If you’ve been to enough of these, you know what to expect once the lights go on, once the last encore is done and the roadies take the stage to pack it up and tear it down: Half the arena is already climbing up stairs, sprinting for exits (though they’ll deny it to their friends), hoping to win the dash to the parking lot.
Not this time. All around Nassau Coliseum Tuesday night, the foot traffic halted, five minutes after Billy Joel had played the final chord of “Only the Good Die Young.” Ten minutes. The show had lasted for 3 hours and 7 minutes and the folks craning their necks inside this doomed hockey rink gladly would have stayed for another 3:07.
It was here I spotted a friend, glassy-eyed and scratchy-throated, planted in his Nikes, taking a final round of snapshots with his eyes.
“I can’t believe,” he said. “This is the last time I’ll ever be in here.”
“He’s going to cry the whole ride home,” his wife said.
There was a lot of that. There were so many memories, so many old stories, so much echoing laughter filling so many of these people as they took their last glance around this place, now stripped of all the championship banners and retired numbers, awaiting a wrecker’s ball and a multimillion-dollar face-lift and the soulless scrubbing of its quirks and charms and idiosyncrasies.
I thought of something else as I stood my own ground: another evening of goodbyes, another melancholy night that mixed euphoria and sadness in equal parts, more than 39 years earlier. That was a Thursday night, May 13, 1976. I was 9. It was a school night, but my father came home with tickets to Game 6 of the ABA Finals, Nets against the Nuggets. We lived 15 minutes — 20 with traffic — away from the Coliseum by car. I floated there.
Julius Erving scored 31 that night. Super John Williamson had 28. The Nets trailed 92-78 heading into the fourth quarter. They buried Dan Issel and David Thompson 34-14 in the fourth. The final few minutes were the loudest I’ve ever heard sports sound like, before or since. I liked sports before that night. After, it would become a part of my very being, as essential as my DNA.
And afterward, as the people endlessly chanted “We’re No. 1!,” I noticed we weren’t going anywhere. I asked my father why. He explained: That was the last game in ABA history. Both these teams would be in the NBA — trading in that awesome red, white and blue ball for the boring brown rock — next year.
“You saw history tonight,” he told me.
It wasn’t what I saw that’s stayed with me all these years later. It’s what I heard. It’s what I felt. And kept feeling, every time I walked into that building.
I was an Island kid, straight to the core, raised on Roosevelt Field and Roosevelt Raceway, raised to believe the lighthouse at Montauk Point was the guiding hand of God Himself, raised to squeeze every summer hour possible at Jones Beach and Adventureland, raised on the playgrounds of Prospect Park in East Meadow and Hickey Field in Rockville Centre, raised in saloons like Fezziwig’s and the Runway and the Barefoot Peddler and St. James.
And Nassau Coliseum was the sun in that universe, Nets games and Islanders games, college basketball games and New York Arrows indoor soccer games. Every spring we would buy tickets for the Newsday Classic, the all-star basketball game between the Island’s best and the city’s best. (How many points did Pearl drop in the ’83 game? Forty? Fifty? More? Anyone?)
But the Coliseum also made us feel big, big-time big, because you could see Springsteen there, and the GoGos, and Squeeze (twice!) and the Stray Cats. And Def Leppard and Journey and Duran Duran (hey, I was a kid of the ’80s, too), and Yes and U2. Didn’t matter where you came up: Nassau or Suffolk, North Shore or South Shore, the Hempsteads or the Hamptons. The Coliseum was yours. It was ours.
Was it a dump? From the hour it opened.
But it was OUR dump. We might have felt similarly about Shea Stadium — same mix of sporting memories and blurry rock-and-roll recollection (anyone else in the house for R.E.M./Joan Jett/The Police in August ’83?), same sensory overload of odor, grime, decay. But Shea was over the border, in Queens. We could visit Shea.
We owned the spiritual deed to The Coliseum.
And that’s made the past few months all the more difficult. That’s what made the Islanders’ three-game stay in this spring’s playoffs so visceral, so full of desperation. The Islanders were leaving the Island, heading for Brooklyn …
(… and it replayed a scene from so many Long Island households through the years, when children would announce they were bound for some rat-trap city address and the parents would inevitably cry, “We worked our whole lives to get OUT of the city, and now you wanna go BACK …?”)
The last game was April 25. Every spasm of “Lets go, Islanders!” felt like the roof might come off; the noise also would cause the Coliseum’s dust to dance to the floor, and many inside quietly crossed themselves every time, hoping that really was only “dust” (OUR dump, remember). The Islanders staved off elimination that day, beat the Capitals 3-1, but the noise was epic, and unending, and unforgettable, and right up there with Game 6 against the Nuggets.
Right up there with Tuesday night, 8:47 p.m., after Andrew Cuomo had walked onto the stage to introduce the final act of the Coliseum’s final day, and couldn’t have been received any better if he’d gone and worn a Mark Messier jersey in front of a room filled with islanders who love their Islanders.
Billy Joel was the only choice to close this concert hall, of course, because he grew up in Hicksville (exactly 5½ miles away) and has called the East End home for years, and because he lived the life most of us native Islanders live, pining to leave while simultaneously longing to stay. And because so many of the songs he chose Tuesday were filled with the kind of characters we all knew. And know.
“This is it for this place,” he said early in this, his 32nd solo show at the Coliseum dating back to 1977, the sadness as evident in his voice as in the periodic “Let’s go, Islanders!” chants that filled the gaps between songs. “No hockey. No nothing for awhile.”
It was Paul Simon, a special three-song guest star, who further emphasized the point later on — though only after curiously revealing that he was a Rangers fan, bringing down enough wrath that it made Cuomo’s reception sound like JFK’s in Ireland (to which Kevin James would later, brilliantly, quip: “I think I saw Clark Gillies beating the crap out of Paul Simon backstage”).
“The idea of the Islanders going to Brooklyn,” Simon said, “is as sad as the idea of the Dodgers going to San Francisco.”
(And, yes, the crowd just roared, reacting as Boon did in “Animal House” when Bluto asks if it was over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor: “Forget it. He’s rolling.”).
But it was Joel, ultimately, who made sure the vacuum that would soon replace this dusty old barn would be filled, forever, with a beautiful sound, a native son playing for a roomful of native sons and daughters, one more time engaged in a three-hour sing-along about Captain Jack and Billy the Kid and Virginia, who started much too late, about John at the bar and Paul the real estate novelist, about seeing the lights go out on Broadway and a New York state of mind (kudos for including The Post in his oft-adjusted lyrics explaining why he enjoys a little give-and-take).
And then the lights were up, and the music was over, and so was something else, something much greater than even a great rock-and-roll show. The people didn’t want to move. They didn’t want to leave. No one was ready to say goodbye.
I’m not sure we ever will be.