Indoor Sports In Los Angeles - A History

Over the last week, I tried to show the rise of USC football from on campus diversion to the city building a giant bowl, and the Rose Bowl game following the same trajectory. How that lead to a demand for professional football, and that those efforts would eventually attract the NFL. Then I tried to show for pro baseball started up in Los Angeles at the turn of the century, around the same time as the National League and American League back east, and eventually the Brooklyn Dodgers taking advantage of the market the LA Angels created (then the AL naming their LA expansion team after that minor league team).

For the final piece of the LA sports puzzle (at least as far as this series is concerned) we again turn to collegiate athletics, the rise of UCLA and USC basketball, and minor league hockey in Los Angeles. The Pacific Coast Conference started sponsoring basketball in 1915, the same time that USC returned to playing American football.

This time UCLA got the leg up on USC. I didn't even both mentioning UCLA in the football article, cause I try and ground these pieces in Los Angeles buildings, and UCLA didn't start playing at the Coliseum until 1928 when it joined the Pac conference, and didn't move to the Rose Bowl until 1982. There aren't any houses that UCLA football built. That is a bit of a disservice, as they did come up in the LA pro football article, so they obviously had an impact on LA Football, just not LA buildings. Before playing at the Coliseum, UCLA played it's home football games at Moore Field, which presumably was on the UCLA campus.

I hope I mentioned in the USC Football article that they got their name Trojans during the rugby years, before a game against Stanford. Cal and Stanford were the power schools then, enough to convince the schools around them to switch from football to rugby and back to football. Before that USC were known as the Methodists or Wesleyans, probably to distinguish themselves from the Jesuits at St. Vincents (now Loyola) or the Presbyterians at Occidental.

Anyhow, it should be no surprise that while USC got their nickname from Stanford, UCLA got theirs from Cal. As the University of California Southern Branch, UCLA played it's first year of football in 1919, and called themselves the Cubs relative to the California Bears (Cal was also known as the Bruins around this time, but it was Bears that stuck). In 1923 they started going by Grizzlies (the bear on the California flag, and where UC got it's nickname, is a Grizzly) and in 1925 they brought out a coach from the University of Minnesota to upgrade their program. In 1928, the Grizzlies were ready to join the Pac conference, but at the time Montana was a member and they were the Grizzlies. So Southern Branch, which had changed its school name to UCLA in 1927, became the UCLA Bruins in 1928.

Now the Bruin basketball program was started in 1920, one year after their football program. The Bruins won conference championships in 1921, 22, 23, 25, 26, and 27; so you can see why they wanted to join the Pac conference. They needed better basketball competition than the local schools could offer, and that also explains the efforts to beef up their football program.

However, after joining the PCC, UCLA wouldn't win another basketball title until 1945. So this is a bit of a fakeout, I just felt bad for old UCLA. Yes, in the 1920s-30s, it was USC that dominated area basketball. They won their first PCC title in 1928 and would win three more before UCLA won their first. Of course, the basketball power in the early PCC, like music to my ears, was California. The year after UCLA won their first PCC title (and a split title at that) Cal won their tenth.

USC was the dominant power in the Southern division (the PCC was split into North and South for basketball). The program was established in 1909, and after winning the South in 1928, won the division 10 times in 16 years. In 1935 LA saw the grand opening of this building:

Yes that's what all this buildup has been for, the Pan Pacific Auditorium, which opened up in 1935. The building is an example of the switch from Art Deco to Streamline Moderne, which an architect will have to explain to me. I just think it looks really cool, but it seems that Streamline was he American response to European Art Deco. Interesting. 

Why the name? LA had been hoping to host of Pan-Pacific Exposition like San Francisco had in 1915 and San Diego had in 1916. It's not simply coincidence. The Pan refers not to all like it's used now, but to Panama. The Panama canal had opened in 1914, and the port cities of SF, SD, and LA were holding these expos as an attempt to drum up shipping business.

USC used the Pan Pacific as their home from 1949-1959. UCLA never moved in permanently, but played some home games there during that same time period for games too big for the campus gym. PPA sat 6,000 for basketball, but was said to get very loud. 

Now the reason I started with the basketball programs, is because in 1959 the City of Los Angeles opened their own gym build specifically for sports, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. This shiny new arena sat 16, 161 and attracted an NBA franchise from Minneapolis, the Lakers.  

There was another sports tenant in the Pan Pacific Auditorium, and that was the Los Angeles Monarchs of the Pacific Coast Hockey League. Hockey doesn't have nearly as long of a history in Los Angeles as basketball, but it was the pro sport of choice for folk up north where it snowed. Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver had their own minor league hockey group as early as 1929. When it restarted again in 1944 (now in it's third incarnation) it included teams in LA, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Diego. In 1952, that league merged with a Canadian league to form the Western Hockey League, which like the PCL was considered a threat to the NHL, enough to make the NHL expand westward. 

The LA Monarchs didn't make it past 1950, as the PCHL decided to disband the Southern division. LA wouldn't join the WHL until 1961, with the Los Angeles Blades playing at the Sports Arena. When the NHL decided to expand into Oakland and Los Angeles in 1967, killing the LA Blades, it was the Monarchs they tried to invoke, naming their team the LA Kings. The Monarchs remain the only Los Angeles Hockey franchise to win a championship, winning the President's Cup in 1947. 

So what else happened at the Auditorium, especially before the late 40s? Ice Capades, Harlem Globetrotters, car shows, tennis matches, political rallies, it was LA's premiere indoor venue. In 1957, Elvis would have a perform at the PPA. It wasn't his first stop in LA, but the press treated it as such and as a result it's probably his most memorable LA stop. 

It took more than the Sports Arena to kill the Pan Pacific Auditorium. The Convention Center downtown, opened in 1971, took away the expo business. 

The Pan Pacific Auditorium was destroyed in a fire, but you can still see those iconic stylized towers. Disney's California Adventure currently has them above the turnstiles to get into the park. Welton Beckett was a principal architect of the PPA, and a neighbor of Walt Disney when he moved to California. It was Beckett who suggested to Disney that he use his own artists, and not an architectural firm, when he built Disneyland, which led to the eventual creation of Walt Disney Imagineering. Who knew? 

So Cal college basketball, minor league hockey, Elvis, and Disney, all in one article. Isn't slice of life history grand?