from the sacbee
Capital's 'big league' dreams came true with Kings' arrival
By Clint Swett -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Monday, November 1, 2004
They landed halfway to nowhere in a converted warehouse surrounded by sheep pastures in North Natomas. They were vagabonds, unloved and undistinguished, bouncing westward from Rochester, N.Y., to Cincinnati, Omaha and Kansas City.
Now, as they begin their 20th season in Sacramento, the Kings are like favored children. They have waiting lists for season tickets and some of the highest prices in the NBA. Their fan base is among the most passionate in the nation.
As the Kings kick off the regular season Tuesday in Dallas, it's worth looking back more than two decades when the annual Pig Bowl football game between the Sacramento police and sheriff's departments was the zenith of local spectator sports.
It was then that the idea of bringing a major league team to Sacramento was met by scoffs and resistance.
"In those days, everyone knew you couldn't do that kind of stuff in Sacramento," said Greg Van Dusen, then general manager of the Sacramento Sports Association, a partnership formed in 1979 to build a 35,000-seat stadium and buy a major league baseball team for Sacramento.
"I always thought there was a tremendous inferiority complex here," Van Dusen said. "People thought that if we wanted major league sports, we should drive to the Bay Area."
The sports association was the creation of a brash 25-year-old developer named Gregg Lukenbill, whose big-league dreams were seen as either naive or self-serving.
Yet Lukenbill remembers thinking that for the city to rise above "mediocrity," it needed first-class facilities.
"Can you have a team without a facility? No," Lukenbill said last week in explaining his singular focus on building a stadium first. "But does having a facility create the opportunity (for getting a team) and a lot of national-scale events? Yes."
Lukenbill first tried for a plot of land off Bradshaw Road but was rejected by Sacramento County supervisors in March 1979.
So he soon scooped up 430 acres of fallow agricultural land within the city limits in North Natomas. Rather than submit to a traditional rezoning process, he launched a ballot initiative to get the land zoned for light industrial.
In a month and a half, Lukenbill got the 25,000 signatures needed to get the issue on the September ballot.
Controversy bubbled up immediately. Although Lukenbill insisted the stadium would cost no public money, critics asserted that Sacramento could be on the hook for millions of dollars in infrastructure costs.
They also thought Lukenbill might profit handsomely from getting his newly acquired land rezoned. Still others resented his end-run around the planning process.
"I had no problem with a stadium, but I saw it as an incentive to open up thousands of acres of urban land that I thought was premature," recalls Anne Rudin, then a Sacramento City councilwoman and later Sacramento mayor.
Though Rudin said she believed that "Lukenbill really had his heart in the (stadium) endeavor, others who wanted to see the land developed rode along on his coattails."
By 1979 standards, Lukenbill and his backers spent lavishly on the initiative - $81,000 compared with $9,000 for opponents. Still, the measure was defeated.
Disappointed but undeterred, Lukenbill continued his quest for a stadium site and a baseball team, this time supported by a committee of the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce formed to study the benefits of bringing major league sports to Sacramento.
With both the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A's wielding veto power over moving a major league team to Sacramento, it soon became clear that Lukenbill and the Sacramento Sports Association needed to recalibrate.
They first targeted the NBA's Indiana Pacers who were bleeding money in Indianapolis, recalled Mike Seward, then the president of the Sacramento Metro Chamber.
By 1983, the sports association had a handshake deal to buy the Pacers, but the deal was scuttled under pressure from Indianapolis city leaders, Seward said.
While trolling for another team, however, the sports association hooked up with the NBA's Kansas City Kings, a team that lost money and games with equal facility.
After intense negotiations, the sports association scooped up the Kings in 1983 for $10.5 million, though Van Dusen recalls the agreement almost collapsing when the two sides were $500,000 apart.
After running the team in Kansas City for two seasons, the sports association sought the NBA's approval to move the club to Sacramento.
Even before approval was given, Lukenbill said, he knew there was plenty of pent-up demand for pro basketball when he arranged for the Kansas City team to hold a practice at American River College during a West Coast road swing in 1985.
More than 1,200 fans showed up on April Fools Day to gawk at the players and get their autographs.
If any doubt remained, demand for season tickets erased it.
"The average NBA club sold about 5,000 season tickets. We did a little reconnaissance around the Sacramento area and thought we could sell 10,000," Lukenbill said.
Indeed, within a month of announcing their intention to move the Kings to Sacramento, the sports association said it received more than 26,000 inquiries about season tickets.
By season's start, fans had gobbled up 9,323 season tickets, sixth highest in the NBA that year.
The seats most in demand were also the most expensive, a now-quaint $19 per game.
One of those early converts was Tim Burke, who owns Quest Technologies, a Sacramento computer consulting business.
"There was a huge amount of enthusiasm for the team," Burke recalls. "Having grown up in Sacramento, I felt like we were second-class citizens (to the Bay Area)."
But the path to opening night was still a painful journey.
