Hockey Team Gambles on Vegas, Comes Up a Winner : Crazes: Fans take up skating, too, as ice fever spreads. But other sports clubs have gone bust in the fickle town.

LAS VEGAS —  A few years ago, there wasn’t a single ice-skating rink in all of Nevada. Perhaps the busiest skates in these parts belonged to the semi-sequined stars of Nudes on Ice. Hockey fans worth their salt traveled 300 miles to the Forum each winter for the requisite dose of breakaways and body checks.

Today there’s someone freezing at the recently built Santa Fe Ice Arena nearly 24 hours a day, and the Thunder, Las Vegas’ brand-new professional ice hockey team, is so far outdrawing the beleaguered Runnin’ Rebels of UNLV--unthinkable in a basketball town that named a street Tarkanian Way.

So what if the public ice arena is in a hotel-casino, if fireworks go off whenever the home team scores a goal, if the ice-smoothing Zamboni machine says Caesars Palace and the topless Girls of Glitter Gulch--an exotic dance revue--is a big Thunder advertiser.

After all, this is Las Vegas.

And the fans currently fueling hockey fever in the desert--transplanted Kings boosters, men and women who still root for the Peoria Rivermen, gaptoothed children hoping to become gaptoothed goalies--will take whatever kind of hockey they can get.

Almost.

“They’ll never back a loser in this city,” says Bill Seymour as he hustles daughter Maxine out of Thomas & Mack Center before the end of a recent Thunder home game. (Hey, he’s wearing a Kings jersey. All L.A. fans leave early. It’s the law.) “If (the Thunder) lose, they won’t have a chance.”

Now don’t get Seymour wrong. The Milwaukee native never thought hockey would follow him out from the Midwest. And he’s just thrilled that it did and would have been a charter season ticket-holder if he’d been able to persuade his wife of such wisdom.

Still, in the eight years the cabdriver has lived here, Las Vegas has discarded a full hand of minor league professional sports franchises: a pair of soccer teams, a pair of baseball teams, a pair of basketball teams. Even a novice gambler can see those are pretty bad odds.

“We knew when we bought the team we’d have to win fast,” said Ken Stickney, who with his father, Hank, owns the minor league Thunder, and whose office has a specially built--albeit empty--shelf for the Turner Cup, the International Hockey League’s answer to the Stanley Cup. To date, “we’re the highest-scoring team in the league.”

Three years ago, the Stickneys admit, Las Vegas could never have supported a hockey team. Climate makes it perhaps the second-most improbable ice hockey venue after Israel or maybe Phoenix (both of which also sport the sport). And tourists here are interested in far different sorts of games.

Then came the two Great Migrations. At a rate of 3,000 a week, newcomers from hockey towns began moving to Las Vegas. And they brought children: the stuff of peewee leagues, yearly purchases of expensive little skates and higher ticket sales.

Soon Wayne Gretzky moved from Edmonton to Inglewood. And a funny thing happened on his way to the Forum.

“When Gretzky came to Los Angeles, the Southwest became viable” for hockey, the elder Stickney said. “He did a lot for hockey beyond just play.”

Although they never personally thanked the famous center (or paid him a commission--not even a complimentary jersey) the Stickneys credit Gretzky with selling 500 of the Thunder’s 2,500 season tickets.

Radek Bonk--age 17, No. 76--has sold another hefty chunk. The Czechoslovakian center, formerly of the Czech national team, hopes to become the National Hockey League’s first-round draft pick next year, a goal that many hockey watchers think is easily attainable.

While he’s waiting, he’s learning English (he already knows “Can I have your autograph?”) and living with his parents. What else is he going to do? He’s too young to drink and gamble and he doesn’t know how to drive.

“I don’t go to casinos,” he said. “I don’t see showgirls. I learn English. I listen to the music. I eat good cooking. . . . I go to training.”

Going to training, however, is tough for the whole team. For a city with no hockey culture just a few years ago, the sport has grown in popularity so fast that the ice at Santa Fe Arena, where the team practices, is almost never empty.

The just-arrived Thunder shares the ice with a burgeoning number of youth and adult hockey players, the semipro Las Vegas Aces and a growing band of figure skaters. Rink manager Karin Doherty, who says she works more than 80 hours a week, says that figure skating practice often starts at 4:30 a.m. and the last men’s hockey game will end about 2 a.m. or 3 a.m.

Gary Sbraccia, director of the Southern Nevada Hockey Players Assn. and store manager at Holiday Hockey and Sport, figures that nearly 600 men and children play in hockey leagues in Las Vegas, up from zero three years ago, when there were no rinks, he said. Roger Ellsworth, who runs the children’s league, figures that more than half of his 190 or so players are new this season.

“Last year, we ran three bus tours to L.A. to watch the Kings,” Sbraccia said. “We get 50 people and a keg of beer. Now there’s not so much interest in going to L.A. with the Thunder in town.”

And that’s true not only for spectators. Erik Wimberly, 9, a new defenseman for the Mite Division Las Vegas Flames, admits that he became a hockey fan “a couple of months ago,” right around the time the Thunder came to town.

Still, not everything has gone smoothly for the Las Vegas puck-pushers. The city is pretty stiff competition; the team drew two of its smallest crowds when Steve Wynn blew up the Dunes hotel in October and Caesars Palace hosted a world heavyweight championship fight the following month.

And then there’s TV news. After a recent home game, local station KLAS dutifully reported the Thunder win--after a story on World Cup Soccer, the results of 11 National Football League games, and a football bloopers tape.

The Thunder did, however, make it in ahead of the 18th annual U.S. Table Tennis Championships.

“We’re just happy to even be on the news,” Ken Stickney said.