Astroturf And Athletes Essay, Research Paper

In today’s sports world Athletes are valuable commodities. Athlete salaries are routinely measured in terms of millions of dollars. Major league baseball teams and NFL football teams spend billions of dollars for medical care, training facilities, experts and physicians all to keep the team’s athletes performing at their very best. Though teams spend incredible amounts of money on signing players and keeping players, some professional sports franchises still play in stadiums with Astroturf or some other kind of artificial grass. Artificial surfaces are proven to cause unnecessary injuries to athletes and should be banned from all Pro-sport and college stadiums. The many disadvantages and dangers of Astroturf and the horrible injuries players can attain, sometimes without even physical contact with another player, greatly outweigh the number of benefits.

When plastic grass was introduced to the sports scene in the mid-1960s, it seemed like a great invention. Astroturf was one of the major factors helping to create the many sports “domes” which are common in today’s sports world. Fake plastic grass was a great help in the construction of Sports domes. These massive indoor sports domes allow for giant sporting events to be held under the cover of a roof, protected from the elements. The first dome, the Astrodome, in Houston Texas originally had a transparent roof that allowed for the sun to shine through and real grass to grow. When a section of

the stadium’s roof was painted over to eliminate glare on the field, the grass would no longer grow. This was the first case where artificial turf was used and where the name Astroturf came to be.

Made from a nylon composition artificial turf is very tough. The turf requires very little maintenance and could be squeegeed off in case of a rain-shower this could in some cases eliminate costly rain delays. The other positive that people believed was that Astroturf is a faster surface and that it speeds up the games of football, baseball and soccer. Throughout the 70’s and early 80’s the “fake grass” surface was considered state-of-the-art. Though these benefits sound great and some are, the disadvantages to fake plastic grass are numerous. Through the years of playing on Astroturf surfaces, players frequently complained of “freak” accidents and injuries. Becoming all too common was a Torn up knee or a freak ankle turn. An incredible 93.4 percent of 965 players surveyed by the NFL players association said artificial turf contributes to injuries, and 53.8 percent believe they sustained injuries on artificial turf they would not have on natural grass.

Sometimes as in the case of Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Rob Moore, this freak accident can occur without even taking a physical hit from another player. The injury Moore received can be directly attributed to playing on the rock hard artificial surface of the metro-dome, in Minnesota home of the NFL’s Vikings. Rob was simply running out his pattern making his cut when his shoe grabbed and twisted his knee tearing his ACL joint. Rob Moore is now out for the season and must undergo extensive surgery and rehab on his knee before he can return next year. Moore was an important part of the cardinals team and now their hopes of success this season can be lowered because of this

loss of a key player to a senseless injury. Another career lost before it ever really began was former Cincinnati Bengal’s number 1 draft-pick Ki-Jana Carter. Carter was playing the Lions in Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome, a notorious Artificial turf playing surface, when a simple running play ended his career. In the play in which the injury happened, Carter was simply running a common NFL run play to the right side behind an offensive tackle when a player came and tried to tackle him. Ki-jana tried to put a juke move on the player trying to tackle him and bounce to the outside when his knee buckled from underneath him and he had torn his anterior crucial ligament. After the game Ki-jana claimed his foot had gotten “caught on the turf”. Since the injury Ki-jana never really regained the form that made him an NFL number one draft pick.

Of all the offending stadiums still using Astroturf, one of the worst playing surfaces in all of sports is Philadelphia’s Veterans stadium. Throughout the years the Astroturf surface in Philadelphia’s Veteran’s stadium has been described by some NFL players as being “like concrete.” As years go by and other teams are building new Natural Grass stadiums such as Ravens Stadium and Camden Yards in Baltimore, the Eagles for some reason fall behind in their conversion to all-grass fields. Not only does this hurt the players on the team but also hurts the Eagles in terms of the team attracting big-money high-priced coveted free agents. Players just don’t want to come play and practice on artificial turf. And who really can blame these players? As in the case with the 1999-2000 off-season the Eagles had to acquire their much needed key acquisition, Offensive guard, Jon Runyon. The Eagles had to go about acquiring Runyon by overpaying him much more than what the general consensus on what he was worth is. This, having to

overpay a player can be attributed to the surface that covers the field at the Vet in Philadelphia. Players of high caliber who can pick and choose the teams they want to go to, do not want to play on such terrible surfaces. Not only does Astroturf hurt the team’s ability to keep its players healthy and on the field but it also affects its ability to field a team that can compete with the other elite teams that have the resources to install grass fields. This ineptness trickles down throughout the whole organization, when a team can’t field a winning team, because of lack of quality players due to poor stadium conditions, the fans don’t fill the stadium which leads to revenue lost and money is wasted.

Aside from the obvious injury standpoint where Artificial turf should be banned and also the point that turf hurts the level playing field of pro-sports there is the opinion that turf is just plain ugly. I feel that a nice natural grass surface looks much nicer than an old faded off-green surface such as the field in Veterans stadium, in Philadelphia.

These many points make is obviously clear that the money spent on up-keep with a natural grass field can be overwhelmingly justified by these advantages. The facts that owners are keeping their players, theses players who are basically their investments, healthy and on the field producing alone is enough for pro-sports to ban the dangerous playing surface Astroturf. This fact along with the others makes it clear that the time of artificial playing surfaces in pro sports and college sports has come and gone.