Greensboro Coliseum Complex

The arena beside you opened on October twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty-nine, with an ice show, and within a decade it had established itself as one of the most important sports and entertainment venues in the American South. The Greensboro Coliseum was purpose-built at a scale that few cities its size would attempt: original capacity was about seven thousand one hundred seats, large for a city its size.

College basketball found a permanent home here almost immediately. The Atlantic Coast Conference tournament has been played in Greensboro more than twenty times, and the coliseum became so closely associated with March basketball that players and coaches came to regard it as a second home. The roar of a packed house at an ACC championship game became one of the defining sounds of Carolina spring.

But perhaps the most cinematic chapter involved a franchise that no longer exists. The Carolina Cougars of the American Basketball Association arrived in nineteen sixty-nine, and they played as a true regional team, splitting home games across several Piedmont cities. Greensboro was their largest stage. In the nineteen seventy-two to seventy-three season the Cougars reached their peak: Billy Cunningham, playing the most brilliant basketball of his career, won ABA Most Valuable Player honors, and a young coach named Larry Brown was finding his footing. That team remains one of the most talented in ABA history. Within a year the franchise was sold and moved to St. Louis, and professional basketball has never returned in the same form.

The coliseum's entertainment legacy is equally striking. When Elvis Presley came through in April of nineteen seventy-two, the concert was filmed as part of the documentary Elvis on Tour, which won a Golden Globe. That footage captured a performer at the height of his powers, and Greensboro became part of his cinematic legacy.

The complex has been expanded and renovated multiple times in the decades since. The coliseum standing here today is far larger than the original, yet the bones of that nineteen fifty-nine vision remain: a city in the Piedmont that bet on itself and built something that would outlast every team that ever played here.