'Old Rockpile' will become just that

War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo

By Tom Hawthorn
The Globe and Mail
July 13, 1987

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Cy Williams sat in the stands of the stadium he helped build 50 years ago and marvelled at his work. ''So many men worked on it, we could have built the Taj Mahal," said Williams, now a major-league baseball scout, as he looked around the dilapidated edifice of War Memorial Stadium . ''We used the best steel beams ever rolled. It'll cost them millions to take this down."

But take it down they will. The building's only tenants, the Buffalo Bisons minor-league baseball team, are moving to a new park at season's end.

The concrete coliseum, for decades known disparagingly as the Old Rockpile, will stand as a mausoleum for some of sport's great stories until it is finally destroyed.

The Bisons held a memorial for War Memorial on Saturday. They invited a squad of retired and active athletes who once played here, including Toronto Blue Jay third baseman Kelly Gruber. The biggest cheers from the 9,786 fans on hand were for gridiron ghosts from the glory days of football's Bills.

''They built this place so the fans would know the players and get to see them," former punter Paul Maguire said. ''It'll be a sad day when they tear the Old Rockpile down."

The stadium was built during the Depression as a make-work project for idled ironworkers like Williams, who was paid $15 a week to erect the 42,000-seat football bowl. It took three years and $3-million to build.

It was designed solely with football in mind, yet track meets, stock- car races, and boxing and wrestling matches were held inside.

A baseball diamond was awkwardly cut out of the rectangular football field, leaving the park with a rather inviting right-field fence only 290 feet away from the plate. Some fans relished the odd sight of bloop home runs.

War Memorial infuriated opposing managers. ''This place stinks," said one. ''They shouldn't even let little-leaguers play here."

Sports Illustrated reporter Brock Yates once wrote: ''It is an arena that looks as if whatever war it memorializes was fought within its confines."

The stadium reached its nadir during the late 1960s. Everything seemed to go wrong. Catcher Johnny Bench broke his thumb in the first inning of the first game he played at War Memorial.

In 1967, the surrounding neighborhood exploded in riots. Management, fearing racial violence, temporarily moved the team to Niagara Falls, N.Y.

A batboy was mugged in the clubhouse one night while his team was on the field.

Paid attendance at a game three years after the rioting was only 150. The baseball franchise was moved to Winnipeg. A year later, the football team moved to its current suburban home of Rich Stadium.

''It was cold, it was grey, it was a foreboding place," says historian Joe Overfield. ''The place was going to wrack and ruin. Vandalism. Kids were coming in and breaking seats."

The Old Rockpile sat empty for eight years. When a new baseball team was acquired in 1979, the scoreboard still had posted the score of the final football game: Visitors 21, Bills 21.

Still, the concrete fortress was the site of running back O.J. Simpson's first professional game, as well as Jackie Robinson competing in a track meet before going on to break baseball's color barrier.

It was on its playing fields that Congressman Jack Kemp, now a presidential aspirant, and powerful county official Ed Rutkowski first put their names to the public.

Robert Redford chose it as the set for his 1983 baseball movie, The Natural.

On Saturday, War Memorial still looked like the set for a movie - a Fellini movie.

The baseball team has a 360-pound ball boy named the Butcher, who is booed and cheered as he tries to catch foul balls off a screen behind home plate.

Beer and peanuts are sold in the stands by a midget called Big Guy, a beer vendor called Conehead, and Earl the Bud, a moonlighting fireman who does a Pee-Wee Herman dance to the song Tequila in the fourth inning.

It was always thus at War Memorial. Among the guests at the half- century celebrations was 73-year-old Joe (Rubber Man) Russo, a tattooed daredevil auto racer who earned his nickname after walking away from a particularly spectacular crash.

Today, War Memorial looms sadly over a modest neighborhood of houses and small businesses like the Tri-Me Beauty Salon and Mattie's B-B-Q Ribs. Weeds grow from cracks in its yellowed concrete edifice.

As the Aug. 30 date for the final home game approaches, fans are taking back some of what they once said about the antiquated stadium.

''Old Rockpile is now said with affection, rather than bitterness or disgust," says Overfield. ''This place was much maligned at one time, but now we're sad to leave her. I will shed a tear, yes I will."