I’ve been saying that the crowd for Sunday’s Sprint Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway would be down by about 15 percent.

Still, I’ve written, the crowd would be close to 140,000.

It looks like I was wrong.

Speedway president Chris Powell said early Friday evening that the 11th annual Las Vegas Cup race on Sunday would be a virtual sellout, meaning that only a smattering a single seats would be available for sale.

Powell decided to open up for sale a couple thousand seats that are in lower rows between turns three and four. He doesn’t put those up for sale generally because they have a partially obstructed view of the track since track banking was raised two years ago.

When a sellout was only a dream two weeks ago, Powell, who has run the track since Speedway Motorsports bought it in 1998, opted to donate a few thousand tickets to returning Nevada National Guard troops, airmen at Nellis Air Force Base and Clark County School District employees.

It was not one of those “Hey, here’s one free ticket and now you have to buy one if you want to bring someone with you” deals. The offer was for two tickets per person.

As part of cost-saving measures at the Review-Journal, employees have been asked to voluntarily take a half-day off without pay. When Powell learned of this, he offered about a hundred tickets to the paper for those answering the request.

In hindsight, all of those donated tickets could have been sold. But Powell isn’t regretting his decision to make those donations.

At a time when many NASCAR tracks are offering discounted tickets to spur sales, Powell didn’t want to do that because it would have slighted the more than 60,000 fans who had paid full price for tickets by last summer.

A Sunday sellout shows the popularity of the speedway, one of the most fan-friendly facilities in NASCAR.

It shows Las Vegas remains the most popular destination on the NASCAR circuit.

Las Vegas is a major-league town without a major-league team but it certainly has major-league events with big-time promoters.

I’m fortunate to report on the biggest sporting events in Nevada: NASCAR, National Finals Rodeo, Professional Bull Riders World Championships, NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series and the ongoing U.S. Bowling Congress Open Championships at Cashman Center.

I’m also very thankful to be covering NASCAR in a market with a track owned by Speedway Motorsports.

I never imagined with our struggling economy that on Sunday there would be a full house at the speedway. I credit the lure of Las Vegas and the LVMS staff led by Powell.

SERIOUS ON SIRIUS

I’m scheduled to be a guest on Sirius satellite radio’s "Press Pass" at 9 Saturday morning with Steve Post and Alex Hayden. That’s channel 128 and 129 on Sirius.