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Summary
Summary
The American sports stadium, for all its raucous glory, is an overlooked centerpiece--a veritable temple--of our national culture. A hallowed ground for communal worship, this is where history is made on grass, artificial turf, hardwood, and even ice; where nostalgia flows as freely as ten-dollar beers; where everything thrills, from exploding fireworks to grinning cheerleaders. In The Arena, "an altogether new and riveting sports classic" (Josh Wilker), intrepid sportswriter Rafi Kohan crisscrosses the country, journeying from one beloved monument to the next. As he finagles access to the unexpected corners and hidden corridors of our most frequented fields, he discovers just what makes them tick--and what keeps us coming back time and time again.
Beginning with the "old-timers," Kohan pays his respects to Chicago's ivy-laced Wrigley and Green Bay's lovable Lambeau, which have creakily adjusted to the twenty-first century while maintaining those age-old quirks fans have prized for generations. Juxtaposing these cherished time capsules with mighty new mammoths like Dallas's shiny AT&T Stadium, Kohan examines the often-punishing realities of how they are built, from architectural ambition to controversial funding and political strong-arming.
Meanwhile, just outside the turnstiles of these commercial cathedrals, whole ecosystems flourish, buzzing with charming merch men and cutthroat ticket scalpers. Trips to Cleveland's Progressive Field and Quicken Loans Arena illuminate such shadow economies, revealing the remarkable impact a team--and even just a single player (yes, we're looking at you, LeBron James)--can have on an entire city. With infectious enthusiasm and wit, Kohan also explores the behind-the-scenes logistics and deeply ingrained traditions within these bustling facilities, cracking open a secret world of unforgettable characters--groundskeepers, mascots, halftime performers--who work tirelessly to make the live event worth the price of admission.
If you've ever wondered how they coordinate those fighter jet flyovers with the national anthem, how many hot dogs they serve in a day at Citi Field, how boozy pregame tailgates are kept in line, or what on earth AstroTurf is made of, look no further. As rowdy and rollicking as its subject, The Arena is a must-read for diehard fans, shameless bandwagoners, umpires, broadcasters, groundskeepers, culture junkies, tailgaters, and anyone else who's ever eagerly headed off to the ballpark to catch a game.
Author Notes
Rafi Kohan is a freelance writer and editor, and an amateur ivy groomer. Formerly, he served as deputy editor at the New York Observer and has written for GQ, Men's Journal, Wall Street Journal, Town & Country, ESPN.com, and more. He lives in New York City and deeply misses the old Yankee Stadium.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kohan, a contributing editor at the New York Observer, delivers an addictive, detailed look at the lives of sports arenas-how these increasingly elaborate structures are funded, how they're maintained, and the kinds of tailgating and sideshow events that take place in and around them. Kohan is a lively, funny writer who eschews theory for experience, venturing to the stadiums themselves and tagging along with the people who give these places life. At the Green Bay Packers' venerable Lambeau Field, he takes the Lambeau Oath and swears to "drink Wisconsin beers until the cooler is empty"; he nervously assists a chair-stacking acrobat during a halftime performance at a Rutgers University basketball game; and he helps construct the Prudential Center's ice just before a New Jersey Devils game. Throughout, Kohan exhibits a genuine desire to learn more about even the most overlooked of arena workers, such as Raymond Smith, who used the Louisiana Superdome for sanctuary during Hurricane Katrina and now sells beer there. Kohan's curiosity and empathy are infectious as he demonstrates how human this corporate aspect of sports can be. He has created an immersive, informative work that will delight and enlighten a wide range of readers. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An inside look at the secular cathedrals where we hold our sporting massesand celebrate with unrepentant excess.In this highly compelling book, New York Observer contributing editor Kohan deeply explores the myriad facets of the places where our sports teams play their games. Part history and sociology, part ethnography, and part journalismsometimes straight shoe-leather, sometimes participatory, and oftentimes a little bit gonzothe book features many of the behind-the-scenes questions you have always had and a few that you never considered. What is it like to be a stadium mascot or the halftime entertainment? Or a groundskeeperand where do they get that turf? How does ticket scalping work in the age of the internet? What happens to a stadium that falls out