#VegasStrong: Sport,Public Memorialization,and the Golden Knights

Sport, Ritual, and the Modern Memorializing of Tragedy

Sport has long been a powerful force in constituting, shaping, and influencing community organization and expression. As Bale (1986) argues, “sport is, after war, probably the principal means of collective identification in modern life” (p. 18). Yet the ways in which this collective identification interacts with, and manifests within, larger structures of sport in the United States has changed quite drastically as major professional sport has cemented itself atop a fractured popular culture hierarchy as a global entertainment product. Major professional sports teams, with their national visibility and cultural cache, stand not only as widely understood articulations of local and regional identity but also as highly marketable representations of the culture and entertainment in a given area. At the same time, the cultural gravity of professional sport teams has intensified those representations of community, and increasing profits and revenues generated by major U.S. sport organizations has led to teams becoming large, corporate businesses whose strategic and financial interests often transcend the specific city in which they play.

The stadium, as the physical “home” for the team, is the most material manifestation of a team’s relationship to the local community, providing, as Bale (2000) states, a “focal point for location pride” and a “source of dynamic geographic memories” (p. 92). As Ramshaw and Gammon (2010) explain, the frequent uses of the word “home” to describe stadiums is significant for it can “construct and confirm particular forms of continuity, authenticity, and identity” within stadiums. Further, they argue, beyond the framing of the stadium as a literal home, stadiums are also conceptualized as spiritual homes due to the rituals and traditions enacted within them. These traditions and rituals are themselves implicated into the performance of community, as Swyers (2010) shows in her study of Wrigley Field spectators. There, she argues, many of the rituals and codified fan practices (such as seating etiquette and arrangement) operate less as a way of performing team fandom as they are ways to reinforce and reflect the history of the local community.

Given these associations, the visible role played by leagues and teams in community healing, as well as the use of stadiums as sites of remembrance and memorialization, makes sense. However, this phenomenon is more a contemporary development reflective of professional sports’ rise to the top of U.S. popular culture that made it the preeminent space for shared social experience and broad civic gestures. Historically, U.S. sporting leagues and teams were much more hesitant to engage in active and assertive memorialization after tragedies and traumas. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor launched the United States into World War II in 1941, for example, Major League Baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking whether the league should even operate for the 1942 season. Only after Roosevelt replied in the affirmative did Landis proceed with the season (Bazer & Culbertson, 2002).

In 1963, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle made the call for NFL games to be played just 2 days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, declaring “It has been traditional in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy” (Gola, 2013). The decision, which Rozelle later regretted as his biggest mistake, drew criticism from media outlets and sports-media commentators. The New York Herald’s Red Smith, for example, chastised the league for hanging up “the business as usual sign” (Gavin, 2012, p. 1). Reflective of the NFL’s lack of stature within the television landscape and its disconnection from public tragedy, Columbia Broadcasting System chose not to air any NFL games that Sunday and instead proceeded with its news coverage of the assassination (Gola, 2013). In contrast to contemporary memorialization practices, the games themselves were solemn affairs, less hopeful, or resilient, than mournful. At a game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins, for example, the decision was made not to introduce the players or have the usual pregame ceremonies. Instead, players silently walked out to midfield and joined hands while a bugler played the military funeral song “Taps” (Pierce, 2014).

The modern emphasis on sports memorializing was solidified, if not fully realized, after the September 11 attacks in 2001, which saw an outpouring of ceremonies, memorialization, and tributes at stadiums and on media broadcasts on a scale that cemented sports’ central role in U.S. culture for mediating tragedy and articulating local and national communal bonds (Burroughs & Rugg, 2014; Rugg, 2016). The sustained nature of these post–9/11 mediations and articulations, which continued, Butterworth (2005) argues, “well past any time during which sport might reasonably have been called strictly diversionary” produced a memorializing infrastructure within the sports-media apparatus that could be utilized for a wide range of tragedies, from terrorist attacks to natural disasters to mass shootings. The central role that sports played in negotiating articulations of community, “healing,” and national identity after 9/11 was so significant that the 10-year anniversary of the attacks saw a reprise of grand gestures made by sporting leagues mixed with nostalgic and congratulatory commentary about the original memorializations (Butterworth, 2014).

