PROVO — Corbin Kaufusi, starting center on this year’s BYU basketball team, looked up at the new $4 million scoreboard hanging from the ceiling of the Marriott Center with its giant 24-foot-wide, 18-foot-high video screens and said, “I hope they don’t fall on us.”
Good line, but not the first time it’s been used.
I was at the press conference when the Marriott Center was unveiled as a brand new building in December 1971, covering the event for the Daily Universe, BYU’s student newspaper.
To inaugurate the 23,000-seat building, the country’s largest on-campus arena at the time, the Cougars were hosting the Time Zone Tournament, featuring teams from each of the country’s four time zones: St. Joseph’s (Pennsylvania) from the Eastern, Kansas State from the Central, BYU from the Rockies and Pacific from the Pacific.
Jack McKinney, the future Los Angeles Lakers coach, was coaching the St. Joseph’s Hawks. When he was introduced to say a few words, he walked on the court, looked up, flinched, and said, “I hope that sucker stays up there.”
Well, it did, for 44 seasons.
The scoreboard that dazzled McKinney, and everyone else back in 1971, measured 26 feet by 16 feet overall — or slightly smaller than just the video screens in the new scoreboard that replaced it this summer.
The latest Marriott Center makeover brought back a flood of personal memories, prompting these questions: 1) Wasn’t that just yesterday that it opened? And 2) Has it really been that long since J. Willard Marriott got his car towed?
On Dec. 3, 1971, the building opened with two basketball games, Kansas State vs. St. Joseph’s and BYU vs. Pacific. In a special pregame ceremony, hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott, whose donation helped significantly in paying for the facility, was honored. As this was taking place, BYU security officers noticed a car parked out front without a parking pass. They towed it away, but when they discovered the car was owned by the same person whose name was on the building, they brought it back.
And so it began. In that night’s basketball games, St. Joe’s beat Kansas State and BYU beat Pacific. The next night BYU defeated St. Joseph’s for the championship. And that, curiously, was that for the Time Zone Tournament, which was never played again.
But the Marriott Center was off and running. It’s incalculable how much it’s been used over the decades. Weekly forums and devotionals, graduations, church meetings and Sunday firesides, dinners, dances, concerts. Virtually every high-level general authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has spoken there, including future church President Howard W. Hunter, who in 1993 was accosted at the pulpit by a man who said he had a bomb (he didn’t). Ronald Reagan spoke there, so did Sandra Day O’Connor, Mark Zuckerberg, Margaret Thatcher, Condoleezza Rice and, most recently, Ben Carson. Billy Joel has performed there, and Elton John, Neil Diamond, Boston, Journey and, of course, The Osmonds.
But nothing’s made itself more at home than basketball. To date, nearly 11 million people have watched basketball games in the Marriott Center, an average of 16,630 every single contest for the past 44 seasons.
That first season, of 1971-72, 10 of the 12 home games were sellouts and average attendance was 21,818, which led the nation. (BYU won all 12 of those games. Overall, the team has won 80 percent of the time in the Marriott Center). Stan Watts, who retired as coach after that season, observed, “Looks like we didn’t build it big enough.”
But times change. From 1972 through 1985, the Marriott Center averaged more than 20,000 fans per game seven seasons. Since then it’s done it once, and none since 1993.
So as the scoreboard got larger this summer, the arena got smaller, at least in terms of seating capacity. Besides the über big-screens, the renovations include 8,000 new padded blue seats in the lower bowl, with more legroom. Capacity now is 18,967 — some 4,000 less than when everything was benches back in ’71.
Eager to see the new old arena, I went to the BYU-Adams State game a week ago to check it out. For old time's sake, and because we bought the cheap tickets, we sat on benches in the upper concourse, staring at those big screens. You find yourself watching them more than the actual players running on the floor, because on the screen the players are bigger. It was just like being home, other than the $4 popcorn I bought from a BYU student working the concession stand who, it dawned on me, wasn’t born when J. Willard Marriott got his car towed. Come to think of it, her parents might not have been, either.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays. Email: benson@deseretnews.com