S.D. Teams Ban Smoking in Stadium Seats

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

The San Diego Padres, the San Diego Chargers and the San Diego State University Aztecs announced at a joint press conference Friday that the no-smoking bans for all three teams will be enforced starting with each team’s 1992 season and will affect all open seating areas. Smoking will be allowed on the stadium concourse behind the plaza areas.

The Chargers join the Dallas Cowboys next year 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 their stadium beginning last April.

Virtually all baseball teams playing in domed stadiums have declared smoking bans, the latest being the Minnesota Twins. Smoking will be banned at Twins games at Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome starting in April.

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

Except for such special games as the Holiday Bowl, the San Diego ban would affect virtually all of the major baseball and football events at the stadium.

Representatives of the three teams said the decision was based as much on economics as on public health considerations. A smoking ban was 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.

Smokers 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 during which anti- and pro-smoking forces did battle before the San Diego City Council and Stadium Authority Board, the panel that oversees stadium operations.

The anti-smoking side argued that second-hand smoke creates a health hazard for nonsmokers, even in an outdoor setting, while smokers maintained that a ban would infringe on smokers’ constitutional rights.

The anti-smoking handwriting, however, was clearly on the wall. Stadium general manager Bill Wilson said Friday that, had the teams not acted, a ban would likely have been approved by the stadium board in January and then passed into law by City Council.

SDSU Associate Athletic Director Jim Herrick said conversations with fans during the school’s successful “Fill the Murph” season ticket sales campaign convinced school officials, including SDSU President Thomas Day, that a smoking ban would sell more tickets to targeted family-oriented fans.

For the past two years, the stadium has dealt with nonsmokers’ concerns by periodically flashing a sign directed at smokers reading “Please be considerate of your neighbors” over the scoreboard . Signs also have been posted at each entrance. Still, the stadium and teams have been receiving a growing volume of complaints from nonsmokers.

“Every other team shares our concerns,” said the Padres’ Adams. “I just don’t know how close they are to doing anything about it.”

Several universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Brigham Young University have instituted smoking bans at their stadiums.

The timing of the smoking ban was determined in large part by the Padres’ marketing program, Adams said. The baseball team has begun to sell season tickets, and it wants to be able to advertise a stadium-wide no-smoking policy to prospective fans.

“There have been people in the past who have told us they would not buy tickets unless a smoking ban” was put in place, he said.

But Adams insisted that the Padres are still not entirely sure whether the net effect of the smoking ban will be to attract or drive away fans.

“If you talk to 10 different people in the Padres organization, you get 10 different answers,” he said. The Padres do not know how many of its fans are smokers, he said.

The ban brought immediate cheers from anti-smoking entities, including the Americans for Nonsmokers Rights headquartered in Berkeley. Co-director Julia Carol predicted that smoking bans will spread rapidly to other professional teams’ stadiums and arenas.

“Stadiums that have gotten rid of smoking have not had any problems,” Carol said. “Smokers aren’t the ones that raise the fuss, it’s the tobacco industry. I predict that, well before the year 2000, there will be no smoking in any sports stadiums, and that it will seem odd to us that there ever was.”

Walker Merryman, vice president of the Tobacco Institute, the Washington-based trade group representing the cigarette manufacturing industry, said the best way to accommodate smokers and nonsmokers is to set aside no-smoking sections as some stadiums have done, leaving it to the “democracy of the marketplace.”.

“When this came up a couple of years ago, Padres and Chargers season ticket holders just threw a fit about this and those included smokers, and I suspect some were nonsmokers because they see it as absolutely unnecessary and unfair to fellow sports fans who enjoy smoking,” Merryman said. “I assume but don’t know that those same people will be vocal in their opposition now.”

Another bone of contention for no-smoking proponents at the stadium has been the huge Marlboro sign situated to the left of the east end-zone scoreboard. But Adams said 16 months remains on the cigarette company’s lease of the billboard.

“We just can’t walk out and snap it down,” Adams said. Marlboro is paying $250,000 a year for the sign.