As Butterworth (2014) argues, public memorialization efforts can “constitute attitudes and identities” within receiving audiences that have “profound political implications” and “consequences for democratic culture” (p. 205). As scholars have shown, the increased role of sporting leagues in articulating community bonds after tragedies and military declarations has brought with it problematic displays of militant nationalism, exclusionary representations of U.S. identity, and an avoidance of the larger social, political, and economic structures that enable and produce tragedy and conflict (Butterworth, 2005; Butterworth, 2012; Fischer, 2013; Gavin, 2012; Rugg, 2016; Silk & Falcous, 2005). In his critique of post–9/11 American sport, Silk (2013) sees these phenomena as the intended efforts of political forces in “mobilizing the affective realm of the mediated sport spectacle” as a form of “public pedagogy” to advance nationalist ideologies and framings (p. 12).

As Brown (2004), explains, the increased effort by sports leagues and teams to confront and memorialize tragedies emerged “out of feelings of honor and desire to keep up good public relations” (p. 37). The frequent displays of solidarity, remembrances, and honoring within professional sports in the United States have resulted in an embedding of memorialization into the fabric of contemporary brand management for teams, and produced templates for the enaction and marketing of philanthropic/memorializing gestures by leagues and teams (Rugg, 2018). Importantly, these memorializations are intertwined in sport through both the ritualistic mechanics of game day activities (ceremonies, pregame honors, etc.) and through the adoption of causes by the team/league as part of more extensive service to surrounding communities.

Building from Turner’s (1969) conception of liminal spaces in ritual as a blend of “lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship” (p. 96), Rowe (2008) argues that modern sporting events do take on the qualities of liminal states that form communal bonds. “Unlike other liminoid forms,” Rowe writes, “such as modern painting or poetry, in which a unique product is created by a named individual, sports, like ritual, emerge from the collective” (p. 135). Sports also utilize myths and legends and incorporate the sacred, most evident in the collective “worship” of sporting “gods.” While these beliefs rarely rise to the level of true religious belief, they do infuse sports with a collective sacred element. Rowe also notes that sports reflect and symbolize the “collective spirit of the group from which they arise” as well as “draw the collective to them” (pp. 135–136). This collective spirit can be seen in many places in U.S. professional sports, with some Rust Belt teams taking on a mystic of being “tough” like their working-class fans, while teams in markets like Southern California have been known for their flashy style and speed.

Most relevant to the experience of the Las Vegas community in the aftermath of the 1 October shooting, sports “serve as primary social structuring events for individuals as well as for groups, drawing the entire community together in heightened appreciation of and identification with their community” (Rowe, 2008, p. 137). For professional sporting events, in contrast to traditional forms of ritual and liminality, there are links to what Ulmer, Sellnow, and Seeger (2019) term the “discourse of renewal,” in which a public relations response emphasizes learning, rebuilding, growth, and opportunity in response to a crisis. Within this discourse of renewal, genuine growth and transformation are prioritized over reputation or image (Ulmer, Sellnow, & Seeger, 2019, p. 25). In a city like Las Vegas, which is uniquely branded, packaged, and sold, one cannot ignore the role of public relations in response to any event with potentially negative economic consequences.

In the age of social media, tragedy and public memorialization frequently operate through the use of hashtags such as the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 (#Bostonstrong), Hurricane Harvey in 2017 (#houstonstrong), and the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting in 2018 (#StrongerThanHate). Of particular note within the sports context, the hashtag #Bostonstrong “emerged as a rallying cry to demonstrate the city’s defiance in response to the terrorists’ attempt to intimidate” (Lin & Margolin, 2014, p. 3). In the first Boston Red Sox home game following the bombing, the Red Sox public address announcer declared, “We are one. We are strong. We are Boston. We are Boston strong” as the crowd bursted into an “eruption of cheers” (Dubois, 2013, para. 2). In a showing of solidarity, the Red Sox rival the New York Yankees sang the Red Sox anthem “Sweet Caroline.” What is unique about the #VegasStrong hashtag in relation to other enactments of community through hashtags is how the Golden Knights were able to exploit the tragedy right as they were starting as a franchise.

