Hitting the Big Time : Closing Book on The Library, UCI Debuts Bren Center

What will $15 million get you nowadays?

At UC Irvine, it will buy you what Coach Bill Mulligan has wanted for seven years and what the university has lacked for 20--a basketball arena, a real one, one that doesn’t look as if it were built for a high-school drama club and doesn’t send visiting teams laughing through their pregame layup drills.

It will buy you 5,000 seats--individual seats, with backs on them yet--and a four-sided suspended scoreboard with a color message board for animation. It will also buy you a lobby with soft, gray, acoustic paneling and softer trendy pastels for that Yes-This-Is-Orange County decor.

It will also buy you, the Irvine athletic department is hoping, admission into the big time, a chance at scheduling schools in the Top 20 and a chance at recruiting players who go to schools in the Top 20.

The money has already been spent and the package, heretofore known as the Donald Bren Events Center, will be officially opened tonight. The ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled for 6:15 p.m. The tip-off, with Utah State as the first opponent, is scheduled for 7:30.

What this means to Irvine basketball is nothing less than monumental. Try to imagine the Anteaters without their homely sweet home, 1,500-seat Crawford Hall.

What, no stage and curtains behind press row? No pull-out bleachers on the other side? No long lines outside in the rain during halftime, inching their way toward a closet-sized snack bar?

This is definitely going to take some getting used to.

No longer will the Irvine basketball experience include:

--Exploding scoreboards that weren’t meant to explode.

--Black trash bags taped over the long, rectangular windows, keeping the sun out so a day game between Irvine and Nevada Las Vegas could be properly televised.

--Groups of fans huddled around the Irvine pool, watching a closed-circuit telecast of the sold-out game inside.

--Hundreds of students camped outside Crawford Hall at 7 a.m. on Monday mornings, waiting to buy tickets during the Kevin Magee, nationally ranked seasons.

--Quiet gatherings of barely 200 for games during the lean years, which earned Crawford Hall the nickname The Library.

--The slackened jaws and bemused faces of opposing teams making their first visits to the little gym.

Some of their reactions:

--”Playing in UCI’s gym reminds me of my junior high school days,” said Utah State forward Dean Hunger in 1980.

--”Our players might be in for a little shock,” said Nevada Las Vegas Coach Jerry Tarkanian before a 1984 meeting with Irvine. “It’s certainly not good for the league. I don’t know all the problems, but obviously they have problems or they wouldn’t be playing there.”

--More from Tark: “You guys can’t make any money here.”

--From one visiting writer: “Do they really play basketball here?”

--From another visiting writer: “Irvine doesn’t deserve a team this good.”

Mulligan, Irvine’s coach since 1980, admits the inauspiciousness of Crawford Hall often worked to his team’s advantage.

“Teams would come in here and say, ‘What the hell is this? Nobody that plays here can be any good,’ ” Mulligan said. “The fact that we were playing in a high school gym made teams think we were no good. Vegas was shocked the first time they came here.”

Las Vegas plays its home games in the Thomas and Mack Center, which seats 18,000--or 20,000 when the fire marshal isn’t looking. You could take Irvine’s home attendance for an entire PCAA season (nine games), put all those fans in Thomas and Mack and still have room for more.

But in 1984 and 1986, Las Vegas failed to get out of Crawford Hall with a victory.

This season, the Anteaters played three final games at Crawford and won them all. The opponents--Nebraska, Bradley and Pepperdine--all reached the NCAA Tournament last season. Under Mulligan, Irvine won 81% of its games in Crawford.

It came as no surprise, then, that the players cut down the nets following the Dec. 20 victory over Pepperdine, the grand finale for Crawford.

“I’m going to miss it,” guard Scott Brooks said afterward. “I love this gym. It’s been good to me. I don’t know if I want to leave.”

Wayne Engelstad, Irvine center, suggests that “We may be hurting ourselves by leaving.”

What does Mulligan think?

“Maybe,” he said, “but I don’t want to say it. I really appreciate the Bren Center. I really do. But winning means so much.

