For Candlestick, Flickering Glory
Niners playoff may be one of last great sporting events at maligned, beloved stadium
The playoff game on Saturday between the 49ers and the New Orleans Saints will be the most significant sporting event at Candlestick Park since 2003, when the Niners beat the New York Giants in a thrilling wild-card game.
It may also be one of the last.
After years of fruitless negotiations with the city, the 49ers are planning to build a stadium in Santa Clara, to open in 2014 or 2015. If that happens, as now appears likely, Candlestick, already abandoned by the San Francisco Giants after the 1999 season, will become the palest of pachyderms and almost certainly will be torn down. That gives the coming playoff game — on the hallowed turf of Mays and McCovey and Marichal, the place where Montana and Rice and Young ran their way into football immortality — a greater sense of urgency.
It is a moment that calls for bittersweet reflection, treasured memories — and a North Face parka with a flask hidden inside.
Since Candlestick opened in 1960, it has been among the most reviled stadiums in America, derided for its out-of-the-way location, its poor access roads, and above all for the gusts that capriciously swirl through it. Candlestick Park conjures images of fly balls making abrupt left turns, hot dog wrappers zooming about like inebriated dragonflies and blue-lipped patrons frozen to their seats. Nationally, the news of its impending demise is not likely to break many hearts.
But San Franciscans have far more complicated feelings about the old joint. There’s a kind of evil-grandfather clause in which even the most despised landmark eventually becomes a beloved icon. Candlestick may be a freezing old eyesore in the middle of nowhere, but it is our freezing old eyesore in the middle of nowhere. Plus, true-blue San Franciscans, their wits addled by hypothermia, regard whining about the wind as provincial. For Bay Area sports fans, Candlestick is more than an icebox in a rough neighborhood. It is the place where we watched the most epic sporting events of our lives.
“When we left Candlestick in 1999 for AT&T Park, it was very much a bittersweet feeling,” said Larry Baer, the Giants’ president, who played a crucial role in the creation of the team’s glorious downtown stadium. “There are memories there that will not leave. Willie Mays patrolling center field, Juan Marichal’s high leg kick on the mound. I think people are able to separate out the wind and the conditions from the memories.”
Candlestick’s story began in 1958, when baseball’s New York Giants left the Polo Grounds and moved to San Francisco. For two years the team played at Seals Stadium. It was a lovely old park, but it had only 23,000 seats, and the Giants’ owner, Horace Stoneham, insisted that San Francisco build a 43,000-seat stadium with parking for 12,000 cars. City officials chose a 77-acre plot at Candlestick Point, near the Bay waterfront in the city’s southeastern corner.
The park’s construction was plagued by controversy and lawsuits, but Candlestick received rave reviews when it opened in 1960. It was the first American stadium to be built entirely of reinforced concrete, and the Modernist structure had state-of-the-art features like the first modern baseball scoreboard and radiant heating under the seats. Vice President Richard Nixon threw out the first ball and told a local sportswriter, “This will be one of the most beautiful baseball parks of all time.”
Nixon’s presence at the opening of a ballpark in one of the most liberal cities in America should have raised suspicions that cosmic forces were plotting against the Stick. So should the fact that the radiant heating failed to work, prompting a successful lawsuit by Melvin Belli, a flamboyant San Francisco lawyer who wore a parka into the courtroom to demonstrate how cold it was in his box.
And then came Aeolus’s curse.
Players began complaining about the wind at Candlestick as soon as they set foot on the field. Hank Sauer, an outfielder who hung up his cleats after the 1959 season, had only one thing to say after seeing the winds at Candlestick: “Thank God I’m retired.”
But the winds did not become the stuff of legend until the 1961 All-Star Game, when pitcher Stu Miller was hit in mid-delivery by a gust so ferocious it made him waver and balk. At that moment a baseball myth was born. “I wasn’t blown off that mound,” Mr. Miller told Sports Illustrated years later. “I just waved a little. But I’ll always be the guy who was blown away, no matter what I say. There were 44,000 people in the park that day, but over the years I bet I’ve had at least 100,000 people tell me they saw me flying in the air. You’d think I’d been blown out into the Bay.”
Candlestick’s chilly conditions contributed to the less than decorous behavior of its fans. Contrary to San Francisco’s quiche-and-Chardonnay image, Candlestick patrons have always been loud, truculent and generally Philadelphia-like in their behavior. Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey, despised by Giants fans both because he played for the hated Los Angeles rivals and for his Mr. Clean image, told the journalist Nick Peters: “I remember walking back to the tunnel after a one-run loss, and something whizzed by me. It was a gin bottle. I picked it up and saw it was half full. Right then, you knew you were at Candlestick. In New York they would have kept it full for more impact. At Candlestick, they had to drink half of it to keep warm.”
While the curse of Candlestick afflicted the Giants, who did not win the World Series until they moved to AT&T Park, the stadium’s other team, the 49ers, were blessed by it. During football season the park was usually one of the warmest N.F.L. stadiums. And when it was blustery, “We used the conditions to our advantage,” said Roger Craig, the great 49ers running back of the 1980s. “I remember once when we were playing the Broncos, it was so windy Joe could hardly throw a pass at all. But Bill Walsh was creative. He had Joe throw outs and hitches, short passes. And we were used to running on wet fields. Jerry Rice would run these incredibly precise routes and the defenders would fall down.” The 49ers won five Super Bowls.
As the stadium’s days grow short, the fans who spent so many happy hours there won’t remember the wind, or the losses, or the days when there were just 600 people in the seats. They will remember the emblazoned days in the great gray concrete bowl off Jamestown Avenue: Dwight Clark soaring impossibly high into the air at the back of the end zone to propel a dynasty, Joe Morgan smashing a home run on the last day of the season to knock the Dodgers out of contention, Jerry Rice leaping for the pass that made him the N.F.L.’s all-time touchdown leader.
And when Candlestick is gone, those memories will live on, like the orange-and-black figures running forever on a Grecian urn.
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