Date: Fri 06-Dec-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: KIMH

Illustration: I

Quick Words:

Column-Football-Sloppy

Full Text:

Kim Harmon/On Sports

When Football Gets Stuck In The Slop

Any true football fan will remember the Ice Bowl - when sneakers borrowed from

a local college campus ended up being the deciding factor - and other games

like it where the ice and the snow and the mud made it less of a football game

and more of a basic fight to the finish.

That's the way the game of football is meant to be played, where men dig in

the mud and the dirt and the ice and crawl off the field like warriors off the

battle field with their uniforms all muddy and plastered to their sweating

bodies. I used to love watching December football with the muddy fields and

the snow and everything and that, above anything else probably, made me love

football more than baseball or basketball.

The weather is the great equalizer and forces teams to rely on survival and

adaptation rather than their skills and while that might be okay for a regular

season game, but for things like playoffs and championships it doesn't serve

the game very well.

Like the travesty at Municipal Stadium in Waterbury on Tuesday night. A CIAC

Class L semifinal playoff game between Newtown and Holy Cross was played on a

freezing quagmire that could, only in the strictest sense of the word, be

called a field.

I've come to realize - after the Houston Astrodome and the New Orleans

Superdome and all the different brands of artificial surfaces were introduced

into the NFL, prompting critics to descry the sterilization of the sport -

that you want your playoffs and championships played in as even a climate as

possible, giving the two teams the chance to show who has the better skills

and not who is better able to weather the storm.

Don't get me wrong, though. To take away a classic December football game in

Lambeau Field in Wisconsin would be to take a big piece of the true aura of

football away from the sport, but well-kept fields - like Lambeau, even in the

dead of winter - are better than mudholes and tarpits like Municipal Stadium

in Waterbury.

When I watch a championship game in the NFL - or even on some high school

field somewhere - I'd like the field to be dry and well kept and the weather

somewhat moderate and far from miserable. The way football has evolved these

days, it has become such a skill sport that taking away the skills does a

disservice to the players and the fans.

That's what artificial turf and domes have done for the NFL, even though there

are many fans who still hate it all.

Obviously, those generally are not options in high school (except for state

championships, which are often played on artificial turf fields at area

universities). Snow and rain and mud are okay, when you can enjoy a football

game that doesn't mean any more than the game the week before or the game the

week after.

But when a game means as much as the one did on Tuesday night between Newtown

and Holy Cross, the least anyone could have done (come on, someone had to know

how bad that field was going to be) was find a dry field somewhere else in the

city to play an important game like that.

Hey, the NFL doesn't play the Super Bowl in Lambeau Field or in Giants

Stadium, does it?

No, it's in California or Arizona or one of the domes.

If I had to make a choice between having to play some games on quagmires or

playing everything in a sterile environment like a dome, I'd take the

quagmires, of course, but there is an option for almost everything and the

option in the case of Tuesday night should have been to move the game.