From the wellness ritual best described as “a show in a sauna” to the week when promoters staged wrestling cards – some starting as early as 11 a.m. — in such storied sports venues as the Fremont Country Club, Beer Zombies and the parking lot at the Punk Rock Museum, 2025 was another strange year in Las Vegas.
We also caught up with Pamela Anderson, the blockbuster known as “F1 the Movie” and Pam Minick, the Las Vegas native who parlayed a Miss Helldorado title into a career that made her one of the most recognizable names in rodeo.
- With WrestleMania taking place in Las Vegas for the first time since 1993, most of the focus was on the two-day spectacle at Allegiant Stadium that had an announced combined attendance of 124,693. The vast majority of fans, though, skipped the dozens of smaller promotions from around the world that set up shop around town that week. Those fans missed out on seeing Cereal Man, the pompous blowhard who wrestles in a purple jumpsuit and gold cape with a box of cereal framing his face; the daredevils of Rise: Underground Pro Wrestling, who traveled from the north of England to bleed all over the Dive Bar on a Saturday afternoon; and the inexplicable joys of watching three men wrestle a blowup doll and lose.
- Rodeo legend Pam Minick wasn’t just born and raised in Las Vegas. She was forged by the city. “When you’re running for Miss Rodeo Nevada and you ride James Caan’s horse, that’s not bad,” the 72-year-old force of nature told us. “And it sounds so name-drop-y, but it’s just how we were. That’s what it was like growing up in Vegas.”
- The under-the-radar wellness ritual known as Aufguss combines elements of meditation, breathwork, yoga and aromatherapy, along with music, dance, intricate towel movements, the occasional tuning fork and a grueling, almost incomprehensible level of heat, even for Las Vegas. It can hit 180 degrees in the sauna. Then participants are urged to spend time in a 50-degree cold plunge or a snow shower that lowers the temperature to 14 degrees.
- In 2024, when Las Vegas and Formula One were still figuring each other out, the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Wynn Las Vegas, The Cosmopolitan and Omnia at Caesars Palace managed to work Brad Pitt and a hundred-person film crew into one of the busiest weeks of the year. The results electrified the summer blockbuster “F1 the Movie.”
- Pamela Anderson has been the subject of so many tabloid headlines generated in and around Las Vegas — she’s been married here (to Rick Salomon at The Mirage), engaged on the way here (to Kid Rock in the desert outside Primm) and honeymooned near here (with Tommy Lee on that infamous houseboat on Lake Mead) — that it’s only appropriate that perhaps her greatest professional success took place in the city with “The Last Showgirl.” Plus, any time you get the chance to talk with Anderson, you grab it with both hands and don’t let go.