The first thing you usually glimpsed upon stepping into Stan Sheriff’s office in the University of Hawaii athletic department, beside the man himself, was the framed watercolor painting on the back wall.

It was of the UNI-Dome, the 16,000-seat, multi-purpose arena erected in 1976 at the University of Northern Iowa, where Sheriff had previously been a driving force as athletic director.

It was, Sheriff would tell visitors, what UH needed and it served as his daily reminder of what he was determined to see rise on Manoa’s lower campus during his tenure as athletic director.

“If we could do that in Cedar Falls, think what we could have here,” Sheriff would say as he alternately jabbed a finger at your chest and pointed to the painting.

As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the facility that carries Sheriff’s name and look forward to the next quarter-century, it should also be a call to renew the kind of bold imagination and resolve of the man that played the key role in getting it built.

A succession of UH athletic officials had held ideas of a large, modern facility since 1944 when Theodore “Pump” Searle, a calabash relative of Sheriff’s, proposed, an on-campus 13,000- to 15,000-seat fieldhouse.

What UH eventually got, of course, 14 years later, was 1,800-seat Klum Gym in a corner of the lower campus quarry. It wasn’t long before the gym, named for the late coach Otto “Proc” Klum, was a leaky, creaky eyesore that earned the nickname “Slum” Gym. It was the only place, critics said, where you could sweat off a few pounds and get a shower without leaving your bench seat during a volleyball match.

In 1975, as UH sought its first conference membership, a blue ribbon panel of national consultants cited it as one of the reasons they rated the school’s athletic facilities “1 on a scale of 10.”

Sheriff’s immediate predecessor, Ray Nagel, envisioned an 18,000-seat facility and spent many long hours at the Legislature trying to sell a concept that never got past the drawing board.

Enter Sheriff, who hit the ground running. Eventually, in 1989, the Legislature agreed to a 4,000-seat arena. A Honolulu Advertiser editorial and columnist as well as others on campus maintained that was enough. But Sheriff viewed that as barely a starting point and got support from Gov. John Waihee, who agreed to push for 8,000, then 10,000 seats.

In a 1989 Rainbow Classic hospitality room encounter, Sheriff told a couple of legislators that lawmakers needed to get their heads out of their okoles. That brought a stern warning that if he persisted, not only might the proposed arena disappear, but so would the AD.

“It isn’t looking good,” the resilient Sheriff conceded later. “But, I’m (still) plugging along.”

The Capitol wasn’t Sheriff’s only opposition as the city dug in to fight what it saw as competition for its Blaisdell Center.

The multi-front battle was so contentious that when there was a movement following his death to name the facility after Sheriff, the school initially named it the Special Events Arena. Only later, when some of the political landscape changed, would Sheriff’s name be affixed.

Before Sheriff died, he had other plans for the name. He had been in discussions with a major hotel corporation on investing $1 million or more to underwrite suites and boxes for which it would get its name on the facility.

These days, the Sheriff Center stands not only as a home for UH sports and the largest indoor entertainment venue in the state, but as a reminder of the need for renewed bold vision.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.