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Peter Bronson says, “Amen.” Let all the people who see the new stadium say, “Amen.” The 100,000 people who thronged to Paul Brown Stadium last week were not on a religious pilgrimage. After all, it wasn’t a miracle, but sales-tax proceeds, that built the new Bengals showcase. But the fervor that greeted the $450-plus million shrine had elements of that old-time religion.
Consider the praise heaped on the structure by Bronson, editorial page editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer and sometime advocate of smaller government. Don’t expect Bengals owner Mike Brown to thank the public for building the stadium named for his father, Bronson warned.
“Some people want Mr. Brown to get down on his knees and thank us,” Bronson wrote on Aug. 20, the day after the Bengals christened their new stadium with an exhibition season win over the Chicago Bears.
Instead, he implied, the people who should be kneeling are the fans in their pews er, seats. The headline for Bronson’s epistle was “Thank you, Mike Brown.”
By coincidence, on the very day the Bengals opened the stadium to public tours for the first time, Aug. 16, a group of clergy in Anderson Township made headlines by challenging the scheduling of youth sports activities on Sundays.
Rev. Henry Zorn, pastor of Lutheran Church of the Resurrection, was one of about two dozen ministers protesting the interference by soccer games, football games and other sports events when, he says, kids should be in church.
“Sports is becoming our god,” Zorn says.
That characterization has its basis in more than a mere schedule conflict. Zorn says athletics has become such a big part of popular culture that kids inevitably are being shaped by its demands.
“We seem to live in a society in which we are pushing more and more stress on our young people, to the point that we are calling 12-year-olds ‘elite athletes,’ ” Zorn says. “We put them on traveling teams away from their families for weekends, away from their churches. The sense that sports and competition is becoming so important just permeates the culture.”
The ministers weren’t looking for headlines, according to Zorn. In fact, the church leaders were consciously trying to avoid looking heavy-handed.
“We tried to take a very low-key approach,” he says. “We were very sensitive to the other faith traditions in our community, and we didn’t want this to come across as the Christian clergy in Anderson Township throwing around our weight. We just mailed it out to the school district and athletic organizations. It’s basically just a request.”
The ministers asked the Forest Hills Board of Education to consider rescheduling a pair of high-school graduations that will conflict with Sunday worship next year and asked sports organizations to be sensitive to the fact that many of their players must choose between church and games.
But calling sports a god is bound to attract attention, and Zorn found himself on radio talk shows, interviewed by Associated Press and appearing in both local daily newspapers.
The fact that the story broke on the same day as the stadium tour was not the ministers’ plan.
“People asked about that, and I said it was a coincidence,” Zorn says. “But now I’m beginning to wonder if it wasn’t Providence.”
While Enquirer columnist Laura Pulfer gushed about the stadium — “This new Paul Brown Stadium looks great. Beautiful, actually.” — Zorn says it evokes in him concern about the community’s spiritual well-being.
“The stadium is really the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “I’m troubled by the message we send by spending $450 million on a stadium when people in our city are starving and dying of cancer. That public money could have been spent to serve a broader range of people.”
After all, Zorn says, even the stadium the Bengals used to use — the one that made the team threaten to leave town unless taxpayers built a new one — is in far better condition than the classrooms serving many inner-city schoolchildren.
But the big money and the big headlines, he says, have gone to the Bengals’ new edifice.
“Cinergy Field is newer than 90 percent of the school buildings in the Cincinnati Public Schools,” Zorn says. “I’d be willing to strongly guess that the new stadium has had more front-page coverage than any other subject has in the past year. What’s on our consciousness? Where are we spending our money? Who is our god?”
And how many of the throng who took the free tour of the stadium went because they know they won’t be able to afford the price of admission to games? One indication might have come Aug. 19, when nearly 10,000 seats sat empty at the home opener. Granted, the event was only an exhibition game, and the crowd at Paul Brown Stadium would have filled the old one to capacity. But high prices won’t help the Bengals fill the stands.
Perhaps the public should thank Mike Brown for that, too — costs will keep at least some adult football fans from missing church services.
What’s more, the convergence of so many grateful fans at one time might have provided unexpected moral insight to at least some of them. The 100,000 people who toured the stadium had to park somewhere. Given the already tight parking supply downtown, more than a few fans likely found themselves passing through Over-the-Rhine, where taxpayers have demonstrably not invested $450 million in better housing, recreation and job creation.
As it happened, the very same week the new football stadium opened, another downtown facility celebrated its grand opening. The event attracted far less attention but will probably have a more direct impact on the people who use it.
The Drop Inn Center opened a new nurse station and examination room on Aug. 18. Funded by a grant from the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, the facility will improve services offered homeless men and women by such non-profit organizations as the Southwest Ohio Nurses Association, the Medical Volunteers of Cincinnati, Parish Nursing and the Foot Care Clinic.
The Drop Inn Center didn’t threaten to leave town unless it received a new nurse station, and Laura Pulfer didn’t call the finished product “beautiful, actually,” but what goes on there likely will do more to uplift its patrons than anything that takes place between the goal lines.
Metaphors aside, Paul Brown Stadium isn’t a temple to a football deity. (Remember, it’s the Bengals who will play there.) Nor is the praise heaped on the stadium idol-worship. But the two Enquirer writers seemed painfully self-conscious about their own reverence for the building.
“I know I’m way out of line here,” Bronson wrote.
“Excuse me for saying so,” Pulfer wrote.
That kind of talk sounds awfully close to another religious instinct: guilt. ©
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2000.