Effort to Give Bleacher Bums a Break Fails at Super Bowl

It all started last year in a New York City cocktail lounge, on Leon Parma’s napkin.

It was on that napkin that the San Diego Super Bowl Task Force first launched a noble endeavor: How best to make comfortable the roughly 21,000 fans who--through no fault of their own--will be confined to temporarily constructed bleacher seats at the Super Bowl.

The idea was to construct a special seat back so fans in the bleachers--who will make up about 28% of the crowd--would be as comfortable as their counterparts in the stadium’s permanent seats, which are built theater-style with backs and armrests.

Despite feverish efforts stretching from Long Island to Tijuana, a combination of high costs, manufacturing uncertainties and, most importantly, a lack of time, strangled the noble endeavor less than a month ago.

The fans in the bleachers, though, will have one consolation.

While their backs may ache after sitting through the 3 1/2-hour game, their derrieres should feel just fine, thanks to the corporate merchandising of GTE, which is supplying all 74,000 seats at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium with special Super Bowl souvenir seat cushions.

Though the attempt to supply the seat backs failed, the effort nonetheless offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the lengths the task force--a group of public and private leaders responsible for preparing the city for the game--has gone to to try to impress the NFL by making the game so successful that the city will be picked again to host the Super Bowl.

Contemplating Events

Last spring, a contingent of task force members, joined by Mayor Maureen O’Connor, traveled to New York City as part of the city’s efforts at convincing the NFL and team owners to select San Diego for the 1991 Super Bowl, which ultimately was awarded to Tampa Bay. As part of that presentation, the city promised that in 1991, the city would provide the temporary seat backs in the bleachers.

Later, while contemplating the day’s events over drinks, a group of task force members, including Parma, the owner of Coast Distributing Co., talked about what else they could do at this Super Bowl to best impress NFL team owners, according to people there.

“Well, what about if we created a seat back for every bleacher seat in the house?” Parma was quoted as saying by people in the bar.

He then drew the prototype on a napkin, and therein was launched an effort that spanned several months.

“I just designed a seat on a napkin,” Parma said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “There was no reason we couldn’t do something like this. . . . It was a very logical step.”

“We wanted to do everything in our power to get them for 1988,” said Peg Nugent, the task force’s associate executive director.

The task force came up with a real prototype--the first of several eventually looked at--and it was built by Morton Equipment, a San Diego company helping construct the bleachers at the stadium. (The temporary seats are not like the long wooden benches usually associated with bleachers. Instead, they are made of aluminum and have a steel under-structure and wooden foot boards.)

After checking with GTE, which agreed to underwrite most of the cost, and the NFL, which initially balked at the ambitious proposal, the task force plunged ahead. But what started out as a simple endeavor soon hit one obstacle after another.

Emergency Stairs

First there was the Fire Department to consider.

The department, concerned about keeping the aisles clear in case of an emergency, said the seats not only couldn’t protrude into the aisles but the backs also had to flip down automatically whenever a fan got up.

“Our biggest concern was the back of the seat. . . . The (building) code handles bleacher seating different than theater seats,” said Jim Sewell, the city’s deputy fire chief.

Because bleachers are constructed as long benches, allowing up to 42 people per row, they can be used in emergencies as stairs, to help people climb up or down as they exit.

Sewell explained that having seat backs that didn’t automatically fold down would prevent the bleachers from being used as stairs and thus would be illegal.

Though there was some concern by the task force about the seat backs flopping up and down and annoying fans, the seat was redesigned.

The task force then went forward with a plan to build 23,000 seat backs, a gamble the group thought was worth taking.

But other problems arose. It became difficult to get the vinyl covering for the seat backs, and it would have to come out of Long Island. “We’d end up trucking it out ourselves,” recounted Les Land, the task force’s executive director who played a lead role in attempting to bring the idea to fruition.

Manufacturing Problems

Then it was discovered that the seat backs could not be manufactured by Morton Equipment, at least not in time for the game. And the price was going up, doubling the original estimate, which officials declined to reveal. It was enough, though, that GTE didn’t want to pick up the difference.

With no time to go out for competitive bids, Land took the seat-back specifications to a manufacturer in Tijuana. While things looked promising initially, there was enough uncertainty about whether the seat backs could be built in time that the task force dropped the idea entirely three weeks ago.

“We felt that everyone is paying $100 for a seat at the game . . . and so everyone should have the same privilege of having a seat back,” Lane said. “We would like everyone to be comfortable.”

“We tried,” said Parma, “but we just ran out of time.”