Jeff Agase This is Part 1 in a two-part series
on the Bay Area’s arenas. Part 2 will only come if Agase can get a
ticket from an "independent ticket broker" outside Maples Pavilion.
E-mail him at agase@ucla.edu.
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Here for more articles by Jeff Agase
SECTION 13, ROW 28, SEAT 1, HAAS PAVILION ““ As things
turned from bad to worse to worser Thursday night, I did what any
20-year-old college student with a 5-year-old’s attention
span would do ““ I gazed around at the inside of the
cool-looking building.
Now, let me make this much clear. Haas Pavilion (or the
“Haas of Pain,” as its patrons like to call it) will
never be Pauley Pavilion. All one needs to do is glance around at
the NIT championship and Sweet 16 appearance banners to see that
the standards at Cal’s nearly three-year-old arena are more
liberal than those back in Westwood.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that Haas Pavilion is a shrine to the college
basketball fan. And, the Golden Bears’ cozy, 12,000-seat gym
is a great source of inspiration for everything that Pauley could
become, once a long-overdue renovation comes.
Cal’s old home was the raucous, suffocating Harmon Gym, a
glorified high school gymnasium. But while it seated less than half
the capacity of Haas, it was known throughout the Pac-10 as one of
the most irritating, claustrophobic places to play.
Open, rickety, sometimes broken windows lined the top of the old
arena, which served only to fuel the mystique of the run-down gym
where no visitor left unharmed.
And after Harmon’s last stand, the renovation committee
thought of someone that might be surprising to us Bruin fans
““ the students.
What a novel idea.
They knew where Harmon’s greatness came from. And they
knew how important the home crowd was to the Bears’ success.
So when they expanded seating by doubling the height of the
original structure, they built up instead of out.
The result is a climb to your seat reminiscent of scaling K2. It
also means that the fans at Haas literally hover over the court,
with nowhere for the opposition to hide.
They also built the addition out of concrete. And what exactly
does that do? Well, imagine yourself in the middle of one of those
Best Buy stereo speaker rooms, only the speakers are thousands of
bloodthirsty Cal fans ready to cripple Matt Barnes after he knocked
Shantay Legans unconscious in the spirit of sportsmanship and
thuggery.
The concrete makes noise ping-pong around, from the opposing
bench, to the Cal Straw Hat Band, to, yes, way up there in Section
13.
The maestros of menace in the renovation committee also, after
some lobbying, put the students so close to the court that all
those participating can tell whether or not the Cal fans made it to
the shower that morning.
That’s not a smack on the Cal fans, though. For most of
the game, they were boisterous and obnoxious, especially when
Barnes clubbed Legans. After the scoreboard operator cleverly threw
up the Pac-10 spiel about sportsmanship on the flat TV screen.
But it’s also not like Cal fans are any different from us
Bruin fans. They’re just as into their team as we are,
it’s just that they are given more to work with. Their
student section wraps completely around, from what would be the
30-yard line of one side to the baseline of the other side. Their
band is on the floor. Their fans all wear blue.
Their arena is loud.
It’s new, yet it still has that Harmon feel. And now I can
say from personal experience that its home-court advantage is
significant. To some, like the usher I talked to, it’s still
not too different from crusty old Harmon.
“They rebuilt it like the dump it was,” he
snickered.
A dump? It was my understanding that that was what Cal took on
UCLA last night.