Angels in the End Zone, and Devils in the Dirt : Pro football: Wind, turf and ghosts make it extremely hazardous for the visiting teams.

We’re talking special effects here. We’re talking science fiction, fantasyland, haze and fog and Jimmy Hoffa buried under artificial turf. We’re talking the ghost of Hoffa, the ultimate team(ster) player, phantasming up from the Jersey swamp, opening the door to the wind tunnel and blowing Brad Daluiso’s 54-yard field goal through the uprights with 32 seconds left last Thanksgiving weekend.

We’re talking Giants 19, Cardinals 17.

We’re talking angels in the end zone and devils in the dirt. We’re talking optical illusions in Candlestick and shifting shadows in Chicago. We’re talking heat strokes in Detroit and turf seams in Philadelphia. We’re talking claustrophobia in Cleveland. We’re talking wet spots in Dallas. We’re talking airsick bags in Denver and warm, fuzzy colors in Atlanta.

We’re talking homefield advantages. Not the kind you get from sellouts; not the kind you get from noise. Not the kind you get from snow and cold; teams can prepare for those. We’re talking about those other special little home-stadium effects that can give a team a break if the team is smart and knows what to do with it.

The Meadowlands has Hoffa, or so the story goes. Hot Teamster rumor, not, of course, confirmed: Hoffa is buried under Giants Stadium. They never found his body anywhere else, right? Hot NFL rumor: A Giants-friendly gate opens at one end of the stadium and creates wind at will to help or harm a field-goal attempt. If it isn’t the ghost of Hoffa, it must be a Giants employee. Suspected, but not, of course, confirmed.

“It’s never been an issue in a game I’ve been in up there, but I watched the one on Thanksgiving weekend last year,” says Washington Coach Norv Turner, who was with Dallas at the time. “The guy kicked a 54-yard field goal, so I’m aware of it.”

Oh, yeah. Word gets around.

“You always hear about that,” Redskins lineman Raleigh McKenzie says. “They can close it and they can open it up, depending on the wind and who’s kicking. But I don’t know. . . . “

We’re talking one of the legends of the game: The Giants operate a wind tunnel at the Meadowlands.

“I can’t verify it, but I’ve heard it,” says Jim Lachey, McKenzie’s Washington teammate and thus a once-a-year visitor to Giants Stadium. “I don’t know if they’ve ever actually done it or not, but I’ve heard about it.”

Wind in New Jersey. Wind in Buffalo. Wind in Chicago. Wind so hard in Chicago that the Giants’ Sean Landeta whiffed a punt--whiffed it altogether--during a playoff game in ’85. Bears punter Maury Buford didn’t miss; Landeta did. Must have been the homefield advantage. When you play at home, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

“Nobody kicks off out of the end zone in Chicago,” Bears kicker Kevin Butler says. “You try to get it done the best you can when winter sets in in Chicago. . . . If they want to make it harder on us (kickers), do away with domes. Let those guys come in here to Soldier Field.”

Wind in San Francisco. Wind in Washington. You play there long enough, you learn the wind.

“There’s a wind at RFK that people don’t really know about,” Redskins kicker Chip Lohmiller says. “It’s up higher than the field at the one end where there’s a Bud sign. You have to play it when you’re kicking down there.”

Wind in Foxboro. Wind so tricky in Foxboro that even the home team sometimes can’t figure it out.

“This is one of the most difficult places to kick in the league,” says Matt Bahr, whose NFL career started in the relative calm of Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium but spiraled down from there into the wind hells of San Francisco, Cleveland and the Meadowlands before a brief stint at Philadelphia and finally New England. “You learn that you can’t prepare for what direction it blows because it changes so often. You can’t anticipate anything, but you’ve always got to expect to see bad weather because that’s what you usually get.”

Wind in Cleveland off Lake Erie. Wind and a short end zone in Cleveland that slopes right up into the Dawg Pound, that friendly little section of stands where the fans wear mutt masks and throw dog biscuits into the other team’s post patterns. Once, late in a game at Cleveland Stadium, as Denver was driving toward a touchdown in the direction of the Dawg Pound, the hail of debris from the end-zone stands was so heavy that game officials stopped the clock and moved the action to the other end of the field.

