IT’S LAMBTASTIC
Green Bay stadium one of few football classics
MAYBE the problem is that we heap so much purple prose on baseball stadiums, there simply aren’t any adjectives, adverbs or gerunds left for any of the other coliseums where we conduct the business of American sport. Football, especially. Face it: There haven’t been a lot of poets who’ve tripped over their tongues crafting verse about the Superdome. MetLife Stadium rarely inspires much of anything, because how could you expect an eight-story pile of venetian blinds stacked on top of each other to inspire much of anything?
Lambeau Field is different. Lambeau is the exception. Lambeau is John Facenda’s voice eternally intoning and extolling “the Frozen Tundra.” Lambeau is this huge oval in the middle of a small Midwestern town. Lambeau is the visible breath constantly emanating from the mouths of 100 players and eight officials and 20 coaches and 80,000 fans during a threehour football game.
It is bigger than it used to be, much bigger. It opened in 1957 with seats for around 33,000 people, and as the Packers under Vince Lombardi turned Green Bay into a phenomenon called Titletown, it kept growing: to 38,000, to 42,000, to 50,000, to 53,000. The whole place is closed in now, and from the field seems to meld into the (inevitably) gray Wisconsin sky above.
“When they expanded, they never affected the integrity of the stadium,” says Ernie Accorsi, the former GM of the Giants and a sports fan’s sports fan who can hold court for hours on the majesty of our athletic cathedrals (among many other subjects). “When you’re in it, it looks exactly as it always did, just bigger.
“Yes, they put in suites, but you hardly notice because they did not build bizarre-looking hanging second or third decks like the new stadiums in Philly or New England. It’s essentially the same place. Then you add the fans, the small town, Lombardi, everything else. There’s no place like it.”
If it seems odd to talk about a football stadium that way … well, it is odd. Accorsi says the old RFK Stadium in Washington used to feel that way to him, too, the way you would feel walking into one of the old baseball basilicas like Ebbets Field or Fenway Park, Wrigley Field or Comiskey Park; the way just about any iteration of Yankee Stadium could, and can, make you take solemn pause; the way even the newer yards have tried so hard to capture the flavors of yesterday.
Soldier Field used to hint at this, before they turned it into a weirdlooking spaceship seemingly moored to Lake Michigan. Now it looks like the “after” picture hanging on Renée Zellweger’s plastic surgeon’s office.
“Baseball is the romance of my life,” Accorsi says. “I’ve said for years the baseball parks are an integral part of the game itself, their quirks, unique features. Of course, I was 10 in 1951, so I grew up with the old parks. I saw games in every park but Ebbets Field — my one sports regret — and Sportsman’s Park [in St. Louis]. I saw all the rest: Shibe [Philly], Polo Grounds, Griffith [D.C.], Crosley [Cincinnati], Comiskey, original Yankee, Forbes [Pittsburgh]. Football stadiums, with rare exceptions ....”
Well, put it this way: If you can’t say anything nice …
It is not impossible, of course. If you walk into Notre Dame Stadium on a football Saturday and aren’t overtaken by goose bumps, your nervous system simply doesn’t work. The Big House at Michigan is magnificent, and so is Ohio Stadium in Columbus, and Death Valley at LSU. Architecture helps make that so. History seals it.
Which is why Lambeau is such a truly unique sporting experience. It is both huge and intimate, both old and new, both back-in-the-day
and state-of-the-art. And yes, there are plenty of ghosts who loiter in the musty corridors and catwalks. That is part of the deal, after all.
It is why the first time Ernie Accorsi visited Lambeau Field, he knew exactly what he needed to do. He walked out of the tunnel, looked around, sought out the oldest security man he could find.
Where was it, he asked the man — who knew at once that this visitor, as had so many before him, had transported himself back to December 1967, back to the Ice Bowl — where did Starr run the quarterback sneak?
“He took me right to the spot,” Accorsi says.