Crumbling Yale Bowl to be torn down

Something is rotting in the state of Connecticut. And it's the Yale Bowl.

According to the Athletics Department, the Yale Bowl has entered a state of irreversible decay, rendering it unusable for the 1998 football season. "It's a huge loss for the Yale football program," Athletics Director Tom Beckett said. "However, it may prove to be a blessing in disguise."

The blessing Beckett refers to is the promise of a new home for Bulldog football--a promise that may become a reality as early as this fall. On Wed., Mar. 25, the Yale Corporation voted unanimously to approve plans for the construction of a state-of-the-art football stadium which will rival any other in the country. Fans will relax in plush, comfortable chairs, see the team play on mudless artificial turf, and drink Jamba Juice amidst amenities that the old Bowl could never have offered.

End of an era

The need for a new stadium did not become apparent until Fri., Mar. 6. As Jeffrey Innis, a member of the Yale Fields Grounds Crew, was mowing the field, he heard a resounding crash from somewhere in the stands. Hopping off his mower, Innis climbed the stairs near portal 21 to investigate.

"When I looked inside the portal," Innis said, "I couldn't believe what I saw. A huge chunk of concrete had fallen off of the outside entrance. It was blocking the path. Dirt and grass and stuff was falling all over the place. It was like the apocalypse was happening right here in New Haven."

The apocalypse it wasn't, but structural failure it was. After 83 collapse-free years, the Yale Bowl had started to crumble. Within a day, the engineering firm of Sisk and McDowell was brought in to assess the damage. After six hours of poring over blueprints and taking measurements with a variety of building gauges, they reached a conclusion. It spelled doom for Connecticut's largest in-ground elliptical football structure.

Since its creation in 1914, the Bowl has hosted 519 college football games. It has held crowds of up to 80,000, and was the home field of the New York Giants during the 1973 and 1974 seasons. But, according to the engineers, the Bowl has no future with capacity crowds or NFL contests.

"Basically, we found that the Bowl doesn't have too many games left in it," Douglas Sisk, DC '84, of Sisk and McDowell, said. "It's not all that uncommon to see a structure this old start to fall apart. It happened to Palmer Stadium in Princeton just a few years ago. The type of steel used in the early 20th century, when these stadiums were constructed, just isn't as strong as today's steel. Neither is the concrete. When the scoreboard was added in 1958 and the new press box was put on in 1986, they put stress on the framework that it just wasn't able to take. Decay was bound to happen sooner or later; it's a good thing nobody got crushed by chunks of falling cement when it did."

"One thing's for sure," Sisk added. "That stadium is going to undergo a total collapse really, really soon. It's made of bad steel. It's that simple."

The Yale Bowl's status as Yale's Bowl was in grave danger. Sisk and McDowell set the cost of renovating the stadium at $62.8 million. They explained that in order to preserve it, the University would have to completely reinforce the inside with titanium-alloy plates, and build eight giant steel buttresses to support its weight on the outside.

The proposal was immediately rejected by the Provost's Office. In a memorandum to Sisk and McDowell, Provost Alison Richard stated,

"From the outside, your renovations would make the Bowl look like a giant spider, which is something we don't want. Nobody likes spiders. If you could have made it look like a giant bulldog head, or perhaps a lemur, we might have said yes. But a spider? Gross. Plus, Yale doesn't have $62.8 million to spend right now. Really, we don't."

`Big freaky nets'

Fearing a massive outcry and a possible drop in advance ticket sales, the Athletic Department kept the news of the Bowl's impending collapse from the public. "We were pretty worried," Beckett said. "We had no idea where the team could play." Frantically, Beckett investigated alternative locales, but each of his efforts proved fruitless. "The New Haven Green has too many trees. Old Campus has those damn statues. And the Freestyle Dueling Association has Cross Campus lawn booked every Saturday afternoon through 2005," he said. Two weeks ago, Beckett got so desperate he even looked into booking games at the New Haven Coliseum. "We thought about turning the team into an arena football team, you know, giving them really colorful uniforms and teaching them how to kick field goals into those big, freaky nets. But [football coach] Jack Siedlecki said no way." With only six months to go before the home opener, the Yale football program appeared to be up the fecal creek with a desperate shortage of paddles.

After Beckett told Siedlecki that arena football was his only option, the coach was devastated. "I couldn't bear to have things end like this, especially after all I've been through with this team," he said. "Our thrilling win over Valparaiso. The shocking near-upset of Penn. The unforgettable Valparaiso game. The time we sort of almost beat Penn three months after the season had ended. Our thrilling win over Valparaiso. I couldn't believe it was over." In a tear-filled meeting 17 days ago, Siedlecki broke the news to his team. "It was a sad occasion," Scott Benton, MC '99, said. "We were all let down. We just wanted to play, and would have been happy to play anywhere. Even Cross Campus. Damn that Freestyle Dueling Association."

Bowl-ing for dollars

Just when things looked bleakest, the fate of the Yale football program was miraculously turned around. Fittingly, the rescue was due, in part, to Yale coaching legend Carm Cozza. As Siedlecki sat in his office on the afternoon of Thurs., Mar. 12, his phone rang. Siedlecki said of the events that followed, "Carm had called to tell me about a tailback draw play that he had designed, and I confessed to him that there probably wouldn't be any tailbacks or draw plays at the Yale Bowl this year. He was outraged, and said that as long as he was alive and able to think of tailback draw plays, he wouldn't allow this to happen."

Cozza immediately called some of Yale's most influential alumni, including William F. Buckley, Jr., DC '50, George Bush, DC '48, Lee Bass, SM '79, and William Howard Taft, Class of 1878. Horrified by the possible end of football at Yale, the alums promised the former coach enormous sums of money on the spot.

