Tampa, Florida					Thursday, September 09, 2010

Wisconsin Practices Where Champions Played-Grange, Nagurski
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
TAMPA—The Wisconsin Badgers are preparing for the Outback Bowl against the University of Georgia on a marvelous practice facility that is far more historic, though not so well known, as the bowl itself, even the stupendously internationally popular Outback restaurant chain itself for which the facility is named. The facility is on the University of Tampa campus that was once the landmark riverside Tampa Plant Hotel railroad magnate H.B. Plant built and where Teddy Roosevelt stopped for a time and trained his troops before they moved on Cuba before the century turned. The training facility the Badgers, and other Outback teams before them are using, includes two football/soccer fields before a standup grandstand (and now a new dormitory), walled in from the outside and inside a world class half-mile running track that once was a dirt automobile racing track for open-cockpit (Indianapolis-500 style) racers, and stockcars. Regularly, one of the great photos shot there is of a vaulter clearing the pole cross bar with the City of Tampa’s tall buildings in the background. Tampa now has an impressive skyline, not so years ago when it all began there. Wisconsin Coach Barry Alvarez was told that at a practice, with the additional note that while A.J. Foyt and Parnelli Jones began their great short dirt track auto racing careers at Plant Field, a star driver also was one Pancho Alvarez, now in the auto sales business in Tampa Bay. Car racing was fraught with disaster because it was a full circular track of only a half mile and dirt. Always there were spectacular wrecks, and yes, sometimes fatalities. Coach Alvarez also was told people and events far better known than Pancho and the Florida State Fair and other races there, made Plant Field, now Pepin-Rood Stadium, their histories there—well, like Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders camping there. Barry Alvarez was told the University of Tampa Spartan football teams, now no more, played their games there, then practiced there in the later years, of Freddie Solomon and John Muszak and Coach Fran Curci. He was told the University of Florida Gators played regular seasons games there, and that Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski played a game there in there heydays, NFL pro teams, before there were Tampa Bay Buccaneers, like the Baltimore Colts of Johnny Unitas and Detroit Lions trained there, as did the New York Jets and Joe Namath.. Alvarez could have been told not that	long ago centered before the grandstand in the center of one of the football fields now was a fine baseball park, and practice diamonds, and locker rooms for it was for a very long time the spring training home for the Cincinnati Reds where Roy Campanella and Frank Robinson prepared and played spring games. And before that, long ago, the Boston Red Sox stayed at the Plant Hotel and trained their baseball teams there, one that included Babe Ruth, before he became a New York Yankee. It was in a spring game there Ruth hit his longest homerun ever, well over 500 feet. A monument is there at the spot the ball was measured to have stopped rolling, erected years ago by the City of Tampa. Newspaper accounts tell of sports writers leaving the pressbox to walk off the astounding distance and proclaim it the longest ever. Ruth retrieved the ball, the papers reported, and that night gave it to Evangelist Billy Sunday during a preaching tent stop in Tampa. It was there on that old Plant Field, as it was then known, the baseball diamond that was home to the old Tampa Smokers (imagine that!) in the old International League where the Havana Cubans played regularly, well before Fidel Castro times, of course. But with the large Latino Tampa population (the Ybor City cigar making district), the games with Havana were sold out and broadcast by radio all over North and Central America. It was before TV. And finally, Alvarez was told the place of his practice, now Pepin-Rood Stadium, named for Art Pepin and Ed Rood, two generous sports and sports fans, was the centerpiece for the old Florida State Fair, where parades ended, including the great Gasparilla Invasion Parade, where circus acts performed for promoter, Al Sweeney, and where daredevil car spectaculars of Lucky Teeter and Joey Chitwood’s thrilled with defying feats, leaping cars through raging fires or rolling them purposefully. But, Alvarez was told that was yesterday. Now, his Badger workouts are performed on two modern soccer fields in the heart of the University campus, a school that produces national champs in that sport, as well as baseball, just south of centerstage, where Tino Martinez and Lou Piniella played collegiately on what is now Sam Baily Field. If champions of the past can rub off on those teams of today who practice where champions of the past worked out, Wisconsin should have a shot at the upcoming Outback Bowl, and win far more than a round of steaks for the team. ##
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