MGM's aging arena, Pac-12 hoopla a perfect match
The MGM Grand Garden Arena is no fresh-faced, hitting-its-prime beauty.
Barbra Streisand performed there as long ago as 1993. Near Arizona’s locker room, a color poster of Jimmy Buffett, singing there in 1996, is on display. Elton John was a relatively young man when he played the MGM Grand in 1997.
The arena has been operating so long that it used to be home to the WAC women’s volleyball championships in the 1990s. The Las Vegas Dustdevils, an indoor soccer team, played a season there 22 years ago.
The seats are old. The infrastructure is dated. Can you imagine all the $13 beer that has been spilled on the metal floors? It is showing its age.
But it has been heaven for the Pac-12 men’s basketball tournament.
The Pac-12 drew a straight flush when it moved to Las Vegas in 2013. The timing couldn’t have been better. It coincided with Arizona’s restoration as a championship contender and of the estimated 60,000 tickets sold Thursday through Saturday, UA fans paid for close to 50,000 of them.
On Friday, Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said he is considering moving the event across the street, a half-mile as the crow flies, in 2017. That’s when the 20,000 Las Vegas Arena is scheduled to open, a facility that hopes to draw an NHL team as a tenant.
It might be better to retain the intimacy of the MGM Grand, beer stains and all, than to risk an attempt to sell 7,000 more seats per game.
One of the reasons the league tournament failed at Los Angeles’ Staples Center, capacity 18,118, was because the venue was simply too big.
Arizona’s final Pac-12 tournament game at Staples Center drew 11,197 fans. It was the 2012 championship game against Colorado.
And the announced attendance was probably inflated by 2,000 or so.
It was a dreadful place for a conference tournament because there was no central gathering place. There was no “feel” and no buzz. Even in the years when Washington was powerful, winning tournament titles in 2005, 2010 and 2011, you rarely saw any Husky purple because there was no rallying point.
It was too expensive, too hard to get to, too sterile.
That all changed when the Pac-12 moved to MGM Grand in 2013.
I’ve been to Rose Bowls and Super Bowls and Final Fours. Fun, fun, fun. But the Pac-12 tournament is a party plus fun. True, Arizona benefits most because Las Vegas is 410 miles away from Tucson, compared to the 900 miles Oregon fans, and 1,125 miles Washington fans must travel.
But it’s close enough to Stanford, Cal, UCLA, USC, Colorado, Utah and ASU that Arizona doesn’t have an unfair advantage.
I sat high in the stands for the second half of Friday’s Utah-Oregon semifinal game, mixed in with Utes fans who probably bought about 2,000 tickets to the game. They were loud. They stood and shouted for 20 minutes and then spilled into the vast MGM casino after the game. You got the sense they’ll be back year after year.
The new Las Vegas Arena will cost about $400 million. It will be a thing of beauty. I hope the Pac-12 isn’t seduced by its size and the new car smell.