Unable to get land rezoned in North Natomas, the sports association built a warehouse-style building just inside Sacramento County's jurisdiction with the intention of modifying it for basketball.
With just 10,333 seats and six luxury boxes, it was tiny by NBA standards.
There were too few bathrooms and concession stands, and the Sheetrock walls would become cratered with holes from the kicks of angry fans after the too-frequent Kings losses, Van Dusen said.
The day before the season opener, the Kings paraded through Old Sacramento to the cheers of 5,000 locals.
Opening night was a wild success despite the Kings falling to the Los Angeles Clippers 108-104.
Even if that was a portent for the next decade, most fans still found plenty of reasons to attend the games.
"When the good teams came to town, people wanted to see Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson," Burke said. "But if it was a mediocre or poor team, we got excited because we thought maybe we could win one of those."
Van Dusen said the sports association was fortunate to have a team in a town so starved for professional sports. But, he said, Kings ownership did its share to keep enthusiasm high - despite a string of 13 consecutive losing seasons. They built seats closer to the court than in most arenas. They installed wooden floors that reverberated with the stomps of 20,666 feet. And a noise meter incited the fans to ever louder displays of passion. Though they cheered for perennial losers, Kings fans earned a reputation as the loudest in the NBA.
Despite operating on a self-described shoestring, Van Dusen said, the Kings pioneered other innovations, too.
Among them was taking the name Arco Arena, becoming the first NBA arena to sell its naming rights. The name traveled to the new 17,317-seat arena the partnership opened about a mile away in 1988.
The Kings also became the second team in the league to have its own plane - the unfortunately named Airball I.
Lukenbill's partnership sold the team as well as the new Arco Arena to Southern California developer Jim Thomas for $140 million in 1992.
Unable to turn the franchise around, Thomas sold Arco and majority control of the Kings to the Maloof family in 1999 for $247 million.
The Maloof crew is credited with molding the team into one of the NBA's elite, further entrenching the Kings into the Sacramento culture.
And for some, it goes even deeper than that.
"As far as I'm concerned, the Kings are like family to me," said Jim Durgin, a 28-year-old teacher at Starr King Middle School in Carmichael.
Durgin became a Kings fan when he was 9 - the same year Kings rookie Joe Kleine began working out at the same health club as Durgin's family. "I see the team as our identity," said Durgin, who occasionally wears his Peja Stojakovic jersey into the classroom. "Our respect comes from the Kings. And when the team isn't playing well, the city gets less respect."
Capital's 'big league' dreams came true with Kings' arrival
By Clint Swett -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Monday, November 1, 2004
They landed halfway to nowhere in a converted warehouse surrounded by sheep pastures in North Natomas. They were vagabonds, unloved and undistinguished, bouncing westward from Rochester, N.Y., to Cincinnati, Omaha and Kansas City.
Now, as they begin their 20th season in Sacramento, the Kings are like favored children. They have waiting lists for season tickets and some of the highest prices in the NBA. Their fan base is among the most passionate in the nation.
As the Kings kick off the regular season Tuesday in Dallas, it's worth looking back more than two decades when the annual Pig Bowl football game between the Sacramento police and sheriff's departments was the zenith of local spectator sports.
It was then that the idea of bringing a major league team to Sacramento was met by scoffs and resistance.
"In those days, everyone knew you couldn't do that kind of stuff in Sacramento," said Greg Van Dusen, then general manager of the Sacramento Sports Association, a partnership formed in 1979 to build a 35,000-seat stadium and buy a major league baseball team for Sacramento.
"I always thought there was a tremendous inferiority complex here," Van Dusen said. "People thought that if we wanted major league sports, we should drive to the Bay Area."
The sports association was the creation of a brash 25-year-old developer named Gregg Lukenbill, whose big-league dreams were seen as either naive or self-serving.
Yet Lukenbill remembers thinking that for the city to rise above "mediocrity," it needed first-class facilities.
"Can you have a team without a facility? No," Lukenbill said last week in explaining his singular focus on building a stadium first. "But does having a facility create the opportunity (for getting a team) and a lot of national-scale events? Yes."
Lukenbill first tried for a plot of land off Bradshaw Road but was rejected by Sacramento County supervisors in March 1979.
So he soon scooped up 430 acres of fallow agricultural land within the city limits in North Natomas. Rather than submit to a traditional rezoning process, he launched a ballot initiative to get the land zoned for light industrial.
In a month and a half, Lukenbill got the 25,000 signatures needed to get the issue on the September ballot.
Controversy bubbled up immediately. Although Lukenbill insisted the stadium would cost no public money, critics asserted that Sacramento could be on the hook for millions of dollars in infrastructure costs.
They also thought Lukenbill might profit handsomely from getting his newly acquired land rezoned. Still others resented his end-run around the planning process.
"I had no problem with a stadium, but I saw it as an incentive to open up thousands of acres of urban land that I thought was premature," recalls Anne Rudin, then a Sacramento City councilwoman and later Sacramento mayor.
