When the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers throw down in Sunday’s Super Bowl, they’ll clash on a carpet of fresh grass that was rolled out just for the occasion—and will be torn up as soon as it’s over.
“We want a brand-new surface for the biggest sporting event in the world,” said Ed Mangan, NFL field director for special events. “The morning after, it will get pulled out, and they’ll build a tennis court and stadium on the football field we just played the Super Bowl on.”
The grass is an extra-thick layer of sod that weighs roughly 660 tons and covers 92,000 square feet in Miami Gardens’ Hard Rock Stadium—which, after hosting Super Bowl 54, will stage the Miami Open tennis tournament.
“It’s like a phone book,” said Richard Wilt, farm manager at Pro Turf LLC, the Georgia company that grew the surface. “The rigidity of it, the thickness of it. We try for it to be strong enough to withstand weather and 330-pound linemen. We want it to be bulletproof.”
The NFL began completely replacing grass for the Super Bowl after 1993. That year, the field at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, Calif., needed extensive repairs before it could host the event.
“So much came out, we decided it would be easier to pull the whole field out and get everything perfect,” Mr. Mangan said.
But cultivating a sturdy and resilient athletic field is different from a homeowner laying sod in the backyard. Most sod farms harvest their fields two or three times a year, Mr. Mangan said, producing grass that is too immature to withstand the pummeling of professional athletes.
“We can’t put a guy making $30 million on a field that will fall apart,” said Mark Paluch, who owns Pro Turf and has provided the Super Bowl field for six of the last seven years that it was played on grass.
To fortify his surface, Mr. Paluch and his staff nurture their turf for 1.5 years. They begin with ordinary sod that is about half-an-inch thick, but by the time they are ready to deliver it, it measures nearly 2 inches.
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That heft is achieved by rolling the initial sod out on a sheet of plastic and applying thin layers of washed white sand as the grass, a variety called Bermuda Tifway 419, grows. Ultimately, 10 or 12 layers of sand are applied, about an inch total, to provide an anchor for the turf’s root system.
In the summer, the sod is regularly watered throughout the day to protect it from the heat, and in winter, it’s blanketed at night to shield it from the cold. Last summer, the high temperature in Enigma, Ga., where Pro Turf is located, was 101 degrees; the winter low was 23 degrees.
The grass, which is overseeded with rye grass for color, is also nourished with fertilizer applied by the spoonful and mowed daily to a height of one-half to seven-eighths inch.
The cost of the surface, not including transportation and installation, is $225,000.
When it is time to ship, a crew of about 40 men roll up strips that are 3.5 feet wide by 44 feet long and load them onto flatbed trucks for delivery.
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This year, they sent 660 rolls on 30 trucks to Miami, where Briggs Golf Construction Inc. had already prepared the stadium. On Jan. 6, the company spent 10 hours ripping out the old grass. The next day, it leveled the field. And on Jan. 9-10, it rolled out the new “lay-and-play” surface.
The 49ers and Chiefs, who have access to practice fields, won’t touch the fresh turf until a walk-through the day before game day. But by then, hundreds of others will have put it to the test.
“There is more traffic on the field before the game than during the game,” Mr. Mangan said. “The pregame show, the half-game show, the postgame show, the trophy presentation all need rehearsal time on the field. We could have 15 to 25 hours of rehearsals before the bowl.”
Once the event is over, Briggs will strip the field.
“We’ll go in at 1 a.m.,” said Frank Giacopelli, whose family owns the business. “A whole field like that will be about 50 truckloads to remove.”
A portion of the demolished field, which is essentially rototilled, will line the paddock and track of a horse farm, Mr. Giacopelli said, and the remainder will be used as filler at a plant nursery.
At that point, the job is done—but Messrs. Paluch and Wilt won’t have time to let the grass grow under their feet.
Next year’s Super Bowl will be played on a natural surface at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., and they are already tending the turf.
Write to Jo Craven McGinty at Jo.McGinty@wsj.com
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2020-01-31 10:30:00Z
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