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At my age, you shouldn’t get too nostalgic about the end of the Spectrum. After all, Uncle Nunzio has ties older than the place. Incidentally, the Flyers once handed out ties as a gimmicky fan giveaway because their games so often ended in ties. No matter, there are good reasons to mourn the passing of the Spectrum.
We attended the very first event there Sept. 30, 1967. Ironically, it was not a sports event, but the Quaker City Jazz Festival. Despite massive doses of ginkgo biloba, I can’t remember exactly who performed. I’m guessing it was Miles Davis and Nina Simone, but that may have been another concert five years later. My wife of 45 years doesn’t remember either. There are certain benefits to being married to a woman whose memory is at least as bad as your own. For instance, the sex is always better when you keep thinking it’s the first time. But I digress.
I do remember on the first night everything was sparkling-new and workmen were frantically trying to get all of the seats in as we entered.
We wound up seeing a number of great concerts at the Spectrum over the years. It was an innocent time before StubHub and seats cost a second mortgage. The night we saw Bob Dylan with The Band they were passing a funny little cigarette down our aisle. We passed it on without partaking, but the fumes were enough to get novices like us a little high.
We saw Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young right after those students were shot at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard during an antiwar protest. CSN&Y; sang "Ohio" and we knew, though our world was coming apart, we still had the music. We also saw The Who perform its rock opera "Tommy" and The Kinks sing "Celluloid Heroes." There was Jethro Tull and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but the highlight was the first time my son and I saw The Boss over an incredible four hours. I was reborn during that Bruce Springsteen concert and forever became a fan.
We saw Frank Sinatra a number of times, once with Ella Fitzgerald (the only time I have purchased tickets from a scalper). We also saw Ol’ Blue Eyes with Woody Herman’s Herd in ’68. It was a benefit concert for presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, who wound up losing to Richard Nixon. The last time we saw Frank was when we sadly watched him stumble through the lyrics with Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli gently trying to help him through it. We even saw the great Luciano Pavarotti perform at the Spectrum.
We went to the very first Flyers game ever — a 1-0 victory over the Penguins — where center ice seats cost exactly $5. I wrote a column about that game that almost got me fired from this newspaper. Little did I know the previous owner of the Review had a feud going with Ed Snider and didn’t want me giving free publicity to his team.
"Hockey will never make it in this town," he told me and I never wrote another column about the Flyers.
It was a time when a bunch of Canadian hockey players who lived in Cherry Hill, N.J., would get all fired up when Kate Smith sang "God Bless America."
There were the memorable Sixers games, the championship run, the last days of Billy Cunningham in uniform, Doc (Julius Erving) and Moses (Malone) and the irrepressible Charles Barkley. The game I’ll always remember was the night Duke beat Kentucky in the ’92 NCAA Tournament on a last-second shot by Christian Laettner. We also got to see Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers win the ’81 NCAA National Championship.
The Spectrum was a place visiting teams feared. The atmosphere was electric, less corporate, more about the real fans. It was a time when the roof blew off during a storm, adding another chapter to its colorful history. It was at once a marvelous palace and an intimate place — the crown jewel of sports arenas, and it was in Philly and, boy, were we proud. The building carried with it the promise a new era was beginning for the city, one that would wash away the old jokes and bring us the glory we felt we deserved. It was big league all the way, baby.
We thought the Spectrum would be around forever, the seats would never get tattered, it would always be state-of-the-art. We thought that way because we knew our own youth would last forever.
We know better now. Our youth is a distant memory. The Spectrum is considered hopelessly out of date. Time moves on.
But the old gal sure gave us a helluva ride.
