Sunday, December 12, 1999Few toasts for stadium
Bengals players not sad to leave Cinergy
BY TOM GROESCHEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Cinergy Field stages its last NFL game today, with far less hoopla than the stadia-mania that gripped Cincinnati when the facility opened in 1970.
![[ickey]](http://bengals.enquirer.com/img/photos/1999/12/ickey_180x135.jpg)
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, Ickey Woods and teammates did the Ickey Shuffle in a stadium nicknamed the Jungle.
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And that leaves Mike Brown and Eugene Ruehlmann, two of the main forces behind the stadium construction, a bit sad.
“When it opened,” Mr. Ruehlmann said last week, “it was state of the art and the envy of the NFL.”
Mr. Ruehlmann was Cincinnati vice-mayor when the stadium was in its planning stages. He also presided over its opening as mayor in 1970, as newspaper headlines gushed, “Newest Jewel In Queen City's Crown.”
But today, when the Bengals (3-10) rekindle their old rivalry with the new Cleveland Browns (2-11) at 1 p.m., the city's mood is indifference. The former Riverfront Stadium has come to be viewed as cold and gray and impersonal, images Mr. Brown believes were media creations.
“It's too bad, really,” said Mr. Brown, Bengals president and son of franchise founder Paul Brown. “People denigrate the stadium, but I still think it's a beautiful building.”
For football, whatever ambience there was has been tempered by the Bengals' streak of nine consecutive non-winning seasons. Nobody has called it “The Jungle” in some time.
“To be honest,” Bengals tackle Willie Anderson said, “I'll be glad to get out of it. I had so many losing games there. A new stadium won't make us win, but it might change some attitudes.”
Former Bengals receiver Tim McGee once said he liked the way the stadium sits on the riverfront.
“But there really isn't anything special about it,” Mr. McGee said.
Maybe that is why, when in 1996 the Riverfront Stadium name fell victim to the naming-rights times, there was virtually no uproar.
The Reds and Bengals have shared the stadium since its inception. While the Reds had three World Series champions play in the stadium (1975, '76 and '90), the Bengals' two Super Bowl years (1981 and '88) produced the greatest fan frenzy the town has seen in generations.
Bengals placekicker Doug Pelfrey, who was born the year Riverfront Stadium opened, knows there is nothing quite like when the Bengals are good. Mr. Pelfrey, a native of nearby Edgewood, Ky., remembers sitting in the stands for the opening game of the '81 Super Bowl season.
“I guess I'm like 10 or 11 years old, and we're sitting way up in the red seats,” he said. “They came back and beat Seattle in that game, although I think we left early because they fell way behind.”
Sound familiar?
Longtime Bengals watchers have seen the Super Bowl teams, the Hall of Fame offensive tackle Anthony Munoz, and the downer '90s of coaches Dave Shula and Bruce Coslet.
The football team played its first game at Riverfront on Aug. 8, 1970, an exhibition meeting with the Washington Redskins. A crowd of 52,299, which at the time was the largest crowd ever to see a Cincinnati sports event, watched Jess Phillips score the first Bengal touchdown in a 27-12 victory.
One newspaper account from that night:
“Afterwards, the Bengals were in a happy mood as they changed clothes in their spacious, carpeted dressing room beneath the concrete palace.”
Other newspaper reports expressed amazement at how easily traffic flowed in and out of the stadium parking lots. To this day, veteran NFL travelers say Cincinnati is one of the best as far as “ingress and egress,” which in layman's terms means “getting in and out.”
The 1970 season produced the Bengals' first playoff team, under coach Paul Brown. But the most memorable game of that season may have been another exhibition game on Aug. 30, 1970, a 31-24 Cincinnati victory over the Browns, in Paul Brown's first meeting with the team that had fired him eight years earlier.
The city was right with the times in those days. Stadiums such as Three Rivers Stadium (Pittsburgh) and Veterans Stadium (Philadelphia) opened within a year after Riverfront, and were also circular, concrete, multipurpose facilities for baseball and football.
Those '70s concrete bowls never engendered warm and fuzzy feelings like a Wrigley Field or Fenway Park in baseball. But football stadiums generally aren't remembered for their quirks.
