The men’s basketball team’s run all the way to the
NCAA championship game was as exciting as it was improbable. Some
type of celebration is in order, and I have just the idea: The
university ought to tear down and rebuild Pauley Pavilion.
John Wooden loves Pauley Pavilion. Then again, the legendary
UCLA basketball coach has a lifetime seat in the second row,
directly behind the team’s bench. For those who have sat in
any of the less desirable seats, Pauley’s charms are less
obvious.
The seats are too far from the court; they are not sufficiently
sloped; and the walkway between the second and third tiers makes
the nosebleed seats seem like they have a 323 area code.
Pauley Pavilion has history, to be sure. But, let’s face
it, it’s a terrible place to watch basketball. The venue is
one of the worst in the Pac-10 Conference, even though UCLA ticket
prices are among the highest.
Any fan who traveled to San Diego to watch the Bruins play in
the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament last month should have
been embarrassed. Those games were hosted at San Diego State
University’s beautiful Cox Arena, where all 12,000 seats are
as close to the action as possible. That’s right: A school
that has never won a single NCAA Tournament game has a far superior
basketball facility than the school that has won 11 national
championships, the most in the tournament’s history.
Perhaps even more embarrassing for a university with
UCLA’s basketball tradition, next season the school down the
street best known for football leaves the creaky Los Angeles Sports
Arena behind and moves into the new, state-of-the-art Galen Center
on the USC campus.
That Pauley Pavilion is a white elephant is not only unfortunate
for the fans, it can’t help in the school’s attempt to
recruit the nation’s best basketball players.
The arena’s cavernous quality hinders the travel of sound,
which means that even the cheers of a near-capacity crowd often
sound no louder than those of spectators at a high school game. You
need first-class facilities to consistently attract first-rate
talent.
Once upon a time, Coach Wooden impressed a 7-foot-2 recruit from
New York named Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) by giving
him a tour of the nearly completed new facility, but the arena that
was state-of-the-art when it opened nearly 41 years ago is not
going to impress today’s future All-Americans, especially
those who also visit USC’s new gym, Cal’s Haas Pavilion
or Stanford’s just-remodeled Maples Pavilion. The
championship banners in Pauley’s rafters are a nice touch,
but all except one of them were earned long before today’s
recruits were born.
None of this is to suggest a new arena is UCLA’s most
pressing need. Collegiate sports are a lot of fun, but as big as
they have become, they are still just entertainment. The costs
should be borne by private donors and ticket sales, not state
higher-education funds or student fees. And it is important to keep
things in perspective. It would be inappropriate to turn a new or
remodeled campus arena into a three-ring circus like Staples
Center, with garish corporate skyboxes serving five-star
cuisine.
Just give us a really good place to watch a ball game, please.
The type that would be a fitting tribute to the country’s
most storied college basketball program. The type that might even
make Wooden, sitting in an even better second-row seat, forget
about old Pauley.
Then maybe we can talk about modernizing the halftime
entertainment, adding some pizzazz to what have to be the
nation’s most pathetic set of cheers, and convincing coach
Ben Howland to bring in more prominent teams to play early-season
nonconference games rather than a slate of no-name cream puffs.
Korobkin is a professor in the UCLA School of Law.