If all the reports coming out of Eugene are true, the Oregon basketball coach has already been told he’s out at the conclusion of the season.

My question is, “Why?”

No, not “Why is he out?” — he’s earned that the old fashioned way: by losing a lot of games. Home games, at that. But the more pertinent question is “Why now?” Why wouldn’t you wait until the end of the season?

There is a possibility, particularly with the parity in the talentless Pac-10, that the guy could win the conference tournament. Yes, a remote possibility — but it could happen. And if you’re going to fire him before the season ends, why not just hand him a gold watch and send him on his way immediately and let the assistant coaches guide the team the rest of the way?

I dunno. I have no idea what’s going on.

I will make a prediction here, though. Nike is going to have a hand in hiring the next coach and trust me, that company — oh, you ought to hear the stories about the wonderful off-season trips it sends its basketball coaches on — has all kinds of muscle with top coaches around the country.

I would expect the next Duck basketball coach to be a very accomplished coach, an experienced winner on the Division I level and someone whose name alone will help sell tickets and sponsorships in that new arena.

Anything less would be a disappointment.

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Tags: Dwight Jaynes, Ernie Kent, Nike, Oregon Ducks

I’m hearing a lot of grumbling from my baseball fan friends who are really disturbed that it appears the city will once again lose the Portland Beavers because PGE Park is going to be modified for soccer and football, with no further configuration for baseball. And of course, no obvious sites for local baseball relocation.

And I’m having to tell them that this time, I’m not on their side.

While I’m not a soccer fan, I understand this city’s romance with the sport. In many ways it is the perfect sport for Portland — all-inclusive, European, Yuppie, rowdy. It’s perfectly Portland, actually. And it’s an easy sport to garner fan support because there just aren’t many games. Perfect for a “mid-major” city like this one.

But the bottom line for me is real simple: Is PGE Park as a baseball venue worth fighting for? The easy answer is: No way. I was there as a little kid for the very first baseball game there, in 1956. It was poor then and it’s still not a good spot for baseball.

Yes, a lot of great players have played there. But if anybody ought to be nostalgic about the joint it’s me. I practically grew up in that place, as a batboy for the Beavers and later a clubhouse boy, pressbox boy, PA announcer, scoreboard operator, official scorer and even a director of group sales. Later, I covered the team for many seasons, starting when it returned to Portland in 1978. I do not think there are many people on the planet who have watched more games there than I have.

But I’m not feeling much of a connection there. It was always a very cold-feeling stadium and never a “ballpark.” Ever. It’s pretty much an inadequate place for baseball, from having too many seats to having way too many poor seats. The concourse is too small, the restrooms too scarce and the seats are difficult to get to. And when you get more than about 7,000 people in there, it’s a very uncomfortable place to be.

I long for a day when the citizens of Portland can have a real ballpark. Not a football stadium pretending to be ballpark, like PGE Park, which is still a venue better served as a greyhound race track than a ballpark.

But oh yeah, we don’t want to spend money in this town to build even a minor-league park. Mostly that’s because a great many people here don’t know how nice those cool new minor-league ballparks are — and what they would do to spark interest in the team.

And hey, we just remodeled old PGE Park a while back, didn’t we? Well, yes — but it was an overall catastrophe, for sure. And we have to admit that and move on. It was poorly designed and not well-thought-out — a project I will always believe should never have been chosen in the city’s request-for-proposal process — but that’s another topic for another day.

Yes, we did fund a poor stadium remodel. But it’s not as if this city has been investing a whole lot of coin in sports venues over the years. Sports fans, you’re living in a city that has NEVER, and I’m including old Vaughn Street Ballpark, funded the construction of a new baseball stadium. It has NEVER funded the building of a new football stadium.

EVER. I mean, is there another city in the world of at least moderate size that can say that? Yes, we funded Memorial Coliseum for peanuts, about half a century ago. That’s pretty much it for all of sports. And of course, the collective ego in this city dictates that a lot of people here think we’ve taken the right path in that regard — and the entire rest of the world is wrong. Yeah, sure.

In the last few years, Seattle has spent more than a billion bucks on football and baseball venues and while you heard a ton of grumbling about it at the time, you’re not hearing it now. People up there are ecstatic with what the Mariners and Seahawks and their venues have done for Seattle.

But that’s the difference between a big-league city and a bush-league town. And so don’t come at me asking to save PGE Park for baseball. I’m not down with that. We’ve lost the Beavers before — twice. And maybe being without them again will finally spark an interest in building a new ballpark. If it doesn’t, well, that’s fine by me.

I mean, really — this is Portland. And it’s about time we started holding out for something better than just the constant attempts to turn a cow’s ear into a silk purse.

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Tags: Baseball, Dwight Jaynes, MLS, PGE Park, Portland, Vaughn Street Ballpark

I got a note from a Portlander named Sean-Michael Riley a while back. There is an advisory committee taking suggestions about possible ideas for the development of the Rose Quarter and his notion is getting some traction.