of use or that never really fulfills its promise to begin with? And how do they deal with all that food and beer? Kohan is an entertaining tour guide, and while his reporting is top-notch, he also takes a deep dive into the literature on stadiums from antiquity to the present. He loves sport but is no fan of stadium boondoggles. He respects the military but wonders about the justification for the increasing amount of jingoistic paeans to the military on game days. His travels took him to stadiums and arenas across the country, from sparkling new gems to old classics like the Big House in Ann Arbor or Wrigley Field in Chicago. The author embedded himself with grounds crews and supervisors, working folks and management, making the most of the impressive access he was granted at facilities across the country. Each chapter takes a kaleidoscopic look at its topic, with the author effectively merging ground-level and bird's-eye views. Kohan brings the modern sporting arena to life in this fine exploration of the "corners of American stadiums that aren't necessarily hidden but are almost assuredly unseen." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Kohan has mixed feelings about today's sports stadiums and the culture that has grown up around them. On one hand, as the subtitle indicates, he is charmed by the antics that go on inside and outside the stadiums, particularly the older ones. Yet he is chagrined by the destructive financial manipulations, at all levels professional, collegiate, and Olympic that drive the construction of newer, municipally funded stadiums. The book is at its most entertaining when Kohan gets into such matters as the arcane dealings of ticket-scalpers in Boston (where the Red Sox' long-sought World Series win killed the scalping business) and Cleveland (where Lebron James' return was an unprecedented boon). His discussion of the various forms of turf found in today's stadiums is also fascinating, as is the surprisingly detailed analysis of all things nonathletic involving stadiums, from the vending industry through flyovers. The text is at its most horrifying in its descriptions of what happened in the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Kohan is overly fond of footnotes, which break up the narrative flow, but his account is comprehensive, accurate, and often quite funny.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SPORTS AS ESCAPE has always been a myth, and I have never been reminded of that so clearly as I was recently before the singing of the national anthem at a marathon in the rural South, when the starter said that anyone who knelt was going to get a "butt whuppin'." (I wondered especially how the African-American runners who had trained for months for the race felt about that jolly send-off.) Over the past month, I have steeped myself in some dozen new sports books, and all seemed, to varying degrees, to speak to the tenor of the times. Or maybe the tenor is sounding a note so long and shrill it seems like white noise in the background for everything. The Golden State Warriors' contretemps with the president over a withdrawn invitation to the White House seized a news cycle, and their subsequent statement that they "celebrate equality, diversity and inclusion" is reflected, for instance, in their hiring of the team president Rick Welts, "the highest-ranking out-gay team executive in American professional sports," as Erik Malinowski puts it in BETABALL: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History (Atria, $26). The phenomenon of Stephen Curry and the sudden rise of the Warriors to the N.B.A.'s heights deserve a deep dive, but "Betaball" is more often a disappointing data dump. Beginning with the purchase of the Warriors in 2010 by the venture capital wizard Joe Lacob, Malinowski, the Warriors beat writer for Bleacher Report, plods along through accounts of seven seasons, too infrequently rising from the morass of statistics and overly detailed game accounts to tell stories of outside-the-box thinking like those that animated Michael Lewis's "Moneyball," the ur-front-office-chronicle. (Game 1 of the 2012-13 second-round playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs takes nearly three pages.) When Malinowski homes in on those innovations that the Warriors adopted or developed, the stories are revealing. In one case, the coach Steve Kerr heeds the advice of the team's performance trainer, Keke Lyles, to consult the Stanford University sleep researcher Cheri Mah, who proposed strategies (like limiting daytime naps to 30 minutes) to mitigate the effects of long-distance travel. Elsewhere, Malinowski convincingly makes the case that the organization's openness to using new sources of data and to adopting suggestions up and down the organizational chart - reflecting Lacob's Silicon Valley background - gives the Warriors a leg up on the opposition. Those accounts, however, are buried in the rote narration of the various