It Never Rains in Las Vegas: How the 2016 Freddies Landed in T-Mobile Arena

The plan for the twenty-sixth Freddie Awards was, by Freddie standards, a gamble - and by Las Vegas standards, a safe bet.

The first outdoor Freddies

The ceremony was booked for The Park, the open-air promenade between New York-New York and the Monte Carlo that leads to the front doors of T-Mobile Arena. Desert plantings, shade canopies, string light, warm April evening. It would have been the first Freddie Awards ever staged outdoors in the event's history - every previous ceremony had been held in a ballroom, a museum or a hangar.

The logic was simple enough to put on a napkin: it never rains in Las Vegas.

Then it started to rain

April in the Mojave had other ideas. As the sky over the Strip turned, the production team stopped debating the forecast and moved. Chairs, staging, audio, the trophy table and several hundred loyalty executives were relocated indoors, into the building at the end of the promenade.

That building was T-Mobile Arena - and it had been open for exactly two weeks.

A two-week-old arena

The 20,000-seat arena opened on April 6, 2016, and became the anchor of the new entertainment district on the west side of the Strip. Two weeks into its life, with the concrete barely cured and the signage still glossy, it hosted the Freddie Awards.

The scheduling company was extraordinary. The arena's early calendar ran through the largest names in American touring music, and the Freddies slotted straight into it: a George Strait run on the nights before, and Billy Joel on the nights after. For one evening in between, the marquee belonged to travel loyalty programs.

How's that for fame.

Why it worked

The forced move produced one of the most popular venues in Freddie Awards history. An arena bowl gives a ceremony something a ballroom cannot: scale. Winners walked out into a proper arena floor with real production lighting and an arena sound system, in a brand-new room that most of the audience had only read about. Attendees who had spent years collecting trophies under chandeliers found themselves collecting them in the newest venue in Las Vegas.

The Freddies have been staged in flight museums, in hangars beneath airliners and in Manhattan ballrooms. They have never again been in an arena - and, as of that April evening, they have still never been held outdoors.