Cooper Needs Influence With NBA and San Diego

On Feb. 8, 1984, the Portland Trail Blazers beat the San Diego Clippers, 114-105, before a tiny crowd of 4,268 at the Sports Arena.

The loss dropped the hapless Clippers to 16-33. And when a fan saw Donald Sterling, the team’s owner, heading for the exit, he bellowed at him.

“Hey, Sterling!” the fan yelled. “You’re a bozo!”

According to one newspaper account, Sterling “seemed momentarily wounded.”

But, the report said, Sterling recovered in time to say, “I think he meant it affectionately.”

Three and a half months later, Sterling moved the Clippers to Los Angeles.

Millionaire With a Mission

It has been more than five years since the National Basketball Assn. left San Diego. And it may be five years or more before it returns, if ever. But if Harry Cooper--a La Jolla multimillionaire with a mission--has anything to say about it, the NBA will be back by 1992 to play in a 22,900-seat multipurpose entertainment palace he plans to build with the help of private financing.

Cooper’s biggest problem is that he doesn’t have much in the way of influence with either the NBA or the city of San Diego. He’s trying to change that.

But the city has been mostly indifferent to Cooper’s building plans. And the NBA will have expanded from 23 to 27 teams in two years with the addition of Minnesota and Orlando next fall.

At its Board of Governors meeting April 25, the NBA’s owners voted not to consider any more growth. “Our league has absolutely no plans whatsoever for expansion,” said Brian McIntyre, an NBA spokesman.

That leaves Cooper the option of convincing an existing team to move to San Diego, where the NBA has tried and failed twice.

All it takes is a simple majority of the league’s 27 owners to approve a move. But the league is enjoying unprecedented attendance success. And few teams would even think about moving, much less to San Diego.

‘Not a Rubber Stamp’

“We would have to review plans to relocate very seriously,” McIntyre said. “You’re not dealing with just a team or a franchise. You’re looking at a community. It’s not just a rubber stamp.”

Many people inside the NBA say the league’s commissioner, David Stern, is much more interested in placing a team in Orange County because of its ideal demographics. Anaheim recently offered Orange County $8 million for the land to build an $85-million sports arena in that city, on a site previously proposed for a jail.

Cooper and his partner, Richard Esquinas, insist that San Diego’s potential as an NBA market has changed dramatically in the five years since Sterling moved the Clippers.

“I think the NBA realizes there was poor ownership here before, and that dictated the flow of fan support, business support and community support,” Esquinas said. “The citizens of San Diego don’t want to be held liable for their (Sterling’s) errors.”

Pleaded Cooper: “Don’t hold us responsible for the mistakes they made.”

Yet Cooper also says he is a friend of Sterling’s. And he says Sterling is the most likely candidate among NBA franchise owners to either relocate or sell.

A Place for NBA in San Diego

For his part, Sterling has taken every recent opportunity to emphasize that he is not moving or selling the Clippers. But he does think there’s a place for the NBA in San Diego.

“There’s no stigma on San Diego in the eyes of the rest of the league,” he said. “This is a business. What happened five or 10 years ago doesn’t matter. A lot of people have bad feelings about San Diego. They don’t understand what happened.”

Bob Whitsitt, president of the Seattle Supersonics, agrees. “The knee-jerk reaction is to say there is a stigma in San Diego. I don’t think so. The NBA is different than it was five years ago.”

(The Supersonics are having trouble negotiating a new lease in Seattle, and the team’s owners looked briefly into acquiring the Sports Arena lease before it was purchased by Cooper.)

It was 18 years ago that the Rockets left San Diego for Houston. The now-defunct American Basketball Assn.’s Conquistadores (later renamed the Sails) folded with a 3-8 record early in the 1975-76 season, their third year.

The Clippers arrived in 1978 and actually won four more games than they lost that season. But they did not make the playoffs, and they failed to finish any higher than fifth in their division in their five remaining seasons here.

Battle With Arena

Part of the problem with the Clippers and their community image was an ongoing battle between the team and Peter Graham, the man who ran the Sports Arena.

Among other things, the Clippers complained that Coach Jim Lynam couldn’t be heard by his players at halftime because of toilets being flushed upstairs.

Responded Sports Arena official Larry Patton: “Looking at the attendance figures, there weren’t enough people at Clipper games to make that much noise flushing the toilets.”

The Clippers also complained about a leaky roof, an inadequate locker room, a faulty basketball floor, a poor sound system and lousy maintenance.

Cooper and Esquinas figure they will get a National Hockey League franchise in San Diego before they get an NBA team. Their hope is to show the NBA the success of hockey and the community enthusiasm for their proposed arena once it gets built.

“The NBA wants to see a unified front in San Diego,” Esquinas said. “More or less, they are still waiting to see it.”

Mystery Bankroller

Cooper has enlisted the aid of San Diego’s own Bill Walton, the former UCLA All-American and All-NBA center for the Portland Trail Blazers. Walton now lives in Hillcrest.

And, Cooper said, “we’ve got a person who wants to bring a team here. He wants to be an owner, and his bankers have assured us he’s got the money.”

Like the prospective NHL owner Cooper says he has waiting in the wings, he chooses not to provide a name.

But it’s clear that Cooper and Esquinas aren’t convinced that Sterling wouldn’t sell the Clippers for the right price.

Said Esquinas: “I think there’s some sentiment in the league that they kind of messed up by letting Don get away with that. And I think (bringing the team back to San Diego) would be kind of a way of patching it up.”