“You can't have seats in the end zone jutting out to stop a receiver or something like that,” said former Bengals kicker Jim Breech. “I've been to places like Lambeau Field (Green Bay) and Cleveland's old Municipal Stadium that have a lot of history. But with football, what stands out mostly are the people. And the games.”
Mr. Breech played in the most famous game in stadium history, the Freezer Bowl in January 1982. That AFC Championship game (Bengals 27, Chargers 7) was played in an NFL record-low wind chill of minus-59 degrees.
“I miss the energy of being in a game like that,” Mr. Breech said. “I miss the way it used to get when it was The Jungle.”
Current Bengal players have little or no idea what that was like. They are more used to getting booed off the field, as they often were before finally snapping an 11-game home losing streak against San Francisco last Sunday.
“I played under the name Riverfront when I first got here,” safety Greg Myers said. “I remember watching games on TV from here when I was growing up. For me, it was like being back in the '80s all over again, playing here.”
Then, Mr. Myers added a long-time complaint about the stadium, although he said it with a smile.
“I won't miss the AstroTurf,” he said.
Bengals cornerback Artrell Hawkins said the stadium will always be special for one reason.
“It's where I started my NFL career,” he said. “I can tell my kids that's where I started.”
Mr. Hawkins and many other Bengals actually played in larger stadiums in college, with Cinergy holding just over 60,000 in its football configuration. But the stadium still struck a chord with Mr. Hawkins when he first visited it.
“After I was drafted, I walked in there and just looked up at it,” he said. “I went, "Wow,' just because it was an NFL stadium.”
The town went “wow” on occasion too, especially in the early years. And of course, whenever the team was good.
The Bengals set their home attendance record in 1971 by averaging 59,266 fans per game, a mark that still stands. Back then, with the newness of the facility and a team coming off its first NFL playoff berth, the Bengals were the hottest ticket in town.
Attendance averaged over 50,000 per game until 1977, when early snows and brutal cold limited the average crowd to just under 46,000 — despite an 8-6 season.
Attendance dipped to an all-time low average of 41,243 with the second of back-to-back 4-12 seasons in 1979. It soared again with good teams in the late 1980s, and the Bengals eventually compiled a streak of 43 straight sellouts from 1988-92.
That seems hard to believe now, given that the Bengals have lost 106 games in the 1990s and have sold out only two home games this year. But today, one final sellout crowd of near 60,000 will attend, drawn partially by the “Battle of Ohio” Browns angle.
There may be some nostalgia, but it's not as if the wrecking ball will hit tomorrow. The Reds, after all, still have a few seasons left in the old yard. And there is the chance that Paul Brown Stadium, while already shooting high in the sky, will not be completed for its first football game next summer.
But either way, the end is near.
And Mike Brown, who does have feelings, is indeed feeling it. When Mr. Brown is asked his favorite memories of the stadium, he naturally mentions the Freezer Bowl and the like, but also the unusual.
Mr. Brown remembers one Saturday daytime practice during the Forrest Gregg coaching era (1980-83), when suddenly a parachutist descended over the stadium lights.
“He cleared the light bank, and landed within 10 feet of me,” Mr. Brown said. “Then he said, "I missed my target. I was supposed to land at Sawyer Point.'”
Should the chutist try that again in a few years, he won't be landing next to Mike Brown. For Mr. Brown will be a few hundred yards west, standing in gleaming new PB Stadium. And not, perhaps, as happy as one might think.
“People think we're building this stadium for me, and it's just not so,” he said. “Economically, we had to move because Riverfront would not generate enough revenue streams. The courts declared free agency (in 1993), and to keep up, we had to have a new stadium or perhaps leave town.
“There was no other way.”
If Mr. Brown had his way, Cinergy Field would stand forever, or at least for several more generations.
“Another 29 years? It could go another 59 years,” he said. “It was symmetrical. It was functional. It worked.”
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![[ickey]](http://bengals.enquirer.com/img/photos/1999/12/ickey_600x450.jpg)
Few toasts for stadium