Seven years after its opening, Boston's FleetCenter remains among the most innovative and best run facilities of its kind in the world. Not that it was easy to replace the memorable Boston Garden, once considered hallowed ground by Boston sports fans. But the $160 million FleetCenter, which was built with virtually no public tax dollars (an amazing accomplishment in this day and age), has more than met the challenge, with bookings for more than 200 days each year.

--Ruling group Delaware North’s opening statement about the Fleet Center

I’ve been a fan of NBA basketball for as long as I can remember. I have family photos of me as a toddler, awkwardly holding one of those orange Nerf balls above a miniature plastic hoop taped to a chair. When I outgrew the living room my dad set up a 7’ high basket with a rainbow painted backboard in our unusually high-ceilinged garage, a safe haven from the winter elements in Aurora, Colorado. To this day, the first thing I think about whenever I enter a room with high ceilings (church, warehouse, the Denver airport) is that it would be an ideal place to put a basketball hoop.

My early love of playing the game eventually made me into a pro basketball fan. For the past eight years of my life I’ve felt fortunate to live in Cambridge, just a short train ride to the Boston Celtics arena and an escape into NBA reverie. But eight years ago, the fabled Boston Garden became the Fleet Center after the bank purchased the naming rights, a trend indicative of the increasing corporate stranglehold on the game I’d been nurtured to love. Recently, Bank of America bought out Fleet Bank and dropped the rights to name the stadium (valued at $4 million per year), so without a buyer, the arena’s owning group, Delaware North, has run auctions on Ebay for the right to name the center for a day.

So far this has been a lot of fun—an irreverent Yankee fan tried to have the center renamed “The Derek Jeter Center” after the Bronx Bombers’ star shortstop—but the most edgy/funny ideas (“Derek Jeter Center” included) have been nixed by the cautious Delaware North overseers. In general, individuals have named it after other individuals, and smaller corporations have named it after themselves or their websites. Today, on February 27, 2005, the locale formerly known as the Fleet Center is the Nocturnal Nannies Arena, a service that hires out overnight nannies for out-of-town parents. The most expensive auction was the first available date, February 16, won by the Golden Palace Casino for $35,000. That night, the Celtics played the Memphis Grizzlies in the GoldenPalace.com Center.

Maybe the gaming connection is appropriate; an NBA basketball arena is somewhat like a casino. There are no windows, no clocks (except for those pertaining to the game itself), bright, flashy lights competing for your attention, expensive food, and the overwhelming sense of goodness for a win, and badness for a loss. Like most entertainment activities, NBA basketball games are fantasy escapes from our daily lives; events where we can ride the coattails of our team of superhumans. There is an adrenaline rush in this out of body experience akin, I imagine, to rolling the dice on a craps table or pulling the lever at a slot machine. For true believers in the game or the gambling, there is something magical about this moment. Or if not magical, at least there is something at stake.
I, however, am too risk-averse to enjoy gambling. The one time I went to a casino, oddly enough, was to watch a pre-season basketball game between the Washington Wizards and Boston Celtics. It was the year that Michael Jordan made his second comeback, and the first time I had the chance to see him play as a Wizard. I went with some friends who were more interested in Mohegan Sun’s poker tables than the game, so I understood that most of my night post-basketball would be spent wandering around and counting light bulbs.

Though Jordan was less than spectacular on the court (at 39 years old, his knees didn’t have the spring of earlier days), he was amazing in the hours afterwards, presiding over a roped-off Blackjack table where games played for $10,000 a hand. A single game of Blackjack takes a minute or two, so I guessed that around $50,000 per player changed hands every hour. I had heard that Jordan loved to gamble (in my favorite story, he’d cheated in a game of Go Fish with his college teammate’s mother), but I had never before seen his habit in action. So I staked out a 25-cent slot machine with a good view of Jordan and his entourage of very tall men (which, initially, included a number of other players on both the Celtics and Wizards) and popped a quarter into the machine every few minutes when the security guard walked by.

Jordan played for the long haul, chewing on a cigar and keeping his cool. His posture had the same, confident-bordering-on-arrogant air that he exuded on court, a kind of deep absorption in the game that optimized his capacity to compete, even against the impossible odds of casino blackjack. He was the quiet king, and his minions played the game at his price or watched. Celtics star Antoine Walker, a native of Chicago who entered the fray, was much more vocal, shouting “Show me the bread and cheese!” when he won a hand.

Meanwhile, I was trying to master the art of slow play on the slot machine, hoping that my $10 investment in quarters would last the night. This was actually kind of difficult; I found myself smug and satisfied when I won, but impatient for the next game when I (more frequently) lost. I could feel myself slipping into a realm where I could brainlessly feed in more quarters, believing that I had some measure of control over the lever, that if I just played a bit more, I would get better at the game and my fortunes would start to change. I tried varying the vigor with which I pulled the electronic slot handle, moving to the adjacent machine, lengthening the amount of time that passed between quarter insertion and handle pull. Sometimes, these techniques seemed to work, but my cup full of quarters nonetheless dwindled. By around 3 A.M., I was very bored and down nearly $7.

At 6:30 AM, Jordan still going strong, my friends finally agreed to leave the poker hall. We gave a parting look to the high stakes blackjack table, Jordan and Walker the last remaining players, then headed for the door. Walker rested his head in his enormous hand, back slumped and eyes half closed, struggling to stay the course with his childhood idol, even if it cost him sleep, bread, and cheese. I sympathized. In the end, I had only lost $3 at the slot machines, but had blown $20 on drinks at the bar. My four friends, collectively, lost around $800, so I volunteered to pay for tolls on the way back, grateful to leave the ugly commerce of the casino behind.

My night at Mohegan Sun was the beginning of my disinterest in attending NBA games. The business element of basketball confronts the fan at the live game in a much more intrusive way than in the living room of the television viewer. Inside the arena, the fan loses control of his visual and aural environment; his couch, mute button, and hanging fern are supplanted by a techno drumbeat and giant billboard for the latest penis enhancing wonder-drug. In my mind, the advertising show has eclipsed the basketball, and the casino-like spectacle of dancing lights just isn’t enjoyable anymore. Like television programs, the Celtics’ basketball games have eliminated dead air space, cramming each timeout with corporate sponsored “money grabs” or trivia questions. The proven success of public image-based advertising (rather than that driven by product function) has made the socially relished sphere of the professional basketball game an attractive locale for a wide range of companies, and Delaware North, like almost all stadium owning groups, has happily obliged the takeover.

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