Grass is back. No, no; not that. Not cannabis, Mary Jane, weed, pot, dope. This is not an update on the 1960s counterculture, Woodstock or the hippie revolution. (Although amended laws in fact have recently given marijuana a new life.) Rather, this is a consideration of how football playing surfaces, after almost a half century of experimentation with synthetic flooring, have reversed field a bit. Or, in some cases, stuck with what the late sports commentator Bud Collins referred to as “God’s own greensward.”
This comes to mind with the annual razzmatazz that surrounds the Super Bowl, which has now been played 57 times with the same fellow overseeing the landscaping at each host stadium. That person is George Toma, now 94 years old, a superstar groundskeeper who has ably dealt with his corner of earth being trod upon by behemoth athletes and all manner of elaborate halftime productions.
In some ways, the just-completed 2023 championship game illustrated the imperfection of what often is referred to, redundantly, as “natural grass.” (Grass is grass; it’s natural.) Sports Illustrated huffed that the game was “completely marred by horrible field conditions”—with players at times unsteady on the Bermuda-grass lawn in Arizona’s Glendale stadium.
It should be noted that exactly half of the NFL’s 32 teams employ grass on their fields, including both of this year’s Super Bowl participants, so neither the Kansas City Chiefs nor Philadelphia Eagles should have had an edge in the big game. Furthermore, several of the losing Eagles refused to moan about the surface flaws, reminding that the Chiefs had to navigate the same ground.
But given modern technology and science, there has come to be an overwhelming expectation of flawlessness in major sporting events—in playing conditions, refereeing, athletic performance—which can get a little silly at times. Lost is the idea that the beauty of competition can be enhanced by what coaches call “things beyond our control.” Why not see how fabulously paid jocks can handle some rain, snow, wind, dirt?
Since we’re on the topic, then: Artificial playing surfaces originated with AstroTurf in 1965 after Houston’s baseball team, housed in the world’s first multi-purpose domed stadium, found that grass didn’t grow well indoors. It was assumed, correctly to some extent, that artificial turf would require less maintenance and be less susceptible to unpredictable weather, and both pro and college teams rushed to join the fake grass movement.
Early reviews were glowing. Dan Jenkins, covering the University of Tennessee’s 1968 season-opener in Knoxville, declared in his Sports Illustrated game story, “The question of whether a good football game can be played on your living room carpet has been answered pretty much to everyone’s satisfaction down on a rim of the Smokies in the Old South. The University of Tennessee has won the sport’s interior decorating award with its new synthetic turf….”
Jenkins wrote that, at the conclusion of a 17-17 tie with Georgia, “everything sagged mercifully except the gleaming nylon playing field….still as rich green and spotless as it had been three hours earlier. And this was after a truckload of Tennessee cheerleaders had driven on it, after a Tennessee walking horse had pranced around it, after a Georgia bulldog had gnawed at it and after a Georgia coach had flicked ashes on it.”
Alas, artificial turf did not grow back.
Return with me to the 1976 Super Bowl at Miami’s since-demolished Orange Bowl Stadium, which was an early convert to fake grass using something called Poly-Turf. In its seventh season, the Poly-Turf had come to resemble a 100-yard banana peel, with rips and bumps. Toma—the God of Sod, the Sodfather, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Man who is on record as preferring grass—was working the 10th of his 57 Super Bowls in ‘76, putting in 12-hour days alongside his crew in the week leading up to the game.
“We crawl every seam on our hands and knees,” Toma said then, “and anywhere that even a fingernail would go under, we glue, using a contact glue, which will hold for a couple of weeks. It’s like the glue you might use on Formica table tops at home.
“Then we take a tractor over it to press it down good. We sewed up a couple of rips. The way the surface has matted unevenly, we can’t do much about that. There will be some slick spots….Where there’s a few bumps, like you might get in your rug in your house, we’ve taken scissors and shaved off the top.”
After that game, the Orange Bowl returned to grass and stayed with the real stuff until it closed in 2008. Hard Rock Stadium, which replaced the Orange Bowl as Miami’s big-time football stadium in 1987, always has featured grass. Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, cite of that 1968 artificial turf debut chronicled by Dan Jenkins, has been back to grass since 1994.
This year’s Super Bowl runner-up Eagles, by the way, were the first NFL team to use artificial turf in their home stadium—in 1969 when they played at Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania campus. From 1971 to 2002, their place of business was Philadelphia’s multipurpose Veteran’s Stadium, so infamous for the gaps and uneven patches in its synthetic floor that it because known as the “Field of Seams.” Since 2003, the Eagles have been settled in Lincoln Financial Field, which is equipped with grass. So maybe there isn’t a better mousetrap after all.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.