Just walking on artificial turf offends me.
The feel of plastic blades mooshing under my feet – the uneven feel of the unnatural surface underfoot – this is one of my least-favourite things.
Even bladeless turf, like the concrete-based hard, flat carpet that once covered old Exhibition Stadium in my native Toronto, never felt right to my feet.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
And I wasn’t trying to play soccer on it.
Where that awful bomb-crater of a ball park was brooded joylessly on the Toronto waterfront, there now stands a cute little gem of a soccer stadium. BMO Field is far from luxurious, but its sightlines and atmosphere far surpass any outdoor stadium yet build in Canada’s biggest metropolis.
And it is choking on its artificial turf. Now a lumpy, lamented “upgrade” to the FieldTurf brand, it seemed soft and grasslike enough just over two seasons ago, when the Toronto FC dream began.
But now, compressed and condensed by a battering schedule of year-round athletic action, it has become a gruesome green menace – hated by the players, lamented by the fans, and required by law to be there as a condition for the millions of dollars the Ontario government donated to help build the stadium in the first place.
The ball no longer runs true at BMO Field. Its bounce is no longer certain. Injuries – well, we’ll get to injuries.
To begin: how did we get here – and how do we ever kick loose?
Astroturf came first. For decades, any artificial turf surface anywhere carried the name, regardless of its make or manufacturer.
Really, it was air conditioning that kicked the whole thing off.
Back in 1962, Major League Baseball’s National League created the New York Mets to compensate The Big Apple for losing both the Giants and Dodgers to the west coast in 1954. But you can’t have an odd number of teams in a baseball league, so here came the Houston Colt 45s.
A baseball team named after a gun? Not to worry. The moniker didn’t last long. See, you can’t really play baseball in Houston in the summer. The city sits in a wide, flat bowl, the air is utterly still, the main industry is oil refining, and the average summer temperature would keep your morning coffee warm till long after sundown.
Swelter! Gasp!
Ah, but this was the sixties, and the entire southwestern United States was being transformed by refrigerated air. If Houston was going to have baseball, it was going to be air-conditioned!
Hence – the Astrodome. Opened for the 1965 season, it revolutionized pro sports. The first dome – and the very first artificial turf playing surface. Of course it was called Astroturf. And of course the ball team became the Astros.
Houston was the centre of the American manned space program, after all. When the astronauts of Apollo 13 had their oxygen tank explode, they didn’t say “Sheboygan, we have a problem.” “Astro” was the coolest pile-up of letters you could bolt to new stuff. It was everywhere.
And it wasn’t just baseball they were playing at this glass-roofed gem of modern stadium construction. These were the pre-merger days of American pointy-throwball. The Houston Oilers weren’t in the National Pointy-Throwball League yet, but they were very much alive and well – and hugely happy to be playing in an air-conditioned dome.
Thing about pointy-throwball: it destroys grass fields. Close-packed hordes of 300-pound behemoths – okay, 250-pound behemoths back then – violently collide for three hours, digging in hard down the middle of the field. Grass can’t take it. Plastic grass can.
The Astrodome didn’t really change the world because it brought outdoors sports inside. It’s real influence was as the very first multi-use artificial turf stadium.
Soon, they were everywhere. Montreal, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minnesota, Seattle, Tampa Bay and Toronto – home of the largest artificial-turf playing field on the planet, because the pointy-throwball endzone didn’t start until out around second base somewhere.
Partly, it was cool. Mostly, it was a way to save – and make – lots of money. Purists howled, but throughout the seventies and eighties, multi-use turf parks were conquering the continent.
It didn’t last – and that’s what we’ll chat about in part two.
Onward!