April 14, 1984: The San Diego Clippers beat the Utah Jazz, 146-128. But they finish 30-52, and miss the Playoffs.
It turns out to be the last game they ever played. In the off-season, team owner Donald Sterling moved them up the Pacific Coast to Los Angeles. San Diego has never had another NBA team, or any other indoor major league sports team, since.
Sterling bought the Clippers in 1981, on the advice of Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss, with whom he'd dealt in real estate. Even in 1982, he was ready to move the team to Los Angeles, which led to an investigation of him by the NBA. In 1984, Sterling and the league settled: Sterling would pay a $6 million fine, and be allowed to move the team.
He must have hated that, but must also have considered it the price of doing business. Certainly, he didn't like paying his players. The best one he ever had, San Diego native Bill Walton, said, "The checks bounced higher than the basketballs when Donald Sterling took over. The basketball was awful, and the business side was immoral, dishonest, corrupt and illegal. Other than that, it was all fine."
Top 5 Reasons You Can’t Blame the San Diego Clippers for Moving to Los Angeles
5. Al Davis. Sterling admitted being inspired by Davis moving the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles in 1982. The NFL tried to stop Davis, and failed. Sterling believed that if he were as steadfast in his attempt to move as Davis was in his, he would win. It wasn't pretty, and it did cost him $6 million, but he got what he wanted.
"Just do whatever the hell you want, baby.
Whatta they gonna do, huh? Sue you?"
4. The San Diego Sports Arena. It opened in 1966, and in spite of its age, this building, now named the Pechanga Arena, is considered one of the best arenas of its size in America. But it only seats 14,600 people, and that was already too small for an NBA arena. Now, with luxury suites being paramount, it would never host a new NBA or NHL team, except maybe as a stopgap facility while a new arena is built.
In addition, the location is far from ideal: While the area around it is safe, it's 5 miles northwest of downtown. If you don't have a car, you'd need to take a trolley and a bus to get there.
Oddly, Buss did not let Sterling share The Forum with the Lakers, so he rented out the even older Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Finally, in 1999, with the Staples Center (now the Crypto.com Arena) going up, Sterling made a deal with Buss for the Clippers to play there. There were still doing so when Sterling was forced to sell the team in 2014. New owner Steve Ballmer is building the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, near The Forum and SoFi Stadium, with the hopes of opening for the 2024-25 season.
3. Los Angeles. It was home to Sterling. He was born in Chicago, but he grew up in Boyle Heights, in East L.A., now an almost entirely Mexican-American neighborhood. He went to Theodore Roosevelt High School in that neighborhood. He went to Cal State-Los Angeles, and then to Southwestern University School of Law, also in L.A.
He practiced law in L.A., but soon found that the biggest way to make money in Southern California was in real estate. He bought an apartment building in Beverly Hills, and later made a killing in Westwood. If he weren't so cheap, Sterling probably could have done what the Clippers are doing now: Build them their own arena in Inglewood, next to SoFi Stadium, the new home of the Rams and the Chargers. Or he could have bought The Forum, modernized it, and moved the Clippers there.
Sterling owes his success to being a product of Los Angeles. He owed San Diego nothing.
2. Bill Walton's Injuries. For 11 months, from March 29, 1977 to February 28, 1978, the Portland Trail Blazers went 70-15, counting the Playoffs, winning the franchise's 1st (and still only) NBA Championship.
With Bill Walton at center; Maurice Lucas, Bob Gross, Corky Calhoun, Larry Steele and Lloyd Neal as forwards; and Lionel Hollins, Johnny Davis and Dave "Pinball" Twardzik as guards, the Blazers played the kind of artistic basketball that had rarely been seen: By the early 1970s New York Knicks, or maybe by one team or another in the ABA, but that was it.
But on February 28, Walton, the team's fulcrum, broke his foot. Although he returned for 2 games of the Playoffs that year, he was never the same player again, and it took the Blazers a decade to recover. He was unhappy about the way the team's medical staff handled him, and demanded a trade. They wouldn't do it, and he sat out the 1978-79 season -- not that his injury left him with another choice. His contract having run out, he signed with his hometown team, the San Diego Clippers.
But his injuries recurred. In 1979-80, Walton played only 14 games. He missed the 1980-81 season. He missed the 1981-82 season. He played 33 games in 1982-83. In other words, from February 28, 1978 to October 28, 1983, 5 1/2 years, he played only 47 of a possible 443 games -- 10.6 percent. As he said in 1981, after one of his surgeries, "Minor surgery is what they do to someone else."
He managed to get into 55 games in 1983-84. But it was too late for the team. A healthy hometown hero might have brought a sellout of 14,000 fans to the San Diego Sports Arena for every game. But without the key figure, no one wanted to spend their money to watch professional basketball.
"When you fail in your hometown, that's as bad as it gets, and I love my hometown," Walton has said. "I wish we had NBA basketball here, and we don't, because of me. It's my greatest failure as a professional in my entire life: I could not get the job done in my hometown. It is a stain and stigma on my soul that is indelible. I'll never be able to wash that off, and I carry it with me forever."
Walton's a bit hard on himself. He didn't get hurt on purpose. But if he had been healthy, maybe the Clippers would have survived in San Diego.
Bill says he loves his hometown. But maybe his hometown is the problem:
1. San Diego. With 1.4 million people, it's the 8th-biggest in the country. But its metropolitan area has just 3.3 million people. This ranks it 23rd in baseball. In the other sports, it would rank 21st in football, 20th in basketball, 20th in hockey and 19th in soccer. And that's after being double what it was 40 years ago, when the Clippers were there.
The city already lost its 1st NBA team, the Rockets, to Houston in 1971. They lost their American Basketball Association team, known first as the Conquistadors and then as the Sails, in 1975. They lost their World Hockey Association team, the San Diego Mariners, in 1977, despite making the Playoffs all 3 seasons, because they couldn't get fans to come and support a winning team.
They came very close to losing the Padres after the 1973 season, and might have lost them after 1998 without the Pennant that convinced people to vote for the appropriation that built Petco Park. Finally, in 2017, they lost the Chargers, when San Diego became the 1st city to face a team owner pointing a gun at them, and giving them Humphrey Bogart's line in Casablanca: "Go ahead, shoot, you'll be doing me a favor." The people were angry at losing the Chargers, but they blame owner Alex Spanos, not the City of San Diego or the County of San Diego. But now, the Padres are all they have left.
And you know what? They don't seem to care that much. Nearly every day, it's 80 degrees with little humidity and hardly any rain, and there's a beach in one direction and mountains in the other. There's less smog than in Los Angeles, and fewer earthquakes than in Los Angeles or San Francisco. People in San Diego like to spend their money on things other than professional sports. With a "great outdoors" like that, who needs an indoor sport where your city never really did anything anyway?
VERDICT: Not Guilty. Donald Sterling is a contemptible person, but he had little reason to keep his team in San Diego.
What he did that kept the team mediocre after he moved it is another story.
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