I went to a Dance Marathon at Manley put on by the students. (For Muscular Dystrophy, maybe?) We’re standing around while nothing much is happening and there is a goofy looking kid standing there telling jokes to a “crowd” of maybe 15 people just standing around, me being one of them. I listened to him for about five minutes then moved on to something else.
The kid? He was a young aspiring comedian by the name of Jay Leno.
My first trip to Manley was to see an SU basketball game that I won a pair of free tickets for on a radio sports trivia morning radio call-in show. I won tickets for the Blazers and the Orangemen (and also later for the pro lacrosse team, the Syracuse Sting) from these radio shows, back when I had a morning paper route. There are not many people up at 6:00 AM to call in to the radio station and suffer the busy signals in hopes of getting free tickets to something - anything - as an 11 year old boy with a paper route, waiting for his dad to get ready to leave.
So, I went to see the Orange there was probably for the Cornell, and maybe Penn State home games, midweek during December 1971 at the start of the season. Those would have been more likely for radio giveaway tickets than a Saturday home game. And you are less likely to give away seats later in the season; you're trying to persuade new customers to buy tickets for later that season, if not season tickets.
I, too, loved the Denny DuVal led pre-game warm-up routine, like the Harlem Globetrotters. It was amazing entertainment, and the crowd was just nuts, screaming and intimidating the hell out of the opponents. I imagine that's probably how people feel about pro wrestling. And the team was so entertaining, and played such fast paced run-and-gun ball! Won over for life.
Just a couple years later, I was running track meets there on the elevated wooden track, above the dirt floor. People neglect to mention the netting at the ends of the raised basketball to floor, to catch anybody if they ran too far. LOL.
Back then, security wasn't so tight on campus, either. And so we could run up to Manley from the Valley, get into the building and run laps on the track. Eleven laps to the mile.
I don't know that it smelled like "the circus had just left town", but running distance races on that 166 yard elevated wooden track was quite the experience! There was a bounce in the track that could really propel you to terrific performances. But the inside of your mouth was literally caked with dirt after running there for 5+ minutes. As someone else said in this thread, it would be considered unacceptable air quality today.
I agree with Tomcat's observation that once they put in the tartan floor and the pull out bleachers, it was a much improved facility, for both the fans and the players.