An Ass-Whipping In Vegas Stays In Vegas, But The Fremont Cannon Does Not

I was over the hill in Napa this past weekend to see two of my friends get married (to each other, as luck would have it), so I wasn't able to get a reliable report on the annual Nevada-UNLV game until late last night even though the game took place in Vegas on Saturday. Turns out the Wolf Pack wiped the turf with their erstwhile rivals from down south by a score of 31-3. This means that the Fremont Cannon will stay blue for another year, and won't be subject to the sort of embarrassing treatment shown to it by the folks in Vegas back in 2000.


The game wasn't on TV and received almost zero press coverage outside the state of Nevada. This is a shame, considering how much the partisans here in Northern Nevada enjoy beating UNLV and would love the world to witness it happen. For some reason, people in Vegas revel in a sense of smug self-satisfaction when comparing themselves to those of us living in and around the Truckee Meadows. Somehow I wasn't surprised at last year's game here in Reno to hear the cheering section from Vegas chanting "Reno is white trash." Or consider this Open Letter to the Fremont Cannon, a little gem published in UNLV's student newspaper before this year's game:

I, like many other students at our fine university, won't feel complete without you among us and our non-mobile homes...My only hope is to christen you with a bottle of champagne once more; not a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon like the other team must have used.

What's hard for those of us who live up here in God's Country to stomach about this southern condescension is how unearned it feels. Sure, there are people in Reno who live in mobile homes and, although I can't think of anyone offhand, I'm sure someone in this city must like Pabst. But that's no different from any town in America, Vegas included. Yet we are forced to endure an overblown superiority complex from the city that considers these guys cultural icons, that made Elvis impersonation a fine art, and that has the world's highest per-capita concentration of creepy guys standing on street corners passing out flyers for call girls. Reno may not be Paris on the Truckee, but spare us the oh-so-sophisticated act, Vegas. You're still the city that's been defining bad taste ever since the Mob conjured you up out of the Mojave in the 1940's. Oh, and your football team sucks, too.