Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 22, 1993 TAG: 9309220034
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY COX STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DURHAM, N. C. LENGTH: Long
The streets around the downtown warehouse district were hot. You could almost see the fine dust, perhaps from the huge cigarette factories, hang in the humid air and settle on the gritty industrial landscape. This was the ballpark's neighborhood, at the corner of Morris and Corporation Streets.
On this night, the Durham Bulls hosted the Wilmington Blue Rocks in a game with ramifications for the coming Carolina League playoffs for the visitors. The gates opened to the fans at 5:30 p.m. - but a crowd had gathered at the ticket window about 30 minutes beforehand
This evening's customers were typical of those who have patronized this establishment over the years. A nice mix of humanity: couples with small children; students from one of the local high schools or perhaps nearby Duke, North Carolina Central, North Carolina or North Carolina State Universities who got in for $2; several fellows who looked as though they punch a clock somewhere; and an older gentleman in denim overalls who had probably spent a lifetime working the rich soil of the North Carolina piedmont outside town.
The ticket window was to the left of the main gate looking out on Morris Street. The ticket office was in a turret with a conical roof painted in the fading rust and blue colors of the Bulls.
Save for the awnings over the ticket windows and the huge team logo of a bull leaping through a large "D" painted on the wall, the turret - everybody calls it "The Tower" - looks as though it might have been imported from an amusement park, where it served as a cheap architectural flourish on an ersatz French chateau.
We bypassed the gate where the regular folks entered because we were privileged characters. We had the peach-colored card signed by Carolina League president John Hopkins that was good for admission to any of the circuit's ballparks.
Over at the pass gate, veteran keeper Romeo McKeever looked at the card, then cast a skeptical gaze over the top of his spectacles.
"You sure you're working tonight?"
The 51-year-old McKeever had worked this station since the Bulls went back into business here in 1980. No sentimentalist, McKeever was one who was ready to make the move to the new $11 million-plus park being built out on the Durham Freeway.
"I think it's time for a change," he said. "A lot of people don't. This place is not adequate for the times. It's nice to be sentimental, but shoot, it's time for a new park."
McKeever has seen the mobs come and go here in the crowded concourse between the covered grandstand and the exterior fence. He's seen the huge lines to buy food at the concession stands or to get into the idiosyncratic pie-slice-shaped toilets.
"I couldn't put up with it if I were a fan," he said. "But people have been very civil here. You never see more than two or three instances of trouble with the crowd a year."
McKeever's employment covered the so-called modern era of the Bulls. There were a Bulls team and a Durham Athletic Park long before that.
The old park was built in 1939, the year Hitler invaded Poland. The new brick edifice replaced the old El Toro Park, which burned to the ground in June of that year.
Dwindling business shut the operation down in 1970, and the Bulls and the D.A.P. were not revived until 1980 when new owner Miles Wolff took over.
The park, which had had everything from rodeo to football in the intervening years, was in serious disrepair. Veteran minor league executive Larry Schmittou - who once owned the Salem Carolina League franchise - told the city fathers: "The only thing that would help this park is nuclear weapons."
Wolff proved him wrong, and the Bulls turned into one of great success stories of the nationwide minor-league revival of the '80s.
Wolff sold the club to Raleigh television mogul Jim Goodmon in 1990, but he still took in games here. On this sticky night with the Blue Rocks and the Bulls having at it, he invited a visitor to join him and his son, scorecard in fist, sitting in the box seats behind and to the right of the plate.
Wolff is a realist. He tried everything he could to get a new ballpark for the Bulls, and when those efforts failed, sold the team to Goodmon. If the political disputes and bickering that held up the new park had ended sooner, Wolff said he would probably still own the team.
"Everybody loves it here, but once they get into the new ballpark, everybody is going to forget all about what they loved about this place," he said.
Those sentiments were shared by Bulls general manager Al Mangum.
"It is true that this place has a great deal of charm," he said. "But with the charm comes the warts."
The press box, buried two feet below ground level and behind an open screen directly in back of home plate, was either wonderful or a wart, depending on your taste.
"We can call balls and strikes better than the umpire because we're right here and don't even have to kneel down," said Bob Guy, the public address announcer since 1985.
This had to be one of the great seats in baseball. But for the dynamite view, one paid dearly. On broiling summer nights like this one, the temperature in this breezeless cell was almost unbearable. It could also get horribly cold on early spring evenings.