Though Rudin said she believed that "Lukenbill really had his heart in the (stadium) endeavor, others who wanted to see the land developed rode along on his coattails."
By 1979 standards, Lukenbill and his backers spent lavishly on the initiative - $81,000 compared with $9,000 for opponents. Still, the measure was defeated.
Disappointed but undeterred, Lukenbill continued his quest for a stadium site and a baseball team, this time supported by a committee of the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce formed to study the benefits of bringing major league sports to Sacramento.
With both the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A's wielding veto power over moving a major league team to Sacramento, it soon became clear that Lukenbill and the Sacramento Sports Association needed to recalibrate.
They first targeted the NBA's Indiana Pacers who were bleeding money in Indianapolis, recalled Mike Seward, then the president of the Sacramento Metro Chamber.
By 1983, the sports association had a handshake deal to buy the Pacers, but the deal was scuttled under pressure from Indianapolis city leaders, Seward said.
While trolling for another team, however, the sports association hooked up with the NBA's Kansas City Kings, a team that lost money and games with equal facility.
After intense negotiations, the sports association scooped up the Kings in 1983 for $10.5 million, though Van Dusen recalls the agreement almost collapsing when the two sides were $500,000 apart.
After running the team in Kansas City for two seasons, the sports association sought the NBA's approval to move the club to Sacramento.
Even before approval was given, Lukenbill said, he knew there was plenty of pent-up demand for pro basketball when he arranged for the Kansas City team to hold a practice at American River College during a West Coast road swing in 1985.
More than 1,200 fans showed up on April Fools Day to gawk at the players and get their autographs.
If any doubt remained, demand for season tickets erased it.
"The average NBA club sold about 5,000 season tickets. We did a little reconnaissance around the Sacramento area and thought we could sell 10,000," Lukenbill said.
Indeed, within a month of announcing their intention to move the Kings to Sacramento, the sports association said it received more than 26,000 inquiries about season tickets.
By season's start, fans had gobbled up 9,323 season tickets, sixth highest in the NBA that year.
The seats most in demand were also the most expensive, a now-quaint $19 per game.
One of those early converts was Tim Burke, who owns Quest Technologies, a Sacramento computer consulting business.
"There was a huge amount of enthusiasm for the team," Burke recalls. "Having grown up in Sacramento, I felt like we were second-class citizens (to the Bay Area)."
But the path to opening night was still a painful journey.
Unable to get land rezoned in North Natomas, the sports association built a warehouse-style building just inside Sacramento County's jurisdiction with the intention of modifying it for basketball.
With just 10,333 seats and six luxury boxes, it was tiny by NBA standards.
There were too few bathrooms and concession stands, and the Sheetrock walls would become cratered with holes from the kicks of angry fans after the too-frequent Kings losses, Van Dusen said.
The day before the season opener, the Kings paraded through Old Sacramento to the cheers of 5,000 locals.
Opening night was a wild success despite the Kings falling to the Los Angeles Clippers 108-104.
Even if that was a portent for the next decade, most fans still found plenty of reasons to attend the games.
"When the good teams came to town, people wanted to see Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson," Burke said. "But if it was a mediocre or poor team, we got excited because we thought maybe we could win one of those."
Van Dusen said the sports association was fortunate to have a team in a town so starved for professional sports. But, he said, Kings ownership did its share to keep enthusiasm high - despite a string of 13 consecutive losing seasons. They built seats closer to the court than in most arenas. They installed wooden floors that reverberated with the stomps of 20,666 feet. And a noise meter incited the fans to ever louder displays of passion. Though they cheered for perennial losers, Kings fans earned a reputation as the loudest in the NBA.
Despite operating on a self-described shoestring, Van Dusen said, the Kings pioneered other innovations, too.
Among them was taking the name Arco Arena, becoming the first NBA arena to sell its naming rights. The name traveled to the new 17,317-seat arena the partnership opened about a mile away in 1988.
The Kings also became the second team in the league to have its own plane - the unfortunately named Airball I.
Lukenbill's partnership sold the team as well as the new Arco Arena to Southern California developer Jim Thomas for $140 million in 1992.
Unable to turn the franchise around, Thomas sold Arco and majority control of the Kings to the Maloof family in 1999 for $247 million.
The Maloof crew is credited with molding the team into one of the NBA's elite, further entrenching the Kings into the Sacramento culture.
And for some, it goes even deeper than that.
"As far as I'm concerned, the Kings are like family to me," said Jim Durgin, a 28-year-old teacher at Starr King Middle School in Carmichael.
Durgin became a Kings fan when he was 9 - the same year Kings rookie Joe Kleine began working out at the same health club as Durgin's family. "I see the team as our identity," said Durgin, who occasionally wears his Peja Stojakovic jersey into the classroom. "Our respect comes from the Kings. And when the team isn't playing well, the city gets less respect."