As Bruns and Burgess (2011) argue in their work on the coordination of public discussion and information-sharing on news and political topics through hashtags, hashtags are used to mark specific themes and topics but have increasingly become platforms for community networking and connection. For Bruns and Burgess, the term “community” implies that hashtag participants share specific interests, and are aware of and deliberately engage with one another, often around generic hashtags. On Twitter, hashtags are a unique tool for managing information flows, given that the rise of digital social networks has seen the breakdown of the role of gatekeeper.

Hashtags function as an indexing system in both the clerical sense and the semiotic sense. In the clerical sense, hashtags allow immediate retrieval of data about a particular topic. Simultaneously, the hashtag functions semiotically by marking the intended significance of tweets (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). Bonilla and Rosa acknowledge hashtags as a mediatized place, a potential field site, that can frame societal discourses. Yang (2016) extends Bonilla and Rosa’s research to argue that a neglected form of agency in the study of hashtags are their narrativity, which unfolds when a large number of comments or tweets appear in response to the hashtagged phrase, often with temporal order, assuming a narrative form. The cumulative effect of this process is that the hashtag itself becomes not just a platform for individual expression on a single topic or theme, but also a communal archive that can provide a temporal, participatory lens. This melding of local voices with broader social discourses is especially palpable during traumatic ruptures.

As Frosh and Pinchevski (2014) argue this type of participation, as a form of media witnessing, stems from “a new configuration of mediation, representation, and experience under conditions of ubiquitous media technologies and global risk” (p. 595). Media witnessing is witnessing performed “in, by, and through the media” (p. 596). Indeed, media witnessing “casts the audience as the addressee and primary producer of meditated testimonies, making them both the subject and object of everyday witnessing” (p. 594), which fosters “vigilance in the face of impending threats” (p. 608). As significant symbolic mediators of remembrance and recovery, then, sports teams have increasingly integrated and extended memorializing hashtags into their social media responses to tragedy, their ceremonial displays and ritualistic events at games, and even into the accompanying merchandise as public embodiments and sites of memorial.

Las Vegas and #VegasStrong

Las Vegas is at once two things: a unique, escapist tourist destination personified by the overwhelming glittering discoherence of The Strip and dominated by the economic concerns of its corporate inhabitants, and a community of over 2 million residents who live their lives in much the same way as residents of other major metro areas. For the most part, The Strip and its excesses have received much of the attention from scholars, commentators, and media outlets who have attempted to understand or critique its trappings. As Douglass and Raento (2004) argue, much of this fascination comes from the Strip’s embrace of excess, mimicry, and fakery, which calls into question what is the “authentic” or “real” Las Vegas. As they argue, the “real” Las Vegas is whatever it decides to be, as it has “critically amassed” its simulacra into an “unprecedented configuration” (p. 21). As Salmela (2017) notes, the tendency of Vegas to “manipulate and simulate historical phenomena” and place them next to the consumerist excesses of billboards and neon signs “eradicates any visible distinctions between tradition and kitsch, or between historical fact and recent invention” (p. 115). This reinvention is not merely aesthetic, however, as Douglass and Reanto (2004) conclude that this flexibility has allowed the Strip to consistently ignore tradition and reinvent itself toward whatever financially prosperous identity awaits, whether it be as a safe, family-oriented destination, a playground for hedonism and debauchery, or a world-class destination for art, food, and entertainment (or all three at the same time). In essence, they conclude, Vegas’ control over its own representation, and its willingness to use whatever symbolic or rhetorical aesthetics it chooses to achieve it, has allowed the city to “become the sole, and hence authentic, representation of its unique self” (p. 21).

