The Outsiders' Edge

(Enjoy Brad’s second Seattle entry. I can only hope this is as well received as his first, or I’m going to move the Seattle Sounders to Little Rock Arkansas.)

Empty, Crumbling, or Shiny: A Catalog of Seattle’s Stadiums

Seattle has issues with its sports stadiums that reflect both national angst and that special ennui we all feel as sunny September weather turn into awful October.  The city went through a taxpayer-financed building binge in the 1990s that bred near-term success for floundering franchises like the Sonics, Mariners, and Seahawks.  A decade later, another round of bad Seattle teams—the Huskies, Thunderbirds, and, again, Sonics)—tried to get free money, only to be spurned.  Now every team in the city is stuck with a stadium with problems ranging from cultural flaws to a decent chance of crumbling before our very eyes.  Going to a game now forces you to revisit a questionable-at-best past or wonder why you have to pay $40 for a seat on a wood bench.  Sports should be an escape, but these places stick around to remind locals of good teams come and gone, and millions spent for fun and sometimes profit.

Key Arena

Current and past tenants: Sonics (NBA), Storm (WNBA), Thunderbirds (minor league hockey)

It’s unfair to say the Key Arena’s why the Sonics are now in Oklahoma and not the Sonics, but on the whole it’s unfair that the Sonics are now in Oklahoma.  The Oklahoma owners, with help from plenty of people at the NBA, painted the Key as an arena too tiny to support a team that was failing.  Too bad that failing was actually a clear Oklahoman strategy to both rebuild the team’s talent and demolish all local support for the Sonics brand.  Like a dust bowl in reverse, it worked and now an arena that isn’t especially awful is especially vacant.

Mission Accomplished

Key Arena is aggravating not just because it’s a fresh scar on Seattle fandom, but because it held and holds such promise.  It was remodeled in the 1990s, is located next to the Space Needle to lure in tourists, and is a good place to watch a basketball.  But it isn’t big enough.  They had to take out seats when they used to play minor league hockey games in the Key—now the team plays in a new rink in the suburbs.  Pink just performed at the Key, but it was too small to permit her to wear actual clothing.  Still, Key Arena isn’t a postage stamp, and even at the end of the slash-and-burn, the Sonics weren’t dead-last in attendance in the NBA (thanks, Memphis and Indiana!)   Now only the WNBA’s Seattle Storm play games there.  Or did until they lost in the first round of the playoffs, like they do every year.

Qwest Field

Qwest Field

Tenants: Seahawks (NFL), Sounders (MLS)

Qwest Field is great is you like loud.  The push for the stadium, opened in the year 2000, came from Seahawks owner Paul Allen, who likes loud enough to build a vomit-shaped museum to music.  He wanted to make sure the new stadium he only partly paid for was also loud.  To quote from Seattle’s now-dead Post-Intelligencer:

“Allen vowed the football stadium would have features to enhance cacophony. He got smart people to do acoustic modeling of sound reverberations in the place… And so, Qwest Field stood poised to become one giant, acoustically amplifying megaphone.”

To be fair, the fans show up to the game, but the Seahawks coddles fans into yelling all the time.  The team has used the “12^th Man” gimmick since the 1980’s, but kicked it into overdrive once the new stadium came around.  If you’ve watched the beginning of a Hawks game on TV, you’ve probably seen a celebrity raise the 12^th Man Flag up a pole high above the south end zone.  They even got Apolo Ohno to hoist the flag.  The shameful thing is that the team pays Texas A&M, because they didn’t come up with the term 12^th Man.   Do Seattle fans really need celebrities and acoustical engineers to make sure they’re loud?  Going to Seahawks games is an awesome experience, but it’d be better if fans could boast about having the best team in football (which they’ve never had) than the best fans in football (again, never.)

