from www.lasvegasadvisor.com
Q:
I really enjoyed reading about Jackie Gaughan and respect him even more than before. I’m sure he had many other donations and philanthropic things which weren’t mentioned. He was also a friend of Bill Boyd and we ‘d be interested in hearing about him, too. How about some background on the Boyds?
A:
The low-profile, self-effacing Boyd clan has come a long way from Enid, Oklahoma. There, on April 23, 1910, company patriarch Sam Boyd was born. At age 18, he headed even further west, in a roundabout career that eventually led him to Las Vegas. Legend has it he arrived with but $80 to his name – some versions of the saga say $30 — and began working his way up through the ranks of the casino industry. He already had another mouth to feed, son Bill having been born in 1931. In classic old-school fashion, Sam Boyd broke in as a dealer. (Bill Boyd is not to be confused, by the way, with poker legend William Walter Boyd [1906-1997], although both men would become downtown casino executives.)
Sam Boyd was not without experience. As his New York Times obituary explained, "He began his gaming career in 1928 running bingo games on a gambling ship anchored off Long Beach, Calif. He later ran games of chance in Hawaii, before returning to run the bingo concession aboard the gambling liner S.S. Rex, billed as ‘the world’s largest floating casino.’" Offshore gambling was outlawed during the waning days of peacetime and Boyd forsook California for Las Vegas, where he fatefully arrived on Labor Day, 1941. He dealt penny roulette and learned the ropes at long-vanished joints like the El Rancho and the Jackpot Casino, later becoming a shift boss at the Sahara and the Flamingo.
"He thought a seven-day week was slacking off," recalled College of Southern Nevada history professor Michael Green and such diligence by the elder Boyd would make him a wealthy man. He wasn’t hard to spot, either: His signature fashion statement was a tall, white Stetson. Father and son always went by "Sam" and "Bill," indicative of the informal atmosphere their eponymous company maintains to this day, even after growing into Southern Nevada’s fifth-largest employer, with a 9,300-person workforce.
Sam Boyd eventually amassed sufficient capital to make deals, first for a percentage of the Sahara, then for three percent of the The Mint (where he became general manager) and eventually for the Union Plaza, in 1971, where he broke with tradition by hiring female dealers. The latter move may have been partly a marketing gimmick but it also was, as Boyd Senior put it, "just the right thing to do." The Mob was omnipresent in those days and Boyd had to walk a tightrope. As former business partner Al Garbian described it, "We knew all of them. We weren’t connected, but we knew all of them."
Bill wasn’t initially inclined to follow in Dad’s footsteps. The U.S. Army veteran (1953-55) took a law degree at the University of Utah. He was in his early thirties before Sam could entice to go him to go into business together. Bill bought his half of Henderson’s Eldorado Casino in 1962 by swapping pro bono legal services for a stake in the joint, which remains in the Boyd corporate portfolio to this day. The younger Boyd was once arrested there, actually, when Henderson police deemed the exotic dancers’ work papers not in order. Bill Boyd took the lawmen to court and won. The Eldorado was a humble place back then: 41 slots and three table games. Today it has 10 times as many slots – but only four tables. The steakhouse, incidentally, is named for one of three third-generation Boyd executives: Vice Chairman Marianne Johnson, Bill’s daughter. Sam Boyd II is an executive host at Sam’s Town (fittingly) and William Jr. has been a Boyd Gaming vice president for the past 23 years.
After The Mint was sold, the Eldorado and nearby Jokers Wild were all the Boyds had. But, in the mid-Seventies, they began thinking big, recruiting co-investors and forming the Boyd Group in 1973. (It would become Boyd Gaming in 1988.) Their first property was the California Hotel, which opened in January 1975. Trouble was, they would have to build their client base from scratch.
According to former Boyd exec John Woodrum, in a 1999 interview, Sam Boyd assembled his team and told them that Hawaii was going to be their target market for their new property. He knew from first-hand experience that Hawaiians tended to get "rock fever" and loved to gamble. He parlayed his connections in the 50th state into a signature Boyd marketing strategy. The Boyds also stocked the California Hotel with amenities that would make islanders feel at home: rice cookers in the hotel room, not tiki torches in the lobby. Dealers wore Hawaiian shirts; island delicacies (like oxtail soup) dominated the restaurant menus.
