Does San Diego’s Wreck-Tangle Have It All Straightened Out?

Don’t forget about the National Basketball Assn.’s spunk contest. It’s every year about this time. Leaders from some of the great cities in America visit the annual all-star game just so they can get right up in the commissioner’s face.

“Hey, we’re from Miami, and we want an NBA team.”

“Hey, we’re from Santa Ana, and we want a team, too.”

“Hey, we’re from Minneapolis, and . . .”

Hey, guess who else is coming? San Diego.

They’re leaving today.

The festivities begin tonight in Dallas, and a San Diego group headed by Vincent R. Ciruzzi, the new Sports Arena president and chief executive officer of San Diego Entertainment, Inc., will be there front and center.

And just what will the San Diego group say while it’s there?

“Just let them know there’s been a change in San Diego,” Ciruzzi said. “And that San Diego is interested in a team! It’s really a get acquainted kind of thing.”

Certainly, the NBA is acquainted with San Diego, though. Uh, the Rockets? Uh, the Clippers? Isn’t San Diego the place where the arena roof leaks, where the arena seats squeak, where the arena operator is perceived as a sneak?

Nah.

“That’s the past,” Ciruzzi said.

“C’mon, I’ll give you a tour,” he says.

He comes upon a man dressed in white. He says hello. He forgets the guy’s name, however.

“I do know he’s our painter,” he says. “He paints 365 days a year. You can’t believe this place. All this stuff everywhere is fresh paint. We paint, paint, paint.”

He walks on. Here’s the roof. It doesn’t leak anymore. Once, a city councilman demanded the place be shut down because of this darn roof. Apparently, some tiles were getting wet all the time and were ready to fall.

It used to leak on the court, too. Ball boys would be stationed at each end during games, ready to run on and dry off a wet spot after players had run to the opposite end. One city official tells of the time he bought tickets for a seat that was even with the free throw line. But the roof leaked, and the portable court was moved to avoid the drips. The official’s seat ended up being even with midcourt.

The tour continues. Here are the seats. They don’t squeak. In the past, the highest priced seats were so damaged that the armrests had been dismantled. Twelve bucks for a bleacher seat?

The locker room has been recarpeted, though the rug looks dirty (“Talk to the Sockers,” Ciruzzi says). Stalls have been installed, too.

The concession stands have new canopies.

New food, too.

The women’s bathrooms have been painted pink.

The landscaping outside has been redone. He says they’ve added bushes and boulders so it will be a pretty walk to the ticket windows.

And there really are 144 new boulders out there.

He says: “The only thing I’m disappointed in, besides having no team, is that we can’t seem to solve the sound system problem. . . . Hopefully, we will. Either it’s too loud in one area or not loud enough in another. But I’m dedicated to finding the problem. Somewhere, there’s a system that works. Darn it (he slams his fist). It should have been done by now. It’s been four months! Four months!”

His name is Vin Ciruzzi.

He wants an NBA team.

That’s why he went to San Diego Entertainment, Inc., which still operates the arena, and asked for $2 million.

“We needed to fix the place up,” he said.

But what he really needs is an owner, for he has done his part. He will try to persuade the NBA this weekend that the Sports Arena, that old wrecktangle, is A-OK now. Forget that a jury ruled in 1984 that it wasn’t “fit” for pro basketball. The next step is to find someone with big bucks.

He has formed an advisory board, to serve as his liaison with the community.

He has hob-nobbed with city council members, with the Chamber of Commerce, with the Greater San Diego Sports Assn. He tells them: “Please help me find an owner.”

Because here’s how to get an NBA team. You must:

--Be a big city.

--Be lucky enough to find a guy who wants to own the team. And he better be rich. The league requires that anyone interested in a team put down $100,000. And it’s non-refundable. They keep the cash even if you don’t get a team. It’s a league rule.

--Be resourceful enough to get about 10,000 pledges for season tickets.

--Be real spunky at the all-star game.

--Be on the winning side of a vote by the league’s board of governors.

And it does look as if the league could expand for the 1987-88 season.

But, even Ciruzzi concedes everything would have to go perfectly for San Diego to get an NBA franchise by that time.

“We would have to find an owner of course, or owners, and have the board of governors vote for us . . . .

“(But) let me pose a question. The San Diego Rockets and the Clippers (two prior NBA teams here) had a combined winning percentage of around 33, 35%. And then we wound up with a controversy (the NBA’s lawsuit against the Clippers for moving without league approval). This city did not ask for what it got last time (with the Clippers). The NBA told us who our owner was. My feeling is I really think the NBA should take a look at San Diego again from the perspective of what if they worked with us to get a quality owner and team.

“Because, I tell you, the NBA owes San Diego one.”

The NBA declined comment.

But Paul Phipps, a former Clipper executive, said: “San Diego won’t see a team, I think, for a long time, if ever. You’ll probably see one in Anaheim or in Miami or in Minneapolis. San Diego has to get in line and they’re in the back of a very unruly line. And they put themselves there. The city (of San Diego) did. To the NBA, other cities are much more attractive.”

So what did the City of San Diego do wrong?

For one, Phipps says it tolerated Peter Graham.

Graham’s family, from Vancouver, B.C., runs San Diego Entertainment, Inc., which operates the Sports Arena, and Peter Graham used to be in charge. He was an amiable man, a charmer. The people who dealt with him say he’d make you think everything was fine.

But was everything fine?

Somewhere, somehow, though, Graham appeared to get lazy. Irv Levin, who had owned the Boston Celtics, swapped franchises with John Y. Brown, who had owned the Buffalo Braves, and Levin moved the Braves to San Diego. Pete Babcock, who later worked in the Clipper front office and who now works for the Denver Nuggets, said Levin ripped off Graham, that Levin got too good a lease.

