New Arena Already Providing Many Pro Viewpoints

There were a gazillion good reasons to build a new arena in our town. Four of them emerged within the past week.

The Sharks and the Canucks. The Sonics and the Jazz.

When they visit Spokane this fall exactly a month apart, it’ll be like playing dress-up.

Major league for a day.

It matters not that the games won’t count in any standings, that the Sharks’ second line on the ice may skate away the winter in Kansas City, that the Sonics will inevitably trot out a stiff whose next action will be to renew his passport. It’s still big league. The uniforms - and, yes, the ticket prices - will say it all.

And without our new hippodrome taking shape on Howard, there is no hockey game, no means to afford both the Sonics and the Jazz.

No mandate.

“Our business is the Spokane Chiefs,” noted owner Bobby Brett, “but when we were given an exclusive on hockey in the building, they looked us right in the eye and said, ‘You’d better bring a game in.’ It wasn’t a requirement - but it was required, understand?”

Likewise, though the Sonics have trudged into town annually for more than a decade and sold out the old Coliseum last year, Tom Barbieri of G&B Presents felt some urgency to upgrade his game by matching Seattle with Spokane’s John Stockton and the Jazz.

“This was a one-time opportunity,” he said. “You only open the new arena once and how many more years is Johnny going to play? If not for Johnny, you don’t try so hard to get the Jazz.”

But because of Stockton, the moment all but demanded it.

And that meant complications.

“On a scale of one to 10,” Barbieri noted, “the difficulty of putting this together was about 11.”

The specific predicament in this case was the pairing. In the past, G&B dealt exclusively with the Sonics - the home team - who invited the opponent based on who might owe them a return game from a previous preseason. G&B wrote one check, to Seattle.

But the Sonics and Jazz aren’t regular exhibition rivals and, in fact, “I don’t know if they have great affection for each other,” Barbieri said. Yes, we do recall some extramural sniping between Frank Layden and George Karl in the past.

So each team had to be accommodated separately, their schedules meshed. But mostly, they both had to be paid.

Gonzaga’s Dan Fitzgerald, whose department used to stage the game, remembers bringing the Sonics to town his first year as athletic director. The tab ran $20,000.

Barbieri wouldn’t divulge a figure - other than to say “the breakpoint (attendance) is a lot higher than 6,700” - but with two guarantees it will probably cost G&B $150,000 to open the doors to the NBA.

And what does it take to get an NHL game here?

“Cash!” roared Brett, the word rolling into a laugh.

But later he acknowledged that “besides the costs of the two teams, we don’t have a bunch of added expenses. This is just like running another game. We are going to promote the heck out of it and, yeah, our goal is to sell all the tickets.”

They have a running start. The day after the game was announced, the Chiefs office processed 2,100 ticket requests. Even general manager Tim Speltz was answering the phone and writing up orders. With about 95 percent of the Chiefs’ season-ticket holders having taken the Sharks game option, Brett estimates the event is halfway to a sellout. The top-end $30 tickets are gone.

The Chiefs signed the Sharks to a three-year deal to come and play and bring an opponent. With former Chiefs Pat Falloon and Ray Whitney with San Jose, Brett can re-hoist the Memorial Cup banner and make a weekend out of it - and make San Jose the adopted home team in the process.

But selling 5,000 tickets in a week hasn’t skewed his judgment.

“The first couple years of this game, we have a chance to have a nice, big attendance,” he said. “But 10 years from now, this isn’t as big a deal. The arena isn’t going to be new forever, and maybe you don’t always have a Falloon or a Whitney. You see exhibitions in Portland and Seattle draw 5,000 or 6,000. The Sharks had one in St. Paul last year that drew 3,000 people.”

Yet it could be self-sustaining. Brett himself sees the NHL game as a great selling point for the Chiefs “because once people see a hockey game in this building, they’re going to want to come back,” he said.

For Barbieri, the concern is how long the NBA will keep coming back.

John Stockton wore a Jazz uniform for the first time in Butte, Mont. The NBA doesn’t take its act there anymore, or to many other outposts. “They didn’t used to be a money maker for a team,” Barbieri said. “They were practice games and a chance to give people in smaller towns a taste of the NBA. It’s big business now.”

And without a bigger building, Spokane couldn’t do business.

, DataTimes