Immediately following the 1 October shooting, the city’s ability to quickly pivot and reinstantiate its collective identity manifested itself. As the hashtag #VegasStrong emerged throughout Las Vegas and the entire country as an organic groundswell—built off the similar use of #BostonStrong and #OrlandoStrong in previous tragedies—the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCA), the government agency in charge of branding and marketing Las Vegas, quickly integrated the hashtag into its branding of the city. Within 30 minutes of the attack, the ad agency responsible for Las Vegas marketing began pulling ads utilizing the “What happens here, stays here” slogan. Within 2 days, the agency had helped the LVCA launch a new campaign based on the #VegasStrong hashtag (Raz, 2017). Starting at 6 p.m. on October 3, major casinos all along the Strip carried a message that read, “We’ve been there for you during the good times. Thank you for being there for us now” along with the #VegasStrong hashtag (LVCA, 2017). By October 5, R&R Partners and the LVCA had released a television commercial that featured Las Vegas native Andre Agassi describing what makes “Vegas Strong” against a slowly zooming in image of the Strip. The commercial ends with the #VegasStrong hashtag against a black background (Ad Age, 2017).

MGM, owners of Mandalay Bay where the shooting originated, also shifted its marketing in the wake of the shooting. The company immediately dropped its 2-week-old advertising campaign, “Welcome to the Show,” which utilized slogans such as “We are not in the hotel business. We are in the holy sh*t business.” The company immediately embraced the hashtag #VegasStrong by displaying a large “#VegasStrong” banner that hung on the Mandalay Bay hotel. On October 15, it then released its own #VegasStrong television spot which featured the song “This Little Light of Mine” set against the backdrop of many MGM properties. The ad drew swift criticism on social media from those who saw it all as an attempt to market off the tragedy, leading MGM to release a press statement defending the ad as a sincere gesture toward community healing (Lupiani, 2017; Richards, 2017; Smith, 2017).

The hashtag quickly migrated from social media onto T-shirts, bumper stickers, tattoos, and signs all around Las Vegas. Despite the sudden and comprehensive embrace of the #VegasStrong hashtag by Las Vegas residents, businesses, and government, the markers of the shooting itself began to fade from visibility on the Strip within months, as the economic desire among city businesses and stakeholders to move beyond continued–aiding in the erasure of the shooting from public space. As the CEO of R&R Partners stated in discussing the #VegasStrong ad campaign, “A lot of people spent a lot of money and a lot of years building this world-class destination. We’re not going to let one lunatic ruin it” (Raz, 2017). In announcing the return of the “What happens here” campaign in January 2018, the senior vice president of marketing for the LVCA stated that “people wanted their Vegas back” (Cano, 2018a). Fittingly, the “What happens here” campaign’s first commercial after its relaunch featured a scientist from the past getting in a time machine and arriving in present-day Las Vegas. The television spot, then, was not just a reintroduction to the preshooting branding of the city, but a symbolic resetting of Vegas, reinvented with its horrible past conveniently skipped over.

Six months after the 1 October shooting, it was hard to find any evidence of the shooting, or the public commemoration of it, on the Las Vegas Strip (Cano, 2018b; Fortini, 2018; Jaklewicz, 2018). The giant #VegasStrong lettering that adorned the top stories of the Mandalay Bay, just above the windows where the shooter was positioned, had been removed. The site of the shooting, across the street from the Mandalay Bay where the Route 91 Harvest Festival was held, was closed off from public view. Mandalay Bay itself was in the process of renumbering its floors to eliminate the now infamous 32nd floor from its hotel.

No permanent memorials, monuments, or tributes to the tragedy were commissioned for or by the Strip. The most visible memorial on the Strip in the weeks after the attack included a large number of white wooden crosses, flowers, and other items of tribute placed in front of the iconic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, which was the result of organic memorializing by residents. Even those tributes were removed within a month and transferred to a county museum. As one resident, aware of the economic priorities of the Strip, said in lamenting the memorial’s removal, “This is a tough spot for them to be at anyway. The sign is such a tourist attraction. Where people smile and take pictures. I get it, that’s what the sign is really about” (Akers, 2017). Today, the only permanent memorial dedicated to the victims stands on a quarter-acre garden next to an adult retail store and miles away from the Strip, paid for and created by volunteers (Cano, 2018b).