To this day, Hawaiian vacationers are the mainstay of Boyd’s downtown business, which grew to include the Fremont Hotel and Main Street Station, purchased in 1985 and 1993, respectively. Long-distance flights chartered by Boyd Gaming channeled the bulk of Las Vegas’ Hawaiian clientele to Boyd’s doorstep. The annual Lei Day is an important event on the Boyd calendar.
Tomorrow: The Boyds take a gamble out on Boulder Highway and are recruited to help clean up the Las Vegas Strip.
Replies:
Posted by: Pointman on June 25, 2013, 12:45 pm
Q:
You asked, "[Jackie Gaughan] was also a friend of Bill Boyd and we’d be interested in hearing about him, too. How about some background on the Boyds?" Yesterday, we followed the Boyds through their grind-joint beginnings to their cornering of the Hawaiian market. In today’s installment, Boyd Gaming takes two fateful steps.
A:
In 1979, four years after building the California, the Boyds took what was considered a huge risk at the time, embarking on the construction of a massive locals casino on then-remote Boulder Highway. According to conventional wisdom, they might as well have been building it on the far side of the Moon. "People thought they were crazy," Station Casinos co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta told the Las Vegas Sun.
"[Friends] said,’’Are you out of your mind? You’re going to lose everything,’" Bill Boyd confirmed. "’There’s no way that place can be successful.’" But successful it was – and still is. Today, Sam’s Town – as it was eventually called – is but one of several large casinos that form what became known as the Boulder Strip. A planned "Sam’s Town Reno," however, was never realized – this was in 1996 and Reno’s fortunes would take a downward turn soon afterward.
An even more significant event in the company’s history and the Boyd family’s life took place in 1983. Long after Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal got run out of the Stardust, skimming continued to be a problem at the prominent Strip casino. Owners Herb Tobman and Al Sachs ponied up a $3 million fine and surrendered their gaming licenses. The Nevada Gaming Control Board took the unusual step of asking Boyd Gaming to assume direction of the property, due to Sam and Bill’s upstanding reputations. "When we took over, the dealers weren’t even allowed to talk to customers. We’re more of a family-type company," the younger Boyd later recalled.
Now that revenue was no longer being siphoned off to the Mob, the Stardust gave Boyd and immensely profitable presence on the Strip, so much so that the company was able to buy the Stardust and the Fremont Hotel in 1985 for a then-whopping $165 million. "All I ever thought about was making the payroll. If we weren’t successful at the Stardust," the younger Boyd told the late Jeff Simpson, "I’d be back to practicing law." When the Stardust closed in 2007, that payroll included over 100 employees who had been with the casino throughout the entire Boyd tenure.
Both altruism and a wary attitude toward unsavory entanglements led Sam Boyd to found the United Way of Southern Nevada back in 1957, years before he became a major force in the casino industry. As Bill Boyd recently explained to Diamond Cake magazine, as a casino executive, Sam was on the receiving end of daily charitable solicitations but had no way of knowing which ones were legit. Solution? Start a local United Way branch. It was the beginning of a philanthropic tradition that would make the Boyd family beloved in Las Vegas. "If you are successful," Bill Boyd told a reporter, "you have an obligation to give back to the very community that made you successful."
Although he lived to the ripe old age of 82, Sam Boyd didn’t last quite long enough to enjoy his company’s greatest triumphs. He died in January 1993, eulogized as "a man known for bringing the straight and narrow to a notoriously crooked industry." At least he was able to enjoy induction into the American Gaming Association Hall of Fame in 1991. Bill Boyd would join him in the AGA Hall of Fame two years later. (Unfortunately, Elaine S. Kartzman’s "informal biography," Sam Boyd: Nevadan, is out of print.) The following July, Boyd Gaming was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: BYD).
Tomorrow, the conclusion: Boyd Gaming becomes a publicly held company, encountering both success and failure in the world of multi-billion-dollar deals.
Posted by: Pointman on June 26, 2013, 12:26 pm
Q:
You asked, "[Jackie Gaughan] was also a friend of Bill Boyd and we’d be interested in hearing about him, too. How about some background on the Boyds?" Yesterday, the Boyds pioneered the Boulder Strip, cleaned up the Stardust and began a celebrated tradition of philanthropy. In today’s installment, Boyd Gaming goes public and grows to undreamt-of scale.
