For Once, They’ve Got Their Heads on Straight

W ATCH YOUR HEAD

Those were the words, scribbled in red marker and taped to a cement stair step, that greeted the Clippers and the Utah Jazz as they made their way from the Anaheim Convention Center’s underground locker room to a basketball court on loan from the Los Angeles Sports Arena for a playoff game on loan from the NBA.

Watch your head, Mark Eaton and Olden Polynice and the rest of Sunday’s seven-foot crowd, because the convention center was never built for NBA basketball, which was part of the charm of this emergency rescue exercise and part of the reason why Clippers 115, Jazz 107 was a neat little novelty for Orange County, instead of a custom.

It took a calamity of international proportion to bring the NBA to Orange County. This is not the way Orange County envisioned it. The fantasy: Anaheim, home to the Clippers on a permanent basis. The reality: Anaheim, refuge for the Clippers while Los Angeles takes off the riot gear and picks up the brooms and shovels.

The convention center is the raison d’etre for those steel girders now stretching skyward where Katella meets the 57 Freeway. By mid-1993, those girders will become Anaheim Arena, the first NBA-sized indoor facility within county lines, an idea that germinated about two decades too late.

Stapled packets of old newspaper clippings were distributed to the media Sunday. They bore these kind of headlines:

“Anaheim: number 24 in NBA expansion parade?”

“Reggie, group trying to lure Pacers to OC”

“NBA franchise still interests Anaheim”

The stories were dated, respectively, 1980, 1983 and 1984.

One more headline, topping an article written in June, 1983:

“A Lack of Seating Stands Between County and NBA”

Cue in the convention center. Pushed to the limits of its seating capacity, the convention center can accommodate 8,005 spectators for basketball. Comfortably, it seats 7,400, which was the configuration Sunday.

By half, that is too small for full-time NBA consideration and worrisome enough for Clipper officials who had already distributed some 11,000 tickets for Game 4 with the Jazz. Anaheim wrote itself off the NBA ticket as soon as it finalized the blueprints for its convention center in the mid-’60s. Expansion franchises were awarded, existing franchises were moved--and all Anaheim could do is sit helplessly on the sidelines and count the seats it wished it had.

By the time Anaheim got around to erecting its Arena, the NBA had elected to settle elsewhere, with the crushing blow, ironically enough, administered by the Clippers.

Had Anaheim Arena been ready in 1984, the California Clippers might be with us today. Instead, the Clippers landed in Los Angeles and, after years of panhandling while the Lakers cruised by limo, they now have forced a jump ball for NBA superiority in L.A. This is a tipoff owner Donald T. Sterling wants play out to its conclusion, no matter how tempting Anaheim Arena’s luxury suites and the allure of Orange County monarchy may be.

Bouncing around the convention center floor in a dark blue sweatsuit, Sterling said before Sunday’s game that he had spent “half the day” Saturday touring the Anaheim Arena site and was “very much impressed with it.” He also said, “You can’t help but love Orange County” and that he “has had talks with the Ogden people in New York,” alluding to the corporate group backing the Anaheim Arena project.

But . . .

“We’ve also had talks about five other proposals for a state-of-the-art arena in Los Angeles,” Sterling said. “That’s what we’re looking for--a state-of-the-art arena in the greater Los Angeles area.”

Those proposals include new facilities in Burbank, at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and near the L.A. Convention Center, along with the renovation of the Clippers’ current home, the Sports Arena. Sterling has discussed the possibility of playing a dozen games in Anaheim during the 1993-94 season--”It was just a thought suggested by Ogden and we’re considering it”--which can be construed as Sterling testing the waters or Sterling angling for leverage, depending upon one’s optimism/cynicism preference.

Most likely, Anaheim will have to go carpet-bagging again, as it did with the Angels in 1966 and the Rams in 1980. The SuperSonics are dissatisfied with facilities in Seattle. That’s one target. Grumbling has begun in Denver and San Antonio. Two more targets. The Sacramento Kings have just been sold to a Southern California businessman, Jim Thomas. Perhaps another.

But any move by one of the above would have to be approved by the NBA and the Lakers and the Clippers and right now, the NBA and the Lakers and the Clippers aren’t sure three franchises can thrive within one 40-mile radius.

For what it is, the Anaheim Convention Center was fine and fun, for whatever Sunday’s game meant.

Clipper guard Ron Harper kept calling the place “a gym” and said “It reminds of when I played my four years in school. You’re so close to the fans. If we were playing in the Sports Arena, 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 fans would never be this loud.”

Loud it was, with 7,148 sets of lungs whooping while their owners whipped white Clipper towels, none of them more than the length of a basketball court away from the action.

“The loudest arena I ever played in,” Clipper point guard Doc Rivers said.

“It was a little different than when I played against the Anaheim Amigos,” said ABA alum and current Clipper Coach Larry Brown.

Still the same size, though.

With better vision 30 years earlier, this scene could have been Anaheim’s scene, 41 times per regular season, not once in a lifetime. The city is building and hoping now, when it should have been thinking big, or bigger, way back when.

Watch your head?

If only Anaheim heeded the advice when it needed it.