Inside the Estadio Polideportivo, the modest arena where, beginning Friday, David Nalbandian, Juan Martín del Potro and Argentina will host Spain in the Davis Cup final, the surface is a luminous blue indoor hardcourt.
Just the other day, Commissioner Gary Bettman was quoted saying hockey should never have left Winnipeg, but he warned that residents had darned well better fill all 15,000 seats at the modest arena, in the absence of much corporate presence.
Near the end of our time together, I mention that I first saw the group in the mid-90s, when they supported PJ & Duncan on a modest UK arena tour.
Standing before an estimated 2,000 supporters at a modest redbrick arena in the working-class community where she received her high school diploma in 1981, Ms. Davis tied her candidacy to both the challenges that brought her to this unlikely campaign and to the promise of a state eternally entranced by its own mythology.
Where the TV licensing boom has perhaps had its broadest impact on the music business has been on the more modest sales arena inhabited by independent musicians, who've historically been shut out of radio.
The long reach of the music was in evidence even at Madison Square Garden last month, where, far from the horse stables and bleachers of the modest Pico Rivera arena, waiters sold $7 cups of champagne garnished with strawberries, and 14,000 fans watched a slick show by two of ranchera music's biggest stars -- Vicente Fernandez and his son, Alejandro.
Princeton University razed Palmer Stadium, opened in 1914, after the 1996 season, and replaced it with a modern arena more suited to the modest cultural status of football today.
He may need many more of those impressions to turn into steady business for his modest goal of global arena domination to come true.
All 25,000 seats in the lovely if modest-sized Red Bull Arena are sold out for Donovan's appearance with the Los Angeles Galaxy on Saturday night.
New stadiums built for the Red Bulls, the Philadelphia Union and Sporting Kansas City (Livestrong Park will open on June 9, capacity 18,476), and new construction in Houston and San Jose, Calif., will put nearly all M.L.S. teams in their own modest but custom-built arenas.
The red carpet the celebrities will tread will be on a neighborhood street behind the arena, where faded brownstones, modest storefronts, a corner bodega and a city playground are the backdrop.
