Sale of Pauley Pavilion seats offers fans, alumni a nostalgic connection to tradition
Courtesy of Lisa Perez
By Samantha Masunaga
Sept. 16, 2011 4:38 p.m.
Concrete campouts before basketball games summed up a huge part of Greg Burcham’s experience as a UCLA student.
He remembers lining up near Pauley Pavilion and writing his name on a slip of paper to get a priority number for sideline seats.
He can rattle off the names of the players he watched: Tracy Murray, the now-retired basketball star who played for the Washington Wizards and the Los Angeles Lakers after leaving Westwood, and his teammate Darrick Martin, who played for Continental Basketball Association teams before landing a spot on the Harlem Globetrotters.
Beyond the typical fan memories, Burcham, a 1991 alumnus, also recalls a more personal aspect of the iconic Pauley Pavilion. It was the site of his Biology 7 final, where he looked at the championship banners around him and knew he had dominated the test. It was the place where he had played intramural games.
So when he heard that seats from Pauley were available for purchase, he knew he wanted a pair for himself.
“It’s cliche when people say college is the best time of your life, but it was,” Burchman said. “The further you get away from school, the more important things like that are. I think (the seats are a) good investment.”
But with a price tag of $479, he just needs to convince his wife of the same thing.
Pairs of seats from Pauley Pavilion have been on sale online and at the UCLA Store for the past month, as the arena undergoes renovation until fall 2012. Seat sales were motivated by fan interest, said Cynthia Holmes, Associated Students UCLA director of trademarks and licensing.
The seats are interconnected and come in pairs of blue or gold. The chairs also have a commemorative plaque for authentication that identifies the era of the seats, which were in Pauley from 1965 to 2011, she said.
Holmes said the seats were carefully taken out of the arena and refurbished ““ but not re-covered, since that would diminish the historical component.
“It’s been a tremendous amount of work,” she said. “You don’t do this kind of work with any old stadium.”
The practice is not uncommon. Other stadiums such as Yankee Stadium have had similar sales in the past.
So far, more than 120 pairs of chairs have been sold or ordered, Holmes said.
Profits from the sales will help offset the Pauley renovation cost, and a portion will also go back to the UCLA Store, said Patrick Healey, director of apparel and accessories at ASUCLA.
Both Healey and Serengeti Enterprises, the company that oversaw the seat refurbishment, would not comment on the price of the restoration.
However, Healey said the $479 seat price covers the cost of the seat cleaning, refurbishment and creation of legs for the chairs, which had been mounted on the floor in Pauley.
The offer will continue on a rolling basis, and additional marketing will be done at football and basketball games, Holmes said. There were about 3,000 seat pairs available for retail.
In spite of the price, Burcham said the sales were a good way to reach out to alumni ““ especially in light of several business decisions with which the fans have disagreed, such as the move to take students off the sidelines at games or the Pauley renovation plan.
“It was frustrating from a fan, donor and alumni standpoint,” he said of the previous decisions. “To see them do something like (the seats), which offers something positive to alumni and connects with tradition, was a really good idea.”
