The Wildest Seat in the NBA Is the One Next to Steve Ballmer

“He gets kind of excited,” Fitzhugh said, “so he wants me to sit on the side so, if he hits me, he doesn’t hit the pacemaker.”

It is not an unfounded worry. When Russell Westbrook knocked down a crucial free throw on Sunday night in what became a five-point L.A. victory in Game 1 of their opening-round series against the Phoenix Suns, TNT cameras caught the 67-year-old Ballmer lurching back in his chair, as if from an electric shock. (The Suns tied the series at a game apiece Tuesday night in Phoenix, and the teams travel to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Thursday.) Anyone who scores an invite to sit next to Ballmer—vetted for sustained focus on the game and a minimization of small talk—has to be ready for more than that: rogue elbows and fist-pumps, the occasional embrace.

“I go to games with people who know me pretty well, and I’ll try to chitty-chat a little bit in the first half,” Ballmer said in a floor-level suite in L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena, hours before gritting through a win over the Golden State Warriors in February. “In the second half, I’m not usually good at chitty-chat.”

Ballmer preaches, and practices, a gospel of enthusiasm. In an effort to tip the scales of Los Angeles basketball—the Lakers have 17 world championships; the Clippers are looking for their first—he has spent lavishly on his team’s roster, acquiring star forwards Kawhi Leonard and Paul George in 2019 and racking up the highest payroll in the league this season. 

The ultimate expression of his commitment will come in 2024, when Ballmer’s new Intuit Dome opens its doors to the Clippers. The arena, currently under construction in Inglewood, is optimized for fanaticism according to his specifications—an attempt to create a building full of Ballmers.

During the venture’s planning stages, Ballmer toured college and professional arenas across the country and sent team members to sporting events around the world, gathering notes on what to emulate and what to avoid. The central question: how to get the modern, distractible basketball fan keyed into the game, not fiddling with their cellphone or killing time in the concourse.

Attending Leonard’s jersey retirement ceremony at San Diego State University in 2020, Ballmer became enamored of steep banks of seats funneling noise down to the floor. “It’s just vertical,” Ballmer growled. “No leg room, no suites. Just”—he clapped his palms together—”intense.” At nearly every building he visited, he despaired over long lines where patrons waited for beers or bathrooms while game action unfolded.

Ballmer’s notes became the instructions for Bill Hanway, the global sports leader for the architecture firm AECOM and executive on the project. The finished arena will have the tightest bowl in the NBA, Hanway says, with an average seat 40 horizontal feet closer to the court than at Crypto.com. Fans will enter from a high concourse so that, as they make their way to their seats, they are approaching the floor and not climbing away from it.

“He didn’t really want suites at all, when we started this process,” Hanway said. “His goal was to have this as close to a high-school gym as possible. We did mention that part of running an NBA arena is you have to earn some revenue.” Ballmer suggested, by way of compromise, luxury boxes with theme-park eject mechanisms in their chairs, forcing well-heeled patrons up and herding them to the court come gametime. Hanway wet-blanketed this as well.

Elsewhere, though, Ballmer got his way. Nearly 200 countdown clocks will tick down to tipoff or the resumption of the game after halftime, and AECOM has outfitted the lighting system to blink, theater-style, as an added twist of the arm. Hanway ran crowd-scale models until Ballmer was convinced that a full house’s worth of customers could get to a concession stand and a restroom and return to their seats during a halftime break. A 51-row block of uninterrupted seating will be stationed near the visiting team’s bench; the Clippers have discussed using most of their allotment of NBA-approved noisemaker giveaways on this section.

Ballmer’s image among basketball fans has sometimes verged on caricature—the tech exec sweating through his button-downs at crunchtime. During the 2021 Western Conference Finals, a shot of Ballmer seizing the legs of his guests in a moment of rapture went as viral as any of the series’ plays. 

The new arena presents an opportunity to clarify his relationship with the sport. As a high school player in Michigan, Ballmer made most of his contributions from the bench. “Coach said, ‘Be rah-rah,’” Ballmer said. “I’m rah-rah.” At Harvard, Ballmer worked at the scoring table for basketball games—a challenge, given that it required at least the appearance of impartiality—and as a manager for the football team. “There you’re just into it, you’re into it, you’re into it,” he said.

When he bought the Clippers in 2014, bringing an end to the scandal-ridden tenure of previous owner Donald Sterling, Ballmer felt a kinship with a fan base that had seen just three playoff series wins in the three decades the team had been in Los Angeles. “Our fans are the most committed fans in the NBA, bar-none, no question,” Ballmer said. “Why do I know that? They’ve stuck with our team.”

Ballmer takes care to distinguish between an involved pro-sports owner and a meddlesome one; his role, as he sees it, is to support the basketball operations without suggesting things to them. He watches warm-ups, where he gauges the arc on the Clippers’ jump shots, but avoids players in the arena’s tunnels before games, lest he interrupt preparation.

The sideline, and the stadium, are the safe release valves for his passion. Ballmer insists that everything fans see—from air-punching glee to temple-gripping anguish—is genuine, with one caveat. “When I’m really mad, I try to hide it,” Ballmer said. “I need to be positive. I need to be part of the solution.”

Ballmer’s first and strongest hope is for a Clippers championship. His second, though, seems to be that people come to view his team, and the building it plays in, as a bastion of pure basketball, an opportunity to be as close as possible to the version of the game played at its highest level.

Hanway remembers the first time he sat next to Ballmer in the baseline seats, because he feared it lost him his job. A colleague’s plane had run late getting into L.A., so Hanway settled in midway through the first quarter—a sure sign, in Ballmer’s book, of subpar commitment.

“We sat directly next to him, and he wouldn’t even shake our hands or look at us until halftime. He just glared,” Hanway said. “I called my CEO and said, ‘There’s a chance we just got fired from the project.’”

Write to Robert O’Connell at [email protected]