Tradition losing its significance
By TED FOX
Sports Columnist
As I write this, history is coming to a conclusion.
It isn't the end of the world, although to some baseball fans, it might be signaling the approach of the apocalypse. No, this is a conclusion to a long chapter of sports history.
As I write this, the Detroit Tigers play baseball for the last time at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in Detroit, where some form of a baseball field has existed since 1896 and where the current stadium has stood since 1912.
I'm writing this article as I track the game against the Kansas City Royals on my computer. It's the bottom of the fourth; the game is tied at two. But that really doesn't matter to me — or anyone in the stands there — today.
The outcome of this game won't have any implications for the rest of baseball, unless you're tracking the race for last place in the American League Central.
Sadly enough, I can't say the end of this game — the last one to be played at this cavernous old ballpark where it still takes more than a pop-up with a strong breeze to connect for a home run — has any huge implications for sports as a whole either.
You would think it would. One of the oldest parks in baseball — one of the oldest venues in sports, a place where countless people, young and old, went from April to October to forget their problems, at least for a few hours — will no longer play host to dreams.
Why wouldn't this be a big deal for sports, or even, at least, for baseball?
Because that's not the way things are run anymore.
Tradition ranks right up there with memories on the list of things that sports doesn't seem to have room for these days.
Still 2-2, top of the sixth.
Tiger Stadium isn't the exception, it's the rule. Everywhere you look now, traditional stadiums are abandoned for new state-of-the-art facilities that are about as filled with emotion as an Al Gore speech.
You need not go any farther than our very own Notre Dame campus. That stadium we go into on fall Saturdays isn't Notre Dame Stadium. It's a big mass of concrete that tries to pass itself off as Notre Dame Stadium.
But we know the difference.
I'll give the University credit: at least Notre Dame Stadium wasn't abandoned, it was just added onto. You could say the real stadium still lives underneath all that artificial exterior and its heart still beats proudly underneath its mask.
But the stadium as the Four Horsemen, Knute, Rudy, Montana, Brown, Ismail, The Bus and even Lou knew it is gone.
But hey, that wasn't even a big deal, because everyone else was doing it, or talking about how they were going to do it, or how they did it. Let's just hope putting domes on stadiums doesn't mount a comeback.
Karim Garcia just homered in the bottom of the sixth, putting the Tigers up 4-2.
It doesn't matter if the Tigers hang on for the win and close out on a winning note at home. It wouldn't have mattered if Notre Dame would have lost to Rutgers in the last game at Notre Dame Stadium.
The game is already over, the last out has already been put in the scorebook. Playing it is just a formality. Tiger Stadium has become a byline in the long list of disappearing stadiums, arenas and memories, just like Notre Dame Stadium.
But maybe someone can do me a favor to make it a little easier. Can you show me where Ty Cobb slid into third at the new Comerica Park or how Touchdown Jesus is the first one on the field to signal an Irish score?
Oh, wait, I guess you can't.
All Sports Stories for Tuesday, September 28, 1999
