LAS VEGAS — In the days leading up to the UFC’s ambitious live event from the Sphere, I jumped at the opportunity to attend V-U2 An Immersive Concert Film that captured U2’s residency at the venue, which boasted providing the experience of attending one of their live shows.
While I had never set foot in venue, I had attended several U2 concerts over the years as a result of my friend’s fandom, including one show, 19 years ago, where we were randomly selected to stand just feet away from the Irish rockers as they performed at Scotiabank Arena
Having heard first-hand accounts from friends who had already seen U2, Phish or Dead & Company at the venue, my expectations were high and I was still not prepared for what I was about to experience.
From the moment the show started, had someone told me that this was not an immersive concert film and that U2 were actually playing in front of me, I would have believed them if not for shots of the audience that attended the show that was featured.
The immersive backgrounds and stage effects are absolutely mind blowing and the experience feels like you are in a different world. Everywhere you look, you notice something new and exciting that enhances rather than detracts from the band’s performance. It is an invitation to be distracted and delighted by what is around you.
During one of his monologues, Bono spoke prior to the band playing “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” on a stage designed to look like Brian Eno’s Turntable II, a limited to 150 LED turntable that sold for £20,000, and said that it felt like they were playing at a venue inside the sphere of imagination that was inside Eno’s head.
It was a brilliant analogy that resonated with me, having recently listened to a Dolby Atmos version of Eno’s pioneering 1975 album “Another Green World”, which was musically so far ahead of its time.
As Eno once poignantly wrote in his diary, “what makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you,” and that perfectly describes attending a show at the Sphere.
When I was soaking in all of the assorted visual stimuli that makes the venue so unique, my mind shifted to this weekend’s UFC 306: O’Malley vs. Dvalishvili event and the amount of invention and audacity required to make such an event possible.
Make no mistake, this is not a venue for sports. This is a theatre with more similarities to a planetarium than an arena that hosts sports teams.
For UFC CEO Dana White, who attended one of U2’s shows during their residency at the venue with NFL great Tom Brady, to even imagine hosting a sporting event in this venue requires a great amount of ambition and, above all else, confidence that you can transform this venue into something it is not.
As the U2 show progressed, I began to understand his vision.
The venue provides a level of sensory opulence that you cannot experience elsewhere. I understood why he called UFC chief content officer and executive producer Craig Borsari during the show and told him that he had to see the venue. Seeing was believing and I had the same thought to call my father, who recently turned 70, and urge him to see an event at the venue at some point in his life.
The venue is an epicentre of imagination, of what is possible, what can be created with a combination of inspiration and the financial means to achieve it, and those two ingredients will combine to potentially create something truly spectacular on Saturday.
Having seen what this venue is capable of, my level of curiosity and intrigue to see how the UFC creates a sports and entertainment hybrid for those who are lucky enough to have secured a ticket for this event is reaching its apex.
Despite being absolutely floored by the venue’s capabilities, I left knowing that it is only scratching the surface of unlocking what is possible.
What has the UFC cooked up in order to make this work and leave combat sports fans as breathless as I was when my mind was processing what I never would have thought possible?
On Saturday night at UFC 306, the organization’s second Noche UFC event, the organization’s debut at the Sphere will exhibit how the experience of combat sports can be taken to new heights.