Smoking Ban to Take Effect at San Diego Stadium in ’92

Smoking will be banned in the seating areas of San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium during almost all baseball and football games, team officials said Friday.

The San Diego Padres, the San Diego Chargers and the San Diego State University Aztecs announced at a joint press conference Friday that smoking bans would be enforced starting with each team’s 1992 season and would affect all open seating areas. Smoking would be allowed on the stadium concourse behind the plaza areas.

The Chargers will join the Dallas Cowboys as the first professional football teams to ban smoking in an open-air stadium. The city of Irving, Tex., which controls the Cowboys’ home field, passed an ordinance last week banning smoking in the grandstand area.

The Padres become the second major league baseball team playing in an open-air stadium to prohibit smoking. The Oakland Athletics were the first, banning smoking in the Oakland Coliseum last April.

Virtually all domed stadiums have banned smoking, the latest being the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis.

“The trend is going to more of a no-smoking atmosphere in stadiums,” said Steve Maki, building engineer at the Metrodome.

Except for such special games as football’s Holiday Bowl, the ban would affect virtually all the baseball and football contests. The Aztecs play their home football games at the stadium.

Representatives of the three teams said the decision was based as much on economics as on health considerations. The ban is a “response to and in consideration of a large majority of the fans of the three teams,” said Bill J. Adams, San Diego Padres vice president for business operations.

A smoker would be “warned once or twice” by an usher before being escorted from the stadium by security officers. But Adams emphasized that smokers would be treated gingerly.

“We’re going to be treating (smokers) with kid gloves and be sensitive to people’s feelings,” Adams said. “We’re not in the business of running fans out of the stadium.”

The decision by the teams caps a contentious four-year battle between pro- and anti-smoking factions before the San Diego City Council and Stadium Authority Board, which oversees stadium operations.

The anti-smoking side argued that second-hand smoke creates a health hazard for nonsmokers, even outdoors, while smokers maintained that a ban would violate their constitutional rights.