Busch boys know Vegas is more than just the Strip

LAS VEGAS -- The neighborhood where Kurt and Kyle Busch grew up is somewhere near the corner of Sahara Avenue and Jones Boulevard, but it's not easy to find. These days the intersection is a testament to urban sprawl, with a car wash, a convenience store, a Taco Bell and the big Nevada Power building all competing for space. Tucked just off a side street is a small cluster of homes, all of them with sand-colored stucco siding, wrought-iron fences, and tidy front yards. It could be a little neighborhood in almost any Southwestern city in America.

But it's not. This is Las Vegas, which becomes evident the moment you make the right turn back onto Sahara -- named after one of the city's legendary old casinos -- and the Stratosphere looms large in your windshield. The 1,149-foot tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, anchors the far north end of the Strip, that four-mile expanse of hotels, tourists and twinkling neon that defines this city. Any aerial photo of Las Vegas focuses almost solely on that one stretch of road, as if the community of 552,000 surrounding it does not exist.

The Busch brothers know different. They grew up here, lived in one of the little houses near the intersection of Jones and Sahara, went to Durango High School -- home of the Trailblazers -- and raced on short tracks across southern Nevada. Tourists to this city are attracted to the Strip like moths to a flame. Locals visit occasionally, if ever at all.

"There is a life outside the Strip," Kurt Busch said. "There's a great school system here, the Clark County School District, my mom worked there for 30 years. When you stay out of the Strip area, it just feels like a regular community, like a Phoenix or a Palm Springs or something like that. It's just a hot desert, and you try to stay in the AC."

Kurt Busch

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There were times when the Busch family would venture over to the Strip to go bowling, or to drop the kids off at Gameworks, a big video arcade near the MGM Grand. They'd go to dinner on the Strip maybe two or three times a year. When you're young, Kurt said, you don't frequent the place that much. But as you get older, the lure of all those bright lights can be hard to resist.

"As a kid growing up, once you get your driver's license, that's the first place you go," he said. "You're there, cruising the Strip, riding with the music as loud as you can have it, cruising the Strip until the cops say, 'OK, we've seen you one too any times, go somewhere else.' And then when you become of age, it's like a whole new game to be able to go to the casinos, pop in a couple of quarters, and drink a Miller Lite."

But racing left little time for other pursuits. Kyle Busch's daily routine growing up? "Go to school, go home, work on racecars, play with RC cars, whatever it entailed," he said. "And then the weekend stuff was always going out to the racetrack. That's pretty much where I lived." That's still the case. After last week's rain-delayed California event finally concluded, the brothers spent two days out in the desert racing sand cars across the dunes.

It's been that way for as long as they can remember. Kyle and Kurt raced dwarf cars at quarter-mile Pahrump Valley Speedway, a dirt oval 63 miles from Las Vegas near the California state line. They raced Legends cars at the Bullring, a 3/8-mile asphalt rack adjacent to Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Dad taught them the basics, mom handled the stopwatch. Kyle and Kurt will start first and ninth, respectively, in Sunday's UAW-Dodge 400 (read more). If it comes down to the two of them at the end, they'll race one another the same way they did on short tracks all those years ago.

Kyle Busch

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"I think we would go back to our roots, like when we were in Legends cars with each other," Kurt said. "That is, to give each other room, to race each other hard, to get into the element of trying to outsmart the other guy, whether it's momentum on the top groove, whether it's a slide job where you slide into Turn 1 and slide out front of him in 2. I think we'd race each other to the bone. It would be clean, it would be fun, and it would be something people would talk about."

And it would cap a busy race weekend for the two Las Vegas natives. Kurt had an appearance at a pub Thursday night that drew 400 people, took part in an activity at the Palms casino Friday, and has a packed schedule for race morning. Kyle, the series points leader, made an appearance at M&M's World on the Strip -- right next to the Gameworks he used to frequent as a kid -- and is in demand by every television outlet covering this week's race. For the brothers themselves, there's something else high on the priority list each time they come home.

"Of course, when you come home, you've got to have some In-N-Out Burger," Kyle said, referring to the famous West Coast hamburger chain. "Catch up on some fine dining in the Las Vegas valley."

Now that's a little bit of real Vegas, right there. So was the somewhat incongruous sight Friday night of three cowboys on horseback, trotting across busy Lamb Boulevard and into an open dirt field. There the animals began galloping in wide, happy circles, oblivious to the passing traffic. It was a small reminder that this city was founded not by outlaw gambler Bugsy Siegel, but Spanish traveling parties who discovered the area's artesian wells. And that to many who live here, the Strip is nothing more than a few lights in the distance.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.