Big Ugly White Guys

I've always had a soft spot for that Great Auk of the NBA, the Big Ugly White Guy.
Most teams have one. A gangly unfortunate, too tall for anything but basketball but woefully underequipped for the sport on any scale except size.
Above is a photo of the greatest BUWG in the history of the NBA, Gheorghe Muresan. At 7'7", nobody was (or has been since) bigger, uglier or whiter. While he was active he was my favorite player in the league. He had a couple of good years for the Washington Bullets, prior to their apotheosis into the neutered Wizards.

I was put in mind of Big Gheorghe when a friend told me the San Diego Sports Arena had been recently and ignonimously re-named 'ipayOne Center', immediately making it heavyweight champion of lame sports venue names in all of the Golden State.

It does get some stiff local competition from 'Petco Park' and 'Qualcomm Stadium, (which bore in my youth the dulcet & dignified title Jack Murphy Stadium, after a reknowned local sportswriter), but you can't beat 'ipayOne' for a certain flavor of seedy desperation. It's a name that's visibly straining for hipness. I see a 50-something marketing exec who saw an iPod ad in a magazine one time making it up to appeal to "the kids".

An aside in a post consisting of little else:
Doesn't it seem quaint now to think of a stadium name as an honor for someone of local achievement rather than a commodity to be lent to the highest corporate bidder?
Jack Murphy, legendary local sportswriter rather than a maker of telecom software, or a corporate pet emporium...or ipayOne.
I bet old Jack knew a lot of whores, so I doubt he holds the renaming of his stadium against anyone.

And what does it say about the poor erstwhile Sports Arena that the best they could manage was 'ipayOne', whatever the hell that is?
It a bit like auctioning off your virginity and having it go for five bucks to a fat old man who was just looking to practice his Amway sales pitch on someone who couldn't slam the door in his face.

Which brings me to Swen Nater.
I don't have many memories of the Sports Arena...it was kind of a dump, dim and musty, a suitable home for the then-San Diego Clippers.
The only thing that stays with me about those hopeless Clipper teams was their center, Swen Nader, who in hindsight was the first Big Ugly White Guy of my acquaintance. I remember him getting more rebounds than he had any right to, skinny dude that he was, so I looked up his career stats (link above) and damned if he didn't lead the entire NBA in rebounding in 1980. That's a fairly unprescedented achievement for a BUWG, and I just thought I'd mention it here.

Swen Nater, I salute you.