Riley has proposed a roller coaster for the area — and I think it’s a pretty good idea. Yeah, I’d still like a ballpark and believe it to be the best possible use of the land, but when I got his note I remembered that Marshall Glickman and I once had a discussion about the same thing.

Marshall, who ramrodded the planning and construction of the Rose Garden for the Trail Blazers, thought a roller coaster was a fun idea to bounce around. Since I’m a coaster-rider from way back (seriously, I’ve been on some of the best in this country) I was excited.

But not just any roller coaster, please. Build the biggest, fastest, highest or longest. Or, since it tends to drizzle here a little, how about the world’s biggest covered one? Or biggest enclosed one?

Riley’s website for his vision is here and I encourage you to take a look. I mean, why not? We don’t have a serious roller coaster anywhere in the Pacific Northwest and I believe it would be a big draw. You could still have an entertainment district but the big coaster could hover above — making it an iconic image for Portland and a destination for tourists.

But maybe such out-of-the-box thinking is way too much for the folks around here?

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I sent you to the website the other day – imaginejumptown.com — but I didn’t have time to comment much. It appears that Larry Miller has gotten his old pals at Nike to buy into the thing with some sort of Nike museum. That sounds great for the area in the Rose Quarter.

But what still bothers me is the stubbornness of sticking to this “bright future for Memorial Coliseum” garbage. I realize the Trail Blazers have sold themselves on the concept that the indoor venue, the coliseum, cut down to seat 5,000 or 6,000  people, is a more viable venue than a Triple-A baseball park for bringing people into the new neighborhood.

I think they’re wrong. Yes, much of the winter the ballpark would be vacant. But that’s the time of year when the Rose Garden will be hopping. You don’t need the ballpark in the winter — you need it in the summer and spring when the Rose Garden (and Memorial Coliseum) is dark all the time.

Does Portland need a 5,000-seat arena? I don’t think so. We already have one at University of Portland’s Chiles Center. I think that size is a little too small for the Winter Hawks, who should be playing in the Rose Garden. And I think by the time you get done updating 50-year-old plumbing, wiring and structure of the old MC, you’re spending so much money you’d have been better off leveling the thing and starting all over.

It’s going to be a money pit. A big, big money pit. And when you’re done, what kind of arena will it be? Probably not much of one. Honestly, if they’re so committed to keeping the outside structure, the box, they ought to gut the inside and install the world’s biggest and fastest indoor roller coaster there. It would have a better chance of being a big attraction than that old junky arena. Seriously.

A wise baseball guy, Bill Cutler, a one-time owner of the Portland Beavers, once sighed as he watched the city of Portland first installing artificial turf on ancient then-Civic Stadium. He turned to me and smiled.

“It’s like putting silk stockings on a hog,” he said. And he was so right. But this is Portland — we just can’t bring ourselves to throw anything away here. We’re constantly recycling.

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Tags: Bill Cutler, Civic Stadium, Dwight Jaynes, JumpTown, Memorial Coliseum, Portland Trail Blazers

Here’s your link to the website. The plan also includes “a bright future for Memorial Coliseum.” That promise right there might be enough to make the project difficult to pull off.

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Tags: Dwight Jaynes, JumpTown, Portland, Rose Quarter, Trail Blazers

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this because the game itself will take more time.

The building looked as good as it’s looked in years. I give the crew over at the Memorial Coliseum a lot of credit for spiffing the place up. And I will say, leaving that black curtain open changes the look of the place on the inside.

But man it was cold in there most of the night. And having the curtain open — and by the way, the old drop-ceiling that used to be in there is now also gone — meant that the noise level in there was much lower that it used to be. Granted the fans didn’t have much to yell about, but it really wasn’t nearly as loud as it once was.

Man, the lines at the concession stands looked impossibly long and the concourse was choked,  as expected. It was fine for one game and I give everyone — coaches, players, front office, support staff, everyone — credit for going along with it.

But once was enough.

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Tags: Dwight Jaynes, Memorial Coliseum, Portland Trail Blazers

Mostly via Twitter:

–  the Blazers say they WILL leave that big black curtain down — the one that blocks out the glass on the outside walls — throughout the game. It’s the first time that’s been done in Blazer history. Must be a few architects in the house. Enjoy the view, guys. And then one more time tell me your plan for the dump.

– The game is now sold out. Be interesting to see if they wistfully call it 12,666, even though I doubt it holds that many any more.

– Portland’s wearing those “rip city” uniforms tonight.

– The replay screen will not be working. Thanks to those previous Winter Hawk owners, for buying that piece of junk. As Blazeredge Ben said, the sound you hear is those replacement refs celebrating. But oh well — they said it was a throwback game. This will be old school. Instead of a PA system they ought to get a guy with a megaphone.

– Have a great time everyone! And don’t forget to comment on the open thread about the Schonz if you’re out there listening.

