Blazer Dancer retires after 12 years with team

Marlene Kanehailua has served longer than most players

By ERIC BARTELS

The Portland Tribune, Apr 17, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Friends and teammates say Marlene Kanehailua (left), a health teacher and dance coach at Aloha High, knows every face in the Rose Garden.

L.E. BASKOW / P0RTLAND TRIBUNE

When the final buzzer sounds at the Rose Garden on Wednesday night, ending the Trail Blazers’ last home game of the season, the career of one of the organization’s most respected performers will come to a close.

After 10 seasons of working for minimum wage and in minimal attire before millions of fans, Blazer Dancer Marlene Kanehailua, one of the most senior dancers in the National Basketball Association, is hanging up her really short shorts.

“I’m leaving a family,” says Kanehailua, 33. “It’s hard, but it’s the right time for me to be done.”

Kanehailua, a Hilo, Hawaii, native, has danced in some 400 games in a career that began in 1995, just before Blazer shooting guard Martell Webster turned 9. Only two players in the 37-year history of the franchise — Clyde Drexler and Jerome Kersey — spent more seasons on the court. And few were as well-liked.

“She’s one of those people people want to be around,” says Heather Dickau, a former Blazer Dancer and the wife of backup point guard Dan Dickau. “She does everything for everybody all the time.

“She knows the ballboys by name, she knows the security guards. She’s one of the best I’ve ever seen as far as relating to the crowd.”

Craig Miller, the Blazers’ director of events presentation, says the absence of Kanehailua’s energy and professionalism will be felt.

“She is a pro through and through,” he says. “She is first class as far as her ability to reach fans and represent the organization. She’s done so many things for the Trail Blazers, everybody kind of looks up to her.”

It’s the ‘island mentality’

Kanehailua has always commanded attention. Exotic-looking even by Hawaiian standards, she counts Greek, Syrian and Italian threads in her lineage. And she has not lost a step. When the squad sharpens routines to the loud growl of a boombox in the dressing room, no dancer snaps off moves more crisply.

Out in the arena, there doesn’t seem to be anyone she doesn’t know. Before a recent game against the Houston Rockets, Kanehailua stopped to chat with Wayne Barker, who has been with guest services since 1999, telling him about a recent trip she and other dancers made to China.

“Marlene has been tremendous to us,” Barker says.

Blazer Dancer coach Dee Dee Anderson, one of the original Blazer Dancers in 1988 and another Hilo product, says Kanehailua’s kindness and sense of duty are part of her “island mentality.”

“She will approach rookies and make them feel like they’re part of the team. If there’s a problem on the team, she’ll come to me so I can fix it. I will miss that. I’m fortunate to have had her.”

Twenty-one-year-old Michelle Marx, in her first season as a Blazer Dancer, concurs. “She was one of the first people that came up to me,” she says. “She’s always there.”

Stereotypes slide away

Heather Dickau says Kanehailua, who came to Oregon to attend Linfield College in McMinnville, is a natural role model.

“Year after year she’s had that same standard. You have to go out there in something that maybe you’re not all that comfortable wearing, there are 20,000 people watching, I’ve never seen her let anything affect her. She’s always on.”

Dickau remembers a game in which events on the court earned the ire of the home crowd, which began pelting the court with bobble-head dolls they’d received in a promotion. Then someone threw a tray, but Kanehailua stayed cool.

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