My brush with Rush

My brush with Rush Limbaugh happened around 1986. I was working for the Sacramento Sports Association as the architect of the second ARCO Arena for the Sacramento Kings.

I had designed the temporary arena two years earlier and was asked to stay on staff while we used the temporary venue as a prototype. The temporary arena was conceived and built under tight security as the Kings had one more season in Kansas City. No one in Missouri believed the rumors that an arena was being built in Sacramento. Fifteen months elapsed between the purchase of the team and the opening night with 11,000 fans walking through the turnstiles.

The Kings left Kansas City the night of the last game of the season. The trucks emptied their contents in the warehouse next to my office. The Kings’ front office had some files and a few pieces of training equipment. I discovered a mound of old game film and a few promotional props in the warehouse space. I was very surprised at how lightly an NBA team can travel.

My quiet warehouse workspace was across the street from the temporary arena construction site. The team front office moved into my space the next morning and life got very crowded.

As you can imagine, the news media was begging for information. I was halfway through the construction of the temporary building. The 11,000 tickets were sold. The phone would ring every 10 minutes with some reporter wanting an update on the construction progress.

I had no experience with the media and would give a quick answer to get them to go away. The owners would call the next day to let me know how much damage I had caused by talking to the reporters. After a while, I learned everyone in the front office got the same call as me and on the same daily schedule.

In the swirl of people who followed the team from Kansas City were two “disc jockeys.” One, named Johnny Dolan, asked for a job as the courtside announcer and was hired. The other, named Rush Limbaugh, breezed through our office and breezed right back out.

Later I learned he decided to pitch an idea to the media market bastion KFBK AM instead of hanging around waiting for a job to appear.

This was the 1980s and AM radio was dying. FM was the high definition sound of the day. KFBK was eventually named as the official Kings’ station for the first 82-game season. That took care of the evening programming slot but the morning time needed local people at the microphone. This is where Rush stepped in and took no prisoners. KFBK’s listenership swelled to new heights and the station was saved.

The temporary arena was finished on time. The Kings were the darlings of the NBA with huge revenues in this new market. Now I had to replace the temporary building with a 17,000-seat building to meet the conditions of the NBA relocation. I spent the next two years drawing ARCO II by hand.

The ultimate goal, as with all sports venues, is to get the surrounding properties developed. The team owners had 117 acres within the city limits targeted for ARCO II and a MLB stadium circled by a ring of commercial space.

The new team owners were old Sacramento businessmen. They had burned a lot of bridges with the city in their development ventures. The City of Sacramento was officially in opposition to the NBA franchise’s move from Kansas City as retribution for the owner’s previous transgressions. Asking for permission to build needed to be handled delicately.

I had enough of the plans ready to ask for zoning permission and the date was set to present the design to a hostile city council. Team manager Joe Axelson (who also managed the team in Kansas City) suggested Rush do the job. Understandably, I was a little resentful. By this time Rush had developed a huge audience in Sacramento.

No one asked me to brief him. There was no way he could know the intricacies of what I had designed. I printed a set of the drawings and left them at my front desk for Rush.

One week later Rush stepped to the podium and delivered a flawless description of the design. His facts were accurate. He highlighted the features that would define the arena as unique and, to my surprise, he listed several details that only I knew about. He was in perfect pitch and closed the deal.

After the council voted its approval, the owners gathered the staff at a watering hole to celebrate. Rush was standing at the end of the owner’s table taking a bow. I made a point to approach him to express my thanks for his glowing review of the building. I did not introduce myself. He must have assumed I was a fan of his radio show.

I put my hand out and said, “Rush, you stole my act.”

He never let me say the next sentence.

He fired back with, “I steal no one’s act!”

He turned and would not speak to me the rest of the evening.

I listened to his show with a new appreciation after that night. He got things correct whether you liked it or not. I wrote to him in the 1990s to assure him my accusation was a preamble to high praise that evening. He never wrote back.

His on-air persona was like an early television pro wrestler. He was the Gorgeous George of radio. He was brittle. You loved him or you hated him but there was no ignoring him.

Architect Rann Haight of Coeur d'Alene is almost as well-known for designing sports facilities in Sacramento as he is for his daily contribution to The Press — a beautifully drawn feature called "Tomorrow is..."