seasons. Sentences like this are not uncommon: "David Lee, pouring in 19 points and nearly 11 boards while playing in 51 of Golden State's first 52 games, was named as a reserve for the Western Conference All-Star squad, the first time a Warrior had been named to the All-Star team in 16 years, since Latreli Sprewell in 1997." These may be sweet memories for hard-core Warriors fans, but they obscure the promised tale in the subtitle. (I also feel obligated to warn potential audiobook listeners that "David Lee" is about the only name the reader doesn't mispronounce.) If Malinowski's book posits that winning through analytics and a diversity of opinion is the wave of the future, Mike Mclntire, an investigative journalist with The New York Times, offers a chronicle of a team that succeeds the old-fashioned way: bending, breaking and ignoring the rules. CHAMPIONS WAY: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports (Norton, $26.95) documents how big-time college programs like Llorida State massage egos, flout the law, bow down to the almighty dollar and make a mockery of the term "student-athlete" in order to keep winning. (Why the subtitle doesn't add "State" to "Llorida" is a puzzle, though.) Mclntire doesn't mention it in the book, but The Onion had been on this case as long ago as 2006 when it headlined a satirical piece "Llorida State University to Phase Out Academic Operations by 2010." If the university had taken that route, we wouldn't be reading about Christie Suggs, a teaching assistant at the College of Business's Dedman School of Hospitality, "located in a rather odd place on... campus: the south end zone of the Seminóles' football stadium." Troubled by the shoddy, incomplete and plagiarized work of football players in online classes ("Coffee, Tea & International Culture" was one) and faced with unresponsive higher-ups, she reluctantly becomes a whistle-blower, but finds her concerns unaddressed and her work responsibilities reduced, notably as the Seminóles are marching toward a national championship season in 2013, led by the star quarterback Jaméis Winston. More harrowing and better known is the story of Erica Kinsman, a Llorida State freshman in 2012, who alleged that she was raped by Winston but whose complaint, Mclntire says, was insufficiently investigated by the Tallahassee police and her case further undermined by athletic department machinations. (Winston was never charged, and the university eventually settled with Kinsman.) Unrelenting in railing against these improprieties and many others on campus, like embezzlement in the booster club and the sordid influence of the rapper Luther Campbell, Mclntire paints a grim picture of a culture of malfeasance, particularly in its treatment of women, at the heart of college athletics. Yet as briskly and passionately as he lays out the horrors in Tallahassee and elsewhere, there's little that's surprising, nor does he plot any way forward. Exposing wrongdoing is the investigative journalist's raison d'etre but Mclntire's account of the systemic depth of its entrenchment leaves one despairing of any potential corrective. The popularity of the rediscovered historical sports narrative, â la "Seabiscuit" and "The Boys in the Boat," has sent microfilm reels spinning, and Roseanne Montillo's FIRE ON THE TRACK: Betty Robinson and the Triumph of the Early Olympic Women (Crown, $27) brings to light the accomplishments of women track athletes of nearly a century ago, who struggled to overcome old-boy resistance and misogynistic discrimination in pursuing their goals. The book is a worthy addition to the genre but also demonstrates its limitations. In the first half, I found the portrait of Robinson, the Olympic 100-meter-dash champion in 1928 (when women were first allowed to compete), lacking in complexity, despite her survival of a dramatic plane crash and rehabilitation after. The "Notes and Sources" seem to indicate substantial reliance, perhaps overly so in the absence of many primary sources, on Montillo's correspondence with Robinson's son. Whatever the case, her style tends to the overheated, whether because of the paucity of sources or not: "She felt her muscles come alive as she dashed down the track, the auditorium pulsating wildly as time seemed to stop altogether yet simultaneously blast forward faster than she could ever have imagined." Weather conditions, one of the readily available sources, seem to get outsize importance and emphasis in her re-creations. It's worth sticking with the book, however, through the second half, which picks up speed in the minibiographies of Babe Didrikson and lesser-known figures like Stella Walsh, a Clevelander who raced for Poland in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics, and whose strength and speed and refusal to shower with others provoked rumors about her true sex. There is also Helen Stephens, whose frank diary describes an awkward encounter with Hitler after her win in the 100-meter