Audio By Carbonatix
In 1995, Phoenix hosted the NBA All-Star Game at what was then American West Arena. Across the country, fans who tuned into NBC got to see the best of the Valley — as well as the arena floor’s whimsically on-the-nose logo: a blazing sunset, tessellated shapes evocative of traditional Navajo designs, and a long-armed saguaro.
The sneakers of Charles Barkley and Dan Majerle, who today owns a sports bar not far from what is now Mortgage Matchup Center, squeaked on that hardwood. Those two Suns legends — along with Hakeem Olajuwon, Shawn Kemp and Latrell Sprewell — were starters for the Western Conference. They faced off against Grant Hill, Scottie Pippen and eventual Suns center Shaquille O’Neal, among other future Hall of Famers. If that floor could talk, it would probably sound like Ahmad Rashad, or maybe the announcer from “NBA Jam.”
Now the logo portion of that game-used floor can be yours. The genuinely one-of-kind item is listed on Facebook Marketplace for $125,000. If you’re the hardest of die-hard 1990s NBA fans — and you have a few hundred feet of spare space at your crib — this is your chance to shoot your shot.
“We figured if we put it on Facebook Marketplace someone local here will get to buy it,” said Michael Beram, whose dad, Tony, bought the floor 30 years ago. “That would be cool to have someone local have it.”
This is where you might expect to learn this piece of floor has had some long, strange trip. But truth is, it has just been chilling quietly in the Valley these many years.
After the elation of the 139-112 win for the Western Conference, the Suns were ready to get rid of the game floor. The plan was to paint over that rad mid-’90s logo and offer the floor to a local high school.
Then Tony Beram, the owner of Western States Ticket Services and avid Phoenix sports fan, came in and offered to take it off their hands. Beram is a lifelong memorabilia collector. He has tickets from the Arizona Diamondbacks’ victorious 2001 World Series, the Suns’ memorable runs to the 1993 and 2021 NBA Finals, and concert tickets, via eBay, from Elvis Presley and Beatles concerts. Still, the basketball court stands out amid Beram’s collection, even when it has been collecting dust in storage.
Michael Beram, who is 26, wasn’t alive when his dad purchased the floor. As a kid, he always saw the floor in a huge, 14-piece stack of 4-foot-by-8-foot slabs. Only an old Polaroid gave him an idea of what the enormous puzzle looked like in its full glory.
“Growing it, we always just saw it there, just stacked up on each other,” Michael Beram said. For decades, he said, his family “never really had any desire to pull it out.”
Now that he’s older — and a huge Phoenix sports fan — Michael Beram wanted to see the floor in its full glory. So six months ago, the father and son took it out of the garage of their central Phoenix home and put it together. Each of the pieces weighs a couple hundred pounds and required six adults to move. Once it was assembled, they got to admire the classic logo and floor that Barkley, Pippen and Shaq hooped on. It’s not the entire floor, but it is the size of a small studio apartment.
At first, the Berams thought they’d place the floor down in their new shop Cactus Coin and Metals, on 3rd Avenue and McDowell Road, down the street from Tony Beram’s bright green ticket reseller. They figured the vintage game-used floor would be a cool attraction for customers.
But to make that plan work, they’d have to cut the floor into pieces. That felt sacrilegious. Instead, they thought someone else might have “a better use for it than we did,” Michael Beram said. (This means you, sports bar owners and midlife-crisis Scottsdale millionaires.)
Since listing the floor for sale, the Berams have fielded a couple of serious offers. One buyer was interested in using the flooring for their half-court home gym. Another wanted to put the floor down in a sports complex with a bunch of basketball courts.
So far, though? The floor remains, like an opening tip, very much up for grabs. Before the Berams take the step of offering the artifact to an auction house, they’re keeping it posted on Marketplace alongside the usual used housewares and secondhand clothes and thirdhand cars. They’re hoping, after all, that the floor will stay local — and remain a net win for the Valley.
