AJ O'Leary

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Great Balls of Fire: My Day at the Vegas Rollers Game

In which I fall down the rabbit hole of professional tennis in Las Vegas

Las Vegas is a land of bright lights and big dreams. It’s also a land of nascent, fly-by-night sports teams, from indoor football all the way down to… tennis.

With our new-ish NHL team’s continued dominance, star-studded WNBA lineup, and the construction of Raider Stadium well in hand, it could be said that sports are having a ‘moment’ in the Las Vegas Valley. It stands to reason, I guess, that World TeamTennis — the Billie Jean King-founded competitive tennis league that once boasted Elton John’s enthusiastic support and has flitted in and out of existence since the 1970s — would get in on the action by placing a team in Las Vegas.

Enter the Vegas Rollers.

The Rollers are one of the WTT’s two new expansion teams for the 2019 season. I found out about them through a targeted Facebook ad, because if there’s one thing Facebook knows about me, it’s that I care about nothing more than cute shoes and off-label sports leagues.

Tickets started at $17. The Rollers played their games just a few miles down the road from me. World TeamTennis’ season is just a few weeks long(?!?). I couldn’t buy my tickets fast enough, and with that, I was set for my first-ever in-person tennis match on Saturday, July 20, 2019.

Oh, yeah, something else I should mention and didn’t even find out until after I’d purchased tickets: Redfoo from LMFAO is their assistant coach.

Match Day

An important thing to know about Las Vegas is that while, no, we don’t all live in or near casinos, most of our arenas and performing spaces are connected to or near them. In this case, the Rollers play at Orleans Arena, connected to the Orleans, a “locals” casino located just off the Las Vegas Strip.

My girlfriend and I decided to make an entire day out of the Orleans. Turns out a sub-par buffet, emotionally devastating movie at the in-casino cinema,and a whole lot of walking through a smoke-drenched simulacra of New Orleans during Mardi Gras do no favors for your sanity.

Any wits that did manage to remain intact after the Tour de Orleans went completely out the window once we’d hit the arena.

The scene was set by a security guard at the arena entrance doing his part to move team swag. “Free programs!”, he bellowed, motioning us over to the fold-out table stacked with programs detailing the team’s roster, sponsors, and wonders of Redfoo, including key takeaways like “hey babe can you make me some celery juice”, “our pet gopher ‘Bropher’” and “what every [sic] I do I’m think about coding and tennis all day long YEAH BABY”.

Game time fun began as soon as we took our seats. World TeamTennis rules, different from tennis as you’d know it from something like Wimbledon, seem designed to be confusing, with different matches of men’s and women’s singles and doubles and a mixed-gender doubles match sandwiched in the middle comprising a “game”.

I lasted about three minutes before Redfoo’s presence threw my mind off the rails. Mic in his hand nearly the whole match, he’d occasionally run out onto the court between sets to lead the arena in a “PARTY ROCK!” call-and-response.

I got the feeling that World TeamTennis is a Very Serious Thing for everyone aware of them longer than two days prior to Saturday’s match, because the opposing team — the fellow good-logo-having Springfield Lasers — glared at Mr. Foo the whole time and the line judge asked the crowd to settle down at one point, as if our cheering debased The Beautiful Game.

Unfortunately for the Lasers and our relationship with reality, things got weirder the longer the game went on and the more we scanned the arena. The Rollers have two mascots, evidently: an Elvis-looking entity with a tennis ball for a head who jumped out to center court at one point to groove to “Blue Suede Shoes” with a crew of dancers, and his country cousin, a giant walking yellow tennis ball with Coolface-emoji shades.

Tennis is tangential to the Rollers’ desire to Vegas all over the place. A guy in a cape who looked like Borat and the dude from Joywave’s long-lost child from our vantage point came out at certain spots between sets to sing along to songs, sometimes with a saxophone, other times to shout out random names from the audience and tell us that our call-and-response rhythm was terrible. The “PARTY ROCK” chants continued until morale improved. At one point, Redfoo exclaimed “VEGAS ROLLERS IN THE HOUSE TONIGHT!” into the heavens.

At one point in the match — I can’t remember if it was during a t-shirt toss or when the Elvis tennis man started dancing with a group of drunk women at one VIP table and high-fived a man identified as a Clark County Commissioner at another — my girlfriend turned to me to ask, “Are we in Purgatory?” No, honey. This isn’t purgatory. This is Tennis. This is love. Wait, no, it isn’t that last one, because that would mean no points are being scored.

The Rollers ended up losing in a “Super Tiebreaker” despite valiant last-ditch efforts, but it didn’t matter. If this is how it’s going to be when eccentric sports leagues come to my city, then I’m here for it. I don’t know if the Rollers, or World TeamTennis, or the world as we know it will still exist by this time next year, but if they do, I’ll be there to celebrate another year of the world spinning on its axis and Assistant Coach Redfoo with a too-white Rollers hat perched atop my oversized head and a song (probably Party Rock Anthem) in my heart. God bless Las Vegas and the world.

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