Monday, March 27, 2000

By ART THIEL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

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You can read about grand and glorious moments in the Kingdome elsewhere. It's the little memories that are pebbles in my mental shoe:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a man of regal bearing, shivered under a blanket draped around him, bag-ladylike, on the Los Angeles Lakers bench. When the Sonics played in the Kingdome from 1978 to 1984, cold air was often sucked into the building through the ground-level entrances and then settled on the floor. Long before the idea was hip, NBA players were seriously chillin'.

In the basketball configuration for the 1989 Final Four, press floor seating was on 2-foot risers opposite the team benches. I took an unmarked space on the riser corner, but as I pulled up the chair to sit, I failed to notice the left legs were off the edge.

As my feet soared over my head, I grabbed the corner of the table, jamming it against the abdomens of my colleagues. I let go, crashed to the floor and sprawled upon my back.

Not caring a bit about my condition, my colleagues and a number of nearby fans applauded. My lone Kingdome ovation.

Still waiting for the remaining 14 minutes, 45 seconds of fame that Andy Warhol promised.

A former P-I sportswriter new to the Kingdome was the last guy out of the press box after a Mariners game. He couldn't find the one turnstile exit on the southwest corner that was always open, nor could he find a single security person. He started shouting, but it was late, not to mention cold and dark.

What he did find was the only guaranteed way to end the loneliness. He pulled the fire alarm.

The fire crew was not happy. Kingdome security was not happy. A P-I boss was not happy. But what was he going to do until daylight? Eat Kingdome food?

After a session of the 1995 Final Four, I walked toward the same exit only to find it unusable. Someone was in it. Stuck.

The cagelike, exit-only turnstile had trapped a college band member and his large instrument case. He was so wedged that no movement was possible. He had been laughing along with his band mates for a while, but most of them had drifted off. He said that someone had gone to fetch a maintenance person, but as I left I told him the last person that happened to had to be removed rib by femur. He started to laugh, then stopped.

I bought a house in the Kingdome. At a home show years ago, I came across a log-house company from my hometown in Montana. After talking with the company owner, I found out he was a shirt-tail relative. After he gave me a family discount, I bought the package and have lived in the place happily ever after.

Dunno what kind of house I would have had if he sold composters.

The late, great P-I sports editor and columnist Royal Brougham was carried out of the Kingdome at halftime of a 1978 Seahawks exhibition game and died a short while later at age 84.

Though some saw it as poignantly appropriate for a veteran scribe, I dreaded the prospect. But I didn't dream that the Kingdome would take the pressure off the nightmare of dying in the press box by beating me, as it were, to death. (Dying in print . . . that's another story.)

As a rookie reporter for the then-Bellevue Journal-American, I was assigned to the first Seahawks exhibition game. I walked into America's coolest new stadium enthralled with the greenness of the turf, the enormity of the roof and the noise and spectacle.

This, I thought, will last forever.

Who knew forever came with a 20-year warranty?