Wilf left smiling as his 'bubble' bursts

AMERICA AT LARGE:THE ADVENTURE began with the New York Giants piling on to a chartered airplane for a flight to Minnesota last Saturday morning, a day ahead of their scheduled game against the Vikings at the Hubert H Humphrey Metrodome.

Before the flight could reach its destination, the howling winter snowstorm that would dump 20 inches of fresh snow on the Twin Cities had shut down all four runways at Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport and the Giants’ plane was diverted to Kansas City.

When the blizzard showed no signs of abating, the Giants hastily booked rooms at a Kansas City hotel. Back at NFL headquarters, league operatives feverishly worked on an alternative plan. With no guarantee that the Giants could fly in the next morning, the decision was taken to postpone the game until Monday night.

While the Giants were safely slumbering in Kansas City Saturday night, the advance television crew from the FOX network was setting up its equipment for the telecast. By the time they had finished, water was visibly leaking from several places in the Metrodome’s air-supported roof. Before taking leave of the premises, a producer presciently trained a television camera on the dome’s interior, with instructions to let it run all night.

His foresight resulted in some dramatic footage when, sometime between 3am and 5am Sunday morning the canvas roof first tore and then shredded, dumping literally tons of snow through the gaping hole and onto the surface of the football field. By sun-up the roof had collapsed like a punctured balloon.

Thanks to the marvels of the internet, FOX’s documented footage quickly went viral on YouTube. It was clear that there would be no football played in the Metrodome for the foreseeable future. The situation might have been regarded as calamitous by the NFL officials in New York, but it was music to the ears of Zygi Wilf, the German-born shopping mall tycoon who owns the Vikings. Since purchasing the club four years ago, Wilf had been clamouring for public assistance in building a new stadium, arguing that the Metrodome had outlived its usefulness and threatening to move the team once his lease expired after the 2011 season.

The stance of Minneapolis civic leaders was that Wilf was crying wolf, and that the Metrodome, which opened in 1982, was perfectly adequate for the Vikings’ needs. Now events seemed to have proven Zygi correct.

A quarter-century ago the inflatable dome seemed to represent the wave of the future for sporting arenas. From an engineering standpoint, the essential concept of the dome hasn’t appreciably altered in the seven centuries since Brunelleschi designed the Duomo in Florence. The major difference between then and now is that most NFL owners would consider a 140-year turnaround time from start to finish somewhat impractical. The concept of a canvas-roofed bubble seemed to represent an ideal shortcut, allowing for speedy construction at significantly lower cost.

The Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, for instance, was built in 1975 at what seemed at the time a bargain-basement cost of $55.8 million (€42 million). Earlier this year that arena was sold, at auction, for just $583,000 (€439,000), to a Greek-born Canadian developer.

Andreas Apostolopoulos was able to pay a penny on the dollar for what had become the world’s largest white elephant because the Silverdome had no tenant and no prospect of acquiring one in the foreseeable future. The NFL Detroit Lions, for whom it had been built, came to view it as such an albatross that eight years ago they willingly paid $26 million (€20 million) not to play there, terminating their lease and moving to new Ford Field in downtown Detroit. (The NBA Pistons, inconvenienced by a collapsed roof occasioned by a 1985 snowstorm, had taken leave of the Silverdome several years earlier.)

So anxious was Apostolopoulos to showcase his new purchase that two weeks ago he offered a site fee that topped those of several Las Vegas casinos in order to host next month’s title unification bout between unbeaten champions Timothy Bradley and Devon Alexander at the Silverdome. Promoters Don King and Gary Shaw will laugh all the way to the bank.

And in Indianapolis, the RCA Dome (nee the Hoosier Dome), built in for $77 million (€58 million) in 1984, fell to the wrecker’s ball two years ago to make way for the Colts’ new retractable-roof facility, Lucas Oil Stadium.

The NLF kicked around several alternative plans Sunday morning, and by the time that afternoon’s 1pm games commenced, the decision had already been taken to move the Giants-Vikings match to Detroit, where it would be played on Monday night. Since the Vikings were nominally the home team, the end zones and midfleld logo were repainted in their team colours.

And in a desperate effort to attract spectators to what had essentially become an 80,000-seat television studio, complimentary tickets were offered, initially to anyone presenting a ticket stub from Sunday’s Lions-Packers game, and eventually to anyone willing to walk up to the window and ask for one. The upshot was that the attendance for the Monday night game was approximately 45,000. Paid attendance, on the other hand, was approximately zero.

A similar scenario could obtain for January’s Bradley-Alexander fight, which pits a Californian against a St Louis native in a venue in which neither man enjoys a natural constituency. The Silverdome, where 93,682 showed up for a Papal Mass in 1987, has been configured at 15,000 for the fight, but King and Shaw will probably have to resort to some NFL-style house-papering to fill even that many seats.

Being cast in the trappings of the home team proved to be of dubious advantage to the Vikings, who were not only drubbed 21-3 by the Giants, but saw injured quarterback Brett Favre’s consecutive games-started streak snapped at 297. With both Favre and the Metrodome almost certainly out of commission for the rest of the season, they might want to get used to it. Next Monday night’s “home” game against the Bears will probably have to be played across town at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium. If the sum effect is not a protracted death rattle for the concept of bubble-domed stadium, rest assured that Zygi Wilf will do his level best to make people think that it is.

In the meantime, we can’t help recalling the NFL’s first experiment at staging a Super Bowl in a cold-weather venue back in 1982. Super Bowl XVI at the Silverdome was a logistical disaster. An ice storm on game day created a mammoth traffic snarl, and the San Francisco 49ers’ team bus barely arrived in time for kick-off. The road to Pontiac looked like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow; hundreds of spectators eventually abandoned their vehicles and tried to make it, on foot, to the stadium.

Could a similar fate await the prospective audience for the Bradley-Alexander bout? Of course not. Super Bowl XVI was played on January 24th. The fight is on January 29th.