dash at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and her own battle with the general presumption that "no one that tall, with a stride that long, nearly six feet, with a form so graceless, could be anything other than a man." (She was subjected to a clinical examination to confirm her eligibility.) By covering a wider range of personalities in the second half of her book, Montillo succinctly adds context to prevailing - and appalling - views and thus elevates the accomplishments of all the women competing in track. Had she been playing 80 years ago, Maria Sharapova, at 6-foot-2 and fiercely competitive, might have suffered Stephens's fate and had her femininity not just questioned but physically confirmed. In any case, it's disturbing to read in UNSTOPPABLE: My Life So Far (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28), the memoir that she's written with Rich Cohen, that she's so oblivious to women's body-image issues she says of Serena Williams, "she has thick arms and thick legs and is so intimidating and strong. And tall, really tall." Williams is 5-foot-9. "Even now, she can make me feel like a little girl." If not overtly racist, the statements play into racial stereotypes, implying that Williams, who holds a lifetime 19-2 record over Sharapova, has beaten the "little girl" merely by overpowering her, not through tactical acumen and other skills of the game. I'm inclined to believe Sharapova that her doping, which caused her to be barred from the tour for 15 months, was inadvertent. And I admire her on-court tenacity and her marketing savvy. But if she really wants to help the "many young girls, who had been inspired by my example and my life" and whom she heard from during her suspension, she would do well to reflect on the way she thinks and speaks about other women. Her inspirational words for those girls: "The record book? Posterity? [Expletive] that. Did you hear what that girl said about me at the press conference? That's what gets me going." I found a balm for Sharapovian self-absorption in Simon Critchley's slim what we THINK ABOUT WHEN WE THINK ABOUT SOCCER (Penguin, $20), whose title is an obvious nod to Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" (its own title a nod to a Raymond Carver story) and whose green cover seems copied from last year's David Foster Wallace collection of tennis writing, "String Theory." I admit to being a sucker for this kind of intellectual maundering about the meaning of sports, but I know plenty of sports fans can't stand it. Critchley trots out Sartre, Foucault and especially Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose idea of the "tragic pensiveness" of the spectator at ancient theater Critchley links to a soccer crowd's participation, which is not "aloof from the action" but "constantly attentive." Further, he asserts, adopting Hegel's terms, that "the being of the players is not being-in-itself, but being-for-us, mediated through the spectators and requiring their recognition in order to affirm the players' existence." He does have the good sense to augment such bicycle-kick difficulty with simpler wisdom from soccer philosophers like the legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly, who once said: "The socialism I believe in is not really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the way to live and be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other." Much that Critchley muses on about soccer could be equally applicable to other team sports, and he doesn't shy away from soccer's long history of hooliganism, corruption and sexism. Critchley's most bracing commentary may be that on Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon's 2006 film "Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait," about the French star: "On the one hand, it gives us a sense of the capture of reality by commodified images in the century into which we have slowly slouched our way. But on the other hand... there is the suggestion, the adumbration of an inaccessible interiority, a reality that resists commodification." Call it a header-in-the-clouds book. My favorite book of the bunch, and the one that best captures the American sports landscape in these times, is not about any competition on the field but about the landscape-clearing constructions where the games take place. THE ARENA: Inside the Tailgating, Ticket-Scalping, Mascot-Racing, Dubiously Funded, and Possibly Haunted Monuments of American Sport (Liveright, $27.95), by the freelance writer Ráfi Kohan, is smart, readable, deeply reported and researched, engagingly personal, funny and often surprisingly poignant. Kohan traverses the country from Green Bay's Lambeau Field to New York's Citi Field to San Diego's Petco Park, embedding with the stadium Everymen and Everywomen who are the nobodies of the sports world. They are the people who tend the grass, change scoreboard numbers, sell food and logo merchandise, scalp tickets and wear