Category Archives: nassau coliseum

The way it was

Leave a reply

Listen to your elders. They can tell you, as I’m about to tell you now, what things were like a half-century ago, before cell phones, emails, laptops, hybrid cars, GPS, global warming, social media and lots of other stuff that we all somehow managed without back then. Specifically, I’m going to describe the moment 50 years ago when big-time sports came to Long Island, this identity-challenged sprawl of suburbia forever in the shadow of the entertainment and cultural center that is New York City.

It wasn’t especially auspicious. But when the Nassau Coliseum opened its doors on Feb. 11, 1972 for a professional basketball game in the short-lived American Basketball Association, it indeed was the beginning of establishing Long Islanders’ sense of joining the in-crowd.

On the eve of that event, new Coliseum executives were promising future top-shelf events previously available only in Gotham—ice shows, boxing championships, major college basketball, roller derby, the Globetrotters, boat shows, ice shows, auto shows, dog shows. The mountain was going to come to us Mohammads.

Not all of that worked out so spectacularly. But the Coliseum, rather quickly, did come to represent a reasonable alternative to Manhattan’s elitism. And here’s how it started:

That Feb. 11 debut, which I covered for Newsday, officially was an “unofficial” opening, with only about half of the planned 15,000 seats installed. Furthermore, the available seats all were in the upper bowl, not quite binocular range but hardly courtside perches. Nineteen-seventy-two ticket prices beside the point—$5.50 to $7.50—all 7,892 spectators were in the cheap seats.

Given the unfinished state of the building, intrepid ushers were armed with mimeographed charts of the seating design, worried that the chalk marks numbering the sections might be accidentally erased. Shortly before halftime, a minor water leak developed in the hallway leading to the locker rooms.

But the game—a 129-121 New York Nets victory over the Pittsburgh Condors—was lively enough and so were the spectators. (Fittingly, one could argue, the venue’s first technical foul was assessed to Nets coach Lou Carnesecca, the now-97-year old New York sports institution known for his passionate involvement in the game, including his pointed assessments of referees’ work.)

Overall, the step up in atmosphere and amenities was a clear improvement over the Nets’ previous home at the generously named Island Garden. “Like going,” veteran Nets guard Bill Melchionni said that night, “from the outhouse to a bathroom with plumbing.”

Then and for the rest of the basketball season, the Coliseum made due with a portable floor, baskets and scoreboard all transported from the Nets previous home, prompting Pittsburgh coach Mark Binstein—who had been a Nets executive when the ABA materialized for 1967-68 season—to sarcastically express surprise “that they built a $28 million arena and still are using the same scoreboard I bought five years ago for $1,800.”

In fact the Coliseum, from the start, was a no-frills, affordable establishment, equivalent to the post-World War II Levitt housing that long defined Long Island. It was not state-of-the-art, hardly Big Town glitz, but it was the ideal counterweight to Madison Square Garden. It was analogous to the style of Al Arbour—humble and efficient—who cemented Long Island’s big-league identity by coaching the hockey Islanders to four Stanley Cup championships in the 1980s.

And it was a terrific place to watch a game. Anywhere in the building.

Of course the Nets left years ago, off to New Jersey in 1977 and resettled in Brooklyn in 2012, so the Coliseum became almost exclusively associated with the Islanders, who played there from 1972 to 2015 and split time between the Coliseum and Brooklyn from 2018 to 2021.

Then last Nov. 20, upon the Islanders’ move into their new $1.1 billion arena at Belmont Park, came gushing reports—rubbing-their-eyes-in-disbelief reactions by fans, players and officials over that venue’s stupendous architectural and technological marvels. For added emphasis, there were comparisons to the Coliseum cast as going from a dull black-and-white existence to full color, descriptions of the Coliseum as “that cramped, spare venue,” a “dingy old building,” a “dumpy….old barn.”

I have not been to the Belmont Park edifice and am confident it is nice. Its hefty price tag, after all, could buy a lot of bells, whistles and comfort for all involved. Even with inflation, that $1.1 billion amounts to six times what it cost to bring the Coliseum into being.