Thus, while the shooting will continue to live in the minds of the residents of the city, the commercial apparatus was ready to move on. While the initial embrace of the #VegasStrong campaign by the city demonstrated the ways in which communities and commercial interests can converge in the immediate aftermath of tragedy, a sustained acknowledgment of the tragedy might puncture the contradictory myths of decades of Las Vegas branding. The ethos of unrestrained, hedonistic pleasure (with no consequences) that can take place within the safe, bounded, theme-park-like environment of the Strip—best represented by the “What happens here” campaign—would only be critically undermined by institutionalized remembrance of the shooting.

In following the call by Johnson, Chambers, Raghuram, and Tincknell (2004) to examine how texts are constituted by “what is absent as well as by what is present,” the Strip’s response on the anniversary of the shooting—a momentary, ephemeral dimming of the lights as a symbolic gesture of remembrance—is perhaps most telling. The gesture draws its power from the lights representing the city and its ethos in the nation’s cultural imagination, halting its outward-facing performance to reflect inward. Yet in finding the gesture solely through the brief shutting down of the Strip’s economic engine visually, the Strip’s response leaves out any remembrance of the social and cultural impact on the city and its residents. The absence of sustained public memorialization and the silencing of contradictory discourses reflects a larger absence of remembering and discussion of issues related to gun control and public safety. This stands in stark contrast to responses to other shootings such as the Parkland shooting that invoked the hashtag #NeverAgain and sparked a national debate. Rather than engaging on the anniversary of the shooting, the Strip retreated from it, shutting down in darkness until it was appropriate to return to normalcy.

Memorializing and the Golden Knights

Despite the stability of Las Vegas in the cultural imagination, the city’s demographics have changed significantly over time, becoming more diverse and in line with other major metropolitan areas in the United States. According to U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent 5-year estimate, Latinx accounted for half of the population increase in the area while the overall White population decreased. As Salmela (2017) argues, these demographic changes, combined with the influx of multinational, corporate global capital into the city of Las Vegas has led to the city itself becoming “more of a regular American city in terms of its hierarchies, residential patterns, and service-based economies” (p. 124). Thus, despite the dominant economic narrative that seeks to define the Strip as the symbolic center of a unique cultural oasis, the Strip itself is embedded within a city that increasingly mirrors the social and economic structures of other major metropolitan areas. Much like those areas, then, it is shaped and acted upon by those who live within its communities. Indeed, as Borer (2017) shows in the examination of local “aesthetic entrepreneurs” in Las Vegas after the 2008 financial crash, residents have often found spaces to change, shift, and modify the Strip in ways that are more reflective of the local community than the established “tourist bubble” (Judd & Fainstein, 1999).

Thus, while the city of Las Vegas moved on quickly from its public grieving and memorializing, the newly arrived NHL team, the Vegas Golden Knights, had a different approach. The team, which marked the city’s first major professional sports franchise, initially would be read as a reflection of Las Vegas’ increasing shift toward major metro “normalcy.”

Scheduled to play its first game on October 6, 2017, at T-Mobile Arena, the team and city celebrated its arrival in typical Las Vegas fashion, overwhelming the city with glamorous events leading up to the opening game. Just days before opening night, however, the 1 October shooting occurred and the Golden Knights found themselves in the disconcerting, yet all too familiar, position of a sports franchise responding to a mass tragedy. Yet, in its response to tragedy, the Golden Knights and T-Mobile Arena became a platform for the residents of Vegas to enact the community memorialization rituals in the tourist-oriented space of the Strip.

As professional sports teams in the United States and elsewhere increasingly experience tension between their community roots and the realities of modern-day sport, the public memorialization of tragedy by and through teams is a complicated gesture. It acknowledges the emotional connection between fans and teams in specific geographic areas. At the same time, it resides within marketing and branding strategies for ever-growing sporting corporations that transcend their local markets to operate within global flows of capital. In this performative space, the memorialization work done by the Golden Knights reflects the reality of sporting memorialization of tragedies. The Golden Knights utilize a familiar marketing template to construct a community-oriented campaign that is easily spread on social media and incorporated into the larger branding mechanisms of the team. However, in the space of Las Vegas, where the pressures of tourism, escapism, and commercialization have overwhelmed attempts at sustained and visible memorialization of the 1 October shootings, the Golden Knights’ continued embrace of the hashtags and the memorialization of the shooting operated as an institutional vehicle for community mourning and reinvigoration. In doing so, the franchise enacted a discourse of renewal within the confines of T-Mobile Arena, transforming the arena into a ritual site for negotiating the aftermath of the tragedy through the corporatized and sanitized confines of the professional sport space.

