An all-sessions pass for the Pac-12 Tournament is $1,100. Get one while they last. That’s four days of basketball at the $375 million T-Mobile Arena, which is maybe 300 yards off the Las Vegas Strip.
A room at New York-New York, which is about 200 yards from mid-court, is $270 a night, if you’re lucky. The wait for an elevator can be exasperating.
It’s such a high roll event that even the referees are paid close to $3,000 per game.
Capacity for a basketball game at T-Mobile — known this week as “McKale North” — is 18,000. If you’re driving to Las Vegas from Tucson, a tank of gas is, well, don’t ask. But expect a full house in Friday’s semifinals and Saturday’s finals if Arizona is involved.
No matter what the ACC boasts about its tournament this week in the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, New York, or how smug the Big Ten feels about playing its tournament in downtown Indianapolis, a historic hot spot of college basketball, the Pac-12 Tournament is the place to be.
This basketball enterprise has gone way beyond what the Pac-12 imagined in 1985, when it first announced plans to stage a postseason basketball tournament.
A step slow, the conference long struggled to find a suitable home for its basketball tournament. There were three problems in the ’80s and ’90s: location, location, location.
The old Pacific Coast Athletic Association was under contract through 1989 to hold its conference tournament at the Los Angeles Forum, home of the Lakers, then the “palace” of West Coast basketball.
The Pac-12 settled on UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.
Half of the Pac-10 coaches, Arizona’s Lute Olson foremost, balked. But the league’s athletic directors were all-in; the promise of a $100,000 payday to each school overcame the idea of giving UCLA a home-court advantage and, besides, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company was signed as the title sponsor and CBS agreed to broadcast a few games.
Interest in the greater Los Angeles community was, shall we say, modest.
Pac-12 basketball was at a historic ebb in the mid-’80s. UCLA was no longer John Wooden and a lineup of Hall of Fame ballplayers. Oregon State had been the league’s ranking basketball power since 1980.
Total attendance at the original Pac-10 tournament was 37,663, an average of 7,532 per session. Even the UCLA-Washington championship game drew just 9,117 at Pauley, capacity 14,000.
Instead of banking $100,000, each conference school received closer to $40,000.
The only true drama came in the press conference following UCLA’s victory, a few minutes after the brackets for the 1987 NCAA Tournament had been revealed. The Bruins believed they would be the league’s only team in the NCAA field.
But as UCLA coach Walt Hazzard and star player Reggie Miller participated in a Q&A session, this is what was said:
Hazzard: “Arizona is in the tournament.”
Miller: “No!”
Hazzard: “And with a home game, too.”
Miller: “No way.”
Hazzard: “Well, their athletic director (Cedric Dempsey) is on the Selection Committee.”
Miller: “Oh, I see.”
Indeed, Arizona played host to UTEP in a first-round game McKale Center — and lost, 98-91 in overtime. But those Hazzard and Miller quotes triggered what has become the Pac-12’s most heated rivalry of the last 35 years, a fire that still burns deeply within each program.
The Pac-12 moved ahead with its basketball tournament, but its original plan to play at neutral venues in big population centers went poof.
The 1988 Pac-12 Tournament was supposed to be played at the Tacoma Dome. That idea died when the Tacoma group couldn’t arrange suitable sponsorship. The possibility of playing at Portland’s NBA arena was examined. But that facility was booked by high school state championship playoffs.
The Oakland Coliseum was also unavailable. The league even considered a move to Sacramento, but there was no suitable arena. Sacramento? That’s how desperate the Pac-12 was 30 years ago.
Putting finance first and competitive balance last, the Pac-12 had no choice but play the ’88 tournament at McKale Center. That idea didn’t sit well with opposing coaches — especially Hazzard, since Arizona, ranked No. 1 for six weeks, was fielding its Team of the Century.
When Hazzard and the Bruins showed up for a Friday night semifinal game against underdog Washington State, the McKale Center crowd of 13,436 rooted for the Cougars with a fervor usually reserved for the Wildcats. Hazzard, whose sideline demeanor was something out of the Sean Miller playbook, was loudly booed, start to finish.
When WSU completed the upset, 73-71, UCLA president Charles Young might’ve been the most unhappy person in the arena. He fired Hazzard following the season, explaining that the basketball coaching position at UCLA was too distinguished to have its coach perceived as a villain.
Finally, in 1989, the Pac-12 Tournament found mostly neutral ground at the Forum. But that didn’t work, either. Arizona, led by Sean Elliott, routed Stanford 73-51 in the championship game, a week during which UCLA was no real factor. No session drew more than 10,565 in the 17,505-seat NBA arena.
By then, neither Olson nor Stanford’s emerging coaching star, Mike Montgomery, could see the value of a league tournament. The sponsor, Goodyear Tire, withdrew, as did CBS. The schools, including UCLA voted against renewing it past 1991. And when the ’91 tournament failed miserably, played at ASU’s Activity Center before a total weekly audience of 37,663 — about 45% capacity — the league tournament went dark until 2002.
The tournament found a steady identity at Staples Center, but a trip to Los Angeles and the logistics involved didn’t create a buzz. Total attendance plunged to 56,051 in 2012.
It wasn’t until the tournament was moved to the MGM Grand in 2013 that the Pac-12 Tournament became the place to be. The 2017 move to T-Mobile Arena set a tournament attendance record of 87,910.
If all goes well this week — meaning Arizona and UCLA don’t get bumped off early — it’s likely 90,000 people will pay big money to sit in T-Mobile Arena and enjoy an $18 beer with their basketball.