That was supposed to even things up for the Broncos, except Denver’s Sammy Winder fumbled and the Browns kicked the winning field goal--with the wind at their backs, wind they would have been facing if the teams hadn’t switched directions in mid-quarter.

Wind in Cleveland, the Dawg Pound in Cleveland, the visitors’ locker room in Cleveland. When you visit Cleveland Stadium, you put on your shoulder pads in space approximating the back seat of a Volkswagen. It’s a big, wide body of a stadium, but all its elbow room is built into the Browns’ clubhouse, across the way.

“They need to light a fire to that place. Burn it to the dadgum ground,” Eagles defensive end William Fuller says.

“It’s the size of my dorm room,” 49ers tight end Brent Jones says. “That probably causes some frustration for some guys, because everybody’s right next to each other and it drives them crazy.”

Pittsburgh has to visit once every season, thanks to its presence in the AFC Central Division. When Chuck Noll coached the Steelers, he included the visiting locker room in Cleveland as one of the road distractions his team had to overcome.

“Sometimes,” says Tunch Ilkin, a former Pro Bowl tackle with the Steelers, “they even give you a nail to hang your clothes on.”

An edge for the Browns? Maybe, but only if the effect you want is the opposition taking the field in as foul a disposition as possible. In Atlanta, the Georgia Dome’s spacious visiting locker room is painted lavender, a nice pastel that reduces aggressiveness. Why would the Browns want to make the other team angry even before the opening kickoff?

“That dressing room can get to you,” says Houston wide receiver Haywood Jeffires, another once-a-season visitor to Cleveland. “It’s the worst in the league. It’s small, and everybody is packed in like sardines. It can definitely get you in a bad mood, especially in the winter.”

Sometimes, it’s something in the air that gives the home team the edge. In the Silverdome in Pontiac, it’s heat, heat so hot the air gets heavy. The Silverdome is the hottest indoor stadium in the league, according to Bucs tight end Jackie Harris. It’s a controlled environment, but the controls apparently have only one setting: canned heat. Heat hot enough that Harris and his teammates are ready to change jerseys even before the game starts.

Where there’s heat, there’s haze, “like at a rock concert,” says Buccaneer Tony Mayberry, a center. “The lighting is real weird.”

If you learn how to play the haze and the heat and the weird lighting, you’re one up on the poor saps still gasping to get a breath. And if you’re one up, you want to stay one up, which is why Lions wide receiver Herman Moore won’t get any more specific than this about his one-upmanship.

“There’s a 20-yard area in the Silverdome where you can never see the ball on an out route, but I’m not going to tell you where that is,” Moore says. “(Opposing receivers) can find out for themselves. The ball goes into those lights in the corner of the stadium and it disappears. It’s almost impossible to catch. We never run out routes there anymore.”

Bad lighting in Chicago on a Monday night, especially on a Monday night when the fog comes in on its little cat feet, makes Soldier Field a chamber of horrors for some road teams. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of the Bears?

“It’s darker than most stadiums,” Minnesota linebacker Greg Manusky says. “There are all kinds of shadows. If they figure out where the shadows are, it could be an advantage.”

Sometimes, it’s nothing in the air that gives the home team the edge. In Denver, the nothing includes oxygen. That advantage may be more psychological than physical, but the Broncos don’t mind using it. When visiting teams check into their locker room, the first thing they see is a sign that says, “Welcome to Mile High Stadium. Elevation 5,280 feet.”

Over the past 10 years, Denver is 62-18 in the thin air at Mile High, the best home record in the NFL over that time. When current Giants Coach Dan Reeves coached there, he played every altitude mind game in the book--and most of them worked.

“I’d always mention how hard it is to breathe in Mile High,” Reeves says. “Particularly if it was a key game.”

The week before the 1987 American Football Conference Championship Game, the altitude factor had Cleveland Coach Marty Schottenheimer so spooked he took the Browns to Albuquerque, N.M., to practice, at least partly for its elevation. It might have helped a little, too, but Earnest Byner fumbled inside the Broncos’ 5-yard line at the end of the game and Denver won, 38-33.

It probably only seems this way to the opposition, but the altitude might even affect Denver’s play selection at Mile High.

