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It was Thursday, and the groundskeepers were getting the place ready for a game that was, in the minds of most of the locals, bigger than Bunker Hill. Pats vs. Dolphins, and a savage December Nor’easter was churning its way up the coast, which was just fine with the New England Patriot fans. Let’s see how the Miami team deals with a couple of feet of snow and a gale-force wind.
“I think they’ll have to sod it before Sunday,” one of the contractors said to me. “I’ve got season tickets and this place was really torn up after the last game. There’s no way that field is in good shape. No way.” Three groundskeepers, all strong young men, walked to the sideline and picked up handfuls of tarp. They turned toward the other sideline and took off like a team of Clydesdales, peeling the pieces of tarp off the field like skin off a potato. “It takes them 12 hours to get this job done,” the contractor said. “The tarp up, and the lines down, I mean. That’s something you never give much thought to when you’re watching the game on Sunday. These guys really bust it to get the job done on time. They use 200 gallons of paint to get all those lines down. Did you know that?” “I didn’t,” I said. “Everything about this place is big.” “Big and important,” he said. “Real important.”
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I was in a big, warm room, 80 feet above the 50-yard line, with 170 guys who had shown up for a GasNetworks seminar I was doing. The weather was still fine, colder than Pluto, but fine. It smelled like money. The groundskeepers were taking the tarp off the field now.
In December 1990, I flew to Stockholm and landed there before dawn, which happens at about 9:30 in the morning in Sweden because it’s so close to the North Pole. I waited for some other people to arrive from their corners of America, and we all got into a car and drove to the city and checked into an old hotel. And that’s when I saw my very first panel radiator. It had tiny, plastic-coated pipes feeding it, and a thermostatic radiator valve, and I had never seen anything like it before. It felt good.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
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