Arena to Make Others Look Just Rinky-Dink

Noses are going to be broken here.

Teeth will be spilled on the floor.

One day soon, most likely this fall, a hockey player will be down on his knees, collecting his wits along with an incisor or two, and he will pause for an instant and he will scan the insides of Anaheim Arena.

“You know,” he will groggily remind himself, “if you have to have your face rearranged, you might as well do it amid an eye-pleasing confluence of burnt orange, cinnamon and forest green, in front of computer-generated sight lines, plush high-backed theater-style chairs and three easy-access concourses lined with a beige-and-white checkerboard design of polished marble tiles imported from Italy.”

At Anaheim Arena, future home of the Los Angeles Kings’ cross-county rivals, there is going to be a thin line between pleasure and pain.

It is still a work in progress, due for completion in late June, but John Nicoletti, the arena’s sales and marketing manager, has been escorting tours of the building for the past few months. Too many tours, if you must know. “In the hundreds,” Nicoletti estimates. “Probably 300 to 500. . . . From now until the summer of ‘94, I expect to live in this building. It’s going to be my home.”

Along the way, Nicoletti hears things.

“It looks like a luxury hotel.”

“It looks like John Wayne Airport.”

It’s a bank. It’s a shopping mall. Since when did the Performing Arts Center start franchising?

“People come in here for the first time,” Nicoletti says, “and they say, ‘This isn’t a hockey arena. This is a . . . classy place .’ ”

Can you believe they’re actually planning on letting Tie Domi inside?

Hockey arenas are supposed to be dank, musty and a little creepy. They are supposed to deliver a sensory bodycheck to the spectator, sending his or her imagination into the boards, reeling.

What’s that smell?

What am I standing in?

Did Gordie Howe really bleed down this aisle?

Boston Garden is a hockey arena. Chicago Stadium is a hockey arena. Anaheim Arena feels more like a hockey museum. It has marble floors, marble walls, marble halls. It has three spectacular glass archways, outlined in granite, and outside balconies that lend themselves to rumination over the Santa Ana riverbed.

It even has glass-enclosed exhibits--Nicoletti calls them “private luxury suites”--that ought to carry inscriptions this fall: “Orange County Corporate Executives At Play In The 1990s.”

There are 82 of these suites, which will each seat 10 to 14 very wealthy humans, and are situated either 17 or 22 rows above the playing surface. Not a skybox in the house. Anaheim Arena couldn’t afford any because, at the time of the groundbreaking, it had no team to market--and therefore, no market to exploit.

“The new Chicago Stadium, where the Bulls and the Blackhawks will play in 1994, sold 190 skyboxes in 11 months,” Nicoletti says. “The lowest-priced suite there is $75,000. And they’re all located upstairs, in the corners.”

At best, Anaheim Arena will be selling last-place hockey during its first few years, so the boxes themselves, and their price tags, had to come down. Without a team, the arena was offering close-to-the-action boxes for $46,000 apiece. With a team, the suites will “begin” at $58,000.

For those fans who don’t own a Fortune 500 business, there are other seats. Surprisingly, they can be occupied without binoculars and mountain-climbing gear. I sat in one well-padded chair in the third concourse and the view was better than anything to be had above the Forum’s loge (lower) level.

Like the Forum, Anaheim Arena has no sight-obstructing pillars.

Unlike the Forum, Anaheim Arena’s seating configuration resembles a steep U-shaped bowl, where upper-deck fans sit high but right on top of the action. The Forum is laid out more like a severely flattened V, with rows extending out and far away from the ice, placing the cheapest seats closer to the LAX tarmac than to Wayne Gretzky.

“The Forum was built like a football stadium,” Nicoletti says. “The seating is very horizontal and very flat. We have more seats than the Forum, but our seats are closer to the floor.”

The builders of the Forum, of course, didn’t have the same technology in the mid-1960s. Aided by computer imagining, the Anaheim architects placed a model of a 6-foot tall spectator in every seat in the building and did their tinkering on-screen, improving sight lines by squeezing the seating upward and inward.

Apparently, media seating was not a huge priority. The press box is literally the worst seat in the house, tucked up high into the green rafters, just under the catwalk.

You get what you pay for in Anaheim Arena--and in Anaheim Arena, reporters get in free.

Down below, beneath the lower level, rests the building’s ultimate extravagance--5,500 square feet, set aside for the administrative offices of . . . a professional basketball team.

“Until we get one,” Nicoletti says, “this will probably be used for storage.”

He aims for the bright side.

“There are two things an arena can never have enough of,” Nicoletti notes. “Space for storage and space for parking.”

In their wildest dreams, the Anaheim Arena staffers see Donald Sterling parking his Clippers here some day. Nicoletti needs to book Sterling on one of his tours. Comparing the Los Angeles Sports Arena to Anaheim Arena is akin to comparing East Berlin to West Berlin--before the wall came down.

Using a kinder illustration, Nicoletti mentions the Forum.

“It’s 25 years old,” he says. “It’s no different than comparing a 25-year-old car to a brand new model. If you take care of that car and treat it right, it will still run as well as a new one, but there are still going to be differences. There’ll be changes, technological changes, just like you’d have with a new car.”

Anaheim’s machine is lean, clean and mean enough. What it needs now is to do something about the empty passenger seat.

* EVENT-FULL

General Manager Brad Mayne has high hopes and big dreams for Anaheim Arena. C14