Sunday, December 12, 1999

Goodbye? No, good riddance!

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BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

        To mark their last game at Cinergy Field, the Bengals are passing out souvenir posters to all fans leaving the game Sunday. Here's a better idea:

        Hardhats.

        Immediately after the game, give everyone a commemorative Bengals hardhat. Then blow the stadium up. Detonate the sucker. Send it back to the Stone Age. Invite fans to witness the big bang. Talk about fireworks.

        If only the Reds weren't sentenced to play at Cinergy three more years. If only they could evacuate with the Bengals. Then we could give Cinergy Field the sendoff it richly deserves.

        When other places start rotting, we talk about their character. Tiger Stadium, Fenway Park, the Cotton Bowl. In other places, decrepitude works. It never hurt the Boston Garden, heaven for every bad cigar and peanut shell in the world. The Garden had an authentic decrepitude. It was a bum with style.

        So was Cleveland Stadium. In December, with the wind off Lake Erie whipping your face sideways and the green-painted mud churned to a latex goo, there was no better place to watch a football game. Cleveland Stadium was prehistoric, in the best sense.

Character flaws
        Cinergy Field doesn't have character. It isn't old enough. Cinergy has “character” the way your blind date had “personality.”

        The Bengals will do their best today to conjure images of their glory years at Cinergy. This decade, I don't recall the glory years. What I recall is a foot-long, glutinous something-or-other decorating the press box window directly in front of my plastic seat. You can guess what it was. Use your imagination.

        It was there for two years. For two seasons, nobody washed the window. Maybe they were too busy cleaning the bathrooms.

        Cinergy Field is a dump. It is not worthy of your nostalgia, unless you get weepy over smashed beer cups left in your aisle since 1972. Have a great time today. If you park in the stadium garage, watch out for huge chunks of rotting concrete, free-falling from the ceiling.

        I know why there is no stadium club and why, for all its lamentable life, Cinergy has had the local flavor of a Wendy's. The Reds and Bengals hate each other. It's a feud that lives today. Mike Brown's resistance to grass at Cinergy is his final parting shot at his former co-tenants.

        But that doesn't explain why the city of Cincinnati never gave the place a decent facelift. If we treated our homes the way the city treated the stadium, we'd be moving every couple years, right after they slapped the condemned signs on the aluminum siding.

        The city saw the stadium as a parking lot until 1996, when it handed it over to Hamilton County. The county has done a little better. Last summer, their people actually splashed a little paint on the red and green level facades. It was the first time the facades had been painted. Ever.

        It was lipstick on a corpse. Cinergy Field was a dump 20 years ago. It's beyond painting now.

Sterile? Try boring
        To see how ugly it is, to understand what a little care might have meant, go to Pittsburgh. Three Rivers Stadium opened the same month Cinergy did. It has a brewpub, a stadium club and paint that looks to be applied every year.

        You go to Three Rivers, you wonder why they're tearing it down. You go to Cinergy, you wonder why nobody shot it years ago.

        I didn't get here until 1988. By then, the garage leaked, the concourses were caked with perma-filth and the bathrooms were where the CIA interrogated spies on weekdays.

        Was it ever nice? Was it ever anything grander than functional? Was it ever. . . clean? We like to say Cinergy is “sterile.” Would it be that were so.

        You can howl at the teams all you want, for shaking us down. You'd be right. But save some indignation for the city, which treated Cinergy Field the way feet treat a welcome mat.

        My biggest wish for the new Bengals stadium is that we treat it better than the old one.

        Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at 768-8454. Fair Game, a collection of his columns, is available at local bookstores.

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