Hi there, welcome to Plain English, a new English podcast that goes at a slower speed that’s just right for English learners. The program is divided into two parts: current events and expressions. This week, we’ll talk about the first major professional sports team to start playing in Sin City—Las Vegas, Nevada—and we’ll talk about the death of American rock icon Tom Petty. If you’re learning English, then you know our language is full of expressions, so the second half of each program is dedicated to two expressions. This week, we’ll talk about making a splash and taking refuge.
You might be listening to the program on your phone; if so, I wanted to let you know that the web site, PlainEnglish.com, has a full word-for-word transcript of the show. If you have trouble understanding every word, you can always go online and read the transcript as you listen. And if you speak Spanish, you can use the interactive transcript that shows translations of words and phrases from English into Spanish.
Las Vegas gets its first major league sports team
Let’s get started with the first of our two current events this week.
Las Vegas, Nevada, is known as “Sin City”, a place where tourists from all over the world go to gamble, party, see shows, hold a business meeting, play golf, attend a boxing match, eat at famous restaurants, or even get married. Now, you can add one more thing to that list: attend a major league sports game.
That’s because the Las Vegas Golden Knights became the newest ice hockey team in the National Hockey League and the first-ever major league sports team to locate in Las Vegas. Ice hockey might not be the first sport you’d think of in the Nevada desert because the city averages over 80 degrees Fahrenheit in October. Still, the city is ready and the Golden Knights made a splash in their first-ever game this week when they defeated the Dallas Stars in Dallas. Their first game at their new home, called the T-Mobile Arena, will be next week.
The fact that there’s now a major league team in Las Vegas is important for a couple of reasons. First, and most important, Las Vegas is the only major city in the United States in which betting on sports games is legal. Patrons can bet on the outcomes of the games, total points scored, and a variety of other things. All four major sports leagues—American football, baseball, hockey, and basketball—had for a long time avoided locating a team in Las Vegas. They didn’t want to risk their own games being compromised, or tainted, by betting in the same city. Their worry was that a player, coach or team employee would purposely affect the outcome of a game in order to cash in on a bet. That concern is less relevant now, since online sports betting is so prevalent. So, while it’s true that the only physical place you can bet is in Nevada, in reality you can bet on sports anywhere as long as you do it online. Since online betting is everywhere, the in-person betting in Nevada isn’t as big a deal.
The other reason it’s important is that Las Vegas has always been seen as a party city and a place for tourists. While Vegas has hosted most of the biggest boxing matches in recent years, those tend to be big, one-time events. Major sports leagues have been hesitant to go there, fearing that they couldn’t hold fans’ attention across a long season since there are so many other entertainment options for residents and visitors. Las Vegas residents quickly dispelled this myth when they scooped up all the available season ticket subscriptions for the Golden Knights’ first season.
The NHL, as the hockey league in the US and Canada is called, said that it chose Las Vegas for its newest team because the city is growing, vibrant and fun. You might be familiar with the Las Vegas commercials that say, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” That’s because the city is famous for its party atmosphere, including bachelor parties, gambling, and shotgun weddings. Las Vegas welcomed almost 43 million visitors in 2016. But now the people who actually live there will have their own sports teams to root for and the non-gamblers like me will have other entertainment options besides the casinos when we visit.
Tom Petty, American musician, dies
If you’ve listened to the radio in the US, you’ve probably heard songs by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, one of the most popular bands on American rock and roll radio stations over the last forty years. Last week, the lead singer, Tom Petty, died in Los Angeles of a heart attack at age 66. Over the course of his career, his 20 albums reached over 80 million sales, making him one of the best-selling rock and roll musicians of all time.
Tom Petty’s music reflected his background. He was originally from Gainsville, a small city in the northern part of the state of Florida, and he had a rough childhood—in interviews, he said that he got bad grades in school and had a difficult relationship with his father. He took refuge in music; according to an often-told story, he traded a slingshot for a stack of records. He often said he was looking for a way out—some way to break free of his small town and make a life for himself. When he saw the band The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular late-night television show at the time, he said he decided his “way out” would be through music. He got his first guitar in 1962, when he was 12 years old, grew his hair long and learned to play an electric guitar to emulate the Beatles.
His lyrics were often about small town life and the average person. Songs like, Runnin Down a Dream, You Don’t Know How It Feels, and Mary Jane’s Last Dance were about the anxieties people feel and their desire to escape or break out, to make a new life for themselves. His voice also reflected his childhood in Florida: his sang in his southern accent, what we sometimes call a southern drawl. A lot of people who grow up with this accent work hard later in life to neutralize it, especially when on TV or in music—but Tom Petty kept his southern accent in his singing. It was part of his authenticity.
His most popular album was called “Full Moon Fever”, which sold 5 million copies; his most famous song was called Free Fallin’, which was about the relationship between a good girl and a bad guy in Los Angeles. In addition to being part of the Heartbreakers band, he was a co-founder of a band called the Traveling Wilburys, which included other famous musicians like Bob Dylan.
Tom Petty kept a high profile throughout his career, right up until his death. His most recent album, his twentieth, was released in 2006, but he performed nationwide tours with his band regularly, including a 30-city tour this year. In an interview last year, he said that being on tour and being in the studio writing and recording music are the only two places where he felt completely OK.
If you’re a Simpsons fan, you may have seen the episode where he played himself; he was Bart’s tutor on the art of writing musical lyrics. In 2008, he played the traditional half-time concert at the Super Bowl and entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
If you subscribe to Spotify or another music streaming site, you should look up the album called Greatest Hits from 1993, which has most of his best songs. I was one of the 12 million people who bought that album; it was one of my first CD’s I ever bought as a kid and I still listen to it today.
Now, in the second half of the program, let’s talk some more about two English expressions I used earlier: make a splash and take refuge.
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