History of Bad Grass and Lawn Care Conditions of Football Fields

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Players can tell you that the surface condition of the turf they play on can make all the difference in a game and how they perform. Field conditions are affected by weather, surface, slickness, and even lawn care.

Long before the modern surfaces and machines we see football played on today, grass fields were the only surface that mattered. Have you ever considered how these playing fields were cared for and kept? Our man Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology has, and may we hear what he found out.

This discussion originates based on Time's Tidbit post titled: The Wretched Field Conditions of Football's Past - In Pictures.

-Transcription of Football Field Grass Cuts with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another evening where we get to discuss some football archaeology with the founder of that website, Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Darin, thank you for chatting tonight, as we seem to do every week, every Tuesday. So yeah, looking forward to it. Yeah, I feel very blessed and honored to be able to talk to you every Tuesday and get this information that you share with us.

Just a few months ago, you had a very interesting topic on one of your tidbits about the field maintenance of the grass that was played on. There was no artificial turf; it was all natural grass, and we're very interested to know how they manicured their fields. Well, yeah, so I actually had an earlier one.

I think I probably have a link to it in this particular tidbit but about the terrible field conditions of the past. And so now we've got artificial turf, we've got prescription grass, and most fields have good drainage and watering systems as needed. And there's just other ways.

The fields are so well-maintained. Back in the day, especially in some stadiums that used to get really heavy use, if you just had one game or one weekend where it was rainy, the rest of the season, the whole central portion of the field was just mud or dirt. It just got torn up.

There's no way to avoid it. And that's one of the great benefits of artificial turf, which is that the central part of the field doesn't wear out, so it's between the hash marks. But back in the day, it sure did.

And so that's kind of a lost element of the game, or of the experience, both as fans and especially as players. But so I'm always looking at old yearbooks and other photo sources. And so back in the day, there were certain things going on in the field that you just noticed, and they were just like, what the hell are they doing there? And so obviously, the muddy fields that I just mentioned.

One of the ways that they try to maintain or dry out muddy fields is by tossing sawdust all over the field. And so I've got images, Yale Field, where there's sawdust all over the field. I'm just trying to draw it out or dry it out, I should say. And then they'd sometimes put hay on the field prior to the game, like if it was going to be icy, and then they'd rake it all off, so all kinds of crazy stuff.

So then once that dirt got all, well, once the field became dirt rather than grass, then you see in early pictures where they raked, you see all these lines in the dirt, and it's just because they raked, just to get all the clumps out and all that kind of stuff. And then, when it dried, the whole field was just dusty. So again, I've got a bunch of pictures of guys just stepping on the field, running around, and there are dust clouds falling; they all look like pig pens from the Charlie Brown cartoon.

But the other one that you see from time to time is long grass, which is, you don't see it as much, but there are times where it's like, I've got pictures of placekickers trying to kick off the grass, and it's like, the grass is literally like 12 inches tall. And so it's like, how the heck did they maintain the grass? Then I looked into that. And so initially, I'd have to make sure I pronounce this correctly, but I was asking, how did they keep football fields, baseball fields, parks, and lawns trimmed back in the day? And so the one way that they did it was with a scythe, which is like the Grim Reaper, with that pole.

A sickle type. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

And so, you know, so they had people up there, you know, cutting it that way. But then, you know, by like 1830, somebody came up with a mechanical lawnmower that pretty much, you know, looks like a real, and I mean real meaning R-E-E-L, so real mower that's used today, but obviously very clunky looking. And then, you know, they also had, you know, so there were the hand-pushed versions, and then there were the horse-pulled versions of these real mowers.

But from time to time, they also reverted back to more traditional methods, which was to bring in a flock of sheep, and you'd just put the sheep out there on your football field or your baseball field and let, you know, let them at it. And then you may have some new obstacles to try to avoid while you're playing. Well, you know, and that would make the grass grow.

So, yeah, and so... Nothing like a good turd tackle, that's for sure. Yeah. One of my brothers has a place up in California where, you know, it's basically a winery where the fields were so wet, or everything was so wet because of all the rain they had.

They brought in a bunch of sheep and just let the sheep go up and down between the rows, you know, eat back the grass. But, yeah, so, I mean, so you think about that, and it was even, you know, so for sure, I've got pictures, you know, it included a picture from like 1943 of sheep grazing in the Rose Bowl, trying to keep it back. And so, even like in the 40s, especially, you know, with gas rationing because of the war, you know, we saw a return to sheep grazing on athletic fields just to, you know, to try to keep it trimmed.

But, you know, I mean, there were like New Mexico, Loyola Marymount, places like that also, you know, I've got newspaper articles anyways indicating, you know, in the late 30s, early 40s that they were trimming their grass the old-fashioned way. Hey, just to put a comment, you know, the images that you have, and we have links to them in the show notes here, folks, and on Pigskin Dispatch from the accompanying article for Tim's images. In the image of the sheep on the Rose Bowl field, I think they got the black sheep of every family in that photo because I think there are two that look like they might be lighter color; all the rest are very colored sheep.

