FLASHBACKS: THIS WEEK IN VEGAS HISTORY
November 6, 1993: James “Fan Man” Miller interrupts the Evander Holyfield/Riddick Bowe fight by swooping into the ring outside Caesars Palace in a motorized paraglider. Fan Man suffers a seventh-round knockout when fans beat him senseless. The fight resumes after 20 minutes. Nine years later his body was found in Kenai Peninsula, Alaska. He had committed suicide by hanging. He was 38.
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November 7, 1995: The Landmark Hotel, which was featured in the movies Casino and Diamonds are Forever but closed five years earlier, is imploded to make way for a Convention Center parking lot. Footage of the destruction is used in the campy alien movie Mars Attacks! Jack Nicholson plays U.S. president James Dale.
November 8, 2002: IBF Super Middleweight champ Laila Ali (Muhammad’s daughter) defeats IWBF and WIBA titleholder Valerie Mahfood in an eighth-round TKO at the Stratosphere to claim all three crowns. She holds them until she retires undefeated in 2007, though some critics say she dodged tough bouts.
November 9, 2009: Joseph “The Kid” Cada, 10 days short of his 22nd birthday, becomes the youngest player ever to win the World Series of Poker grand prize at the Rio Casino. The Michigan native, who began playing online poker at 16, takes home $8.5 million.
November 10, 2003: Actor Christian Slater is hospitalized with a gash in his neck, reportedly suffered in a scuffle with his wife, Ryan Haddon, in their room at the Hard Rock Hotel. She’s arrested for domestic battery, but charges are dropped after they say the glass she threw at him was a “misunderstanding.”
November 11, 1971: Rolling Stone publishes part 1 of Hunter Thompson’s wild, surreal, drug-addled memoir that becomes the groundbreaking book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
November 12, 2006: Madame Tussauds wax museum at the Venetian prepares to unveil a display featuring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt getting married, with George Clooney as best man and Elvis Presley and Liberace among the guests. They cancel the plan the next day when the unmarried Jolie and Pitt object.
November 13, 2005: Paris Hilton’s boyfriend, Stavros Niarchos, starts a wild pillow fight in his Hard Rock Hotel suite after a party celebrating Kelly Osborne’s 21st birthday. The revelers break a sprinkler, flooding rooms and forcing the evacuation of the hotel. His billionaire dad, former arch-rival of the late Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, pays $25,000 to cover damages.
Researched and written by Mike Precker