Bowled Over

After 33 years, 100 million visitors, and several billion boos, Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium is no more. Once hailed as an architectural marvel, in recent years the Vet has become better known for leaks, smells you couldn’t quite place, a wild kingdom of rats and feral cats, collapsing concrete that left a cadet with a broken neck at the 1998 Army-Navy Game and the worst AstroTurf in baseball or football, which shredded both of Chicago Bears wide receiver Wendell Davis’ knees on the same play. In its day it hosted three World Series, two MLB All-Star Games, and two conference championship games, one of only five stadia in sports history to accomplish that feat. At 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning, Greg Luzinski depressed the detonation plunger, and 62 seconds later the era of multi-purpose, cookie-cutter stadia was all but over. Only St. Louis’ Busch Stadium, slated for replacement in 2006, remains. But Broad and Pattison wasn’t just a concrete bowl with mostly empty earth-toned seats and some truly awful baseball teams – it was the place many of us grew up and learned about baseball, how to elevate profanity to an art form and how to appreciate a slightly orange chili dog.