BYU, Las Vegas a good fit, bowl director says

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — As Bronco Mendenhall ascended the steps at the ESPN Zone with his three children for a reception inside the New York New York hotel and casino, Tina Kunzer-Murphy was there to greet them by first name.

"There is some familiarity," said Kunzer-Murphy, who, as executive director of the Las Vegas Bowl, welcomed the Brigham Young University football team to town Wednesday night for the fourth time, each time with Mendenhall as Cougar head coach.

Mendenhall and the team are filling the hours leading to to the bowl's competition Saturday against Arizona.

"They're just so delightful," Kunzer-Murphy said of the Cougars. "For me, it's very comfortable, and I really like that. I think our (bowl) committee feels the same way. We're really comfortable having BYU here."

Kunzer-Murphy hopes her guests share that sentiment.

It was former BYU head coach LaVell Edwards who joked that when attending the Holiday Bowl in San Diego, "BYU fans would bring a $50 bill and the Ten Commandments and never break either one of them." While the extent to which the coach's quip is true may be debatable, inviting BYU and its almost exclusively Mormon following to a bowl game is certainly a unique proposition.

In Las Vegas, however, the two seemingly disparate cultures appear to meld well.

This is the fourth consecutive season in which the football team from BYU, a school owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has spent bowl week in Las Vegas, a city identified by its gaming and nightlife. The tenets of the LDS Church forbid gambling, alcohol and tobacco consumption, and premarital or extramarital sex.

The atmosphere around the bowl events is unmistakably Vegas — from the slot machines and Elvis impersonator at New York New York to David Hasselhoff being scheduled to sing the national anthem preceding the game on Saturday. At the same time, Kunzer-Murphy, a Las Vegas native who attended college in Cedar City and has many LDS friends, said she endeavors to make sure the visitors feel at ease. In the case of BYU, that means taking into account LDS culture and beliefs.

"What I try to do is make sure that the players have a great time here and are comfortable," she said. "We're aware of it. I don't know if we do anything different, but it's definitely a different culture, and I think everybody in Las Vegas is aware of it and we try to accommodate.

"I don't want them to be uncomfortable. I want everybody to have a good time, so I'd like to think that people think we adjust to make them feel comfortable here in a city that's known for gaming and things that, you know, are not part of (LDS) culture."