I AM, incidentally, probably one of the only journalists in history who came out of a brothel with more money than he had on entering it. Like so many vastly improbable tales, it is absolutely true, and entirely innocent. It happened in 1981, when my old school friend Frank Fee and I were in town for the Ray Leonard v Thomas Hearns welterweight classic.
The all-pervasive glitter and jangle of Las Vegas palls very rapidly, so after two or three days there the non-gamblers, like us, try to get out of town as far as possible. Frank and I hired a car, and went driving in the desert. Four hours down the road, with our throats as parched and arid as our surroundings, we spotted a hand-painted sign directing us off the highway to ‘Belle’s Roadhouse’, which in our Irish innocence we assumed was a pub.