So, a lot of black sheep in that family. Well, there was; it may have been the breed because the article mentioned the breed, which, you know, I don't know one. I don't know my sheep breeds; I apologize.

But, so it may be that that was just a function of. Well, luckily for you, we just want to know about your football. We don't need your agricultural knowledge.

I'm not really good at the agricultural side. Now, that same image, the herdsman or the farmer that's caring for these sheep, he must be a pretty popular guy because it looks like he has like a five-gallon bucket of, I'm assuming, water for these dozen or so sheep to all drink out of. So, I'm sure they're very popular guy in the water.

So, I mean, the other thing, he could have had some grain in there. Then, tossing grain into different areas would attract the sheep to mow the whole field. Oh, okay.

Gotcha. I mean, again, I'm guessing this only because I saw a YouTube video of some guy in New Zealand who created a picture of a heart in his field, let the sheep in, you know, he spread grain in the shape of a heart, let the sheep out and they all went, and then sheep formed a heart. So, it is quite an art form to get your sheep to manicure your lawn.

That's right. All right. Well, hey, I'm even more glad this week, and I have to cut the grass with the modern conveniences we have today.

I'm not out there with a bucket throwing grain on my grass with a herd of sheep. So, although we do like those days, those were the days. All right.

I had a little, much harder time in many ways. So, we appreciate those pioneers of early football who took care of the yards that we played in and helped us advance to where we are today. And Tim, you have some very interesting, fascinating pieces of football that even go beyond the game and equipment like this, you know, caring for the field, which is, you know, you have to have a field to play on.

So, it's, you know, it has to be that. And I know one point I was going to bring up, too, is a really interesting study I saw just came out within the last week or so from, I believe, the National Football League on injuries compared on natural grass fields that are played in the league versus the artificial fields. There was a higher injury rate, as this study showed in the 2022 season, where people on artificial fields were injured more often, or more injuries occurred than they did on the grass fields.

And I don't know if you saw that, but it's kind of interesting to go back to old school, possibly. Yeah, I didn't see that. And, you know, I mean, obviously, when artificial turf first came out, it gripped so well that, you know, guys just blew out their knees all the time on that.

And it was like playing on concrete, you know, I mean, I mostly played on natural, you know, I played on one or two artificial turf fields that were fairly early in the development, and it was, you know, it was horrible. But anyways, yeah, I'm actually a little bit surprised by that result, you know, just because, you know, my sense is that the artificial surfaces have come so far. But, you know, there's a certain amount of, you know, there's kind of no going back on some of it, you know, if you're in a dome stadium, you're going to play on artificial turf, right? And then it's, you know, it's one thing to be on turf, you know, it takes, it just takes a lot of money from an ongoing maintenance standpoint to have a really well done natural turf, you know, so if you're the Packers or something like that, okay, you can afford it.

A lot of other places, it's just, you know, so I mean, anyone in the NFL can afford to do it if that's the right thing, right? Yeah, I know at Akershire Stadium, the old Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, they replaced the turf, I think, two or three times during the NFL season. Of course, the Pitt Panthers are playing on that. They have high school games, usually on Thanksgiving weekend.

They have four championship games or five or six now. I think they have levels playing on that field. So it gets tore up that time of year and they, they replace it within a couple of days before the NFL game.

And that's why you see so many famous games played at Pittsburgh stadium where chunks of the field are coming up, or they had a rainy Monday night game in Miami 20 some years ago, where the punter kicked the ball, and it came down point first and stuck right in the middle of the field and some things. Well, you know, that, that actually raises a point. You know, I don't know if the study was able to control for that, but you know, how long was the turf installed? You know, at the time an injury occurred, because, you know, turf that's been in there for months is different than turf that was installed last Monday.

Right. Yeah. I think it's; they just took an aggregate of the 17 games or, I guess, eight and a half games on average on each field and looked around to see how many state injuries happened at that field by the opponents, you know, both teams playing on it.

So I think that's how they studied it. And you know, it's got some, some, you can sling some arrows at it and shoot some holes in it, but it's an interesting study. And one, I know the NFL takes player safety seriously, as they do with most items.

I am so anxious to see where that leads us. Yeah. Interesting stuff.

Tim, your tidbits are, you know, bringing up items like this constantly every single day, sometimes a couple of times a day. Why don't you share with the listeners how they too can share in on all the fun of hearing these? Yeah. So, you know, best way is just to go to my website, footballarchaeology.com, subscribe.

And that by doing that, you'll, you'll get an email every night at like seven o'clock. I may actually push that a little bit later, but anyways, we'll get an email that with, you know, with the story for that, that evening. And, you know, if you, if you don't want the emails, then just, you can follow me on Twitter.

Yeah. So great subject. We really enjoyed having you share your knowledge with us, Tim, and appreciate you.

And we will talk to you again next week. Very good, sir. Look forward to it.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.