In contrast to the fading acknowledgment of the shooting on the rest of the Strip, the presence of T-Mobile Arena constituted a sustained memorialization where both the fans and the team could unabashedly partake in sport memorialization and ritual. In doing so, this productively reflects how the performance of public memorialization within sport, though often commercialized, can still provide spaces for community ritual and reflection in ways that the hyper-capitalist structures of the Strip neglect. Additionally, the incorporation of the #VegasStrong hashtag into the existing #VegasBorn merchandising and branding campaign of the team cemented the idea of community recovery into the celebration and support of the team. This allows fans themselves to extend the hashtag from the sanctioned ritual space into everyday life, further embodying the #VegasStrong and enmeshing sports performances with witnessing and memorialization.

The opening night for the Golden Knights was, unsurprisingly, an emotional affair with tributes from players and teams from around the league. In covering the night, Sports Illustrated interpreted the ceremonies within the contradictions of the Strip, stating, “there was a great enfolding of the team into the community, the real community, the place where real people live and die” (Pierce, 2018). In addressing the crowd, Deryk Engelland, Golden Knights defenseman and long-term Vegas resident, invoked Vegas Strong stating,

To all the brave first responders that have worked tirelessly and courageously through this whole tragedy, we thank you. To the families and friends of the victims, we’ll do everything we can to help you and our city heal. We are “Vegas Strong.” (Pierce, 2018, para. 13)

The team’s rhetorical and memorializing focus within the space of its inaugural game carried on throughout the season. At every home game during the season, the team honored those involved in the response to the shooting during a “VegasStrong Heroes of the Game” segment. Defenseman Deryk Engelland started the “Vegas Born Heroes Foundation” to select individuals making a difference in the Las Vegas community and reward them with Vegas Born merchandise and trips to Golden Knight games. Players from the team also attended blood drives, visited with Mandalay Bay employees and first responders, and took part in medal ceremonies awarded for heroic efforts related to the shooting (Gotz, 2018).

On March 31, 2018, the 6th-month anniversary of the 1 October shooting, the Golden Knights faced the San Jose Sharks for the last home game of the regular season. While the rest of the Strip had long moved on from the #VegasStrong campaign and any visible acknowledgment of the shooting, the Golden Knights again held ceremonies honoring the shooting. Upon entering T-Mobile Arena, fans saw “#VegasStrong,” in bold lettering, displayed on the face of the building. “#VegasStrong” banners hung high on the walls. Near the merchandise stands, the hashtag spanned across an entire wall. Even the hockey rink itself displayed #VegasStrong on the sideboards where the Golden Knights enter and exit the ice.

On that night the game announcer started by declaring, “Tonight we pause to remember the events of 1 October.” Both teams stood on the ice along with the crowd. A tribute video began to play “Warriors” by Imagine Dragons (a globally renowned band originally from Las Vegas) while showing the first responders of the tragedy alongside notable Las Vegas landmarks. As the video came to a close, individuals in the video, along with members of the audience, shouted, “We are VegasStrong.” Continuing the commemoration, the announcer stated:

“Tonight as we close out the regular season at home, we memorialize the individuals whose lives were taken that night. Vegas Golden Knight owner, Bill Foley, Team general manager, George McPhee, and Defenseman Deryk Engelland are joined on the ice by the parents, husband, and sons of 1 October victim, Neysa Tonks, representing all 58 families.The Vegas Golden Knights have decided that the number 58 will never be worn.…Tonight we fly 58 stars in the sky as a reminder that the 58 will always be with us. We are and always will be #VegasStrong.”