Okay, the Coliseum is undeniably from a previous era—a previous century! But having frequented the Coliseum with some regularity, going back to Feb. 11, 1972—fifty years ago!—as well as covering the Islanders’ initial appearance there in October of ’72, I am here to bear witness to the old joint’s functionality and ambience.

Time marches on. But, kids, you missed a good thing.

 

 

The Islanders: Stranded off the Island?

2 Replies

The people chanted, “Bring them back! Bring them back! Bring them back!”

The New York Islanders were playing at the Nassau Coliseum last Sunday. (The place now identifies itself with one of those bewildering corporate names, but everybody still calls it the Nassau Coliseum.) The game meant nothing—a pre-season skirmish, a one-time-only tease to the traditional fan base more than two years after the team ran away from its home of 43 years.

But the place was packed and it was rocking, alive with the sing-song “Let’s go, Islanders” pleas that go back decades and the more recent, unrestrained “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!” goal celebrations. Hours before the game, the Coliseum’s parking lots had been filled with tailgating customers sporting team jerseys.

“Pretty close to what we had in the playoffs,” said the team’s marquee player, John Tavares, comparing the scene to the 2015 post season. “Through the roof for the warmups. The fans here have a tremendous identity and they don’t want to lose hold of that. And the players recognize that.”

That didn’t stop management from opting for greener pastures—that is, greater potential revenue streams—after the 2014-15 season by packing off to Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center. When Barclays’ developer Bruce Ratner subsequently bid to renovate the Coliseum, he secured the lucrative project by promising six Islander games there per season. Soon enough, that bait was switched and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman repeatedly has declared that the Coliseum is “not an option” in the Islanders’ future.

So what, exactly, was the point of Sunday’s event? To give those old paying loyalists one day of throwback atmosphere? To sell more than 13,900 tickets for an event that typically would have drawn no more than 5,000 or 6,000 on a football Sunday afternoon? To offer a genuine gesture of appreciation to so many abandoned customers?

It would be dangerous to rhapsodize too extravagantly about the Coliseum, opened in early 1972 and forever lacking in frills. It was built with $28 million and, even with its $165 million facelift—the slinky exterior is nice enough and the insides have been cleaned up noticeably—there still aren’t enough bathrooms.

The joint still doesn’t offer what the team wants in terms of modern amenities, more space for the one-percenters to lounge in high-end suites and the kind of luxurious locker room that 21st Century jocks have come to expect. (The New York Giants have a practice site dressing room shaped like an enormous football, pointed at each end and wider in the middle, where 10-yard pass patterns could be executed.)

But Barclays hardly has proven to be a better deal for anyone. The majority of Island residents miss their tailgating ritual at the Coliseum, grumble about the inconvenience of alternative travel by train, hate the obstructed views from hundreds of Barclays seats, mock the arena’s off-center scoreboard. Average attendance last season there was 13,101—well short of Barclays’ 17,732 capacity for hockey and a number able to comfortably fit in the supposedly too-small Coliseum.

The players have been unhappy with Barclays’ below-standard ice surface, and all indications are that new management already intends to leave Barclays more than 20 years shy of the team’s original 25-year lease. The plan is to build a new arena near Belmont Race Track, a mere 15 miles from the Coliseum.

Jilted Coliseum patrons might find some hope in the fact that it took eight years, from the initial proposal to opening day, for Barclays to materialize, so even with a Belmont arena soon approved and in the works, the team could be desperate for a temporary landing spot.

Why not the Coliseum, a building without a bad seat and guaranteed a hard-core spectator following that has been all-in on the identity front? Islander fans, like the original Islanders, are anti-big city elites. And proud to use the Islanders—who had been Long Island’s only big-league professional sports team—as proof that the often nondescript suburban sprawl they call home need not remain constantly in the shadow of the Big Town.

For the ceremonial puck drop at Sunday’s exhibition, it was a nice touch to bring back three members from the Stanley Cup years—Clark Gillies, Bobby Nystrom and, especially, Billy Smith. When the Islanders’ first of four championships, in 1980, was called New York’s first since the Rangers’ 1940 triumph, Smith shot back, “The Stanley Cup is not in New York. It’s on Long Island.”

On Sunday, one of those 13,000-plus Long Island fans left behind a sticker on a bathroom stall at the Coliseum that featured the Islanders’ logo and the appeal, “Bring Them Home.“