State-of-the-art venues lack history, alienate fans

I’ll never forget the first time I walked into Wrigley Field in Chicago.

On the ground level, surrounded on all four sides by neighborhoods created out of love for the Chicago Cubs, the first thing that revealed itself to me wasn’t the ivy on the outfield wall or the perfectly sculpted dirt forming the infield.

It was the smell.

Like walking into an old saw mill, the aroma of history — combined with years of leftover vomit, beer and urine — wafted through the crowd’s nostrils with an equal tenacity toward support and admiration of the North Siders.

It was exactly what I wanted.

Regardless of the alleged curse currently haunting the Cubs — no World Series appearances since 1945, no World Series championships since 1908 — the fans of Chicago continue to sell out their most hallowed of grounds.

It’s a shame this trend looks like it’s over.

More often, sports franchises opt for newer, state-of-the-art stadiums in lieu of retaining emblems of their history, by far the biggest factor in establishing any type of home field advantage.

Entire generations of fans have looked forward to the day when they could introduce their children to the same, almost cult-like worship of their hometown team in their hometown stadium.

It’s exactly what pumped through my veins the first time I entered the Louisiana Superdome.

As a die-hard Saints fan, I can’t fully explain the meaning of the Superdome to anyone who hasn’t followed the sport. Others might think I’m either wasting my time following a “meaningless” activity or even suggest I need a little more church.

On Sundays during football season, the Superdome is church.

But like many other churches, the popularity of “old school” is being replaced with high-tech mega-behemoths.

Since 1999, 10 stadiums, labeled state-of-the-art, have been constructed for NFL teams. Two of those arenas house this Sunday’s Super Bowl participants, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals.

Both Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field, which hosts the Steelers, and Glendale’s more recently built University of Phoenix Stadium — housing the Arizona Cardinals — serve as a stark reminder of just how obsessed sports teams are, not with cultivating and nurturing a fan base but with eliminating any semblance of tradition and history.

The latest obscenity of technology lies in Indianapolis, as the Colts opened Lucas Oil Stadium for its inaugural season last fall. The project was estimated to cost up to $720 million, forcing local counties around the area to raise taxes to supplant the $100 million the Colts put up as a franchise.

Like most other SOTAS, the stadium comes with more than a hundred corporate suites.
ESPN.com’s “The Sports Guy,” Bill Simmons wrote a column last November about how SOTAS destroy home-field advantage by forcing its fans to adhere to the changes and to try to redevelop a tradition to last with the team. He verbalized his discontent by claiming Lucas Oil Stadium was nothing more than “the latest state-of-the-art football venue that seems much more interested in looking cool and making money over, you know, actually helping its home team win games.”

It’s this fear that worries me about the future of sports and, most importantly for University students, the upcoming baseball season.

There was no shortage of people attending baseball games at the old Alex Box Stadium. The University even holds the record for most in a season, with 291,676 catching a game in 2003.

The new Alex Box Stadium will house 8,500 seats. The old stadium eclipsed this number five times, despite its capacity of 7,760. It will feature more than four times more space dedicated to restrooms and 5,100 square feet for an arcade, suites, a club lounge and a hall of fame — all brand new additions to LSU baseball.

While 9-year-olds have the chance to ignore the game while pumping quarters by the hundreds into LSU’s Athletic Department, those of us with memories of LSU baseball are understandably miffed.

After losing the 2003 Super Regional to LSU, Baylor head coach Steve Smith commented on what made his experience at old Alex Box memorable.

“I want to commend what I truly believe may be the premiere crowd in all of college baseball — that is a special, special crowd out there. I want to say that the way the fans have responded all weekend to just excellence and outstanding play leads me to believe that they truly do appreciate the difficulty of playing this game. I’m glad to have our players play in front of a crowd that I truly believe appreciated their performance.”

Regardless of the distractions to the game, the fans are what makes a team unique.
Stadiums don’t make dynasties. They simply make money.


Originally published in The Daily Reveille...