In integrating the memorializing of the shooting within the familiar mechanism of the sporting tribute, the team not only further cemented the relationship between the team and the tragedy but also created one of the only permanent memorials to the shooting on the Strip. T-Mobile Arena became a commercially sanctioned space of ritual for those navigating, negotiating, and otherwise remembering the tragedy. This liminal space, then, between commercialism and community—the Strip and the city—became not just a place where those rituals were allowed, but the only public place in Las Vegas where they were expressely encouraged. Unlike the rest of the Strip, the historical communal associations with sports and sports teams meant the commercial impulses of the team aligned with an outreach and memorialization strategy in a city that has traditionally lacked such compulsion.

However, despite the sincerity of the ceremonies, the rituals performed in the liminality of the T-Mobile Arena are themselves tightly restricted by the corporate sports franchise. Much like other displays of mourning, memorialization, and unity within the public sporting spaces, the rites and rituals offered by the Golden Knights to its fans reflect apolitical gestures that highlight the consequences of violence and reiterate a universal heroic response to overcome it. Absent from these gestures and remembrances are any proclamations about the causes of gun violence, support for initiatives to end gun violence, or acknowledgment of the complex emotional and psychological responses to pain and suffering beyond the stoic boast of strength and resolve. In doing so, the Golden Knights have created a structure of mourning and memorializing that appeals across its entire fan base and synergizes with the aggressive and masculine-oriented positivism that animates contact sports.

This is also true of #VegasStrong, which embodies both a prevailing and emergent script, acting as a metonym for the community of Las Vegas, a stoic encouragement of strength, and a defiant declaration of resilience against violence and tragedy. The use of #VegasStrong in the immediate aftermath of the shooting called for global attention to the events through social media and served as a uniting online platform for the Las Vegas community to commiserate, communicate, and coordinate. The unpredictability of the economic state of the city and the physical state of concertgoers compelled Las Vegas residents to seek actionable ways to participate in the recovery. Yet, following the tragedy, there were limited opportunities for contribution as blood banks reached capacity within days and specified shelters could no longer accept donations due to the surplus of deliveries. Thus, the adoption and declaration of the hashtag itself became an actionable form of participation, offering an experience of “real time” engagement, community, and even collective effervescence (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).

The hashtag quickly took direction from the marketing campaign by the city of Las Vegas, which, governed by tourism, sanctioned it to mediate the crisis and brand it palatable in terms of economic resiliency. Afterwards, it found new life within the confines of T-Mobile Arena, both as a symbol of recovery and remembrance of the 1 October shooting and as a branding mechanism for conceiving the Golden Knights and narrating their on-ice success. Within these uses then, the hashtag, much like T-Mobile Arena where the hashtag was most visibly displayed, operated in between bonding and branding.

Over the course of the season, the use of the hashtag increasingly was invoked and integrated with the team’s original branded hashtag, #VegasBorn. That hashtag, conceived of before the shooting, represented the first marketing attempt by the team to brand itself locally within the shifting and evasive commercial internationality of the Strip. In using the word “born,” rather than a more accurate term like “built,” the campaign seeked to declare that it was different from most projects on the Strip, an organic product tied to the innate humaneness of civic concerns rather than the mechanical motivations of conventional corporate capitalism. Conveniently for the Golden Knights, this branding strategy aligned neatly with the team’s attempts to present itself as a partner in recovery and provided the rhetorical backbone for its claims of sincerity.

Unsurprisingly, then, despite the quick and emphatic adoption of the #VegasStrong hashtag into the branding of the team and T-Mobile Arena, the team continued to use the #VegasBorn hashtag on in its marketing materials, stadium signage, and on merchandise. The hashtags’ interchangeability, rhetorical synergy, and ability to apply to both the team and its fans (combined with their almost simultaneous introduction to the public), produced a seamless traversing between the two slogans, now rhetorically, symbolically, and commercially linked. This linkage of the two hashtags, one from the community and one from the team, and their operationalization through the branding mechanisms of the team, its merchandise, and fan engagement media, produced a powerful synchronous representation for both the team and its fans that carried across team, fan, and media depictions. For example, after the team lost in the Stanley Cup Finals, Budweiser released a 2-minute ad congratulating the team and, like in many previous tragedies, presented the team’s success and purpose through the lens of helping the city recover. At the very end of the ad, the company’s slogan is modified to say “this bud’s for Vegas strong,” before switching it out for “this bud’s for Vegas born” and finally “this bud’s for you.”

