Pechanga Arena

The arena you're passing, now called Pechanga Arena, opened in November of nineteen sixty-six as San Diego International Sports Arena. It cost six point four million dollars to build, and on opening night more than eleven thousand fans watched the San Diego Gulls hockey club defeat the Seattle Totems in a Western Hockey League game. The place was barely dry and already packed.

What followed was a half-century of San Diego sports history compressed into one aging building. The San Diego Rockets arrived as an NBA expansion franchise in nineteen sixty-seven, played four seasons here, then relocated to Houston, where they became the franchise that would eventually win back-to-back championships with Hakeem Olajuwon. The San Diego Clippers of the NBA came along in nineteen seventy-eight, played six seasons in the arena, then departed for Los Angeles in nineteen eighty-four, where they remain.

In between there were American Basketball Association teams, the Conquistadors and the short-lived Sails, and across all those years the San Diego Gulls kept coming back in various incarnations and leagues, most recently as a member of the American Hockey League. The arena also hosted the nineteen seventy-one NBA All-Star Game and the nineteen seventy-five NCAA men's basketball Final Four, where John Wooden coached his final game and UCLA won its tenth national championship.

The building has cycled through five different names over its history, a common fate for arenas whose naming rights outlast the corporate sponsors who buy them. It is overdue for replacement. The city's Midway Rising redevelopment plan envisions a new arena in the surrounding district, but Pechanga Arena has in the meantime received a local historic designation, an acknowledgment that six decades of professional sports, concerts, and arena spectacles leave a mark worth remembering, even on a building this unglamorous.