Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has never lacked for energy, demonstrating a youthful exuberance you wouldn’t expect from a tech billionaire. The boisterous 66-year-old conveyed his passion earlier this week while visiting the construction site of Intuit Dome, the Clippers’ new home beginning in 2024, reveling in the knowledge that his state-of-the-art, 18,000-seat facility will have triple the toilets of a normal arena.
“Toilets!” gushed Ballmer, who stepped to the podium with a hard hat and fluorescent safety vest. “Eleven hundred and sixty toilets and urinals, three times the NBA average! We do not want people waiting around. We want them to get back to their damn seats.”
That is, to state the obvious, A LOT of toilets. Anyone who has ever been to a major sporting event can attest to the tediousness of long bathroom lines, particularly at halftime, when fans, usually after an adult beverage or two, descend upon the restroom in unison, rushing to relieve themselves before the start of the second half.
Tripling the amount of toilets would go a long way toward alleviating that headache, cutting down on foot traffic while allowing fans to watch more of the game they paid, in many cases, hundreds of dollars to see. Not to give him too much credit, but the plumbing needs and collective upkeep of 1,100 toilets would also, at least in theory, create jobs for maintenance and janitorial staff, adding an altruistic flavor to Ballmer’s vision.
Ballmer’s eye for efficiency and innovation is part of what made him so successful at Microsoft, where he served as CEO from 2000-14. It also catapulted him to another stratosphere of wealth and resources (with a net worth of over $80 billion, Forbes ranks Ballmer 10th on their list of the world’s wealthiest people), allowing him to bypass the usual red tape and administrative gridlock of public funding, bankrolling the $2-billion project himself.
After years of being an afterthought in their own building (Crypto.com Arena, formerly known as Staples Center), the Clippers, thanks to Ballmer, can finally get out from under the Lakers’ shadow, creating their own identity in Inglewood. Who knows if that will translate to winning, but at least patrons can finally pee at their leisure, enjoying the fruits of Ballmer’s imagined bathroom utopia.
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