Fueled with IPO dough, Boyd expanded from a Nevada-only company to one with a national presence. Riverboat gambling was expanding throughout the Midwest and on Native American reservations, and Boyd Gaming plunged quickly into the Tunica, Mississippi market and dabbled slightly in tribal-gaming management. Riverboat casinos in New Orleans (Treasure Chest) and Peoria (Par-A-Dice) soon followed. Eventually, Boyd’s reach would also extend to Indiana and to Mississippi’s Biloxi market, where it owns the former Imperial Palace.
Not all its ventures into new territories were successful: Sam’s Town Kansas City went bust within three years of opening. (A half-hearted move into Florida was also a dud.) An attempt to merge operations with Michael Gaughan in 2004 was a shotgun wedding that went to divorce court within two years: Boyd kept all the Coast casinos except South Point, which Gaughan retained. However, the company continues to grow to this day, having recently absorbed Peninsula Gaming, thereby broadening Boyd Gaming’s base in Louisiana to five casinos, and giving it footholds in Iowa and Kansas, virgin territory for Boyd.
The Boyds’ generous support of higher education, meanwhile, was causing the family name to crop up all over the UNLV campus, most famously on the William Boyd School of Law, founded in 1997 in the former Paradise Elementary School and moved onto the main campus in 2002. Over the years, Bill Boyd has invested $30 million in the law school. (Ironically, the former Political Science major matriculated at the University of Nevada Reno.) In further recognition of the family’s generosity, UNLV’s Silver Bowl football stadium was renamed Sam Boyd Stadium in 1984.
Bill Boyd co-led the campaign to raise the $13 million needed to build the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, in downtown. And the Boyds haven’t been too proud to donate to UNLV’s William F. Harrah Hotel College, though it bore a rival company’s name. The younger Boyd even mediated a settlement between UNLV and scandal-plagued basketball coach, Bill Bayno, in 2001. He’s also sat on the board of the National Center for Responsible Gaming.
In 1984, Sam and Bill Boyd, along with Jackie and Michael Gaughan, were part of a consortium of community leaders who lured the National Finals Rodeo away from Oklahoma City and onto the UNLV campus, where it remains a fixture of wintertime in Las Vegas. As it proceeds into the 21st century, two projects have defined Boyd. One is Borgata, a $1 billion-plus Atlantic City resort (in which MGM Resorts International is a passive partner). Three years in the making, it opened in 2003 and immediately became –- by far -- the leading casino in town, a status it has never relinquished. No other Atlantic City casino remotely approaches its amount of revenue.
The other, Echelon, was a chastening experience for Boyd. In 2007, the company imploded the old, reliable –- but financially fading -- Stardust to embark upon a five-hotel, $4.4 billion metaresort. Employees who stuck it out to the end of the Stardust received severance packages ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 … generosity highly atypical of the Strip. But Echelon retail developer General Group Properties soon went into bankruptcy and hotel partner Morgans Hotel Group blew its dough on the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino instead, presaging Echelon’s doom.
In the summer of 2008, with the Great Recession gathering force, Boyd wound Echelon construction down in orderly fashion. (Other Strip companies were less prudent and had to stop projects abruptly.) The land and semi-constructed hotel-casino were eventually sold to Genting Group, but at a terrible markdown: $4 million an acre for land that was once worth $15 million/acre. Alas, this also means that whatever casino is built there will not be graced by a William B.’s gourmet restaurant. The same year that Echelon was mothballed, Bill Boyd stepped down as CEO in favor of Keith Smith, who holds the post to this day.
Although as executive chairman of Boyd Gaming, Bill Boyd keeps very much in the background now, never overshadowing his leadership team, he’s still on the move, "as the primary liaison of Boyd Gaming with customers and employees," in company parlance. In recent years, one of his favorite practices has been to visit Boyd casinos –- across the country –- two and three times a month and just walk the property, getting to know the workforce and the patrons. In 2009, the Las Vegas Sun described the purpose of these drop-ins as "to say hello, show his face, impart a sense of caring … No, this is no doddering elderly figurehead."
Or, as one dealer told the Sun, "Nobody cares about working people anymore. He don’t need to do this. He could just be off playing golf and counting his money." In April 2004, in the course of announcing his own retirement from Boyd, then-President Don Snyder said, "The deep personal relationship with Bill is perhaps the most difficult part of leaving." That’s about as nice a compliment as one could wish.
