SF Chronicle: CAL'S CRUMBLING HOME STADIUM ON THE BRINK

Link.

By Sam Whiting.

California Memorial Stadium may be the best place in America to watch a football game, but it's the worst place to dress for one. Or to be carted off the field with an injury if you are a player. Or to visit the restroom if you are a fan. And definitely the worst place to be, as a player or a fan or anybody else, during an earthquake.   These conclusions were drawn after studying Memorial Stadium operations and infrastructure, starting four hours before kickoff on Aug. 30, when 63,000 people climbed up into the elbow of Strawberry Canyon. To open their 85th season in the chipped and splintered colosseum, Cal's Golden Bears hosted the Michigan State Spartans, who last played here in 1957. The visitors must have been charmed to find that the structure hadn't changed in the 50 seasons since. As one Spartan was heard to comment upon entering the primitive visitors' locker room, "This is like high school."

Any spectator who has sat on the benches of rotting wood or cold aluminum would agree. The seat numbers are measured to the width of a skinny teenager. When the place is packed there is no leg room. There is no back room. There is no side room.  "This stadium was fine when the team was no good and it wasn't that full," season-ticket holder Jim Branson said. "When they get the big crowds like in the last few years, they really can't handle it."  It is unknown when this will improve or by how much. The construction project that caused protesters to live in trees for nearly two years is Phase I: the Student-Athlete High Performance Center. Major construction will start in January and will cost $140 million, but it doesn't address the experience of the paying customer. That comes with Phase II, retrofitting and modernizing the west side of the stadium, which won't start until summer of 2010 at the soonest. Phase III, the east side, follows, but no start date has been set.

Originally scheduled to follow Phase I, there is now talk of doing Phase II concurrently to lop a year off the timeline. The retrofitting will require Cal to play the 2011 season elsewhere. The entire project is expected to be finished in 2014.  This much is known: The Beaux Arts bowl - John Galen Howard was the architect - dedicated to "Californians who gave their lives in the World War" (Phase I not II), will not be compromised, nor will the proximity of seats to the playing field. They aren't going to pop on an upper deck to double the seating. The bowl may lose 10,000 seats for code requirements, but they aren't going to sacrifice capacity for comfort by lopping off thousands more seats.  There will never be luxury boxes. There will be 4,000 stadium chairs and special seats in the press box for donors, but there probably won't be backrests or armrests for the other 55,000 or 60,000. They will have to settle for more restrooms and access to concessions, and avenues of egress in the event of a major eruption. The Hayward Fault enters the stadium in section KK, at the Prospect Street entrance, directly under the restroom closest to Jim Branson's aisle seat.

"I have this recurring dream that I'm going to be standing at the urinal when the earthquake hits," said Branson, Class of '67, who has been playing the odds for 40 years. "There is concrete in front of me and a thousand people behind me. They're going to find me days later."   Still, he's in his seat two hours early for the Michigan State game and he'll be there for Colorado State on Saturday.   

Tunnels

North

To take the playing field, the Cal team emerges from a set of double doors and fans can reach out and touch them from the concourse. The players can reach out, too, and grab the dirt of the embankment while coming down the cement stairs. They leave the field at the same time the Cal marching band is attempting to take it. All that blue meets head on, plumed hats against helmets. This collision should be alleviated in Phase I of construction. To reach the field, players will come upstairs onto the plaza and walk 40 feet outside the stadium to the tunnel.

South

Visiting players eager to get out of the claustrophobic clubhouse find things worse on the stairs leading to the tunnel. The doorway is the width of one lineman's shoulder pads. They come out single file and down steps that sag with the weight. There is an immediate left turn then a hard right. If traffic isn't controlled at the doorway, they bunch up as they cross the bridge over a spectators' tunnel. Cal rooters know this and stand here piling the verbal abuse onto visiting players stuck on the steps. But at least there is plenty of time for reflection on the history of the place.  "How many Heisman Trophy winners have come through this door?" assistant athletic director Bob Milano Jr. mused. (Ten, with seven from USC.)   Once they reach the safety of the tunnel it is a downhill walk to another stairway below grade. This prevents them from making any type of charge onto the field. The 1920s design was brilliant if intended to prevent opponents from being fired up for their entrance. Stanford has solved this by avoiding the tunnel and taking the stadium stairs down through their own fans for Big Game.

Visiting team's locker room

The boxy build-out inside the Prospect Street gate would never be taken for a football dressing room. A break room for concessionaires maybe, or a police substation separated from the south end zone plaza by a curtain.  Behind the curtain and through double doors is a dank vault furnished in long blue benches. While loading gear into lockers that look like orange crates, Michigan State equipment coordinator Bob Knickerbocker thought back upon his 35 years humping gear to stadiums and admitted that this visitors facility was the most cramped and antiquated he had seen.  To make it all fit, he put the lockers of his smaller players - quarterbacks and kickers - in the closet-sized anteroom. The adjacent shower room became the training room, where players were taped and massaged while admiring the pro-Cal graffiti left on the walls. "Bear Territory," it read, and not far off in its description.  "I've never seen anything like it. It's like a meat locker in here," said Michigan State equipment manager Dylan Marinez as he unloaded trunks full of gear. He'd have to load it all back onto a truck parked outside the gate during the first half so the shower/training room could be turned into a halftime meeting room. By game's end it was a shower room again, if players didn't mind waiting. There are only 12 overhead nozzles. Offense showers first, then defense.

