the master
of the quick change
A decade ago, the candy bar maker Mars started an ad campaign with the tag line that if you weren’t “going anywhere for a while,” you might as well grab a Snickers. One TV spot shows a man meticulously painting the end zone of a football field, as players practiced behind. As the painter finishes, a player comes up and looks over his handiwork.
“Hey, that’s great,” the player says. “But who are the chefs?”
As the camera pans back to show a missing “I” the man grumbles, “Great googly moogly” in disgust over his typo.
Funny? Probably not if you are not an NFL fan and are not aware that the team’s correct name is the “Chiefs.” But football people, even those in the business of seeing that such things as field markings are spot on, see the humor in it.
“I do!” says Todd Boyan. “It’s a good commercial.”
Boyan is Vice President and General Manager of Dolphin Stadium, and it is his job to see that not only are the field markings correct but that everything else runs smoothly when the stadium hosts the NFL’s Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl a week later. It’s an enormous task with no room for error.
“There’s an immense amount of details,” Boyan says, citing issues such as security and public safety, food and beverage, transportation and parking, halftime show rehearsals, media events and more, all which must be meticulously addressed for pro football’s biggest game. “That’s why the planning goes on beyond a year.”
Though this is the tenth time that South Florida has been the host for the Super Bowl, planning for it is never routine. This time, the addition of the Pro Bowl to the week’s schedule provides a unique twist, not to mention a challenge.
Fortunately, Dolphin Stadium crews are used to the demands of adapting the field for different events in a short period of time. The stadium not only is home to the Dolphins and University of Miami football teams and baseball’s Florida Marlins, it is also host to the FedEx Orange Bowl and numerous other affairs like concerts, Monster Truck shows, and other smaller events.
“We just had a wedding here,” Boyan smiles. A couple of Dolphins (of course) said their vows on the sideline and then enjoyed their reception on the club level.
“In general,” Boyan notes, “converting the venue from one event to the next is a fairly regular occurrence here.”
Often, the stadium crew has only a day or two to convert the playing field from one event to another since the Dolphins, Hurricanes, and Marlins seasons all overlap. In the case of the Pro Bowl, however, they have the luxury of having nearly four weeks between events.
After the FedEx Orange Bowl was played on January 5, Boyan says, a crew of 50-to-75 workers began ripping out the 80,000 square feet of turf of the playing surface and started re-installing a new Bermuda grass surface for the Pro Bowl, complete with specific AFC and NFC markings in the end zones and at midfield.
Following the Pro Bowl, the grounds crew will rip out the 5,000 square feet of turf in the end zones and another 1,000 square feet in the middle of the field. Super Bowl and participating team logos then will be painted over a fresh surface.
“Some venues simply elect to paint over the old logos,” Boyan says. “We feel strongly from a best-in-class standpoint, that the field is really your stage and that is something that is important to all of us. We want it to look as good as we can. Those end zone logos are very important as part of the branding of the event.”
Cleanup from what is expected to be a near capacity crowd for the Pro Bowl will begin immediately. Media day for the Super Bowl, which attracts thousands of print and broadcast members from around the world, will be the Tuesday after the Pro Bowl, and Boyan wants the stadium as pristine as possible for that. Come kickoff for the Super Bowl, the 75,000-plus in attendance at the stadium and an international television audience will gaze upon a more “customized field” Boyan says, with markings on a “grander scale” than those for the Pro Bowl.
And, yes, everything will be spelled right.
“The good news is there are stencils, and the grounds crew has the ability with stencils to create the logos in the end zones, which helps and guides them through,” Boyan says. “It’s really an impressive skill when you see them painting and how it’s layered on there and how it’s planned out, in terms of the spacing and the different colors.
“Field painting has really become quite an art.”
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