SPORTS TURF WARS
Fittingly, it all started right here in Space City.
I t seemed like such a good idea at the time.
The postwar generation was ascendant, enjoying the spoils of convenience. Sociologists were warning of a leisure-time glut. The kitchen got Hamburger Helper. The garage got cordless power tools.
And the fields of play got artificial turf.
Where better to start the future of sports than here in Space City, where air conditioning promised to make even the most humid afternoons fit for a pleasant ballgame? To complete their new wonder of the modern world, the owners turned at first to a team of grass breeders at Texas A&M University.
“Houston Stadium Is This Year’s Star,” declared newsreel footage on Opening Day 1965, as an announcer called the Dome “the shape of the things to come in our national sport.”
Up against a crisis as their Aggie-designed indoor field failed to thrive, stadium managers turned to Monsanto, the giant agrochemical firm, which had been testing an artificial playing surface at a prep school in Rhode Island.
The company’s invention, made of nylon, padding and asphalt, gained immediate fame as AstroTurf. As the Astros, the Oilers and the University of Houston Cougars played under television lights on the bright greenery, orders came in from across the country. The professional football leagues soon began granting expansion franchises in places previously considered inhospitable, such as Seattle. Turf now cover about 12,000 fields nationwide, according to trade group figures. It was good for the fans. It was good for the leagues.
But it was never good for the players, including the high school and college kids who tested their underdeveloped bodies against artificial turf as it swept away the grass of the Southwest Conference and even a good number of Texas high school stadiums.
Finely attuned to signs of injury, elite athletes blamed the turf for rampant knee injuries and more.
“Artificial turf hurts, and it really gets to you,” Oilers receiver Ken Burrough told Texas Monthly in 1979. “Year after year, you pound, pound, pound on it. You’re going to get the burns, you’re going to get the bruises, but there’s no easy way out in football.”
If you detect a certain fatalism in the last part of the quotation, chalking the injuries up to the take-your-lumps spirit of football, you’re not alone. For years, popular culture has brushed off complaints from athletes as prima donna talk. In an episode of the 1980s sitcom Cheers, for example, the retired pitcher played by Ted Danson, auditioning for a sportscasting job, got laughed off the air for his
commentary on the merits of grass over artificial turf.
For all the safety advances made since the glory days of the Astrodome, though, new concerns have made the argument against artificial turf worth a fresh look.
Repeated exposure to the tiny granules of used tires known as chrome rubber, the most common material used in turf fields, showed a correlation – though not a causal link – to incidences of disease, according to an investigation by NBC News. Though government investigations have failed to draw any significant similar conclusion, hundreds of parents have petitioned school districts to keep the material out of fields.
More significantly, the Concussion Legacy Foundation issued a report noting that 15 percent of head injuries in high school students come from collisions with a hard playing surfaces. That adds up to more than 350,000 head injuries every year.
While calling for better maintenance of grass fields, the foundation also singled out artificial turf as particularly worrisome. “Artificial surfaces,” the foundation wrote, “should receive the same attention and scrutiny as football helmets.”
At last, some athletes have convinced organizers to take their complaints seriously. Nearly all major league baseball parks have returned to grass. NRG Stadium, which has become the home of pro football in Houston since the slow demise of the Astrodome, tried using big patches of sod, but replaced them with artificial turf when the seams became too difficult to maintain.
Last month the U.S. women’s soccer team, riding high on the credibility of a World Cup championship, walked away from a scheduled game at Aloha Stadium in Hawaii. Goalkeeper Hope Solo sent her social media followers a photo of the peeling surface. The underlying issue was sexism — the less successful men’s team always gets to play on grass — but the boycott made an important statement on the too-long ignored trouble with turf.
After all these years, calls for more scrutiny fall short. A return to grass wouldn’t be convenient. It would just be right.