Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Still think we don't need a new coliseum?

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Monday, November 29, 1999

Still think we don't need a new coliseum?
Fiasco shows how badly CC needs to build arena
By Bart Wright
Caller-Times Sports Editor

Take a memo, please.
   Send it out to the good people on the City Council, and get a copy to the mayor's office.
   Is it possible to get it to all the eligible voters in Corpus Christi? They need to know about this, too:
   The plug needs to be pulled on Memorial Coliseum. A fine building for a small coastal town in the 1950's, the coliseum's time has come and gone.
   All the evidence you really need has been painfully visible the last week when its main sports tenants have tried to coexist.
   It isn't working and it isn't going to work.
   On Sunday, the IceRays had an afternoon game scheduled that finally got started Sunday night. The ice was unplayable after being hidden beneath a basketball court for a few games.
   By the time they removed the court and stripped off the material that is supposed to be the buffer between the ice and hardwood, they had themselves an unworkable mess. Workers had to scrape the junk off the surface, flood the ice a few times, scrape some more, you get the idea.
   People who bought tickets for a 3 p.m. hockey game were sitting there at 6 p.m. still waiting for it to start.
   By the time they made the surface playable, the smallest crowd in the IceRays' brief history was on hand - about half had already left. Three hours of pregame boredom helped beer sales - most of the stands had sold out before the third period finally began - but did nothing for the city's image.
   It was, clearly, a civic embarrassment. Only slightly less of an embarrassment than the conditions that Division I basketball games were played under during the previous week when fans wrapped themselves in blankets and parkas to ward off the coliseum's uncomfortably cold conditions, but a civic embarrassment all the same.
   This won't help Corpus Christi's image when word gets around to the other 17 cities in the Western Professional Hockey League.
   No offense to the gentlemen and ladies on the playing rosters and in the front offices of the other WPHL cities, but who cares what they think about us?
   More important is what we think of us.
   If there's no sense of civic pride here that we can't come up with a suitable facility for a minor league hockey team and a Division I basketball program, let's just bury our heads in the sand and pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist.
   If there's no motivation to find a way to fund a modern facility, let's say thanks and goodbye to hockey and basketball.
   It was so bad Sunday that no one from the IceRays or the coliseum was available to explain why a city of 350,000 or so can't figure out how to stage hockey and basketball games in a reasonable setting.
   "I'm not sure that anybody even knows why or how this happened," said Bill McBean, one of the IceRays' new owners. "The thing is, this is just the start, this is the first time it's come up, we'll have to do this several more times.
   "I'm sure somebody at the city will look into it and try to determine what the facts are," McBean said.
   When they do, they will find they are dealing with a facility that wasn't built to house both a hockey and a basketball team.
   In modern buildings, the ice-making equipment is built into the structure, not piped in from the outside. Modern buildings routinely host basketball and hockey games on the same day, one in the afternoon, one at night.
   Here, somebody needs to ask if the city is too small for both hockey and basketball. For basketball, the conditions are unreasonably cold. For hockey, the conversion simply takes far too long.
   This isn't about the IceRays being bad guys, or about the officials at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi being unreasonable, or the coliseum workers being incompetent.
   This is about a facility that wasn't built to do what it is being asked to do.
   The survival of minor league hockey and major college basketball here requires a new facility and once you get to that realization, there's a multitude of other benefits having nothing to do with sports that a new facility would provide.
   We're talking about concerts, conventions, trade shows, the kind of entertainment opportunities you find all over the country in cities much smaller than Corpus Christi.
   The question is whether the city wants to think in those terms about the future or turn in full retreat and slink into the past.
   One thing's clear - it isn't working this way and the building just keeps older and less functional.



Sports Editor Bart Wright can be reached at 886-3745 or by e-mail at wrightb@caller.com.

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