‘84 Lessons Affect Approach to ’92 Women’s Final Four

Lasting memories of the last Women’s Final Four at Los Angeles in 1984:

--Cheryl Miller and company--Pam and Paula McGee, Rhonda Windham and Cynthia Cooper--shake off pregame jitters by, what else, dancing.

--Miller dances her way past Tennessee’s zone in leading USC to a 72-61 victory in the championship game.

--Not much dancing in all those empty seats--a mere 5,365 spectators in 12,819-seat Pauley Pavilion.

Now that the Women’s Final Four is returning to Los Angeles, at the Sports Arena on April 4-5, organizers are hoping to eliminate a recurrence of memory No. 3. So far, the results have been favorable, judging from Wednesday’s news conference at City Hall.

Already, more tickets (6,000) have been sold for this year’s event than there were for the 1984 tournament. Appearances, too, are just as important. Which is why it’s Judith Holland’s job to make sure that spectators are seated in the right places--namely, the courtside and baseline seats.

“My thought on this was: We don’t want a lot of those seats being empty because when you turn the CBS cameras on, that camera is relentless,” said Holland, senior associate athletic director at UCLA and chair of the NCAA Division I women’s basketball committee.

“It shows the empty seats unless they’re way high. . . . If you’ve been at the Final Four, you know what happens in the end zones. It’s ghost city in the end zones. Everybody wants me to fill the sides. But I said, ‘Whoa, the camera shows the end zones.’ It’s just horrible.”

To that end, UCLA and the Amateur Athletic Foundation (AAF) bought up one end zone at full price and probably will give the tickets to underprivileged children.

Once again, it seems to be another pivotal year for the Women’s Final Four. Almost everyone thought the 1990 crowds (34,196 total) at Knoxville, Tenn., signified a turning point. But 15,796 showed up a year later at New Orleans.

“If Tennessee was the watershed we all thought it should have been, then New Orleans should have been a sellout without any question,” Holland said. “So that told me that we had a lot more work to do. And I feel that it was propitious that Los Angeles came up on the schedule.”