The conversation started because Rick Pitino,
who was the coach and president of basketball operations,
wanted the team to play in a summer league, but he didn’t want to travel,
so the idea was, “Let’s have a summer league in Boston,
let’s do our own here.”
It could be a program that would benefit the city in as many ways as possible.
And the mayor got involved, and after they tossed around a couple of ideas
and looked at a couple of sites, the mayor said,
“Well why don’t you go talk to the folk over at UMass Boston.”
We would get here at like 6 in the morning and get set up for the first game
which generally started at 9 o’clock,
and then the games didn’t end until 11 at night.
The camps were here during the day;
in the evening the paying customers would start coming in and they’d pack the place.
It didn’t hurt that it was LeBron’s first pro debut here. He brought in a lot of people.
I’m sure most of them were here to see LeBron.