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Tags: Dwight Jaynes, Memorial Coliseum, Portland Trail Blazers

My lifelong friend, Mike Clopton, and I stood on a street corner across the street from the left-field entrance to Safeco Field Thursday afternoon, getting ready to duck into a quiet little place called “Jimmy’s” where we’d watch Ian Furness do his talk show live on KJR.

The Mariners were playing a rare 3:40 game and I hesitated before ducking into the joint. On one side of me was Safeco Field, a glimmering baseball oasis on a perfect sunny afternoon. On the other side was a meeting hall and theater, attached to Qwest Field, where the Seahawks play — another most impressive structure.

The streets were alive with happy people. Families, business people ducking out on work, singles, senior citizens — people who seemed giddy about what their afternoon promised them. Even the scalpers had smiles on their faces.

What a town, man. Yes, Seattle lost its NBA team. Cry no tears — with the NFL and major-league baseball, it’s barely noticed.

When I was a kid, Seattle and Portland were heated rivals in just about every way. They had the Rainiers in the Pacific Coast League fighting our Beavers and the Totems in the Western Hockey League always losing to our Buckaroos. Those were the days.

But then the Kingdome went up and Seattle became a big-league city. While we were focusing on keeping it weird, they were concentrating on pennant races and dreaming of Super Bowls. They haven’t won a World Series or Super Bowl yet, but they are allowed to think about it every year. They paid the price of admission — in erecting beautiful public facilities that, yes, probably cost too much money.

But I hear no complaints as I stand on that corner. You never hear any around here. I see excited people headed to the ballpark to watch what turned into a honey of a game. As Mike and I alternated between great seats behind home plate, an inning in the press box and about four innings in the owner’s suite (Thanks to an all-time great guy, Randy Adamack), I couldn’t help but reflect.

Right there within a block of each other, twice as many sports facilities as the city of Portland has built since that coin toss when the little settlement on the Willamette became “Portland” rather than “Boston.”

It’s a shame we quit being Seattle’s rival. It’s a shame we didn’t dare to dream big. What fun we could have had in this town.

But I will say one thing for us. We’ve got Memorial Coliseum on the National Register of Historic Places. Those idiots up there in Seattle, who probably could have done the same thing with the Kingdome had they been smart enough, decided instead to implode it to make way for a gorgeous, state-of-the-art football stadium.

Fools. Don’t they know you’re supposed to keep old, disgusting, worn-out dumps like the Kingdome around and sink even more dough into them? I mean, that could have been an athletic club or a velodrome, right?

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Tags: Dwight Jaynes, Mike Clopton, Portland, Qwest Field, Randy Adamack, Safeco Field, Seattle

Yes, we knew this would happen. I’m sure, now that this designation has been won, all those architects who fought so hard for this will pay whatever associated costs there are for getting this whole thing done. Yeah, sure they will.

The best part of this story, by the way, is buried toward the end. It reads:

Four large concrete columns carry the building’s weight, allowing the walls to be made of glass panels. The lack of interior support gives spectators in a curved bowl a view of the outdoors.

This is the big misconception of all the fools who drive by that building all the time but don’t set foot in it for any kind of events. If you’ve been in it literally hundreds and hundreds of times, as I have, you’d know that the people in the interior bowl NEVER get a view of the outdoors. That’s because whenever there’s an event in the building, a huge black curtain is lowered that blocks out that view.

So there you have it, the thing that makes the structure so unique really doesn’t exist in the real world. But hey — we’re going to keep it alive not because of its function, anyway, but because of its style. And now the $64 million question is what the hell are we going to do to find a function for it? It’s Portland, so of course, the mayor has already set up a committee of people who don’t know much about the place to study it.

That will take money and months. And in the end, they’ll have a lot of ideas.

I believe, knowing the city the way I do, it will inevitably end up being a site for some sort of farmer’s market, flea market, street fair, bike racing track, mass transit museum. All at the same time.

And before it’s brought up to code and “repurposed,” it’s going to cost enough money to build three ballparks.

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Tags: Dwight Jaynes, Memorial Coliseum

People have been asking me, what with the Phoenix franchise in such a mess, why isn’t somebody trying to buy that team and move it to Portland?

Well first, the economic times wouldn’t dictate any more big-league teams heading to Portland. No corporate support here right now. But second, the NHL has a HUGE investment in keeping that team right where it is — in its fancy new arena out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think the league wants Portland or any other city trying to get that franchise.

That’s why the league is even willing to buy the team for a year or so, just to buy time to find an owner willing to keep the team where it is. You see, any league wants to push the myth out there that when the taxpayers fund a new arena, it not only gets them a team — it ensures they keep that team there for the long term.

Moving that hockey team now, just after the construction of a new arena, would look bad all over the league and perhaps discourage other communities from building fancy new arenas.

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Tags: Dwight Jaynes, NHL, Phoenix Coyotes, Portland