The best home-court advantage in the Big East is a cozy on-campus arena that sends most visitors home with two headaches: one from the noise and the other from the score.
Villanova owns a record of277-61 in the6,500-seat Pavilion, which opened in 1986. That includesa whopping 146-19 mark since head coach Jay Wright took the reins in 2001. The Wildcats have won 34 straight theredating to February 2013.
Seton Hall knows it well. The Pirates are 0-13 there since 1994, with an average loss margin of 15 points. Only two of the current players were alive when Bryan Caver led the Hall past Kerry Kittles and company in P.J. Carlesimo’s final season.
With the Pirates giving it another shot Wednesday at 7 p.m.-- both teams are 12-2 overall and 2-0 in the Big East, although 11th-ranked Villanova is a significant favorite-- an interesting question comes to mind. Could Seton Hall ever have renovated Walsh Gym to become its very own Pavilion?
“I asked the questions, and other people asked the question over the years,” said Larry Keating, the athletics director at Seton Hall from 1985-1997. “It always got answered right away.”
The answer was no, and the reasons behind that answer shed light on the complicated life of a university with limited space.
Parking problem
For starters, there’s the roof. A jewel of the east when it opened in 1940, Walsh’s roof was constructed with “a very unique architectural design” and could not simply be raised or redone, said Keating, who now is aspecial assistant to the athletics director at Kansas.
Then there’s parking. During Keating’s tenure, the campus underwent major development, including new dormitories and what is now called the Richie Regan Recreation Center. But increasing Walsh from its old size of 3,200 seats to, say, 6,000 would have required a virtual doubling of available parking spaces.
“If you blew it up to 6,000, you could never get the parking approved by the town,” Keating said.
The Village of South Orange has butted heads with Seton Hall forever, at one point even shooting down the seemingly innocuous acquisition of an adjacent home to house the school’s ROTC program.
“There’s a (parking space) ratio you have to abide by. I remember counting spaces around Walsh and making them six inches smaller to get 10 more spaces,” Keating said, referring to a smaller-scale renovation. “We put a 10-foot satellite dish way in the back corner by Walsh, and we had to take two parking spaces for it. That was an issue. It was, ‘Why are you taking two parking spaces?’”
The mystery land
There was only one potential path to the Walsh expansion dreams: Ivy Hill Park. At some point, in the early 20th century, the land behind Seton Hall was owned by either South Orange, Seton Hall or the Archdiocese of Newark. The details of this transaction seems to have been lost to history; even Seton Hall archivist Alan Delozier isunable to zero in on it.
According to published materials, the City of Newark sold the 18 acres to the Essex County Parks Commission in 1927.
“We had questions about that, but it was something that couldn’t be done,” Keating said. “They were not going to give that land up for parking or a building. That’s another one of those things that never got past asking the question.”
Hypothetically, even with the land, “you don’t have the access points, getting cars in and out,” said former Gov. Richard Codey, who knows Essex County and Seton Hall better than anyone.
For Seton Hall, a win and a lesson vs. DePaul
Walsh stories
So when fans poured in to see if Nick Werkman would score 50 points on a given night in the 1960s, or watch Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin or Pearl Washington light up Big East games in the early-mid 1980s, or check out the Pirates'Final Four-bound team four times in 1988-89 (including a 26-point romp of Rutgers), Seton Hall got creative.
Codey joked about taking the fire marshal out to dinner so extra students could be jammed near the opposing bench. Keating said the building’s official capacity, as it shrunk due to subsequent renovations, was listed with a wink and a nod. It seats a legitimate 1,800 now, and the placeis quite nice for practice and small-event purposes, but thebig games of yoreare a thing of the past.
Longtime Star-Ledger basketball writer Tom Luicci, now senior director of digital media at Rutgers, said Walsh used to beso cramped that reporters worked in the athletic director’s office after games.
Former Villanova player Whitey Rigsby, who has been the Wildcats’ radio voice since 1980, said the Nova-Hall battles of the mid-1970s were so claustrophobic andtense that one devolved into a brawl broken up by state troopers.
“Walsh was a gym. That’s what I grew up playing in-- gyms,” Rigsby said. “That’s the way the game was meant to be played, with people all around you. It was intimidating to go play there, just like it was for them to come play in our Field House.”
5 thoughts, 5 quotes from Seton Hall's win over DePaul
Nothing like a gym
The old Villanova Field House is a Walsh clone, stage and all. It’s used by other sports now. The Pavilion, meanwhile, is inline for a renovation.Rigsbyhopes the massive student section will be moved 15 feet closer to the baseline-- other possibilities includeputting students onboth baselines or the sideline--but he does not expect the capacity to change.
Rigsby said the old joke is that the Pavilion has 6,501 seats --“the one seat would be for a township employee who could make sure there’s not 6,502.”
The reality is, Villanova has the best of both worlds: big-ticket games at theWells Fargo Center in Philadelphia and a cozy campus gym to rattle the heck out of everyone else.
“I played in Madison Square Garden, and I played in the Spectrum,” Rigsby said, “but there’s nothing like playing in a gym.”
Staff writer Jerry Carino: jcarino@gannettnj.com.
