Idiots Write About Sports

The University of California’s Memorial Stadium has many charms. It’s one of the most beautiful places to see a college football game in the country. If you’re a regular, it’s been unchanged since the day you first started going there… mostly because it’s really in the same state it was in when it was built in 1923.
Its charms, however, don’t include the cramped benches and tight rows, designed for the tiny people who roamed the land during the Harding administration. Or the decrepit scoreboards. Or the poor training facilities that make recruiting top high school players to Cal a far tougher sell than it should be.
So it’s encouraging to read that the Memorial Stadium renovation is finally underway! Okay, maybe not quite underway, but it’s coming. Although the ball isn’t rolling, university officials have announced their intentions to buy a ball and hire a team of consultants to help them get it rolling.
The plan is quite scant on details, as you might expect. What we do know is that there won’t be any luxury boxes (thank goodness), that any corporate naming sponsor would only have its name attached to the existing Memorial Stadium name (Comcast Memorial Stadium: In Memory of All Who Died In the Name of Substandard Cable Service), and that there might or might not be seats replacing the ridiculous bench areas in at least some of the stadium.
The football players will get their modern training facility beneath the east end of the stadium; the west end will presumably be upgraded as well, with a diversion of the street that runs in front of Memorial and the creation of a plaza in front of the stadium on the west side. Oh, and there will be massive seismic upgrades since the Hayward Fault runs right through the middle of the whole place.
It will be different, that’s for sure. Any reshuffling of seats will displace season ticket holders, meaning that it’s highly unlikely I’ll continue to sit in the seats my family has had since before I was born. Entering the stadium will presumably become a true event featuring a real centerpiece entryway, as opposed to what it’s been like up to now: oddly like jumping a fence and sneaking in to an abandoned amusement park.
For at least a year, too, Cal will be playing somewhere else. Optimistically it’ll be the 2006 season, although it might be 2007 instead. Or both. My vote’s for Cruel Phone Company Overlords Park, if anyone cares.
So 85 years of tradition will soon end. Frankly, after 85 years, it’s all for the best. At the very least, Memorial should have had an upgrade in the late ’60s or early ’70s; if it had, even that upgrade would be pathetically out of date by now. The end result of this experience will, with any luck, be a stadium that’s comfortable to sit in and fun to go to, with modern bathrooms and concessions… and a solid team on the field every year, owing to the quality of the training facilities and the education.
Given how the university runs, they better choose the ball-roller wisely. Because once this is done, we’ll be stuck with the results until the next big investment in 2090.