Despite or because of its discomforts, the visiting locker room is not part of Phase I of the Student-Athlete High Performance Center. Guests will continue to endure. But the women's lacrosse team and men's rugby team, who also use these facilities, will get moved into the new facility. The visiting football team will have the 1923 vintage locker room all to itself until Phase II.

Cal training quarters

Memorial Stadium was built for football games, not football practices. Historically, the team was headquartered in Harmon Gym, at the bottom of campus, and practiced on the outfield of Evans Diamond. Game-day quarters consisted of an old tar-roof shack under the bowl of the stadium, one story up from the north end zone. It was improved over the years, but not by much.  "It was very concrete and bleak, but it was all we knew" recalled Matt Bouza, a wide receiver from 1978 to '80. "As far below the standards as the locker room is now, it is a country club compared to what we had."  The football program relocated in the early 1980s when Astroturf was installed at the stadium, making it usable for both practice and games. Locker rooms, physical therapy areas, meeting rooms, coaches' offices, weight rooms and a team dining hall were jammed into the concourse starting at the south end zone and following the curve of the bowl to the 35-yard line on the west side.  To get from, say, the dressing room to the coaches' offices, a player must go up and over and around and through and down narrow hallways, all of which are invisible to fans walking the concourse on the other side of the stucco wall.   It was inconvenient but doable in the years that football, rugby and soccer were the only sports headquartered at the stadium. But 10 or 11 other varsity sports have been added with all their gear and all their needs.

On any given afternoon there are 105 football players wending their way through this maze, plus 300 athletes representing softball, lacrosse, field hockey, rugby, soccer, gymnastics and golf. Look into the sports medicine room and you'll see a half-naked football player on a table getting treatment next to a gymnast or field hockey player.   The uniforms are all stored together in a cramped mezzanine. Softball has even more uniform combinations than football. Two industrial-sized washers and dryers are going around the clock, even on game days. It is right there along the mezzanine and if you get bored by the game, you can always come watch the washers spin.  The medical room is next to the laundry room and if a player gets seriously injured during a game he must be carted up a ramp and brought right through the gridlock of fans.

"One game, I think it was Colorado State. The quarterback broke his leg," recalled assistant athletic director Bob Milano Jr. "They brought him up here through the crowd, and he was just crying. It must have been humiliating for him."

There is one, and probably only one advantage, to the training quarters and that is the view. While dressing, a player can step out onto a balcony and look across Berkeley to the bay. From the weight room, up against the rim of the stadium, the view is even better, though it was made worse by the tree-sitters.  "One guy used to get fully naked while the guys were in here working" said John Sudsbury, associate director of media relations.

Amenities

West side of the stadium

The concourse, which runs from end zone to end zone on the west side, is about 10 feet wide, pinned between the stands and the training facilities. It would be passable if there weren't concessions along the way. Standard procedure is to form a line on one side of people waiting to use the restroom, and a line on the other side of people trying to move along the concourse. Between those two lines, people queue up to reach the concessions. At halftime none of the three lines moves.

South end zone

The concession area and restrooms are precisely where the Hayward Fault enters the stadium. You can follow its path by looking at the pillars, built to shift over time, in the seismic upgrades of the 1920s. Not built to shift are the door jambs of the restrooms. Some have become comically crooked as the earth moved and carpenters compensated.

East side of the stadium

On the east side, there is no concourse. There are no restrooms either. The men's room outside the stadium became the rugby clubhouse and the women's room was also decommissioned. All that remain are rows of blue outhouses. "We essentially operate the east side of the stadium on an extension cord and a hose bib," assistant athletic director Bob Milano Jr. said. "We have extension cords strapped to the fence."

Hall of Fame Room

Donors who arrive early get folding chairs. Others are seated on metal stairs, balancing lunch on paper plates on their knees, or seated on benches up against the glass memorabilia cases. The displays are nice but the main draw to the Hall of Fame is its restrooms. Outside on the concourse, the line to the women's room is already six deep, 45 minutes before kickoff.

Press box

Years ago the stadium press box, a double-length freight car with windows, was removed for seismic reasons. The replacement box looks like a row of storage containers. "Because it was temporary, nothing in it is up to what you would expect," said Joe Starkey, who has been the voice of Cal football since 1975. "We've got posts in the way. I have to look around things. They actually had to put a hole in a cardboard blockage on the window to my right so I could see the scoreboard."

Swell treatment

VIPs and donors sit on two levels at the south end of the press box. On the first level they are on plastic folding chairs. One level up, on the roof of the press box, they get a slight upgrade to wooden folding chairs in two rows on carpeted risers. But the people in the upper riser have to stand up to see the action, and they are exposed to fog, wind and rain - and a postcard view - coming in from the west.

Also check out this article here.