BETTER DAYS GONE BY.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

The Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena got a not-quite-fitting send-off Saturday when USC beat Oregon State in basketball, the arena's final tenant actually winning in its last scheduled home game. But the evening wasn't without appropriate touches: Public address announcer Petros Papadakis bellowed ``Auld Lang Syne,'' a fan held a sign reading ``Thanks for the Memories,'' the stands were two-thirds empty, the escalator on one end was stalled, and the ground-floor men's room leaked.

I've come to feel sorry for the Sports Arena. It's been the butt of too many jokes. Not that they weren't funny jokes.

Such as Charles Barkley's famous crack when somebody asked for a comment on the former home of the Clippers: ``This place? Nothing positive. OK, I want to say something positive. It's positively a dump.''

A more gracious guest might say the Sports Arena is the victim of fickle Hollywood, where we too quickly toss aside our sweethearts for younger models with bigger, firmer luxury suites.

The old girl's best days, its salad days, its Doris Days (the actress was a front-row fixture at early Lakers games), came in the few years between the Sports Arena's July 4, 1959, dedication by Vice President Richard M. Nixon and the Forum's late-1960s opening.

John F. Kennedy was nominated for president at a Democratic Convention in the Sports Arena. In ``The Making of the President 1960,'' Theodore H. White describes a ``new arena, glistening with its glass panes and ceramic tile.''

Muhammad Ali, who was Cassius Clay then, boxed in the Sports Arena. After a fourth-round TKO of Archie Moore in 1962 that stamped him as a heavyweight championship contender, Clay spotted titleholder Sonny Liston in the $30 ringside seats and shouted, ``You're next!''

The Lakers and the Boston Celtics played parts of their first four NBA Finals showdowns in the Sports Arena. The Celtics won them all, closing out the 1963 series in a thrilling Game 6. It ended with Bob Cousy dribbling out the clock and then hurling the ball toward the roof. Bill Russell hopped over the bench to save the ball from the fans. Russell realized Cousy might want a memento of what proved to be his last game in green.

And John Wooden's UCLA basketball teams won their first two national championships, in 1964 and 1965, while sharing the Sports Arena with USC.

There was more sports history to be made at the Sports Arena, again involving UCLA, which clinched its national titles in 1968 (with Lew Alcindor) and 1972 (with Bill Walton) in Final Fours played downtown.

But in recent decades, fans at the Sports Arena were more likely to be dancing to ``Glory Days'' than living them. Bruce Springsteen played here, as did the Rolling Stones and David Bowie and Madonna.

Basically, the building that cost a then-lavish $7.4 million to put up went out of vogue when Jack Kent Cooke moved the Lakers and Kings to Inglewood.

It wasn't as if the seats were uncomfortable, the sight lines bad or the sound fuzzy. The 15,000th-best seat in the Sports Arena is actually below cloud level, unlike Staples Center, with its luxury boxes pushing the cheap seats sky high.

The big problem was that nothing good seemed to happen at the Sports Arena anymore, not after it became synonymous with the always-losing Clippers and the perpetually unfulfilled Trojans.

Ten professional and college teams have called the arena home - basketball's Lakers, Clippers, Stars (ABA), Trojans and Bruins; hockey's Kings, Blades (WHL), Sharks (WHA) and Ice Dogs (IHL), and arena football's Cobras. Through 2005, the tenants had played the equivalent of 88 seasons. Their only championships were the Bruins' pair.

Eighty-eight seasons, two championships - that precisely matches the Boston Red Sox's recent record.

Radio's Rory Markas remembers watching Clippers guard Gary Grant walk out of the locker room in uniform 45 minutes before a game and buy two hot dogs from a concession stand.

``Nobody bothered him, or seemed to notice,'' Markas said. ''Can you imagine if Byron Scott (of the Lakers) tried that (at the Forum)? It showed me the difference between the franchises, but also the difference between the arenas.''

John Lee, the Coliseum's and Sports Arena's marketing director, says it ``may be a little bit premature'' to call Saturday's USC-Oregon State game the last major sports event at the corner of Martin Luther King and Figueroa. At least until (or unless) the NFL returns to the next-door Coliseum, and the Sports Arena is turned into a parking lot, the building is not scheduled for a wrecking ball.

The Trojans could even return to the Sports Arena for a National Invitation Tournament home game before moving into the $147 million Galen Center next season.

For now, though, the only events on the calendar in the near future are high-school basketball championships the next two weekends, the Korean and ``Rock En Espanol'' festivals in March, and a Fall Out Boy concert and ice show in April.

JFK? Clay? Bruce? Same place, way different time.