Riverfront Stadium came into the world 32 years ago to parents who were proud but unavailable. The builders never finished the finishing touches. The Stadium Club in center field never opened, the absence of a permanent floor in the press box went down as a running joke and the joint languished in plain blandness for decades until the Reds began hanging their retired numbers and the Bengals painted their end zones.
The old stadium died in the past week the way a man dies from neglect -- slowly, with a certain bitter inevitability, knowing its loved ones would see in its demise better days to come. Though the Reds and the city observed its passing with the right ceremonial order, no one forgets that the stadium has endured backbites and insults from the moment it lost credibility as a vision of the future.
While the stadium is disparaged on aesthetic grounds, it hasn't been as aesthetically challenged as its tenants. Typically, Bengals ownership didn't like frills and Reds ownership didn't like paying for them. Like a half-dozen similar stadiums in the National League, Riverfront Stadium's design favored function over funkiness because it needed to accommodate multiple sports. Indeed, Riverfront Stadium made multiple pro sports possible in Cincinnati as a precondition for Paul Brown's football franchise.
But if Brown prodded for the project, it was Pete Rose, more than any other single inhabitant, who made the stadium so energetic and memorable and whose absence shadowed the stadium's decline. Rose knocked over Ray Fosse at home plate to end the 1970 All-Star Game, the stadium's first national showcase, two weeks after it opened. For all the Reds' star power, Rose put the face on those clubs as they won five divisions, four pennants and two World Series in the stadium's first seven years.
The Reds let Rose go to Philadelphia as a free agent after the 1978 season and slowly declined until hitting bottom in 1983. The stadium sat dead for three summers before Rose returned as player-manager late in 1984 to bring back the electricity.
No one complained about the sterile baseball environment of Riverfront Stadium in the few years that followed. No, the building snapped with pride and activity, Cincinnatians came in droves to cheer the Reds and, as often as not, the moon even dropped in from the summer night to stamp the game with its blessing.
On Sept. 11, 1985, Rose banged hit number 4,192 into left-center field, perhaps the stadium's greatest moment. He continued managing the Reds to second-place finishes until evidence of his gambling brought him down in 1989. As the Reds blasted to their wire-to-wire World Championship in 1990, the locals were a little less enthused until the very end.
The stadium's doom began to be told in 1993, when the Reds fired popular manager Tony Perez 44 games into the season. The fans liked the Reds a little less for undercutting the legend, and attendance began to lag. A year later, Major League Baseball undercut tradition by moving the National League opener elsewhere for television, and then the baseball players went on strike in August.
Before the strike, the Cleveland Indians opened Jacobs Field and began to supplant the Reds as Ohio's favorite club. Not long after, Bengals General Manager Mike Brown threatened to move without a new football stadium. Before you knew it, the Reds were asking for the same, in the course of which they bad-mouthed Riverfront Stadium and wondered at the same time why fans stopped coming.
Within a couple years, the great shrine of Reds history mattered only as a temporary place-holder for new facilities, and its only value consisted in naming rights. It soon became Cinergy Field. But the electric company's name didn't make the place any more dynamic, and one wandered the stadium from the mid-1990s on, wondering where all the zip went.
The first shouts of Riverfront Stadium's obsolescence came some years earlier from romanticists, particularly those of American League cities on the eastern seaboard who cited their intimate, jagged ballparks as evidence of the junior circuit's superiority. No one could argue that the National League parks were more interesting. Still, the larger aesthetic questions were largely ignored, for the National League parks grew a faster, more interesting game.
With their rounded, symmetrical outfield fences, the NL parks favored no hitters. Pitchers could work more aggressively, knowing they wouldn't be done in by cheap home runs. With their vast outfield spaces and the true bounces of their artificial surfaces, they rewarded foot speed and stronger throwing arms. Unlike the American League, the National League played baseball in the base paths as much as the batter's box.
While it's permissible to deride Riverfront Stadium's aesthetic deficiencies, it bears reminder that you didn't have the aesthetics of that kind of baseball without the aesthetics of that kind of stadium. Nor did you have the Big Red Machine, who played that game as well as anyone.
Former General Manager Bob Howsam, who should be in the Hall of Fame, designed and built the machine with the stadium characteristics in mind, assembling a club that fit the city's sense of style while playing the throw-back, pre-Ruthian baseball the facility would demand.
The Hall of Famers on those clubs -- Perez, Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench -- blended just the right kinds of skills with those of center fielder Cesar Geronimo and shortstop Dave Concepcion, who set the defensive standards for their positions in that environment. Ken Griffey hit line drives, George Foster hit home runs and the Reds raised their own line of power pitchers who just went ahead and threw, knowing that big ballpark and those gold gloves would make it right. In the end, Rose played in more wins than any player in the game's history.
Keeping with the incredulous mode of operation MLB has repeated consistently for more than 10 years, it suspended Rose for life in 1989 under an agreement of no finding that he bet on baseball. The lack of a finding despite strong evidence forced baseball to seek a finding in the court of public opinion to support its sentence. But most baseball fans, particularly Reds fans, believe MLB railroaded Rose, even while they agree he bet on baseball.
So no observance of Reds history goes by without coded recognition of the missing man. At the Sept. 22 closing ceremonies for the stadium, the Reds left a rose in the middle of the wishbone "C" behind home plate, speakers left space in their remarks for fans to chant Rose's name, Joe Nuxhall came right out and said Pete Rose belonged on the field and Tom Browning spray-painted Rose's number 14 on the pitcher's mound.
Rose remains every bit as big in exile as he would have been in good standing, especially in that building. He didn't build Riverfront Stadium, but he built a lot of the history there.
Next year, the Reds will move to a new ball park faintly in Rose's shadow. But Riverfront Stadium, which sold out its final major league game, also sold out a softball game for the following day, staged for no other reason than to give Rose his due.
In advance of the stadium's Dec. 29 date with the wrecking ball, changes in the scene already began to register last weekend, when a college football game took its place as the most-attended sporting event in Cincinnati history. Who would have ever predicted that? A crowd of 66,139 packed Paul Brown Stadium to watch the University of Cincinnati boost its image with a 23-19 loss to No. 6 Ohio State.
In the aftermath, it was noted by most everyone in the UC and Ohio State camps, as well as by most neutral observers, that the Bearcats should have won the game. But for all of quarterback Gino Guidugli's presence and precision, the Bearcats just weren't finely enough tuned to take a game they led for all but the last four minutes.
The Bearcats dropped two last-minute passes in the end zone as they drove toward the winning touchdown. While they still led, the Bearcats suffered two ugly turnovers -- an interception in the Ohio State end zone when a receiver evidently broke off his route and a fumble at midfield when an Ohio State defensive end inexplicably went unblocked and clobbered Guidugli from his blind side.
For the first time in several years, if ever, the Bearcats and Bengals games last weekend both went out nationally to football fans without special television subscriptions beyond basic cable. Fans in other parts of the country would be stunned to hear that Cincinnatians are more interested in the pro team after watching the Bearcats lay it on the line against one of the nation's best operations, then seeing the Bengals stink up the Georgia Dome in their 30-3 loss to the previously winless Atlanta Falcons.
No doubt, they also would agree that it was nice to see Paul Brown Stadium finally put to good use. Perhaps, if enough top college games and high school doubleheaders can be scheduled for the stadium, the taxpayers will get their money's worth. And we'll see about Great American Ball Park.
But the two new stadiums combined are left a huge bill to fill if they're to match Riverfront Stadium's usefulness and historic significance.
contact bill peterson: letters@citybeat.com
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