#VegasBorn, then, starting as a marketing attempt to launch a new product, could now be utilized by fans as a declaration of civic pride and community awareness in the aftermath of the shooting. In the disorientating geography of the Strip—quick to move on from the shooting and re-embrace its identity as an ephemeral consumerist oasis—the new memorializing power of the hashtag, bolstered and reshaped by its association with #VegasStrong, carried new weight in Golden Knights’ advertisements on billboards and taxis, and on the jerseys and T-shirts of fans. The Golden Knights, from a branding perspective, had an incentive to emphasize the shootings and memorialize the victims because they were working to establish a brand as a marker of local culture. #VegasBorn emphasizes renewal and the birth of a franchise, fueling the efforts to create a connection to Las Vegas.

Conclusion

In reading the Golden Knights’ response against the larger structures of sports memorialization and community relationships, the implementation of the memorialization by the Golden Knights follows a familiar script put forth by previous sports teams in times of tragedy. The bevy of memorializations proffered by the team, from the routine recognition of the “VegasStrong heroes of the game” to the retiring of a jersey in honor of the victims all operate within the conventional expectations of how a modern U.S. sports franchise is run, and are open to critiques of commercial exploitation, apolitical apprehension, and the articulation and bounding of community within exclusionary ideologies of “belonging.” While the commercial, ritual space provides a site for renewal, the sanitized, corporate space of T-Mobile Arena stymies any critical reflections and engagements with the tragedy and its circumstances that may emerge, leaving the memorialization toothless with regard to political activism, calls for policy changes, or engaging in the larger debate on gun culture in the United States. Further, the embodiment of the hashtag, utilized as a platform for community and a call for resiliency, may be seen as an ephemeral claim to assist in momentarily passing through trauma, but ultimately not bearing the brunt of truly embodied witnessing. Thus, the larger social and political issues at the root of the shooting may be neglected or unaddressed as the centering of these memorializing acts, rituals, and performances within the spaces and structures of commercial sport raises the possibility, as Gano and Zagacki (2011) argue, “that the expenditure of emotional and physical energy in the context of a sports purgration ritual was all that mattered” (p. 215).

Further, the unexpected success of the team enabled the media to link the success of the team to the healing of the city, performing what Serazio (2010) criticizes as “a substitute success” where “the body politic could be measured more obliquely in wins and losses” than in the addressing of the effecting problem (p. 156). Indeed, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, CNN, The Washington Post, and the Las Vegas Review Journal all published long-form pieces that presented the team’s success as a metaphor for the larger healing within the region. Even the New York Times, generally more removed from the boosterisms of sports media or local publications, identified the team’s relationship with its fans as one of the five reasons the team made the Stanley Cup Finals. The fans, the article declared, “found healing in hockey” (Shpigel, 2018).

However, to solely relegate this memorialization as commercial exploitation, superficial coping, or a problematic diversion is to deny the power of sports as a discourse of renewal (Ulmer et al., 2019), particularly in the wake of crisis. In the case of the 1 October shooting, T-Mobile Arena served as the site of remembrance and memorial that, while unremarkable in the wider sports world, is remarkable within the confines of the Las Vegas Strip. This discourse of renewal was not disruptive, but tied to the economic, capitalist discourse of Las Vegas, reifying the public relations response of the “#strong” performance seen in the wake of similar tragedies. Yet, the presence of the Golden Knights and its memorialization efforts operated as a bridge between the commercial and the communal—the Las Vegas Strip and the city’s residents—that would otherwise not exist. Within this space the team, much like the #VegasStrong hashtag plastered on its video boards and merchandise, allowed the community to embody the shooting and grapple with its effects (though not its causes). In these ways, the liminal space of T-Mobile Arena stood alone as a dedicated site of sanctioned memorialization that could enact a script for renewal of the local population, in stark contrast to the rest of the Strip and its trappings of fading economic, political, and corporate responses.