And he said he thinks Graham later had a vendetta against the Clippers, failing to fix the roof, the locker rooms, the seats, etc.

Phipps, meanwhile, said he used to need a number of tables for home games, but many times, Graham’s people would refuse to give him the key to get them.

Still, Graham denies the lease had anything to do with his actions.

“Let’s put it this way,” Graham said this week from his home in Vancouver. “I signed the lease. And I was over 21. I thought it was an all-right lease. I didn’t make a mistake. I got the NBA into San Diego. I thought it was a good move. . . . The one thing I didn’t expect was that the tenants (the Clippers) would go to heck. They started drawing 3,500, and I was getting the minimum--$2,500.”

Eventually, Phipps took his troubles to the Chamber of Commerce, to the City Council, to the Greater San Diego Sports Assn. He says only one councilman, Bill Mitchell, helped him.

Mitchell and former associate Bob Trettin said the city’s property department never really forced Graham to fix problems--like the roof.

But Marty Breslauer, the city’s assistant property department director, said Graham did make repairs, but just enough repairs to keep the department off his back.

“He (Graham) stayed within the agreement barely,” Breslauer said. “ . . . Everyone agreed the arena was a waste, but the question was whether we had the authority to do anything. We could only go so far.”

When the roof needed fixing, Graham said he brought in a roofer, who said a $100,000 job would do it. It took $500,000 to finally get the job done this summer. Graham had had it done cheaply, satisfying the property department, but a while later, it leaked again. Water often would run down through electrical wires. Those roof tiles got soaked. Mitchell was the one who demanded that the place be closed.

Former Clippers speak out even today.

Forward Terry Cummings, now with Milwaukee, said: “During practice, we had buckets out there on the court, with all those leaks. The locker rooms weren’t the best. I’ve seen better in high school. The carpet in there stank.”

Forward Tom Chambers, now with Seattle, said: “It was gross in there.”

The Clippers eventually did file their lawsuit and eventually did leave town. Later, the club won that suit, although Graham now is appealing.

“It wasn’t the only arena with a leaky roof, and won’t be the last,” Graham said. “They (the Clippers) used that as an excuse for their lawsuit. That team wanted to leave (town) the year before. It was all part of the window dressing to justify their leaving town.

“In that trial, they once had five (different) guys testify about how a sandwich was stuck to the locker room ceiling one day. Geez. I told my lawyer that was really great. Five guys testified, but never one testified whether the bread was white or brown. Really. I mean, so what? Is that cause for damages?”

Nevertheless, Graham quit and went home to Vancouver shortly thereafter, though his family still ran the arena.

“I had had enough,” Graham said. “I had 14 years. I enjoyed myself in San Diego. But I decided it was time for me to retire, and let someone else take the heat.”

Vin Ciruzzi.

Graham said he doesn’t care if the whole city seems to hate him, blames him for the loss of the team, blames him for the loss of the 1972 Republican Convention. Then-President Richard M. Nixon was quoted as saying that a ridiculous financial demand from Graham forced the Republicans to go to Miami instead.

“If you’re from out of town, that’s one thing,” Graham said. “But if you’re from out of the country, look out, Charlie! I was picked on, sure. I don’t live in San Diego, so it doesn’t bother me. I don’t have to be a folk hero there. It might’ve been different if I were a San Diego resident. But I just left town one day and said goodby.”

“Hello, Mr. Ciruzzi!”

“Hello, Mr. Ciruzzi!”

He is a popular man. He was 1982 Citizen of the Year in El Cajon. He is a past president of the Boys Club. He is on the United Cerebal Palsy board of governors. He is a past cabinet member of the United Way. A white man, he once received an award from the NAACP.

He worked for Sears for 30 years.

He is from San Diego.

Need we say more?

Miami and Santa Ana already have taken the $100,000 plunge.

Minneapolis, St. Louis, Toronto, Tampa and Raleigh, N.C., are thinking about it.

And there’s San Diego.

“I think San Diego is a great basketball town, a great sports town. Probably the biggest disappointment in my career was the failure of the San Diego franchise to take off,” said former Clipper Bill Walton, San Diego’s most famous basketball native.

“I don’t think the fans stayed away because of the quality of the Sports Arena at all. I thought it was a good building. . . . We really had a terrible team when we were there. The fans in San Diego don’t want to put down their hard-earned dollars to go watch a bad team.

“I’d love to see an NBA team go back there.”

Potential problems:

- Twice, the NBA has failed here, though NBA spokesman Terry Lyons said: “It’s one of the best cable markets in the nation. That’s definitely a plus in its favor.”

- Aren’t there already four teams (Clippers, Lakers, Warriors, Kings) in California? But Lyons said: “I’m sure that doesn’t matter. They’re looking for a strong area. You don’t ignore the eighth largest city.”

- No potential owner has stepped forward. And said one NBA source: “The issue is not whether or not it’s a great place to play or not a great place. If they’re interested in having a team, and San Diego can support a team, then there has to be someone willing to pay whatever it costs to have a team, buy a team and put it in San Diego. That’s more important than the arena.”

- There’s the NBA’s pending litigation against the Clippers for moving to Los Angeles without league permission.

What happens if the NBA wins that case?

Said an NBA source: “One of the things we’re seeking to do is terminate the franchise. Take it away from Mr. (Donald) Sterling and get rid of it. Sell it to someone else, relocate it or do whatever.

“We’re looking to vindicate the fact that you just can’t pick up and move without getting approval of the league. To do so is a violation of the NBA constitution. And violation of the NBA constitution can result in the termination of a franchise. Let’s assume we win the case. We terminate the franchise, we take it back, and we sell it to somebody. We see who wants to buy it and for where.”

San Diego?

It has an arena.