Arena has seen it all
Editor’s note: As we wait for the sports world to return, we’re occasionally looking back at some of our favorite Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press stories. This story ran in The Pilot in 2018. To catch up on stories in this series, visit pilotonline.com or dailypress.com and search “Our Greatest Hits.”
— Jami Frankenberry, sports editor
NORFOLK — Elvis Presley got all shook up at the old Norfolk Arena. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached there on civil rights, and Richard Nixon raised his arms in a victory salute before 7,000 screaming adherents during the 1968 presidential campaign.
Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice, spoke on racial justice at the arena. Conversely, American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell filled the building with his hate.
Yet, the Norfolk Arena was hardly just a place for serious endeavors. Entertainers, singers, beauty queens and bands by the hundreds performed there, as did
some pretty impressive basketball teams.
It’s where William & Mary upset Jerry West and nationally ranked West Virginia, and the Globetrotters beat up on opponents. NBA teams played exhibition games, and Virginia, Virginia Tech, Navy and Old Dominion had regular-season contests.
Odds are, you’ve never heard of the arena or paid it any attention if you passed it on Granby Street in Ghent. It’s an unimpressive, anonymous, gray building without any sign hinting at its past.
But its walls ooze with history.
The 75-year-old facility, which held 3,200 fans for basketball, was the first major venue for indoor sports in Tidewater, and during its three decades of prime-time use, was a cool place to watch a show or a game.
John Rhamstine, who heads Norfolk’s Seven Venues, took me on a tour of the building a few days ago. It was my first time there in more than 35 years, and it has little of the glitz I remember as a kid.
It serves as a construction area for the Virginia Opera, which plays at the Harrison Opera House on the opposite end of the building.
The portable bleachers on both sides are long gone, the wooden chairback seats in the balconies filled with boxes and staging equipment. Saws, tables and cases holding paint cans used on opera sets are all over the floor.
None of that dampens the memories many have of the arena.
“It had so much character,” said former Maryland basketball coach Lefty Driesell, who played and coached there in high school and brought his Terrapins back to his hometown.
“And the fans made so much noise. It was such a great place to coach and play.”
Mike Head was a 12-yearold living in what was then Norfolk County in 1962 when his mother took him to see Gary U.S. Bonds, a rock ‘n’ roll star from Norfolk, play a sold-out midnight show.
Head later played basketball for Great Bridge High and said walking into the arena then was as big as playing at Scope is now.
“You could smell the popcorn as soon as you walked in,” said Head, the basketball coach at First Flight High School in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. “It was as big an arena as there was back then. It was special. It was just the best.”
The Norfolk Municipal Auditorium, as it was officially called, and the accompanying Center Theater were conceived in 1941, after Norfolk’s population doubled in three years as the nation prepared for World War II.
Officials decided Norfolk needed an entertainment center for sailors, soldiers and Marines. It cost a little more than $500,000, with the city and federal government each paying about half. It was completed in 1943, and early on, it hosted a war-bond drive that netted $700,000.
The arena hosted more than 150 events a year in its heyday, a list that included Katherine Hepburn, Jimmy Dorsey, James Brown, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and the rock band The Animals. By the mid-1960s, six million fans had paid their way into the facility.
It also hosted seminal events in the battle for civil rights. Henry Wallace, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president during his first term, came to speak at the arena in 1947 and demanded that the audience be integrated. City officials insisted Jim Crow laws be enforced.
That led to a bit of a showdown.
“If the officers of the law will not allow us to continue our meeting here, we will walk into the streets and hold our meeting there,” said Dr. Clark Foreman, president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
The police quietly stepped back, and for one night, Jim Crow was ignored.
Nearly two decades later, WNOR radio sponsored “sock hop” dances that were patterned after the “American Bandstand” TV show. It was the mid-1960s, yet Zeke Avery, then a teenager, said “they had black and white teenagers dancing on the same floor. That was something unheard of at the time.”
Avery would later win two state championships coaching basketball at Booker T Washington.
Former Maury basketball coach Jack Baker played and coached at the arena, and recalls the 1969, three-game series between Booker T. and Maury as the best in his memory. The schools had never played before, and both were led by superstars.
Booker T.‘s Roy Ebron went on to star at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now LouisianaLafayette) and played briefly in the American Basketball Association. Maury’s Craig Lieder later helped lead Virginia Tech to a National Invitation Tournament title.
Maury won two of those three games, including the first, in which Baker scored 33 points. “Booker T. was all over Craig Lieder and left me open,” he said.
It was a game I desperately wanted to see, but I was one of the thousands left waiting in line as the last tickets were sold. My two brothers and I waited in a cold, driving rain for our mom to come pick us up.
The arena’s best year may have been 1963, when eight events sold out in just 10 days. Thousands of wrestling fans who turned out on a Thursday night — wrestling night in Norfolk — could not get in. Many protested.
That led the city to commission a study whether to expand the arena to nearly 6,000 seats. The committee instead recommended building a new arena, which eventually led to the construction of Scope.
In 1972, shortly after Scope opened, the arena officially shut its doors. It would host high school games here and there, but its days as a popular venue were over.
Seeing the arena again after so many years was a sad and happy day for me. Sad because of its deteriorated state, but happy for the memories it rekindled.
When I closed my eyes, I could almost smell the popcorn.