“You can never prepare for the altitude up there,” Chargers linebacker Junior Seau says. “You can be in the best shape here on the (West Coast) and go up there and feel like you’re out of shape and haven’t been working out for a couple of days. And if you feel like a couch potato here on the West Coast, who knows what you are in Mile High.

“The way the Broncos run their offensive schemes up there, they throw a quick pass here and there. They make sure you feel it early. If you’re young, you can have a mental breakdown, easy. That’s one of the hardest stadiums to play in because of that.”

Then there’s the high tides and green grass of San Francisco. The higher the tide in San Francisco Bay, the greener the grass in Candlestick Park. It’s greener because of the seepage factor: The field gets soggier at high tide. And when it’s soggier, it’s slower.

The 49ers have learned how to read the water level in the Bay for their homefield advantage.

“You see a high tide or a low tide, and you know pretty much what to expect,” 49ers defensive back Merton Hanks says.

How can a team from, say, Washington figure out the tides? It can’t. So the Redskins do the next best thing. They watch the shoes the 49ers wear in pregame warmups. If the cleats are long, they change to long cleats themselves.

“You start to thinking, ‘Hell, I’ve got to wear some Jerry Rice shoes so I can get the same traction he gets,’ ” the Redskins’ McKenzie says.

Gotta be the shoes. The 49ers keep playing those mind games, too, especially late in the season when the sod at Candlestick is so mangled that nothing is going to help.

Except, maybe, Kitty Litter, which is what they put on the field to help cushion the blows from the dirt in the baseball infield. Such pleasant working conditions in San Francisco: Bay water in the grass at one end, Kitty Litter in the dirt at the other end.

“You’ve got the wind right off the bay,” says Saints kicker Morten Andersen, who has to play there every year. “And you’ve got grass that’s different on one end of the field as opposed to the other end of the field. It’s thicker and more waxy on one end, and shorter and more sandy on the other end. It’s different.”

So who makes a shoe that works in watered-down Kitty Litter? Wouldn’t you like to see Deion Sanders in that commercial? “Neon” running through a tub o’ soggy Kitty Litter?

At Veterans Stadium, field goals are kicked from what sometimes seems like the foothills of the Appalachians west of Philly. Hands down, the Vet wins the gold medal for worst artificial turf in the NFL. No need to award the silver or bronze. (New turf is on the way for the 1996 season.)

Other baseball/football groundskeepers find an acceptable way to make the transition from one sport to the next every autumn. They apparently haven’t mastered it yet in Philadelphia, where the Eagles play in a venue Cardinals quarterback Steve Beuerlein less-than-affectionately refers to as “that rat-trap.”

Good thing kicker Eddie Murray has been around the league as long as he has. He will need every bit of experience to figure out the Vet, now that he is kicking for Philly full time.

“Down where they have the baseball diamond, it’s raised up a couple of inches,” says Lohmiller about Veterans Stadium. “When you’re trying to kick a field goal down there, you have to go up and down mounds to try to find the ball.”

It isn’t just the part of the field where the Phillies’ infielders play in the summer, either, that makes for interesting footing in the fall. Sometimes, pieces of artificial turf in the Vet act estranged from their next-door neighbor. They don’t always care to be seen together.

That gives those Eagles who’ve played on it for a while an advantage, at least in knowing where to step lightly. That is, if their knees and ankles survive that long.

“There is nothing like it in all of the NFL,” Philadelphia safety Rich Miano says. “There are different types of turf where they put second base and the pitchers mound and all that. You’re dealing with different surfaces that your feet adjust to differently. You’re dealing with big seams. You’re talking about a dangerous surface.”

That surface was the undoing of former Bear receiver Wendell Davis and could cost him his career. Last October at the Vet, he sustained ruptures of the patella tendon in each knee.

Footing can be an adventure in Texas Stadium, too, when it rains. The hole in the roof keeps part of the field dry, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out which part. The Cowboys seem to know the slick spots.

“That turf can be amazingly slippery in places,” says Turner, Dallas’ offensive coordinator for three years before he defected to Washington and started sounding like a rival coach. “I think the Dallas players have an advantage down there, knowing the right type of shoes to wear.”