You'd think that the chill would render unusable the fingers of organist Mike Cummings, who shared the pressbox with Guy and the local scribes. But Cummings said that it is the one-second lag time between the notes he plays and the moment they emerge from the PA system that bothered him more than any heat and cold.
"It took me a long time to get used to it," Cummings said.
There were other hazards of work in the pressbox.
"No bathroom down here," Guy said. "Extra inning games can get to be a real chore."
Guy, who was the general manager of a newspaper distributorship by day, is a beloved figure.
"He's more than a PA guy," Mangum said. "He's a personality, but a very cerebral one. He's the kind of guy who reads six or seven newspapers a day. He can also be a pain in the neck."
A pain in the neck is what it was to walk around the crowded ballpark on one of these last game nights. Making our way past the right-field bleachers and the Bulls bullpen took a while. The pitchers lounging in the 'pen sat right beside the fence that separates the field from the seats. Nothing prevented the fans from stopping by to chat.
One of the pitchers is Brad Clontz, the former Patrick County High star. Like most, if not all, the Bulls, he loved it here.
"The fans here are the difference," he said after the game. "They're just great. It makes you look forward to coming to the park. It's almost an electric atmosphere."
Back in the stuffy pressbox, Guy concured.
"It's just great to see all these little kids we get here get all goggle-eyed over Class A ballplayers. It's amazing. But I'll tell you something. On any given night, 5,500 of the 6,000 fans who come here would not know who we were playing, what league we're in, or that we're a farm team of the Atlanta Braves."
Past the bullpen, we reached the picnic area beneath a big open tent. Looming beyond is a hill, which fans had worn almost free of grass as they sat on the ground to catch the action. Behind the fans seated in the dust was a set of small bleachers, full this night, and behind that was the fence that runs along the old brick wall of the Nu-Tread tire business next door.
Following the wall, we reached one of the ballpark's most enduring landmarks, the mechanical Bull.
The Bull. Nothing more than bolted-together plyboard atop creosoted poles, The Bull was installed here in 1988 to serve as a set piece for the movie "Bull Durham."
The Bull, with its inscription "Hit Bull Win Steak," can be seen all over the ballpark. Its operator, moonlighting landscape architect Cathy Sokol, 39, worked from behind this minor-league monument, atop a sort of deck reached by a long set of wooden stairs.
She issues an invitation to join her and her two young temporary assistants. Travis Wardell, 8, and Jesse Stevens, 9, have just wandered in to take a look and as Cathy does with most kids, she lets them take a turn pulling the rope that operates the beast's tail, flick the switch that turn the red lights that serve as his eyes on and off, and flip the valve that feeds the smoke from a tubular carbon dioxide tank on the fenced deck to the Bulls' nostrils.
Cathy explains to the youngsters what they're to do.
"There's eyes, tail and smoke - that's the hierarchy," she said. "A walk or a hit gets the eyes, and they can get real excited or slow, depending on what kind of play it is. A double gets the eyes and the tail. On a triple, the eyes and tail just don't quit. A home run gets the eyes, tail and the smoke."
From The Bull, we made our way down the narrow, broken-glass strewn, poison-ivy infested path that runs between the center field fence and the Nu-Tread wall. The path comes out at another dusty plateau with another bleacher. This one is beyond deep center field looking in over the fence. There were mostly young people here who appeared to be having a splendid time.
Passing them, we arrive at the scoreboard, which was a hybrid of the modern electric board and the old-timey kind where the numbers are hung from hooks. Up on a catwalk protected by a net to ward off the occasional fly ball, was the operator, 24-year-old Bob Lord of Reston, Va.
Lord, a University of Virginia graduate, was preparing to enter Duke's MBA program this semester.
"You don't have to dodge too many fly balls, and you do get to read a lot," he hollered down. "Every night, I read the newspaper. I've read all the John Grisham novels this summer."
The game ended during the discussion, and Lord was left to his work. We made our way back through the departing crowds to the Bulls clubhouse beneath the grandstand. It was dank and dark under here, with all manner of equipment stuffed into the space where the pitch of the stands meets the ground. To the left is the door to the Bulls cramped clubhouse. Directly in front is the office door of Leon Roberts, the field manager.
Roberts was winding down after the game, a 3-2 Bulls victory.
"It's a neat place," said Roberts, in his second year at this post.
We leave the clubhouse and return to the edge of the grass, along the first-base line. A television crew had set up in center field, pointing the camera back toward the grandstand.
One by one, the ballpark lights were extinguished until the camerman and the park was clothed in darkness.
by CNB