“Waiting in line for something mundane is very boring.” —André Leon Talley
“Where did you get those clothes? At the … toilet … store?” —Brick Tamland
I am sitting in the Intuit Dome, but I’m not in my seat. I’m in the latrine. The Weeknd’s playing. He feels it coming. So do I. The toilet beneath me is sturdy and well-built, and all the toilet paper dispensers are made by some company called Tork, a weird word to stare at when you’re dropping bombs. It sort of encourages you, makes you hustle and give your all.
Will Rogers once said, “The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.” Clippers owner Steve Ballmer agrees. He pounds his chest, sweat on his breast, and he agrees.
“The thing I hate most in life,” Ballmer once said, “is arenas where you have to wait in line for the bathroom. I’ve become a real obsessive about toilets. Toilets, toilets, toilets.”
So step aside, cancer. Step aside, boiling oceans. Step aside, dementia and Alzheimer’s and mosquito bites and genocide and fascism and bartenders who keep their heads down. Toilets are the star of this grief show. Ballmer has not shut up about the lavatories since he first started braying about his new arena back in 2021. Ballmer, shrieking: “Three times the NBA average.” Ballmer, to 60 Minutes: “Can I show you the toilets?” He even commissioned the creation of a computer modeling program to simulate bathroom and concession-stand trips during sellouts to ensure fans would have time to do their business during a standard NBA timeout.
When the richest owner in the league and one of the 10 wealthiest men on earth builds a $2 billion basketball schloss and shouts more about the toilets than anything else, you pay attention to the porcelain thrones. He has demanded it. They are his fixation, his love, his everything, and the Intuit Dome is specifically curated to reflect his desires. Now I cop a squat before you to relay what I have seen.
There are just so many bathrooms, a damn mother lode of shithouses. Place is riddled with them. You walk the main concourse, and they pop up every 10 seconds. In one extreme instance, I saw a men’s bathroom, then a women’s, then the entrance to section 22, then another men’s restroom. Door to door, men’s to men’s, it was 12 steps. I walked it. And I wasn’t trying to be a hero. If I’d really stretched the gait and gone Gumby with it, hell, I might’ve done it in eight.
Speaking with all due respect, as a dude with a similar body type, one gets the sense Ballmer may have, at some point, soiled his chinos waiting in a too-long line for the restroom. Who among us has not dropped an unfortunate load into a pair of briefs? Mine happened at a bar in Newport Beach. Chucked the undies in the bathroom trash and scrambled outta there like Michael Vick. Who’s to say where Ballmer’s happened? But in his wisdom and grace, he vowed, “never again.” Cut to a shovel breaking ground on the Intuit Dome. All told, there are over 1,400 toilets. “The architects keep getting on me,” Ballmer has said. “You’re supposed to call them ‘fixtures’ instead of ‘toilets.’ But it’s the same thing. We’re putting a whole lot more toilets than anyone else in the NBA.”
Little flourishes adorn the signs for the restrooms, tiny silhouettes of men and women raising their arms to the sky, foam fingers on their hands.
Little flourishes adorn the signs for the restrooms, tiny silhouettes of men and women raising their arms to the sky, foam fingers on their hands.
I walked into every men’s restroom I could find to fix my eyes on these fixtures and see the fruits of all his fussing.
What I expected: mood lighting, dark wood trim, hardwood floors, screens in the stalls, in-game audio, futuristic country club commodes equal parts stylish and high-tech. Not bidets, but maybe seat warmers. The softest two-ply money can buy. Urinal cakes with Tim Cook’s face on them. Couches, candles, mints, that weird spray deodorant Arrid makes. Mouthwash and floss, Tylenol and BOSS. Some dude in a dress vest handing me paper towels with crests on them.
What I got: workmanlike, utilitarian brascos. Black and white, mainly, with some gray and silver in the mix. Abandoned Blue Moon and Pacifico tallboys on stainless steel shelves above the urinals, shreds of TP flecking the floors. No in-game audio to speak of. You want to know what’s happening in the game, you zip your pants up and get back out there, friend. Music over the speakers, a weird collection of the current and past top 40. Unfortunately, “Party Rock” was in the house that night. So was, thankfully, “Not Like Us.” There was also some new Drake song I stopped paying attention to and, somehow, 50 Cent’s “Best Friend.”
I didn’t take many pictures in the bathrooms because I am not a weirdo and public restrooms are not places that warrant or invite documentation. But this was a preseason game against the Kings. Some were ghost loos.
The bathrooms won’t win any design awards from an aesthetic perspective. We’re not dealing with the troughs at Wrigley, but we’re also not pissing into marble thrones. They’re there to get the job done, nothing more. We’re talking pragmatic, functional shitters. Some bathrooms were big, and some were small. Some were so huge they had structural pillars in them, but every single one was, for all intents and purposes, normal.
People watched videos on their phones while they pinched loaves, noise and stink wafting over the stalls, an unidentified voice hollering, “We got him snipped, but the military did it. It never took.” They texted at the urinals. They tried to figure out the automatic paper towel dispensers. They looked at themselves in the full-length mirrors, adjusted the drape of their Terance Mann jerseys, and answered the phone with, “What’s the good word?”
The normalness was confusing, and maybe a little disappointing, at first. A multibillionaire who has hyped up the toilet situation every time he’s been on the mic—how can the mind not brim with possibilities? But thinking on it more, the streamlined simplicity made sense.
“We do not want people waiting in line,” Ballmer said in March 2023. “We want them to get back to their damn seats.”
He wasn’t lying. The Intuit Dome is built in this image. Its focus is what’s happening on the court, and any added bells and whistles enhance the in-seat viewing experience. “I like to think about it as a basketball palazzo,” Ballmer said. Va bene, Stefano, pompare i freni. A 38,375-square-foot wonder called the Halo Board looms over center court, a double-sided screen so colossal it can show replays from four different angles simultaneously. It is luminous and seductive, full of stats and lineups, point breakdowns and shot charts. Even still, it’s not so in your face that it messes with sight lines. I walked around the top of the dome, and everywhere I stood had clear views down to the court. There are infrared-powered LEDs installed in the armrests, and on big plays, they flash and shine different shades of red, white, and blue. Accompanying those lights are USB-C chargers in each seat. Ballmer may have thought the iPhone was a dumb idea, but he at least wants to keep yours fully juiced. Take pictures, videos. Show your friends the fun time you had.
Ballmer doesn’t want you to be in the john a second longer than you need to be. He’s not trying to give you a comforting lounge space in which you can luxuriate and relieve yourself surrounded by the finer things. He does not want you to take your time and extend your stay. He wants you in and out and back to your damn seat. James Harden’s about to bait the refs again. The grift is on. There’s no time to waste.
