Memories flood back as Mac Court comes alive again 

Nicole Bausenwein calls the hallway office she found refuge in to grade finals “a little spooky.”

The lighting is poor, the window looks out to a cemetery and the elongated room that once made up the 100-level corridor of McArthur Court occasionally leaks in sound.

Sometimes it’s noise from peers using the other office spaces in an arena that’s sat mostly vacant since the Ducks left it for Matthew Knight in 2011. And there’s always someone rummaging around the stored couches, chairs and tables strewn across the main-level hallways between closed concession stands.

“I like working when there’s background noise,” said Bausenwain, a first-year master’s degree student from New York. “I feel like I can always hear something.”

On Friday, as the sun dropped below the hill of the cemetery outside, and light in the room dimmed, the sound came from the barricaded entrance of what used to be section 114.

Sneakers. Whistles. The growing rumble of a crowd shaking Mac Court back to life. 

A legend looks on

Ron Lee pointed toward the sideline and laughed about how exhausted he used to feel.

“We practiced for three hours every day, and it was a real three hours,” Oregon’s all-time leading scorer said. “It was like boot camp.”

Lee came to McArthur Court on Friday to watch the Elmira boys take on Siuslaw. The teams were among a handful of local high school programs that played 19 games inside the arena over the last two weeks as part of the “Return of the Mac” event put on by Pure Focus Sports.

The two-weekend jamboree brought hundreds out to see basketball played on the once-dormant court, including Lee, a three-time All-American during Oregon’s mid-70s Kamikaze Kids era who moved back to Eugene from Los Angeles nine years ago.

He likes the people, the 73-year-old said, and he’s been back to the Mac a few times over the years — once for a photo shoot, he said, and a couple of other times when he slipped in to watch intramurals that the gym has continued to host.

And as he watched the Falcons and Vikings run the floor and dive for loose balls as their fans rattled the floor-level seats below the sectioned-off and dusty upper levels, memories began to flood back.

There was the win over Bill Walton and No. 1 UCLA in 1974 — and the ensuing Sports Illustrated cover. There were students close enough to breathe down the necks of opposing players.

There was all that damn cardio.

“Sideline to sideline — 16 times in one minute or else we all do it again,” Lee said of coach Dick Harter’s notoriously hard practices. “We’d have to do it five or six times in a row. The good thing about it was we didn’t jump on each other — we knew that at some point each one of us was going to have a bad practice. For me, that’s what made us so in unison — if I got beat on defense, I knew someone was going to pick him up. Period.

“It was fun — at the time it wasn’t. But when you look back, it’s fun.”

Many who came through McArthur Court’s doors over the last two weekends took in the basketball with the same tinge of nostalgia.

At 79, longtime small-town sports writer John Page said he first began coming to games at McArthur Court when he “was crawling up the stairs here.”

“We used to sleep outside Friday night to make sure we were the first person in on Saturday,” Page said. “You couldn’t imagine the noise level in here. It can never be duplicated. Everyone here is just happy to be back.”

Or, in the case of the players, there for the first time.

Freshmen who took the court over the last two weeks weren’t born when the Ducks left the Mac, and seniors on the rosters might have only glancing memories.

“It’s exciting for the adults, but the kids don’t really understand the history,” Elmira girls coach Jeff Greene said. “They enjoyed it — but we got here in a hurry. It was the last thing we were thinking of.”

They were focused on winning a basketball game, which they did, 56-26, with hounding defense and a transition game that wore down the already faded Mac floors. Fans watched while eating slices of Track Town Pizza. Cheerleaders performed, parents recorded on their phones and the hardwood vibrated with each dribble.

It was the unmistakable feeling of life.

In a month, the lives of Lee and the other members of those 1970s Oregon Ducks will be honored at Matthew Knight Arena. They’ll assemble at the 15-year-old building, with its 12,000-seat capacity, expansive restrooms, fresh-smelling hallways and club sections that allow fans to trickle in casually late.

The current Ducks will be wearing jerseys honoring those Oregon teams from the mid-1970s.

It’ll be a special moment, Lee said — one that won’t make him feel a whole lot different than days like Friday, when this old mausoleum across the street from the cemetery found its heartbeat once more.

“All of us are fading away — you have players who are at that age,” Lee said. “It’s always enjoyable coming back here. It brings back good memories.”