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| Cyclist and LVSportsbiz.com producer Alan Snel with his new book. |
That ride
changed Snel’s life and became the motivation for his first book, Long Road Back to Las Vegas.
A few
minutes past 8 a.m., as Snel pedaled along Old Dixie Highway near Fort Pierce,
a Chevrolet Cruz driven by Fort Pierce resident Dennis Brophy plowed into him
from behind. Snel doesn’t recall the collision and doesn’t know how long he was
unconscious. He came to his senses while lying on a gurney being wheeled
through a hallway in a Fort Pierce hospital. “You were hit by a car,” the EMT
told him.
Snel was
lucky. Besides a concussion and other injuries, he’d suffered two broken
vertebrae that came within a half-inch of either killing him or paralyzing him
from the neck down.
The
collision knocked Snel out of his old life and into a new one. Fifteen months
after the accident, he was back in Las Vegas, where he’d worked as a reporter
for the Las Vegas Review-Journal
before going back to Florida to take a new job in Vero Beach. Drawing on his expertise
and deep experience in the highly specialized genre of sports business
reporting, he’d launched a lively, insightful website called LVsportsbiz.com
and was hustling to report on the city’s burgeoning sports market.
In between
the near-death experience in Florida and the glittering lights and new start in
Las Vegas were weeks of physical pain and a painful self-examination and frank
reappraisal of his own life. Lots of people don’t recover physically or emotionally
from such an experience. But as his friend and former South Florida reporting
colleague Jeff Houck noted, “The road is hard. Alan Snel is harder.”
For the
record, I’ve known Al for 25 years. Our paths crossed for the first time in
South Florida in the 1990s at the dawn of the Internet age. We covered the same
government beat for intensely competitive newspapers in an old-fashioned knockdown
drag-out newspaper circulation war. A half-dozen newspapers from Miami to Vero
Beach were entangled in an all-out fistfight for the same readers.
Al and I
attended the same meetings and chased the same people for quotes. Amid the grinding
daily competition, we discovered common interests, including sports in general
and baseball in particular. By the time Al moved on to better things, we’d
become good friends.
Anyone who
has known Al for even a few minutes knows his zeal for bicycling. He describes
cycling in Zen-like terms. Bicycling, Snel writes, is “the truth” because it
“requires one thing of you—willpower.”
“There are
no words that will propel the bicycle,” he writes. “Riding a bicycle is
stunningly fair. You get exactly out of it what you put into it. . . . You get to your destination using your
own human power. There is no motorized propulsion. The motor is in your soul
and the fuel comes from your food and your willpower.”
Snel talks
candidly about the driver who nearly killed him and who recently died of an
illness. The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department, which investigated the
incident, did not write a ticket to the driver even though he admitted that he
was not paying attention when he hit Snel and, by hitting him, violated a Florida
state law requiring motorists to give bicyclists at least three feet of
clearance when they pass.
The
Sheriff’s Department’s reasoning for not writing a citation followed a
mysterious and rather obtuse chain of logic: The driver did not intentionally
hit Snel and did not set out to deliberately hit a bicyclist. So in the eyes of
the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, Snel had no more legal standing than
that perpetually unfortunate, ubiquitous roadkill, a possum.
After
talking to friends in Florida and Nevada, Snel decided to return to Las Vegas
and start his own sports business website. He picked a perfect moment. The city
had just acquired its first major league professional sports franchise, the Vegas
Golden Knights of the NHL, and was about to start construction of a
spiffy—and very expensive—new stadium to house the soon-to-be transplanted NFL Oakland
Raiders.
Snel’s
book is full of insider knowledge of cycling and tidbits about the hard-earned
wisdom he acquired while recovering from his injuries.
“This
book’s message is simple,” Snel writes. “If I can overcome trauma, you can,
too. But it’s not going to be easy. Overcoming trauma is hard. In fact, I can
understand how it can be easy to get emotionally stuck and not move forward.”
The
collision with the car “forced me to re-evaluate my life,” he continues. “Faced
with mortality, decisions become easier to make because the mental clutter
falls away.”
Copies of
Long Road Back to Las Vegas are available for $16 either through PayPal to asnel@LVSportsBiz.com
or by mailing a check to Alan Snel at 2601 South Pavilion Center Drive, Unit
1091, Las Vegas NV 89135. Snel will inscribe all books ordered from him
directly. The book also is available through Amazon.com.
Listen
to Willie
Drye talk about the upcoming new edition of his book Storm
of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 , with
meterologists Bryan
Norcross and Luke Dorris. The new, expanded edition of the book will
be published in July 2019 by Globe Pequot
Press.
