Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

The sellout figure was invented on opening night because the PA announcer liked the number two - and 12,222 stuck for four decades. The Don Haskins Center at 151 Glory Road in El Paso opened on 3 February 1977 as the Special Events Center, a 10-million-dollar octagonal arena on the University of Texas at El Paso campus that replaced Memorial Gym as home of Miner basketball. Its street address is the story: Glory Road was renamed for the 1966 NCAA championship won by Texas Western - as UTEP was then known - when coach Don Haskins started five Black players in the title game against Kentucky, a landmark in American sport retold in the 2006 Disney film of the same name. The arena took Haskins's own name in 1998, a year after his induction into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame and a season after he notched his 700th career win on its floor against SMU. When he died in September 2008, the coach lay in state in the building for several days as the city filed past. The Don, as El Paso calls it, seats 11,892 for basketball and around 12,567 for concerts, its 127-by-84-foot octagon shape wrapping the court in one of the more intimidating home floors in the west - the Miners have won more than three-quarters of their games in the building, including 25 straight from 1987 to 1989. It has hosted Western Athletic Conference and Conference USA tournaments and NCAA tournament rounds in 1981. Beyond basketball the arena carries El Paso's big-event calendar - touring concerts, graduations, family shows and dinners - as the largest indoor venue on the border between San Antonio and Tucson. Set below the Franklin Mountains beside the Sun Bowl, the building is both a working arena and a monument: the house named for the man who changed college basketball, on the street named for the night he did it.