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That I hold the opinion expressed by the title of this commentary truly means there is a time and place for everything under heaven. I graduated from Brother Martin High School in 1976. As a student, I saw five years of various "mud bowls" played at Tad Gormley on the natural dirt surface of the field. Notice I do not say "grass" surface; Tad Gormley had precious little grass and most of it was not on the actual playing field. One of the worst parts about being a sports statistician was having to spot from the dilapidated press box on one of those sloppy nights. Now, which grime-coated receiver made that catch? As I grew older, I didn't spend as many Friday nights in the fall in City Park, but there was invariably a story in the Saturday paper about two teams sloshing it out in the mud. (For those of you unfamiliar with Tad Gormley, click here to jump to our information page on the stadium.)
When the GNO Sports Foundation scored the US Olympic Track and Field Trials for 1992, they had to find a place to hold the events. The Superdome was out (had to be an outdoor facility). Tulane Stadium was long gone and none of the fields/stadia attached to high schools in the area were big enough. Tad Gormley had the seating capacity (25,600) needed for a national event, but the place was in real shabby condition. Armed with a federal grant for repairs and upgrades, a fundraising drive was launched to get additonal funds, and the old stadium was transformed from a run-down Depression-era construction project to a really classy facility. One of the changes made to Tad Gormley for the 1992 meet was the installation of artificial turf to replace the grass. It was a quite logical move--the track and field folks didn't mind turf (they run on the running surface anyway), and the artificial surface would be less expensive for a strapped city to maintain when the olympians departed. The local high schools who used Tad Gormley gladly traded in their cleats for turf shoes. They'd make that money back in the savings on post-game laundry alone. Everyone was happy. Then the Gamblers moved up to the USISL A-League.
Prior to the re-organization that put the Gamblers in the top rung of the USISL structure, the Gamblers played their home matches at Pan-American Field, on the other side of City Park. That facility didn't get named "Pan-American" for nothing--many a soccer match had been played on that pitch long before professional soccer came to town. The A-League requires a much larger facility, however, and that meant moving to Tad Gormley. While there are no specific rules against artificial surfaces for A-League matches, soccer on turf just isn't the same. All the arguments we've heard on the subject of grass vs. turf apply to soccer, and then some. For openers, there's a serious groove in the turf where the end of the football field is located. Since the soccer pitch extends about seven yards wider than a football field, this groove is actually on the soccer playing surface. I get the creeps everytime I walk out onto that pitch after a match just thinking about taking a fall onto that surface. It's amazing that we haven't had a player seriously injured from a fall onto that rock-solid plastic stuff.
Still, in spite of the problems the artificial surface presents, I never really thought it in itself could be part of the Gamblers' overall attendance problem. I received e-mail from a reader regarding my earlier commentary on why attendance was so low at matches. I offered a bunch of theories, and this reader simply suggested that real soccer fans won't go to a match played on artificial turf. Is the problem that simple? Last week, over 6,200 people came out to see the Gamblers play the Dallas Burn of Major League Soccer. Did they come to see the major leaguers, because the match was held in Jefferson, or because the pitch was grass?
Well, there's one way to find out, and that's to put the natural surface back at Tad Gormley. The city has a real tenant for the facility now, one that can provide personnel and funds to properly maintain a grass field year-round. Upkeep is the city's biggest problem with both stadia in the park. Pan-American looked like an absolute jungle a month ago. It was completely impossible to play any sort of sport on that field. No big deal, however, since it won't be used until September anyway. Bring in the tractor mowers and the smaller schools get their field back. Tad Gormley's field doesn't grow any longer, so the city doesn't even have the cost of running the mowers there. With a professional soccer team as its permanent tenant for the spring and summer, maintaining the field through the fall high school football season is no longer an issue for the city. We can have grass at Tad Gormley, real grass, not just a dirt surface that got some sod placed on top every few years when funding allowed. It won't be that difficult to persuade Nike and Reebok to step in and help out any schools who find switching from turf shoes back to cleats a financial burden. Playing on grass removes all the other problems people have found with turf over the years, particularly injuries to still-developing high school football players. There's no real reason for the city to object to switching back to grass. If for some reason the Gamblers fail as a franchise, they can always pull the rug out from storage and lay the plastic back down.
Mr. Donnie Pate, owner of the Gamblers, was quoted as saying that the team needs to play on grass. That means either changing the pitch at Tad Gormley or moving permanently to a facility like Zephyr Field. The ballpark just won't cut it as a soccer stadium, because the seating won't work and because there will be too many conflicts between the two teams' schedules. Tad Gormley is a stadium that could be MLS-quality if it had grass. If Mr. Pate is willing to put some money behind his words, he should pick up the phone and work something out with the to start growing grass on the field for next season.