In an even savvier move, Cozza also made calls to several major corporations. Within hours, he secured corporate sponsorship for the new Bowl from Barnes & Noble. "We want to show Yale students that we're not evil, monopolizing corporate scumlords," Barnes & Noble president Edward Lynch said. "And there's no better way to do this than to buy their affections with money we made selling pornography."

In four hours, Cozza raised an astounding $1.2 billion--sufficient funds to not only rebuild the Bowl, but renovate all 12 residential colleges, supply fancy two-ply toilet paper in every dispenser at Yale, and establish a top-notch gay and lesbian studies department.

But Cozza had bigger plans. "Frankly, the Bowl always bugged the hell out of me," Cozza said. "It's dirty, it's ugly, and the benches give you splinters in your ass. You have to walk a mile to get a frankfurter at halftime, and the playing field has the consistency of dog poop. Yale players and Yale fans deserve something better. They deserve a new Bowl."

With some of the money he raised, Cozza hired the architecture firm of Telgheder and Whitehurst to draw up the plans for a replacement Bowl, to be erected on the
intramural fields across the street from the current Bowl. Completed a mere five days ago, the proposal was immediately approved by the Yale Corporation, with construction scheduled to begin on Wed., Apr. 1.

"Ordinarily, we would go about a project this large through our own means," Corporation member David Gergen, ES '63, said, "but we admired the way Cozza was able to squeeze an enormous amount of money out of alumni. That's the kind of initiative we members of the Yale Corporation like to reward."

Papa's Got A Brand New Bowl

There's never been a football stadium quite like the one Telgheder and Whitehurst have designed. "We had $1.2 billion to play with, so we went all out," said Walter Whitehurst, one of the firm's partners. "We really went crazy."

"Crazy" might be the wrong word. "Fantastic" might be closer to the mark. The Barnes & NoBowl, as it will be called, will be the only stadium in North America to boast 50,000 easy chairs. "And they won't be cheap recliners like you can buy at a yard sale. These are deluxe, from the Sharper Image," Whitehurst said. "Some of them will have vibrating back massagers and individual TV screens, so if the game gets boring, you can catch a rerun of Charles in Charge. And the seats aren't the only remarkable amenities. No one's going to believe the bathrooms we're going to put in this joint. One word: bidets. That's all I'm going to say."

COURTESY MR. BIGGLESWORTH SHAGADELIC: News of the NoBowl's construction has even hit 1960s Britain, and people are rushing to get advance tickets.

Fans will have the opportunity to feast on a variety of snacks, from beluga caviar to bleu cheeseburgers. The concession stand plans to stock 38,472 different varieties of microbrewed beer, many of them fruit-flavored. Jamba Juice will open a booth, and plans to introduce a new vitamin drink, "Crystal Meth Boost," designed to make fans' NoBowl experience all the more memorable. Local restaurants, including Broadway Pizza, the Doodle, and Main Garden will be offered franchise opportunities at the NoBowl's grand Comestible Kingdom, allowing Yalies to eat their favorite local foods while they watch the Bulldogs trounce their opponents.

And it's not just the fans who will be seated in the lap of luxury. The spectacular mechanical roof will retract when it's sunny and close if it's raining, preventing the players from getting all wet and logy on crummy days. And the field will be made of revolutionary BingoTurf. "The NoBowl will offer the players a contact sport experience unlike any in North America," Whitehurst promised. "In addition to the super-springy artificial turf on the field, we've installed artificial turf all over the place--on the walls and ceiling of the locker room, on the shower room floors. Everywhere. The players' areas are going to be just like the Jungle Room at Graceland, only with artificial turf instead of shag carpeting. Turf. It's the wave of the future."

`Frankly, I'm kvelling'

"I can't tell you how excited I am about the NoBowl," Beckett said. "Even after paying for the vibrating BarcaLoungers, we've got ridiculous amounts of money left over. There are going to be some great things going on here. This season, we're putting the `ram' back into the Yale football program." Contemporary sports artist LeRoy Niemann has been hired to paint the big "Yale" logo in the end zone, and actor Charlton Heston has been hired as the NoBowl's public address announcer. A "waxing suite" will be provided in order to give especially hirsute Saybrugians a chance to prepare themselves for their first-quarter strip. In addition, 23 members of the New York Philharmonic have signed on to play with the Yale Precision Marching Band, sparking widespread rumors that the band might be audible this year. "Frankly, I'm kvelling," said President Richard Levin, GRD '74. "I'd never thought I'd see this happening. Finally, the football team gets to move out of that dingy old stinkhole and into a place of glory, a place that reflects Yale's glory as the glittering torchbearer of Western civilization."

Student reaction has not been as overwhelmingly positive. "Does Yale really need a new stadium when the police don't have a contract and the unions are being treated unfairly and people are working in sweatshops and children are starving and WYBC is run by a bunch of jerks and the ozone and everything?" Sarah Turtle, JE '00, president of the Yale Society of Petitioners for Every Available Movement (SPEAM), asked. "Yeah," fellow SPEAMer Michael Goldberg-Wasp, TC '99, said. "It's really not cool for Yale to do that. We're staging a Frisbee-in next week to protest. Also, we'll be sending petitions around in the dining halls."

But a more salient issue has been raised by Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg. "We're rebuilding the Yale Bowl, and that's great. But Title IX regulations demand equal facilities for men's and women's sports. I expect to see a $1.6-billion field hockey stadium erected, and I expect to see it soon."

COURTESY TELGHEDER AND WHITEHURST Barns & NoBowl: Telgheder and Whitehurst's proposal for the new Bowl includes personal TV screens.

Graphic by Lucy Schaeffer, JE '99, design intern at the firm of Telgheder and Whitehurst.