Throughout this week, thousands will flock to the BangorAuditorium, for more than 50 years the traditional home ofbasketball in eastern and northern Maine.
On the way there, they will pass the future home of basketball,the new arena now under construction and due to open in the fall of2013.
In that new arena may rest the repository of basketball historyin Maine, in the form of the proposed Maine Basketball Hall of Fame.
Basketball is the sport that Mainers have taken most to heart,yet there's no home for its history.
'There's not a town in Maine that hasn't been touched bybasketball,' said Peter Webb, who has been Maine's commissioner ofbasketball for the past 22 years. 'There's Halls of Fame foreverything, but not for the sport that's king. We want to make surethat basketball's history is preserved.'
Webb added that there's a need to gather the materials needed forthe Hall of Fame soon.
`It's vital we do it now,' he said. 'In another 10 years, what wewant to do will be much more difficult.'
Webb is one of the organizers of the Maine Basketball Hall ofFame, along with Skip Chappelle, former Fort Fairfield andUniversity of Maine coach, who as a player at Old Town High Schoolplayed in the first regular-season high school game at the BangorAuditorium back in 1955.
Chappelle sees the new arena as the natural place for such ahall.
'We're talking about capturing the last hundred years ofbasketball in the state, and history says that Bangor is at thecenter of it,' he has said.
Organizers are now working with members of the Friends of theMaine Center and Bangor city officials to determine what form thehall will eventually take. The Friends are a citizens' group whocame together in 2010 to assist and support the Bangor City Councilin the effort to build a new arena and convention center.
A. Mark Woodward, former executive editor at the Bangor DailyNews and Friends spokesman and co-chairman with Miles Theeman,cautioned that it's very early in the process for the arena and theproposed hall. Still he feels the two have a shared destiny.
'There's a powerful connection between people in this state andbasketball,' Woodward said. 'The key is for us to capture that andcapitalize on that. The arena is the right place for [the hall],since its predecessor was the center of so many great moments inbasketball.'
Having the hall inside the arena would help to make the newfacility more diversified, Woodward added.
'We hope to be part of the dialogue of how this arena should bedesigned,' he said. 'The design could be tweaked to accommodate anarena the city of Bangor can be proud of. It would be something tobring people to that facility when there isn't a major event there.'
Woodward, Steve Pound of the Hall of Fame organizing committeeand Bass Park Director Mike Dyer recently walked through the currentauditorium, with an eye toward items that could be sold asmemorabilia, with the funds pumped back into the facility, pendingCity Council approval.
Woodward used that story to illustrate how many steps must betaken before the arena and the Hall of Fame can be joined together:'We've got to finalize the design, find out what space is allocated[for the hall], gather and sell the artifacts.
'There is support for this on the council, and we've hadconstructive conversations with city officials,' he continued.'There's still a lot of things we need to work through, the mostimportant being to sit down with the council and get its approval tomove forward. This project seems like a natural for the new arena,but it's still the City of Bangor's building and we will adhere towhatever the council prescribes for us if we are allowed toproceed.'
