PORTLAND, Ore. — Frank and Mary Gill's season tickets at the Rose Garden used to place them among the most coveted locations in the city: second row, Seats 7 and 8, about 25 feet from the middle of the court at every Portland Trail Blazer home game.
Now the only thing their seats offer is a prime view of a once-proud franchise in its decline. The Gills occupy them at their own risk; Frank was hit by a piece of chewing gum that Trail Blazer Bonzi Wells threw in frustration last season.
They keep coming because they're loyal and, like a bad cellular phone service contract, they're stuck in a long-term deal. But for many in the Portland community their ties to the team are loosening, unraveled by the players' extraordinary run of misguided acts and their increasingly mediocre performance on the court.
The Gills hold another pair of season seats on the opposite side of the court, and "some games it's so bad we can't give those other tickets away," Frank Gill said.
Average attendance is 16,309, about 3,000 below capacity. The Trail Blazers sold out the final 809 games at the old Memorial Coliseum before moving to their new home in 1995. They had a run of 104 consecutive sellouts that ended two years ago.
What happened to the franchise that used to be more central to the city's identity than the Willamette River that runs through its heart?
You can find the answer in the police blotter, where the Trail Blazers have made regular appearances in connection with a variety of illegal-substance or moving-vehicle violations (sometimes simultaneously) and violent acts.
You can find it on the court -- that is, when league and team suspensions aren't keeping the players off it -- with a team whose performance never equaled the talent on the roster.
Consider the lineup the Blazers had on the floor during the fourth quarter of Saturday night's game against the Lakers. It included Rasheed Wallace, just more than a year removed from a marijuana possession arrest and fresh off a controversy over his racially tinged comments on the state of owner-player relations in the NBA. And Damon Stoudamire, with a string of marijuana arrests on his record. There was Ruben Patterson, who two years ago entered an Alford plea to charges of forcing his nanny to perform a sex act. (In an Alford plea, a defendant does not admit guilt, but acknowledges that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict him at trial.) And there was Zach Randolph, the promising young player whom the Blazers would like to consider their primary building block for the future, but who brought back the same old headlines from the past with an arrest on charges of driving under the influence of intoxicants this month.
