U.S. News and World Report be damned. Percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students be damned even further.
I didn’t come to Washington University in Saint Louis for any of those overly pretentious or lofty ideals. I came for one reason, a reason that’s slightly more.earthy in nature.
The grass.
Yeah it might sound like a bad idea to spend 120 grand on a school with a nice turf, but you’ve got to know what makes you happy, right?
My earliest memories of WU are those of being dazzled by the breathtaking aerial photography in the annual Viewbook that is sent out to seemingly every high school senior with a pulse and a grasp of simple subtraction.
I wondered to myself, “Could there really be an academic utopia with such sprawling fields of green and majestic criss-crossed malls?”
Of course, after visiting the Hilltop, I realized that most of the photos I had seen in the promotional materials were strategically taken B.C. (that’s Before Construction-I’m sure you understand what I mean).
Since coming to this school, I can count no less than seven new dormitory buildings and four new academic buildings that have come into existence.
Don’t get me wrong, growth and development are great; they’re awesome, even, but they’ve put a damper on the na‹ve dreams of an eager-eyed seventeen-year-old high school kid.
And, in the end, WU should be a really nice, complete place with every building we could ever imagine wanting. That time, however, will probably come sometime around, oh, 2006, at which point, of course, Mallinckrodt and Olin will need replacing, along with Wohl-yet more construction cones and yet fewer reading blankets.
To me, grass is (not coincidentally, since I am writing this column) also very tied to my view of sports. Chalk it up to living in humid Houston, Texas, deep in the heart of the southern U.S. Gnat Belt. Chalk it up to seeing countless baseball games in the rain-proof, forefather of artificial turf, the Astrodome.
Somewhere along the line, I developed a great respect for stadiums with natural grass and the way that natural grass can make an entire building glow. This may be bordering on Matt Goldberg-esque maudlin sentimentality, but there are some serious case-in-points in the fight for natural grass.
Case 1: This one should hit close to adoptive home for a lot of you readers. Busch Stadium, the playpen of the hometown Cardinals, or as I like to call it, the last of the serviceable cookie-cutter stadiums still standing, is the perfect example.
I can remember as a kid watching the speed-laden, defensive-minded Cardinals of Whitey Herzog flipping out onto an Astroturf field that was so hot on summer game days, you could actually see little heat waves rippling up from the surface of the turf. I even recall one brave reporter that ventured out onto field level before the game and measured the surface temperature to be 140 degrees Fahrenheit!
Since 1996, when Cardinals brass ended turf’s 26-year reign of terror, natural grass has transformed Busch into a place with all the charms of one of the newer, luxury-laden parks of the twenty-first century. Bravo, Cards, for taking the leap that they never took in Philly, Pittsburgh or Cincinnati before starting to build a new stadium altogether. I say we keep Busch-it’s got everything you need to have a great baseball game.
Case 2: It has long been known that Philadelphia’s artificial turf at Veterans Stadium is the worst surface in all of sports. Exceedingly hard, tightly stretched over unforgiving cement and prone to pulling up at seems, the Vet has been deemed unfit for play several times, as players feared for injured ankles and toes.
Finally, the stadium’s surface was replaced with NexTurf, supposedly the next generation in artificial surfaces. It has more layers of padding, and you even get to sprinkle it with plastic pellets before playing. Neat! What’s more impressive: walking out over the hallowed pitch of Lambeau Field, or dredging over the fake gray-green hair-like excuse for a surface they play on at the Vet?
Case 3: Tampa Bay-this is easily the worst stadium in baseball. It is the only professional stadium today that uses FieldTurf, another replacement for the Astroturf of the 1960’s. This mixture of sand and rubber is made from recycled Nike sneakers. and it shows. The field looks horrible, it doesn’t even feel like baseball. The biggest crowd to date at Tampa Bay’s Tropicana “Field” was a New Kids on the Block concert. What does that tell you?
To me, grass is everything in sports. There’s no comparison to emerging from a concrete concourse and walking out to a sea of perfectly manicured, crosshatched green grass under a bright shining sun.
It’s one of the feelings that I liked when I first visited WU, and though it may not look exactly like the publicity photos in the Viewbook, it’s pretty darn close.