New home is up and running ... on empty

If you build it, they will shun.

USC’s arena of dreams formally awoke Thursday with gunk-filled eyes and a yawn.

The Galen Center was, as gales go, little more than a breeze.

For every sparkle, there was an empty seat. For every brightly stocked concourse, there was a vacant section.

The place looked absolutely beautiful, but felt familiarly bare.

A Staples Center body with a Sports Arena engine.

An announced attendance of 7,512, an actual count of somewhat less.

Thanks to bobbing white-shirted students who filled the seats of one end section, USC’s 80-74 overtime loss to South Carolina was occasionally accompanied by a strange Trojans basketball roar.

But, mostly, it was a night of that familiar Trojans basketball silence, surrounded by that usual Trojans basketball emptiness.

There were empty seats at courtside. Empty seats in the sections rising above midcourt. Empty seats high above in the suites.

This from the same school that can throw a helmet into an ancient Coliseum and draw 90,000.

Yet, in the first men’s game in a brand new on-campus basketball arena, they can’t even fill it with 10,258?

Against a South Carolina team that last season beat NCAA champion Florida twice?

On a night when there was no NBA basketball being played down the street?

This night was supposed to be a statement about USC basketball.

Unfortunately, it was.

If you build it, they will shrug.

Even on a night that cost nearly $140 million and took more than four decades to create.

“I am really surprised it’s not sold out,” said Rich Walther, an Arcadia CPA and USC graduate who has season tickets in both basketball and football. “Fans should be here. It’s the first game. It’s a great arena, better than anything else in the Pac-10. I thought for sure they would fill it.”

Could it be that USC basketball has been so irrelevant for so long that it doesn’t yet have the juice to light the coolest new sports spot in town?

“We’re going to have to put a quality product on the floor,” Coach Tim Floyd acknowledged afterward. “I think you have to earn that, I really do.”

Floyd heaped praise on the filled student section -- “When all those students show up, it gives us something to build on.”

But he said he didn’t really check out the empty seats elsewhere.

If he had, he would agree that this place deserves better.

It has the best skyline view of any sports place in town, downtown rising beyond huge plate glass windows at one end.

It has the best sports scoreboard in town, with a constant video feed that is sharper than my home television.

The seats are padded, the sound system is powerful, the sightlines are near-perfect.

It makes Pauley Pavilion look like an 11-banner barn.

And you know that, when it comes to recruiting, it’s going to eventually make Ben Howland turn powder blue.

“It’s going to help out our program tremendously with recruiting, it already has,” Floyd said.

As an instant fan attraction, the Galen Center may have flopped.

But as longtime promises go, the Galen Center made good.

“When I was being recruited in the late ‘60s, they told me that we would have our own basketball arena by the time I graduated,” said Paul Westphal, sitting in the stands before the game. “Today I look around and it’s hard to believe I can finally think about that story and smile.”

Like the quiet player for whom the court is named -- Jim Sterkel -- the arena is a triumph for all those who loved this team in obscurity.

“I think back to all the people who have done so much for USC basketball when nobody was watching,” said Westphal. “All those people who loved the program and didn’t care that it wasn’t UCLA. I hope somewhere today, they’re all smiling.”

It says here that eventually, those smiling faces will be filling this place. Maybe not this month, and certainly not after Thursday night, but soon.

One of the reasons could be heard from a student section that chanted, “O-J, May-O.”

If the nation’s top recruit arrives here next season as promised, this L.A. jewel will be given an L.A. buzz.

Another reason is rumpled Floyd, who, walking the sidelines, looks a bit like an old couch in a remodeled living room.

His young team plays hard, plays smart, and will get better.

Yes, the Trojans lost to a team that was whipped by UC Irvine. But they came close to winning the game in regulation while getting big minutes from one kid who should be a senior in high school (Daniel Hackett) and a true freshman (Taj Gibson).

They outrebounded the Gamecocks, held them to 39% shooting, and committed only 11 turnovers in 45 minutes, not bad for a team without academically ineligible guard Gabe Pruitt.

“It’s a journey for us,” Floyd said.

A journey that, even in the new arena, began amid the same old apathy.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.