Welts pours longtime love of NBA, experience into new arena
SAN FRANCISCO — Standing in the rain seven stories above concrete, construction workers, steel and mud, Rick Welts is beaming at an arena project that is absolutely his baby.
“It’s real,” Welts says, wearing a bright yellow jacket and hard hat for the work site tour. “It’s happening.”
After years in the making, too.
The chief operating officer of the Golden State Warriors has been entrusted by team owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber to be the unofficial foreman as Chase Center goes up in the Mission Bay district of San Francisco for a scheduled opening of late summer 2019. The goal is to build one of the top entertainment venues in the world, right up with The O2 in London and Madison Square Garden for attracting the best music shows.
Welts has been an NBA junkie since his early days growing up in Seattle, where he got his start as a Supersonics ball boy at 16. Later, he got the keys to the Seattle Center Coliseum and, specifically, the laundry room.
Welts, who turned 65 in January and is the first openly gay NBA executive, can lean not only on that time with the Sonics but also his experience in the league office and with the Phoenix Suns to see what things work and don’t work when it comes to running a franchise and building an arena.
“I know his experience in the league and the league office has helped him immensely in understanding the business and how to operate a franchise,” Golden State coach Steve Kerr says. “But you can learn all that stuff, you have to have the personal skills to make everything function. I think that’s where Rick really has it. It’s a combination of his vast NBA experience and just his humanity and his way with people.”
There have been more meetings than Welts can count, and when the number 500 is thrown out as a guess, even that seems low to him.
“That was just last week,” he jokes.
“And getting it done in San Francisco? Mission impossible, right? And it’s happening,” Welts notes. While he’s not spending his own money, his name has been signed to many a big check in this process.
The arena will be topped out in steel by August and have a roof by Halloween if all continues to go on schedule. A tad superstitious at times, Welts will knock his fist on a metal beam if necessary to keep it all on track.
Far below his initial vantage point, Welts stands in the slick mud at what eventually will become center court. He points to the side that will be a theater entrance — so well thought out that those patrons arriving for a play won’t necessarily know otherwise that they’re inside a basketball arena.
“There’s nothing like actually seeing it,” he says, “it brings it to life.”
Sure, Welts takes a lot of pride in watching the arena get built, but quickly makes it clear, “We all do.”
“I go down there two or three days a week, just to look,” he says, grinning. “It’s inspiring.”