GU finally lands WCC tourney

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – It’s the biggest college basketball upset since Chaminade over Virginia.

The West Coast Conference tournament? It’s coming to Spokane.

Really.

We’ll pause here while your spousal unit gives you a couple blasts with the defibrillator paddles.

The presidents of the WCC on Monday followed through on a tournament rotation plan adopted in 2002 and awarded the 2006 tournament to Gonzaga University and the 2007 event to Portland, a notion that once upon a time could only have been broached if accompanied by a California clergyman grumping, “Over my dead body.”

This is, of course, a classic good news/bad news conundrum.

The good news: after two decades, the Bulldogs finally get a crack at hosting the league’s premier event, showing off in the process their new $23 million home and an atmosphere that’s routinely more electric on a January game night than this tournament generally is in March.

The bad: no escape to the Cali sun for Zags fans of the Washington tundra. But only for a year.

After that, it will apparently be 2012 before Gonzaga could ever host the event again, since the rotation plan calls for tournaments in southern California in 2008 and 2009, and back in the Bay Area the following two years.

So the victory is probably more symbolic than practical, but it’s a victory to be toasted nonetheless.

The tournament has been a thorny issue for the WCC from its inception, and the debate turned rancorous three years ago when Gonzaga coach Mark Few suggested that poor leadership at the conference level – in settling on proper site and seeding formats as well as enhancing marketing and television prospects – was dragging down the collective, to say nothing of failing to properly reward the worthy programs.

Commissioner Mike Gilleran dragged the media away from a tournament game to fire back at Few and, well, let’s just say it was not a kumbaya moment.

But from that seed has grown at least a twig of cooperation and resolve.

“What’s been nice to see is a feeling of, ‘Let’s do the right thing,’ ” said Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth. “We changed the format of the tournament from the old 1 vs. 8 first round to a situation where both the No. 1 and 2 seeds get rewarded for their regular season play. And when it was determined not to be feasible at some locations to just give the tournament to the No. 1 seed on a year-to-year basis, the league has found a format to at least share its best event.”

Roth was not surprised nor even remotely upset that Gonzaga was not given the host’s role for both years of the Northwest rotation – even though his school’s projected revenue for the event was, sources indicated, far in excess of what Portland would make.

“In my opinion, it was a no-brainer to split the tournament up,” he said. “I didn’t foresee the league saying, ‘Gee, we’ll go to Spokane for both years,’ when you have two facilities that can clearly host it.

“It’s hard to argue that it’s not the right thing.”

Well, not for someone less level-headed.

Because Gonzaga has muscled up into the WCC’s dominant program – Monday’s title game was the Bulldogs’ eighth straight, and 10th in 11 years – both its fans and its athletic employees have chafed at the continued lack of regard from the Californicated part of the league, and most especially where the tournament is concerned.

More than half the tournaments have been hosted by Santa Clara – prompting former GU coach Dan Monson to once call it the “Santa Clara Invitational.” But often it’s wound up at Santa Clara by default; this year’s tournament was supposed to be played at San Francisco, but the Dons couldn’t get a facility facelift completed.

The 2001 tournament was sent to San Diego to allow the Toreros to show off the just-completed Jenny Craig Pavilion, but then it wound up back there the next two years as well.

So perhaps it’s not unreasonable for the Zags, who have never hosted the event but hungered to for years, to ask, “Where’s ours?” – again, particularly in view of the disparity in bids between GU and Portland.

“I’m just not troubled by it,” Roth said.

“At one point in time, there was a concern – because the tournament had to be at least a break-even proposition – that the only way to do it was in the Bay Area, because three teams wouldn’t have to fly and you wouldn’t have to travel the league office and there’d be all sorts of money savings. It was not so much about making money as saving money.

“Well, what we found in San Diego is that we don’t have to worry necessarily about just saving money,” he said. “This event will break even or even make money.”

Of course, there’s one reason for that: Gonzaga.

What made the San Diego events a success wasn’t a huge turnout for the Toreros – it was the fact that Gonzaga fans traveled in hordes and filled more than half the building. The audience of 1,145 for Sunday’s women’s championship game here was easily three-fourths Gonzaga. And now every Gonzaga regular season conference game on the road is a sellout – generally, the only one the other schools have.

“That’s the flip side – everybody else in the league right now could say they have the fan support,” Roth said. “They know that our people are coming.”

But if that’s not a source of some embarrassment throughout the league, it should be – the fact that none of the schools have generated more than a small fraction of the rabid fan base that the Zags have. Other schools have had success but either never felt it important enough or simply couldn’t capitalize on it or sustain it.

“We hope that part never changes for us,” Roth said, “but we also want the other schools to get more competitive, too – that’s what made the league so much better this year than in the past and that’s what’s healthy for the league overall.”

In any event, it won’t happen soon enough to help Gonzaga next year – or maybe any year it might host the tournament. If the coaches and athletic directors have been reluctant to send the tournament north, the chances of any school sending many fans to Spokane from California aren’t slim and none – they’re none and none.

That didn’t stop Roth from basing his revenue projection on selling 6,000 season passes to the tournament.

Frankly, that wouldn’t be an upset at all.