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Point of View

Recalling an old stadium in shadow of the new one

By Carl Heintze

The recent opening of the new downsized Stanford Stadium opened a flood of memories for me. I spent 4 1/2 years at Stanford (a world war intervened, that's why it took that long) and good number of them were tied up in the old Stanford Stadium. The stadium was and is a presence whether you're on the campus or not.

If you enter from El Camino Real, it looms up as the first sight of what once was The Farm but is now a kind of industrial urban complex.

The old stadium, built back in the 1920s, was a much larger presence, but then it could hold 92,000 plus people--something it didn't do very often--and it also was a lot more uncomfortable. For one thing, the old stadium had no seatbacks, just benches. If you wanted back support--something to be devoutly sought after three quarters of football--you had to bring your own.

And a lot of people did. We used to lug ours up and down the stadium steps before and after every Big Game.

If you had a seat in the 80th row, something that happened to me once, you had back support--a cement wall--but you were a long way from the playing field and dead center in the chilly breezes as they whipped over the top of the stadium.

It also took some conditioning to get to the 80th row or to get into the stadium at all, for that matter. That's because before you climbed to the 80th row, you had to climb a set of outside stairs from ground level, a set of stairs almost as steep and formidable as those inside the stadium.

It's easier now, so I am told, because the new stadium is smaller by about half. It is also completely enclosed, as compared to the old open-ended arena, lower and double decked. I'm not so sure about the latter, but I'm willing to be shown.

My experiences with the old stadium go back to the days when the scoreboards were hand-operated. I know that because sometimes in the 1940s I used to hide out in back of the old scoreboard to study for finals. (Well, that was my excuse, anyway. Mostly it was to get away from the din of being in a dormitory room amid healthy young males intent on doing most anything except studying.)

I also once ran, or tried to run, all the way from the playing field up to the 80th row, a little like jogging up the stairs to the top floor of the Bank of America Building in San Francisco. This came about because I was foolish enough to sign up for a so-called body-building class.

My body certainly needed building. It was mostly flab. But the class hardly did the trick. After chugging up and down the 80 rows and trying to run back to the men's gym, I couldn't walk for a week.

The Army took care of the rest of my body-building--or tearing down, depending on how one looked at it. But the experience of running to the top of the old stadium--well, OK, jogging--has remained with me.

So was attending the 100th Big Game, the 100th rendition of the annual confrontation between Cal and Stanford--which happened by chance to be in Stanford Stadium.

It was a big occasion in the history of the old stadium, perhaps--excepting when the Super Bowl was played in the stadium--its finest hour. It also happened to be near the end of the halcyon days of Silicon Valley and computer companies furnished every Big Game attendee with a special commemorative seat cushion. (I've still got mine.)

That probably was the last time the old stadium was filled to capacity. We sat in almost the last row of the last section in the stadium, section AA, close to the last aisle.

It was sort of like not being at the game at all. It lay far to the right of us on what appeared to be a green postage stamp inhabited by red and blue dots. But at least we could say we were there.

The powers that be at Stanford say that won't happen again in the new stadium because of the two decks and because the stadium is lower and because the former open end (which stood between Section AA and the rest of the campus) is no more.

Well, one can hope.

And the uncomfortable days of yore could be no more. With enough money and the right connections, one can get an inside "luxury" box seat in the new stadium, shielded from inclement weather, warmed or cooled by air conditioning and presumably fortified with proper beverages. Not nearly the challenge of the old days, but a heck of a lot more enjoyable.

It won't be the view from the 80th row or from Section AA, but then one somehow has to yield to progress.