History
Before the construction of the facility, the teams played in the much smaller OU Field House, located on campus near Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. With the success of Sooner basketball in the 1970s and star forward Alvan Adams, demand became sufficient to upgrade to the modern and spacious Lloyd Noble Center, named after an alumnus and former member of the OU Board of Regents who gave OU's first ever $1 million gift to finance the center. The Sooners frequently sold out the arena during the Billy Tubbs era, with All-American forward Wayman Tisdale leading the high-scoring team to several Big Eight Conference titles and NCAA Tournament appearances. This led to the popular colloquialism around Norman that Lloyd Noble Center is "the house that Alvan built and Wayman filled."
In January 2006, after the NBA's New Orleans Hornets decided to move two games from the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge because of low attendance, and the Ford Center in Oklahoma City was unavailable for one of the games against the Sacramento Kings, it was moved to the Lloyd Noble Center.
The Fieldhouse is still home to the university's volleyball and wrestling teams, and hosts a number of other on-campus gatherings.
Read more about this topic: Lloyd Noble Center
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)