mascot costumes. Of Brad Collins, who inhabits the character of Sluggerrr, the Kansas City Royals' lion mascot, Kohan writes, "After frolicking on the field in 90-degree heat for pregame festivities and player introductions," Collins enters the windowless mascot quarters, "slams the door and rips off his Sluggerrr head, which is not insubstantial, about one and a half feet square. The stench is immediate and overpowering, like lifting the cover off a cake tray filled with soggy gym socks." Don't mistake the breezy style for lack of substance. Amid a section on the Dallas Cowboys' stadium in Arlington, Texas (that is, Jerry's World, for the team's owner, Jerry Jones), Kohan describes over-the-top amenities like a $15 million sculpture by Anish Kapoor (which looks like "a celestial magnifying glass, as if God were frying Cowboys fans like ants"), but the section also undertakes a comprehensive, cogent survey of the literature on stadium economics. Other chapters explore the pathos of minimumwage groundskeepers, detail the rollercoaster life of the halftime acrobat the Amazing Sládek and reveal illicit deals vendors cut to earn a few extra dollars - and management's efforts to catch them. Kohan's penultimate chapter is called "Sex. War. America," and it covers the way that sports has appropriated and intermixed that triad to tease out emotion and profit, portrayed memorably in Ben Fountain's novel "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," based on the Dallas Cowboys' 2004 Thanksgiving Day halftime show. Fountain tells him, "just seeing the display of militarism, American exceptionalism, pop music, soft-core porn all mixed together in this kind of crazy to-do - I started feeling like it was its own kind of voodoo." Kohan also reminds us of a 2015 report from Senators Jeff Flake and John McCain revealing undisclosed payments from the Department of Defense to teams in order to fund military tributes, what Kohan calls "camouflaged propaganda." The issue, for the senators and others, was one of transparency. Kohan is sincerely moved at Marine Corps Appreciation Day in San Diego (paid for by the team, not Defense) as he watches a mother reunite with her teenage son for the first time since he left home for boot camp. At the same time, he states, "In the post-9/11 era, pressure has been growing inside stadiums - often implicitly - to participate in group patriotism." And outside stadiums, explicitly, at small-town marathons, before the starting gun fires. JAY JENNINGS, the senior editor at Oxford American magazine, is the author of "Carry the Rock: Race, Football and the Soul of an American City."
Library Journal Review
This wide-ranging meditation on the significance of sports in American society views its topic through the ecosphere of the modern stadium or arena. The journey starts at two venerable stadia: football's Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI, and baseball's Wrigley Field in Chicago. These two venues strive to maintain tradition while making necessary updates to keep pace with contemporary reality. The story ends with two decommissioned pleasure palaces in their useless ruin: the Pontiac Silverdome, MI, and the Astrodome, TX. In between, journalist -Kohan surveys the current landscape of publicly funded and subsidized palatial dream parks that hold U.S. cities hostage for fear of losing their "big league" status. Kohan embeds himself with several figures involved in stadium life, including ticket scalpers, team mascots, halftime entertainers, grounds workers, and a changeover crew that converts an arena from basketball court to concert stage. Through Kohan's investigation, we see the weight of these expensive monuments in our communities and how they relate to the public expression of not just sports fandom, but who we are as a people. -VERDICT A unique and readable perspective on the impact of U.S. sports stadia and arenas.-John Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, NJ © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Before We Begin (Or: Preface) | p. ix |
| Chapter 1 Taking the Oath (Or: The Old-Timers) | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Super Subsidize Me (Or: The Newcomers) | p. 41 |
| Chapter 3 All the Ticket Men (Or: Beyond These Walls) | p. 82 |
| Chapter 4 "As Far as the Eye Can Seem Toilets" (Or: Straight to the Dome) | p. 112 |
| Chapter 5 Ed Mangan's Burden (Or: Field of Dreams) | p. 141 |
| Chapter 6 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Gross (Or: Fans Behaving Badly) | p. 174 |
| Chapter 7 Identity 101 (Or: Col-lege!!) | p. 206 |
| Chapter 8 The Other Side of the T-Shirt Cannon (Or: Are You Not Entertained?) | p. 229 |
| Chapter 9 The Secret Life of Stadiums (Or: Let's Get Logistical) | p. 270 |
| Chapter 10 Sex. War. America. (Or: For God and Country) | p. 303 |
| Chapter 11 Ghost World (Or: Life After Sports) | p. 328 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 363 |
| Index | p. 367 |
