The answer is I am still not watching NFL football, the game will be on in house but the real interest as far as I am concerned is the advertising commercials. I did hear on the radio Friday that NFL viewership for the year was down from last season by 10%, nice to know that I am not alone in leaving those high priced brain dead players behind.
In the interest of full disclosure I do have a couple squares on the game where the score at the end of each quarter determines the winner. My numbers are pretty decent or at least they seem to be 3 and 0 and 7 and 2, well at least the 3 and 0 seem good. My boys and the wife are still football fans, I am a fan on this Super Bowl Sunday of the commercials and the food that we will be consuming, not even interested in the half time entertainment either.
The people of Minneapolis do owe the people of Houston a debt of gratitude though and so I thought I would take this time to point it out. You see without the people of Houston voting for and approving the construction of the Astro Dome back in the early 1960’s there is a good chance domed stadiums would not exist today. The NFL consistently awarded the Super Bowl to warm weather climate cities for the game that concluded the season and crowned the champion. Let’s face it, no one in their right mind wants to sit in zero degree temperature to watch a football game, championship or not.
When the Astro Dome opened in April of 1965 it was the largest single building enclosure ever built. To walk around the outside perimeter of the building is a half of a mile walk. The playing field was natural grass of the Bermuda grass family, and the roof had translucent panels to allow the sun light in for the grass to grow. While that combination wasn’t ideal for growing grass it was adequate; but the roof panels caused a bigger problem for the baseball players when it came to catching fly balls. The panels distorted the light and made judging the fly balls a real problem, so the panels were painted over, the grass ripped out and a new green short knapped carpet was installed as the playing surface, it was appropriately named Astro Turf.
Domed stadiums and synthetic turf that we have become accustomed to in several major sports markets are the direct result of the vision of Texans from years gone by.
The original Astro Dome is still standing as we speak; several other stadiums of similar design and function that were built after it have been built, used, and then demolished to make way for newer and more modern venues. The dome was given the nick name “The eighth wonder of the world” shortly after it opened in 1965; it hasn’t been used for any event since 2008. The Harris County Commissioners who have control over the fate of the dome have tried unsuccessfully numerous times to get a developer to submit plans to renovate the dome and bring it back to life in some form or fashion. None of the submitted plans were deemed to be feasible or lacked the proper funding that it would take to make the project work.
Mean while the taxpayers of Harris County, myself included, are stuck paying on the maintenance and upkeep of the dome. County records show that the cost to keep the building standing is right at $170,000 a year. I need make note of that and attend a commissioners court meeting and inquire as to why we are still holding on to keeping this building standing, the people of the county voted in November of 2013 to have the building torn down. The dome is never mentioned on the news any longer and unless you go to a Texans game or the rodeo you probably wouldn’t even remember that it is still there. The stadium that the Texans and rodeo are in is literally a couple hundred feet from the Astro Dome.
This past week Steemusa had a writing challenge called StateWars, where folks wrote different things about the state that we call home. I looked at including the dome into one of my Statewars submissions but I lacked any of my own photographs of it to include in the post so I left it out. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that might be true, but in a Statewars post the pictures serve as ammunition and I fight my battles with the intention of winning so the dome was left out. So,please look at this daily dose as a look back on a piece of antiquated artillery that had no live rounds of ammunition available to be fired.
Meanwhile, enjoy today’s big game for whatever reason you may be watching and just remember, had it not been for the people of the Great State of Texas and their vision for the future; Minneapolis would just be another frozen city watching the game instead of hosting it.
