A couple of blocks past the arena formerly known as The Fabulous Forum, we pulled the rental car into a parking structure. The attendant said, “Fifty bucks, pay as you leave.”
My son Eric, who was riding shotgun, said, “Not a bad deal.”
Clearly we were not in 1984 anymore.
Eric and I, along with two grandsons, Jack and Gil, were on our way to Inglewood’s new arena, the Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, who were playing the Boston Celtics that night.
But it wasn’t the Clippers-Celtics game we’d come especially to see. It was the Dome.
Open now for slightly more than a year, the Intuit Dome is the basketball gym you get when a tech multibillionaire who is also a hoops fiend decides to build a basketball gym.
Steve Ballmer, the owner of the Clippers and a former Microsoft CEO, has a net worth estimated at $172 billion. That makes him the richest owner in not only the NBA but also the NFL, MLB and every other professional sports league in the world.
It would be $174 billion, but he spent $2 billion to build the Intuit Dome.
As soon as it was finished, Time magazine put the Dome on its list of the World’s Greatest Places. It is the crown jewel of sports arenas. The Taj Mahal of hoops.
Ballmer reportedly visited more than 100 arenas before even digging the foundation of the Intuit Dome. He studied sight lines, leg room, proximity to the floor, angle of the stands, anything and everything he could think of.
One of the arenas he admired and copied is Salt Lake’s Delta Center. He loves how close the fans are to the action. He wanted to recreate that fan-friendly atmosphere. It’s why the Intuit Dome has such steep angles.
But there are additional amenities the Delta Center, or any other NBA arena, doesn’t have. Starting with the scoreboard. Although calling the double-sided halo board that hovers above the Dome arena a scoreboard is like calling a Ferrari a Prius.
A Forbes article pointed out that you could fit 3,600 60-inch big screen TVs in the halo board. It cost $100 million. It has 233 million LED lights. It keeps you constantly entertained with stats and replays, in addition to the score. It’s as good as staying home and watching the game on TV.
As long as it stays up there (it weighs a million pounds), it is easily the Dome’s coolest feature.
But wait, there’s more. Such as the plush cushioned seats, the extra leg room, and three times as many restrooms as most other arenas. The Dome has 1,400 toilets; that’s one for every 27 seats. Steve Ballmer does not want you standing in line to go to the restroom.
There’s also the facial recognition and checkout-free concession and merchandise stands.
When you download the Intuit Dome app on your cellphone, it comes with a facial recognition feature that not only lets you breeze right into the arena, but lets you purchase concessions and merch with nothing but your face.
Want to buy a hot dog? All you do is look at the camera at the concession stand and the automatic gate opens. Then you go inside, pick up the hot dog, which, like all the food and drinks, has already been freshly packaged, then walk out the exit. You feel like a shoplifter; you’re sure someone’s going to stop you. But nope, the arena built by the tech billionaire intimately knows you and your credit card.
These checkout-free concession stands are designed to allow you to get your food or beverage in 123 seconds.
I’m all for getting a hot dog and drink in 123 seconds, but my main complaint about the Dome is the concession stand experience was way too impersonal. It’s weird, I know, to call a place that recognizes your face and flashes “Hello Lee Benson” on the screen when you walk in impersonal. But convenience, efficiency and technology can take a good thing too far. The human touch is gone. You end up thinking you’re in an episode of “The Jetsons.” And there’s nobody you can yell at for charging $6.50 for a 12-ounce can of Gatorade punch (of which Gil had two).
As we paid for our $50 parking and left (Boston won, there was no Domecourt advantage), we drove back past the arena formerly known as The Fabulous Forum. I thought about how much has changed in the 25 years since the Lakers and Kings stopped playing there. It’s still in operation (Steve Ballmer bought it), used mostly as a venue for music concerts.
As a Deseret News sports writer, I spent a fair share of time at the Forum. I saw some of the best basketball playoff games in Jazz history there. I was in attendance for the 1983 NBA All-Star Game when Marvin Gaye sang one of the two best national anthems I ever heard live (Whitney Houston, Tampa Bay Super Bowl XXV, was the other).
I thought of the Showtime Lakers, the Forum Club, Jack Nicholson and Eddie Murphy and all the rest on celebrity row when Inglewood was at the apex of professional basketball.
When it opened in 1967, the Forum — Lakers play-by-play announcer Chick Hearn christened it The Fabulous Forum — was designed to look like the Roman Coliseum. It cost multimillionaire Jack Kent Cooke, the Lakers and Kings owner who made his fortune in newspapers, radio and TV, $16 million to build it. It was cutting edge. State of the art. The Taj Mahal of hoops.
Now, it sits in the shadow of the new Taj Mahal.