Going to the office for roughly a half-century meant showing up at the Rose Bowl. Or Yankee Stadium. Wrigley Field in Chicago. Madison Square Garden. Boston’s Fenway Park. Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. The old Forum in Montreal.
Sometimes I spent my days and evenings in my Long Island newspaper’s sports department. But the real action was in arenas, stadiums and parks from here to Sydney, Australia (2000 Summer Olympics). And the recent flurry of reports sentimentalizing the New York Islanders’ final games at their original home, the Nassau Coliseum, has prompted some recollections of athletic venues I have known.
Plus, of course, a list.
Still counting, but the current total is 247, just in the U.S. and Canada. Wait. That doesn’t include various tennis sites—in Mason, Ohio; Washington, D.C.; Hilton Head, S.C.; Indianapolis; and the old West Side Tennis Club in Queens before the U.S. Open moved to the Billie Jean King Center (already on the list). So, at least 252.
I also haven’t gotten around to enumerating specific international sports settings—the eight soccer stadiums throughout Italy during the 1990 World Cup or the multiple venues at the Olympics in Seoul (1988); Albertville, France (1992); Barcelona (1992); Lillehammer, Norway (1994); Nagano, Japan (1998); Sydney and Melbourne (2000); Athens (2004); and Turin, Italy (2006). Or the various sites at the Pan American Games in Venezuela (1983) and Cuba (1991). Or Wimbledon’s hallowed tennis grounds.
And what about those Davis Cup matches in Prague in 1990 and World Cup tune-up games for the U.S. in Budapest and East Berlin, as well as a special German unification soccer match in Dresden that same year? All those amount to an additional 50, minimum. We’re past 300 now.
The fun of visiting all those locales, or course, was covering the events therein, the contested drama—though just as important was the atmosphere, the involvement of spectators. And the buildings themselves certainly were a fundamental part of the experience.
So, here goes:
Dodger Stadium was a favorite, set in L.A.’s surprisingly bucolic Chavez Ravine with a view of palm trees and the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. Also Camden Yards, the first of the “retro” stadiums that opened in 1992, with a glimpse of downtown Baltimore beyond centerfield and the brick, eight-story 19th-century B&O Warehouse looming past right field. Fenway with its Green Monster. Wrigley with its ivy-covered outfield fences. Soccer’s Providence Park in Portland, Ore., more than a century old; cozy, charming.
At the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati—a vast improvement over the old cookie-cutter Riverfront Stadium in that city—one could contemplate the possibility that a batter might duplicate Adam Dunn’s 2004 home run that technically traveled into neighboring Kentucky, bouncing onto a piece of driftwood and into the Ohio River beyond centerfield.
Naturally, ambiance and scenery have played significantly into these adventures. Along with the quirks. Georgetown University used to play its football games on a roof atop a mostly underground field house. At Minute Maid Park in Houston, there is a small locomotive high on the wall beyond left field, which took a brief 800-foot run when an Astros player hit a home run.
At mostly nondescript Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the howling winds that once blew a pitcher off the mound could make summer evenings there colder than the football dates in late autumn. Chicago’s Soldier Field once was a classic Romaneque structure until 2003 renovations changed it so much—hiding its stylish columns with a dull, unimaginative oval look—that the U.S. government took it off the National Register of Historic Places. Which brings up the L.A. Coliseum.
As a baseball stadium—I went to a few games as a young lad in 1958 and ’59—the Coliseum’s peculiar dimensions were memorable if hardly logical, yet the old joint, opened in 1923, remains an architectural beauty that works wonderfully for football and track and field. The peristyle end, with its Olympic cauldron, is a particularly nice touch.
Other thoroughly pleasant venues were the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field, site of countless major track meets; New York’s Belmont Racetrack, home to the last leg of the Triple Crown; and the University of Missouri’s Faurot Field (well, because it was my school). Also, there were the places famous for being famous: Michigan Stadium, the University of North Carolina’s Dean Dome; the Yale Bowl; New Orleans’ Superdome; Notre Dame Stadium; the Indianapolis Speedway.
Indoor spaces typically have had less appeal, and too many of the newest parks and arenas give the sense that a spectator is inside a video game—surrounded by massive screens and scoreboards with special effects. And domes, by and large, are dismal buildings, none more so than the Houston Astrodome.
The Nassau Coliseum, which triggered this whole discussion, opened in 1972, a $28-million no-frills structure, and I covered its first event, a game in the long-defunct ABA with the then-New York Nets. Over the years, there also were tennis and track and field events to be chronicled there, as well as many Islanders games of great import that produced raucous, passionate spectating. So the joint’s disappearance as a destination for athletic fireworks—meant to happen as soon as the Islanders’ presence in the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs is concluded—is a bit sad.
Nothing lasts forever, though. A rough estimate of my former sports journalism stomping grounds that no longer exist would number past 60. Places such as Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, Omni arena and Georgia Dome; Boston’s Foxboro Stadium and old Boston Garden; Dallas’ Texas Stadium and Reunion Arena; Detroit’s Tiger Stadium and Joe Louis Arena; Houston’s Astrodome and Indianapolis’ Hoosier Dome; Miami’s Orange Bowl and Miami Arena; Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium and Spectrum; Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium and Civic Arena (the Igloo for Penguins games); two earlier Busch Stadiums, Kiel Auditorium and the Checkerdome in St. Louis.
Just here in the New York area, the once-familiar haunts that have met their demise are Giants Stadium, Shea Stadium, the original (and refurbished) Yankee Stadium, Columbia University’s Baker Field, the Nets’ old homes at the Island Garden and Commack Arena.
Oh, the places I have been. Is it fair to count the Colosseum in Rome, even though there was no game the day I was there?