“If it can just help us get some players. . . . “

Crawford Hall was built in 1965 and it was built for what was needed at the time--a brand new university and a fledgling Division II basketball program. Back then, 1,500 seats were fine.

But in 1977, Irvine made the jump to Division I, and when it came to recruiting, Crawford Hall served as a millstone.

“I’m sure it cost us some kids,” said Tim Tift, who coached the Anteaters from 1969 to 1980. “But we wouldn’t dwell on it. We tried to stay away from it.”

Tift’s final three seasons at Irvine resulted in records of 8-17, 7-19 and 7-20. When Mulligan was named coach in 1980, he realized the transition from losing to winning wouldn’t be made without better players. And to get better players, Mulligan needed some lures.

Like, for starters, a real basketball arena.

“It was always on the back-burner at Irvine,” Mulligan said. “But the thinking was, ‘Why build a new arena if you can’t get anyone to go to your games now?’ ”

With Kevin Magee, Mulligan found a way. Magee had been a community college All-American for Mulligan at Saddleback and when the coach left for Irvine, the center tagged along.

Magee came in, led the nation in scoring and led the Anteaters to seasons of 17-10 and 23-7. Crowds at Crawford Hall spilled out the doors.

Suddenly, Crawford Hall was insufficient.

In 1981, Mulligan began the campaign that would eventually lead to the Bren Center. He went to the Irvine students, hoping they would first go to the ballot box and then to their wallets.

“The big thing was getting the students to tax themselves,” Mulligan said. “Kevin and I would go out and hustle the students. We’d go to mixers, get together with them for ice cream, talk about the new arena.”

The Irvine students apparently listened, because later in 1981, they voted to pay an additional $69 in annual fees for 30 years to support the construction of the Bren Center. The facility took its name after Donald Bren, Irvine Co. board chairman, who donated $1 million to the project.

Ground breaking took place in April, 1985, but because of delays in the architectural planning, construction did not begin in earnest until December, 1985.

That, along with some heavy rains last winter and spring, pushed back the Bren Center’s opening date. Originally, the arena was to have been completed by the Anteaters’ season opener Nov. 28. The new target date was set for Jan. 8, Irvine’s home conference opener.

The construction crew just beat the deadline. Wednesday, the Anteaters practiced in the Bren Center for the first time--accompanied by the sound of an occasional hammer.

Tonight, they will take the court for the second time--against Utah State.

A crowd of 4,600 is expected and most in attendance will probably like what they see. Rows of blue plastic seats rise from both sidelines and a section of folding chairs is stationed behind the north basket. At the south end is a color message board, which has been programmed for animation, photos of the players, logos and such crowd exhortations as “LET’S GO” and “NICE SHOT.”

Hovering above midcourt is a four-sided scoreboard, similar to those at most basketball arenas but quite a switch for Irvine, where Tift can remember the old wall scoreboard occasionally shooting off sparks.

The railings and the walls are painted in rose, light blues and greens--the same color scheme as the new Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“It may a little shocking to some on campus,” said Steve Neal, Bren Center director, “but when they come in the building and see it, I think they’ll really like it. This is more than a basketball arena. There will be many concerts and plays here.

“We wanted to emphasize the special-events aspect of the facility with lighter colors, rather than the usual blues and grays.”

It may not go over in Iowa City or Chapel Hill, but in Irvine, it blends into the scenery.

This is not to say, however, that the Bren Center comes equipped without glitches.

The permanent floor won’t be ready until the summer, so the basketball court had to be borrowed from the Riverside Convention Center. Decals have been pasted over the “RIVERSIDE” painted along the baselines.

And no new parking lot has been built. Parking for Crawford Hall was always a problem, so triple the attendance and the Bren Center could give new meaning to the term gridlock. A multi-level parking garage is in the planning stages, but for now, it’s every car for itself.

To Mulligan, however, the Bren Center is a work of art. He sees it as Irvine’s key to better players and better scheduling.

He also sees it for what it is.

“It’s an arena ,” he says, almost having trouble believing the fact. “It’s not a gym. It’s a real arena.”

And it’s finally here.