Storied sports arena faces wrecking ball

One of  the world’s most storied buildings was in the news recently.

Fifty-six years after it opened, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena will soon face the wrecking ball to give way to a new soccer stadium.

On its spot, the LA Football Club will build a 22,000-seat facility for fans of soccer, the most popular sport in the world.

An expansion team of Major League Soccer will call the new edifice home. The main target audience, of course, is the Southland’s humongous Latino population and its entertainment dollar.

I have fond memories of the Sports Arena, former home of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. I used to eat my “baon” (packed lunch) in its greenery near the California Afro-American Museum.

Before moving up to Sacramento where I closed out my public information career with the state, I was a spokesman at the nearby California Science Center, dubbed the “Smithsonian of the West.” In the mid-80s, it was called California Museum of Science and Industry.

The arena, three museums (the Museum of Natural History is the third one), the venerable Coliseum—main venue for two Summer Olympic Games—and a sunken rose garden are located in prime and treasured government land known as Exposition Park in LA’s south central district.

Anyway, the point of this real estate tour is not about personal nostalgia.

It is about the fact that sports venues, however revered—like our own Rizal Memorial Sports Complex—outlive their purpose. They have to give way to state-of-the art facilities craved by athletes and fans alike.

But the world will long remember that it was at the Sports Arena in the summer of 1960 where John F. Kennedy got the Democratic nomination. He later walked to the Coliseum for his immortal “New Frontier” acceptance speech.

It was at the Sports Arena where the Los Angeles Lakers and a playmaker named Jerry West played their home games after moving west from Minneapolis.

It was there where the 1963 NBA All-Star Game, and the 1968 and 1972 Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament were held.

It was there where the United States lorded over the boxing tournament in the 1984 Olympics because the Russians and the Cubans boycotted the LA Games.

It was there where Bruce Springsteen and Madonna used to rock ‘em and where Muhammad Ali rocked ageing fighter Archie Moore.

It was there in 1982 where Ferdinand E. Marcos made his last hurrah to the LA Filipino community—the largest outside of the Philippines—before his ouster by “People Power” in 1986.

It was there in 1993 where then newly elected President Fidel V. Ramos urged strong ties between the Philippines and the US, a mere two years after American armed forces were booted out of our shores.

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Admirers and bashers of Imelda R. Marcos will find a new coffee table book interesting.

“Imelda” is a collection of mostly unpublished photographs of the former first lady by veteran lensman Emmanuel “Jolly” Riofrir, a swashbuckling sports cameraman in his younger days.

Riofrir, now based in LA, followed Imelda as a government photog and videographer from 1974-84. The book is available via the publisher’s website at www.emmaliebooksinc.com