Qwest Field isn’t great if you like grass.  When Washington voters narrowly approved giving Paul Allen millions to build Qwest, they thought they’d be getting grass for their new outdoor stadium.  The marketing campaign for the stadium included promises of getting a Major League Soccer team.  Apparently Allen heard that soccer moms vote.  But a year later, Allen’s people decided FieldTurf, the latest and greatest AstroTurf, would be a better choice.  This decision thwarted top-level American soccer in Seattle for years.  Some special games at Qwest over the years have trucked-in grass fields, but now the MLS Sounders play on the fake stuff.  FieldTurf’s website has a positive quote from Sounders striker Nate Jaqua, but real top-level soccer teams still use grass.  A couple outdoor NFL stadiums—Cleveland, New England and New York—use fake grass, but the Seahawks have already had to rip out and replace their field, so the stuff can’t be that much easier to maintain.  It may well help keep the stadium loud.

This is actually a picture of dry land in Seattle after a rainy day.

Husky Stadium

Tenant: UW Football

Husky Stadium has a lot of things going for it.  The open east-end offer great views of boats and mountains.  It’s close to the University of Washington campus.  There a decent-sized parking lot for tailgating, unlike anywhere else in the city.  It may have been the birthplace of The Wave, America’s only nationwide cheer (The Oakland A’s and the entirety of Mexico disagree on that point.)  It’s old enough to have some history.  Too bad that history means that many of the seats—and by seats I mean wood benches—are crumbling.  It also must have been built in a far-back time when track and field drew big crowds, because eight running lanes surround the field.  The players, coaches, and mascot may love the extra space to stretch out and relax, but it creates an additional 20-plus-foot moat between fans and the game they’re trying to watch.  This makes tackles only slightly easier to spot as boats tacking on Lake Washington.

The University of Washington is trying to cobble together the money to somehow fix the aging stadium, but there’s this pesky recession that’s wiped out both government money and wealthy booster money.  The school’s request for $150 million in tax dollars (which would be matched by private donors) died in the state legislature, just like the Sonics’ trip to the government ATM in Olympia did a couple years ago.  Another complicating factor for the Huskies is that the Washington State Cougars are also going through a remodel of their (tiny, not as pretty) stadium, and don’t want their rival getting money.  If the Huskies can pull off a few more improbable victories like the USC win, maybe they’ll get funding before low-income health care programs.

(A few thoughts on that UW/USC game: I was down on the Huskies on all week when ESPN was saying they might have a shot at an upset.  I was down on the team throughout the game, when USC seemed to be able to run the ball whenever they wanted.  I was ecstatic when somehow the Huskies managed to cobble together enough field goals to win the game.  Jake Locker didn’t overthrow receivers when it counted!  Now I’m down on the team to stay in the AP Top 25 poll—they’re #24 right now.  A more realistic goal now is to just get to a bowl game.  If they don’t win against a not-great Stanford team this weekend, that won’t happen.  Stanford’s still favored by 7 points, so while the AP likes the Huskies, bettors don’t.  Still, I hope the crush the Cardinal and the Cougars and enjoy their trip to the Poinsettia Bowl.)

Safeco: The House that Buhner built.

Safeco Field  Tenant: Seattle Mariners

Safeco Field is gorgeous, but it has one of the most expensive roofs ever.  The hangar-like retractable roof that prevents rainouts (something Seattle baseball hasn’t had since I was born) led to a price-tag of more than $500 million.  Granted, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones would laugh at that total, but those are 1999 dollars—if the M’s were dumb enough to blowup Safeco and then rebuild it, they’d be out about $700 million.  Fortunately, the stadium’s pretty and shows off the Seattle downtown skyline.

The problem with Safeco Field is the people.  It’s about the only venue in Seattle where fans are too quiet.  Whenever the Mariners field a big-name opponent, like the Red Sox, Yankees or Blue Jays (who are a big-name in nearby Canada), local fans are shouted down.  Mariners’ management actually breeds this lack of enthusiasm in the stadium.  Ushers are quick to calm down any raucous fans and, in one over-reported instance, quick to stop women from kissing each other.  So Safeco stands apart from other Seattle stadiums in being a perfectly respectable venue, albeit it’s too rough on right-handed batters, done in by enervated fans.

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