Three weeks ago, in this same place, a very different scene.
Then, there was no missing the fact that the most anticipated boxing match in many moons was taking place at the MGM Grand, that Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. were in town.
The fighters arrived to great ceremony a few days before the bout, a huge media centre was set up to house the cameras and scribes, the midweek news conference was long and glossy and filled the theatre that currently houses magician David Copperfield.
Soon enough the famous and the wealthy and the boxing "fancy" assembled in and around the casino, the table limits climbed to the stratosphere, the air began to buzz with anticipation as has been the ritual for decades.
That's what a Big Fight has always looked like.
And perhaps this is what a Big Fight looks like now.
The massive casino/hotel/convention-centre complex is packed full of people with perfect, pearly white teeth, testament to a cosmetic-dentistry convention that, until late Thursday night, seemed to fill every available public space.
Just finding the news conference for UFC 71, an event that in many ways feels like the big coming-out party for mixed martial arts, requires a road map — or at least following the trail of muscle-bound guys with cauliflower ears wearing T-shirts with "Tap Out" lettered on the front.
In a faraway corner of the conference centre, the press contingent is small and the Old Media are hardly represented at all.
But that's deceiving, as are so many other comparisons between the one-off that was De La Hoya-Mayweather, widely regarded even by the faithful as a glamorous last gasp from a sport in its decline, and what's to take place here Saturday night.
When Dana White steps to the mike, the shaved-headed, tight-T-shirted, occasionally profane president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, he has two magazines in hand: Sports Illustrated, the measure of mainstream tastes in North America, and ESPN The Magazine, its more hip competitor.
On the cover of both right now: the UFC.
"One day, I knew we'd be in magazines like this," he says. "But I never dreamed that we'd be on the cover."
Sitting behind him are the combatants in the main event: Chuck (The Iceman) Liddell, whom White calls the greatest MMA fighter in history (he wears his hair in a modest Mohawk, showing off the tattoos on his scalp), and Quinton (Rampage) Jackson, one of only three men to have beaten Liddell and the only person in the room wearing a suit.
Jackson has an enormous head and a mouth full of bejewelled teeth (wonder what the cosmetic dentists would make of that?)
Saturday night, they will meet for five five-minute rounds or less in an octagonal cage, trying to beat each other using skills drawn from boxing, wrestling, and the oriental martial arts.
Chances are that it will be action-packed, it will be bloody, and that it will delight a sold-out house in the MGM Grand Garden Arena, and a massive pay-per-view audience.
During the buildup to De La Hoya-Mayweather, UFC was the elephant in the room, the upstart, the usurper, the threat.
It was even mentioned during the HBO broadcast, dismissed by the elder members of the boxing crowd, quietly embraced by some of the younger, written off by Mayweather himself as "a fad."
Now, the MMA crowd has centre stage, knowing that while that fight did an astounding 2.15 million pay-per-view buys, Mayweather's technical, artistic triumph (a "fight fan's fight," boxing people said, the full appreciation of which requires a knowledge of and history with the sport) was largely lost on the UFC's core audience, raised on video games and demanding action.
Behind the muscle-beach trappings there are some savvy sports marketing minds at work here.
These guys know what they're selling, they understand their consumers, and most tellingly, they realize how boxing's incompetence, its cutthroat competition among promoters, its maze of weight classes and champions and sanctioning bodies, gives their single corporate entity an enormous advantage.
"The [De La Hoya-Mayweather] fight sucked," White says.
"I fell asleep twice," Jackson chimes in.
They sense weakness, they are emboldened, and now they think they're going in for the kill.
