Big Thinker
Let’s not forget who made Golden 1 Center happen
By R.E. Graswich
Photography by Aniko Kiezel
May 2025
As Golden 1 Center nears its 10th birthday, I’ve been thinking about the people who brought the sports arena into existence.
There was NBA Commissioner David Stern, who orchestrated the eviction of the Maloof family as Kings owners and welcomed managing partner Vivek Ranadive.
There was Mayor Kevin Johnson, who followed Stern’s playbook and convinced the City Council to help finance Golden 1 Center.
And there was someone else, a person forgotten in Sacramento but instrumental in the long, sloppy march to replace Arco Arena with a building worthy of NBA games and Paul McCartney.
His name is Chris Lehane. In 2009, he was a San Francisco political strategist and crisis manager known for ruthlessness. Johnson’s kind of guy.
I was Johnson’s special assistant. That meant being subservient to Lehane. Mostly, I marveled at his cleverness.
The link between Lehane and Johnson was Lehane’s sister Erin, who briefly managed Johnson’s mayoral campaign. Without that connection, the Kings would be gone today, the K Street arena a boarded-up shopping mall.
Lehane gave the arena project confidence and strategy. Before Lehane, the arena faced an impossible task—convincing taxpayers to fund a millionaires’ game.
Two previous mayors, Joe Serna Jr. and Heather Fargo, tried to rally support for an arena. They flopped.
In 2006, the county Board of Supervisors sponsored a ballot measure to fund an arena in the Downtown railyards. Maloof brothers Gavin and Joe destroyed the campaign by appearing in a TV commercial where they drank $6,000 bottles of wine and ate hamburgers in Las Vegas. The arena vote lost by 80%.
Failure didn’t bother Lehane. A decade earlier, he built momentum around Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco. He knew how to cloud tax abatements and public subsidies in a mist of subterfuge called “infrastructure and community benefits.”
Driving weekly from his home near the Presidio, parking his BMW on 10th Street by City Hall, Lehane sold Sacramento on an arena. He worked for free as a favor to Johnson.
“Every time I come to Sacramento, I lose money,” he told me.
He insisted the arena wasn’t about sports. It was about economic growth, jobs and cultural opportunity. He called our campaign “Think Big.” He designed a “blue ribbon” committee to position the arena as an engine for prosperity and pride.
Ambassadors included restaurateur Lina Fat, businesswoman Dea Spanos Berberian and retired city treasurer Tom Friery. We had a labor boss, architect and lawyer. The roster was diverse.
To empower his committee, Lehane told Johnson to make a speech introducing “The Rules,” a list of guarantees:
Taxpayers would come first. Think Big would engage smart lawyers and bankers and never get out-maneuvered by the NBA. Nobody would use Sacramento as leverage. Not even David Stern.
Those were The Rules.
Most consultants hide in shadows. Not Lehane. He loved the spotlight.
He testified at City Council meetings. He manipulated the media, handing out scoops to the Bee and Channel 3. He told reporters how to frame stories.
Lehane dazzled me with his verbal artistry. He made gibberish sound brilliant. One day, he told our Think Big crew, “We’re going to create the delta and bifurcate the delta.”
Nobody knew what he meant, but we rushed out, eager to bifurcate.
If Lehane had a weakness, it was David Stern. The NBA commissioner despised the strategist from San Francisco. Stern ordered Johnson to “keep your friend away” from plans to extract the Maloofs from the Kings.
In his eagerness to prove Think Big’s independence, Lehane portrayed the NBA as the enemy. It was pure theatrics. Stern didn’t laugh.
Golden 1 Center opened in 2016. Stern died in 2020. Today Johnson runs four soul food restaurants.
And Lehane? He’s wealthy, the muse, wingman and global policy chief for billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
That’s Chris. Thinking big while he bifurcates the delta.
R.E. Graswich can be reached at regraswich@icloud.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