A:
Fueled with IPO dough, Boyd expanded from a Nevada-only company to one with a national presence. Riverboat gambling was expanding throughout the Midwest and on Native American reservations, and Boyd Gaming plunged quickly into the Tunica, Mississippi market and dabbled slightly in tribal-gaming management. Riverboat casinos in New Orleans (Treasure Chest) and Peoria (Par-A-Dice) soon followed. Eventually, Boyd’s reach would also extend to Indiana and to Mississippi’s Biloxi market, where it owns the former Imperial Palace.
Not all its ventures into new territories were successful: Sam’s Town Kansas City went bust within three years of opening. (A half-hearted move into Florida was also a dud.) An attempt to merge operations with Michael Gaughan in 2004 was a shotgun wedding that went to divorce court within two years: Boyd kept all the Coast casinos except South Point, which Gaughan retained. However, the company continues to grow to this day, having recently absorbed Peninsula Gaming, thereby broadening Boyd Gaming’s base in Louisiana to five casinos, and giving it footholds in Iowa and Kansas, virgin territory for Boyd.
The Boyds’ generous support of higher education, meanwhile, was causing the family name to crop up all over the UNLV campus, most famously on the William Boyd School of Law, founded in 1997 in the former Paradise Elementary School and moved onto the main campus in 2002. Over the years, Bill Boyd has invested $30 million in the law school. (Ironically, the former Political Science major matriculated at the University of Nevada Reno.) In further recognition of the family’s generosity, UNLV’s Silver Bowl football stadium was renamed Sam Boyd Stadium in 1984.
Bill Boyd co-led the campaign to raise the $13 million needed to build the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, in downtown. And the Boyds haven’t been too proud to donate to UNLV’s William F. Harrah Hotel College, though it bore a rival company’s name. The younger Boyd even mediated a settlement between UNLV and scandal-plagued basketball coach, Bill Bayno, in 2001. He’s also sat on the board of the National Center for Responsible Gaming.
In 1984, Sam and Bill Boyd, along with Jackie and Michael Gaughan, were part of a consortium of community leaders who lured the National Finals Rodeo away from Oklahoma City and onto the UNLV campus, where it remains a fixture of wintertime in Las Vegas.
As it proceeds into the 21st century, two projects have defined Boyd. One is Borgata, a $1 billion-plus Atlantic City resort (in which MGM Resorts International is a passive partner). Three years in the making, it opened in 2003 and immediately became –- by far — the leading casino in town, a status it has never relinquished. No other Atlantic City casino remotely approaches its amount of revenue.
The other, Echelon, was a chastening experience for Boyd. In 2007, the company imploded the old, reliable –- but financially fading — Stardust to embark upon a five-hotel, $4.4 billion metaresort. Employees who stuck it out to the end of the Stardust received severance packages ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 … generosity highly atypical of the Strip. But Echelon retail developer General Group Properties soon went into bankruptcy and hotel partner Morgans Hotel Group blew its dough on the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino instead, presaging Echelon’s doom.
In the summer of 2008, with the Great Recession gathering force, Boyd wound Echelon construction down in orderly fashion. (Other Strip companies were less prudent and had to stop projects abruptly.) The land and semi-constructed hotel-casino were eventually sold to Genting Group, but at a terrible markdown: $4 million an acre for land that was once worth $15 million/acre. Alas, this also means that whatever casino is built there will not be graced by a William B.’s gourmet restaurant. The same year that Echelon was mothballed, Bill Boyd stepped down as CEO in favor of Keith Smith, who holds the post to this day.
Although as executive chairman of Boyd Gaming, Bill Boyd keeps very much in the background now, never overshadowing his leadership team, he’s still on the move, "as the primary liaison of Boyd Gaming with customers and employees," in company parlance. In recent years, one of his favorite practices has been to visit Boyd casinos –- across the country –- two and three times a month and just walk the property, getting to know the workforce and the patrons. In 2009, the Las Vegas Sun described the purpose of these drop-ins as "to say hello, show his face, impart a sense of caring … No, this is no doddering elderly figurehead."
Or, as one dealer told the Sun, "Nobody cares about working people anymore. He don’t need to do this. He could just be off playing golf and counting his money." In April 2004, in the course of announcing his own retirement from Boyd, then-President Don Snyder said, "The deep personal relationship with Bill is perhaps the most difficult part of leaving." That’s about as nice a compliment as one could wish.
