Lights finally dim on Candlestick Park
The old pile of concrete was already close to 30 years old — hard, weather-beaten years — when the San Francisco Giants braced for games 3, 4 and 5 of the 1989 World Series, though Game 5 looked like a pipe dream the way Tony LaRussa’s Oakland A’s were brushing the Giants aside.
Candlestick Park. It had history, and a certain twisted, oddball cachet.
But in the days before Google, where did you go to access the best folklore, anecdotes and archives on this venerable south San Francisco monument, built hard by the bay?
“Come with me. I’ve got some files in my trunk,” said Art Spander, who at the time had not yet been elected to the Football Hall of Fame or enshrined by Augusta National, though he was already a legendary figure among sportswriters, employed at the San Francisco Examiner.
Spander, who’d have been played in the movies by Groucho Marx, took a couple of Canadian scribes out to his car in the parking lot, popped open the boot and revealed what appeared to be something a homeless person had lived in for a couple of years. But like the memorabilia-jammed lower floor of his home in the Oakland Hills, there was method to Spander’s mad clutter.
He moved a couple of blankets, a parka, a couple of sets of golf clubs and 40 or 50 media guides, swatted away a raccoon or two, dragged out a cardboard box, opened it and extracted an inch-thick file.
“Here,” he said. “Give it back when you’re done.”
It was a Candlestick Park primer, clippings from the best stuff ever written about the place that would come to be known, over its lifetime, as Candles-tink, the Polar Grounds, the Froze Bowl and — after it survived the severe shaking it took on Oct. 17, 1989 — Wiggly Field.
But on this day, the day before Game 3, the day before the Loma Prieta earthquake would hit at 5:04 p.m., it was perfectly sunny and calm.
We had walked onto the manicured grass, looked around the place and wondered what the fuss was all about. The Giants were out there telling tales of the weird and funny and off-putting things that had happened during games in their very own frigid, gale-stricken house of horrors — perhaps trying to get into the A’s heads in those days before regular season interleague play.
But it was such a pretty day, warm and windless, who could believe them?
“Nice day, huh?” a San Francisco writer said. “It’s nice here a lot in the daytime. They must have built this place during the daytime.” And so, to the files: “Opened: April 12, 1960,” according to the literature. “First complaint about wind: April 12, 1960.”
San Francisco Chronicle city columnist extraordinaire Herb Caen had once dug up a copy of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s August 1959 newsletter.
“Radiant Heat To Warm Fans at Night Games,” was the headline over a story about a giant boiler which would heat water for some 35,000 feet of pipe to be installed in concrete immediately under the seats.
Except the pipes were buried too deep in the concrete and the heat never did work.
“Architect John S. Bolles took advantage of the terrain to deflect prevailing winds from the playing field and stands,” the report went on. “Nestled against Bayview Hill, the stadium has a concrete shell baffle, shaped like a boomerang, to provide wind protection.” (Laughter ensued.) A lot of history happened there. The Beatles played at The Stick in 1966. It was their last concert ever. Many feel it was no coincidence.
In the 1961 all-star game, Giants reliever Stu Miller, a little right-hander, was blown off-balance by a gust of wind in mid-delivery, and a balk was called. In the early ’70s, a baby grand piano was wheeled out to home plate for the anthem before a Giants game. The pianist lifted the lid, the wind caught it, and upended the whole piano.
Good history, too, of course, like all those Joe Montana-Jerry Rice-Dwight Clark championship teams. But somehow, it’s the stadium’s contrary nature that may always be remembered.
This is the park that closed Monday night with a 49ers game against the Atlanta Falcons, fully 24 years after it ought to have fallen down on a house full of baseball fans, not to mention players and coaches who rushed out of the dugouts in the temblor’s wake and frantically waved at their families to come down to the field, away from the concrete.
One of the people it ought to have collapsed under was me, en route to my auxiliary press box seat in the upper deck, high above home plate. The quake hit, and Candlestick quivered and shook and swayed — and remained standing.
Today it all seems like a wonderful adventure. Rushing back to the darkened media workroom to retrieve my computer by the light of someone’s match, finding it, almost tripping on the way out over an elderly Bay Area writer who had fallen asleep in his chair before the game and hadn’t been awakened by the quake but wrote about the whole thing the next day in lurid detail.
Writing columns alongside fellow Canucks Allan Maki and Jeff Blair and Marty York under the dome-light of a rented car, going back into the stadium against the warning of the cops, dictating over the phone to the Calgary Herald’s horse racing writer, who faxed it on to the Edmonton Journal, the editor calling my wife at home to say: “He’s OK. He filed.”
So they’re probably going to take the wrecking ball to the place next year, they say. Or just implode it. If they had announced its impending doom in 1989, no one would have been very surprised. It was old then, by today’s standards. But The Stick kept on torturing fans for another two-plus decades, out of sheer perversity.
No doubt the 49ers’ new place, 63 kilometres further south in Santa Clara, will be warm and comfy.
The seagulls will be able to escape over the stadium rim without being blown back in. A famous lawyer will never sue for the price of his season’s ticket over frostbite at a baseball game and win.
It just won’t be the same.